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.
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.
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.