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Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a very powerful program for creating digital graphic art. It's power comes from the fact that it creates graphics with vector points, instead of pixels. In Photoshop you have to plan your project around the resolution (pixels per inch), but in Illustrator you can create resolution free graphics that will look good anywhere, from your web site or business card up to and including the side of a building.

Sadly, Illustrator has a steep learning curve. Most people, myself included, began creating digital art on computers with Photoshop. When I first opened Illustrator six years ago, I went looking for my favorite Photoshop tools (airbrush, filters and layer styles) but they aren't there. Creating artwork in Illustrator is very much like creating an old fashioned montage with scissors and colored paper. If you want to draw an apple, you cut out an apple shape from your red paper and paste it down. If you want to draw a shadow on the apple, you cut out the shadow shape from your darker red paper and paste that in place.

To use the analogy, in Illustrator your scissors is the pen tool, and your paper is the color picker. Where it gets exciting is the beauty of the artwork you can create once you climb the initial learning curve. Unlike drawing with pencils or pastels, if you want more detail or precision in your Illustrator artwork, you simply zoom in and adjust the bezier curves in your pen paths. Of course Illustrator is much deeper than just a tool for creating digital art, it has a strong suite of type formatting tools and is extremely useful for creating business stationery such as business cards, letterheads, posters, CD covers and maps.

Here is my latest free Illustator tutorial on how to make a robot with simple shapes and fills. This is original copyrighted content. You are free to use it for non-commercial purposes, such as in the educational environment.

Green Gears
I created this illustration as a lesson plan for an advanced Illustrator class. It's very hard to find detailed step by step lessons for advanced Illustrator projects. It seems that most book publishers feel their books have to cover the toolset of the entire program. This leaves no room for an advanced step by step project that may take 14 pages to explain. Because of this, I prowl the stock photo agencies looking for advanced illustrator artwork that would be suitable as a lesson plan. When I find one, I purchase it and download the *.ai file. Then I recreate it from scratch, writing the lesson plan as I go in Adobe inDesign. These lesson plans take about one hour per page to write. The artist who created and uploaded this artwork to the stock agency (istockphoto.com) can be found at http://www.delariman.com.

Because I exported this Illustrator file as a Flash file, or .SWF, you can maximize the window, and/or 'Right Click', and zoom in on the pop up window to see the detail work.

Cell Phone driver
I created this illustration while working an exercise in the "Illustrator CS WOW" book. I scanned the page from the book, then brought the scan into Illustrator and traced over it. It took me about 8 hours. There was a tremendous amount of pen work in this illustration. The most difficult part was getting the woodcut look, and that was done with hand made custom brushes. While this did take a long time, towards the end it was looking so good that that there was no way I could have stopped, I was having too much fun!

Because I exported this Illustrator file as a Flash file, or .SWF, you can maximize the window, and/or 'Right Click', and zoom in on the pop up window to see the detail work.

Black and White self portrait
I teach Illustrator at Clover Park Technical college. My students are always certain they can't draw a portrait. I created a lesson plan demonstrating just how easy it is to go from an instant digital photo to the finished Illustration over the course of a 2 hour lecture. This has become an extremely popular lesson as students discover the power of this amazing program while "illustrating" their self portrait. Because of the popularity of this lesson, I was filmed by the a local cable channel demonstrating the process for cable TV. Look for it soon on "Click!" channel 89. You can also see one of my lessons on web design.

5 1/2" x 8" notepaper
I used the logo below to create this notepaper as a demonstration for my students on the power of Illustrator to create stationery. While inDesign is the power player for multiple page files, Illustrator excels at single page documents.

Logo
This logo project began life as a photo taken on a canoe trip. I brought the photo into Photoshop, posterized it then brought it into Illustrator where I traced out the essential black and white shapes ending up with a vector based logo which I have used in several other projects involving Illustrator and inDesign.

Illustrator Guitar
Several of my students drew guitars for their final project in Illustrator. I drew this guitar as a demonstration of what you can do when you master the program. We were all inspired by a magnificent guitar an earlier student (Brent R.) had created. I thought it would be easy to copy Brent's guitar, but was surprised to find that the smooth wood tones of the body were impossible to achieve until he explained the secret: draw the body horizontal, not slanted. Make a very simple 3 row, 3 column mesh using 4 mesh points. The rows and columns must follow the contour of the body. Rotate the body AFTER the mesh is applied. There is also a "lighten" layer mode on the reflection, which is also a mesh. Project time: 20 hours.

Illustrator Glass
This drawing began as a 12 hour pencil drawing. I needed a challenge in Illustrator and decided to draw it again using vector tools, with surprising results. I almost like it better than the pencil version.

Because I exported this Illustrator file as a Flash file, or .SWF, you can maximize the window, and/or 'Right Click', and zoom in on the pop up window to see the detail work.

Illustrator Fish
From the same WOW book mentioned above, I found this excellent tutorial on how to draw a fish. I love the way the Gradient Mesh tool allows me to control the flow of color. While I was creating this fish, I was also painting a still life at my easel with traditional media in the evenings, and I found myself longing for the ease of "edit>undo". Computers make it easy.

Manikin
Like many artists, I have a little wooden manikin on a stand. About a year ago I set him down by my computer, and with the aid of a nearby desk lamp providing clear directional light, I drew him with the pen tool and simple gradients. I have a 9x12 Wacom tablet, without which I would hesitate to tackle a project of this nature.

Because I exported this Illustrator file as a Flash file (SWF), you can maximize the window, and/or 'Right Click', and zoom in on the pop up window to see the detail work. This illustration was accepted at http://www.istockphoto.com/ . You can download the *.ai file there for a fee if you search for "manikin vector".

Note: I have also drawn this little guy with traditional pencil and paper, but I prefer the Illustrator version.

Sitting Manikin
Same manikin as above, but he had to sit down to rest. Similar to the balloons above, once all the basic shapes were drawn and colored with gradients, it was relatively simple to redraw him in a different position. Drawing these manikins from 'life' was when I began to understand why the software is called Illustrator. You do not have to be a classically trained artist to create digital art, although it helps. If you spend the time learning Illustrator's toolset, especially the Pen tool, it's only a matter of time until you create something lovely.

I saw a series of call-out illustrations in a book and thought they might be cool to recreate in Illustrator. It turned out to be a great learning experience in custom brushes and masking.