Adobe Illustrator is a the underrated powerhouse in the Adobe Creative Suite. It can produce everything from pixel perfect layouts to expressive painterly artwork. Even better, being a vector based drawing program, Illustrator’s drawing shapes and effects are infinitely editable. For any artist in a professional graphics environment, where many versions and revisions of artwork are necessary, Illustrator is indispensable.
The course will start by presenting different tools and palettes in the application’s interface, followed by detailed presentations of common techniques for utilizing these tools and palettes.
Some of the topics covered in the course include defining the colour mode for a document, understanding the stacking order of objects and layers, understanding the different elements that create an object (path, fill, stroke, and effects or filters), using the pen tool, types of anchor points, tools used for editing a path, selecting objects form the workspace or using the layers palette, painting and blending modes, adjusting an object transparency, working with the appearance palette, defining graphic styles, creating different types of fills and patterns, defining and using brushes, defining new symbols, adding vector and opacity masks, distorting an object, creating gradient meshes, shading and gradients, managing layers, importing or linking to an image, live trace, live paint, manually tracing an image, creating different types of text, saving and managing files, and finally exporting illustrations as images for web.
During the course, students will finish in class-tutorials, weekly homework assignments in addition to two projects.
Week One – Creating Shapes with the Pen Tool
Demo: Explore interface and the Appearance panel. Discuss Bezier curve, vectors and curve types (first degree, second degree, etc).
Exercises. Students will be asked to reproduce vector outlines of given shapes using the pen tool.
Week Two – Drawing Tools
Demo: Stroke palette. Brushes. Distort Tools. Pathfinder Palette.
Exercise: Create a brush from a vector form and draw a portrait with that brush.
Week Three – Colour in Illustrator
Discuss RGB/CMYK colour modes. What is HSV
Demo: Swatches palette. Kuler and Color Sets. Color Harmonies.
Opacity palette. Blending Modes. Gradient palette.
Exercise: Create three colour versions of a single drawing using the Colour Guide palette.
Week Four – Effects and Masking
Demo Dynamic Effects. Introduction to 3d effects. Opacity Masks. Combining bitmap files with vector forms.
Discuss Urban Art/Street Art. View portion of movie “Next”.
Exercise: Create an “Urban Art” piece using varied textures as masks.
Week Five – Symbols and Graphic Styles
Explore the symbol sprayer.
Explore the offset effect.
Exercise: Create a symbol and use it to create a texture field.
Week Six – Type in Illustrator
Explore Character and Paragraph palette. Discuss Typography. View section of movie “Helvetica”.
Assignment Create a light post banner for a community of your choice. Due week 9.
Week Seven – Getting Organized
Workspaces. Multiple Artboards and it’s uses. Adobe Bridge. File structure.
Exercise: Create a stationery suite (business card, letterhead, etc.) on multiple artboards.
Week Eight – Exporting
Explore exporting options from Illustrator. Discuss file types. Exporting to Photoshop. Exporting to InDesign. Exporting to the Web. Exporting for client approval. Exporting for Animation.
Week Nine – Creating an Illustration.
Demo: Using Illustrator to “render”. Discuss form and lighting.
Using the “Inner Glow” effect.
Assignment 1 Due.
Assignment Two: Create a series of diagrammatic Illustrations illustrating a process. Due Week 12.
Week Ten – Other Tools
Gradient Mesh tool. Graphing tools. Perspective Tool.
Assignment 1 critique.
Exercise: TBD
Week Eleven – Live Trace and Live Colour
Exercise: Create an illustration using Live Trace.
