Getting Started With Adobe Illustrator
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by: AndrewWhiteman
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Adobe Illustrator is a widely used vector drawing application with three main areas of functionality. Firstly, it allows the creation of corporate and other graphic artwork for high quality printing. Secondly, it can be used in the web design process, allowing you to build the overall design as well as individual items like icons and buttons. Illustrator is also a basic page layout program suitable for originating single page documents like CD covers, book jackets and posters.
Illustrator is often the final member of the Adobe Creative Suite that people will get around to learning. Delegates coming on our Adobe Illustrator training courses will often complain that the program seems less inviting and exciting than Photoshop. And, although Photoshop is a complex package, they find themselves using it for all their graphic work, even things which would much easier to create in Illustrator. Part of this difficulty in getting started with Illustrator is the fact that it often appears to new users that the program is hard work: you create a new file and you're presented with a blank page. You have to create your drawing entirely from scratch.
When we run Illustrator training courses, we accept that our job is not just to show delegates how the program works and how to use its various tools and options. We also need to show them how to get past this idea of the stark blank canvas with nothing on it. There are four main antidotes to Blank Canvas Syndrome. The first is to have a very clear idea of the type of artwork you want to produce with Illustrator. The second is to use the excellent Live Trace facility built into the program. The third technique is to make liberal use of scanned and other bitmapped images as points of reference. And, fourthly, reuse elements that you have already created, both within the same drawing and between different illustrations.
The most successful Illustrator training courses that we run are for people who know exactly what they want to use the program for. It could be cartographers, technical illustrators or fabric designers; as long as they have a specific brief, we can show them the best techniques to solve their particular requirement. However, for a lot of delegates, Illustrator is something they feel they could and should be using but they don't really know where to start.
For users who are using the software in a less clear-cut and focused way, we always try to point out on our Adobe Illustrator training courses that you don't have to start with a blank canvas. We always recommend that wherever possible you import relevant graphic material such as scanned images, keep them on a background layer and use various Illustrator tools and techniques to either trace the images or simply to use them as guides and points of reference as you are creating your own original artwork.
Illustrator's Live Trace function is a powerful built-in utility which converts bitmapped images into editable Illustrator vector images. It contains a series of presets for tracing specific types of image, such as colour or black and white logos, line art, charts or technical drawings. As well as these presets it is also possible to create your own customised settings. The artwork produced by the Live Trace function will almost always need to be cleaned up and modified before becoming useable as Illustrator artwork. However, it can be a huge time saver and can be a welcome alternative to drawing elements from scratch.
Scanned or other images can also be placed on a background layer and used to provide constant points of reference when originating new Illustrator artwork. Background images can help to ensure that elements within the Illustrator artwork you create are of the correct dimensions have the correct relative proportions and so forth. For example, if you are drawing human figures, placing a photo of some people on a background layer can help to ensure that you don't end up creating figures with disproportionately large heads or long arms.
Another trick we always point out to delegates attending our Illustrator training courses is the ease with which you can create elements which are variations on existing elements within your drawing. Illustrator has powerful techniques for creating transformed copies of an object. It also allows you to place multiple strokes and fills on an object and to apply effects to each of them. Thus, for example if you need to create four concentric circles, you can just create one circle and give it four strokes, using the Offset Path command to position each of them.
In short, that blank Illustrator page can soon be filled with lots of funky stuff. The trick is to realise that, once you decide what it is you want to create, your can accelerate the process of drawing by tracing elements from bitmapped images, using images as points of reference and basing new items within your drawing on elements that you've already created.
About the Author
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Illustrator training courses in London and throughout the UK.
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