Week 6: Introduction to Adobe Illustrator

This week marked the beginning of our learning and practice of the various Adobe software's. We started off with Adobe Illustrator, and learnt some of the basics to drawing pictures and such.

As an intro to Adobe Illustrator, there are some basic illustration tools that we were taught how to use. These include selection, direct selection, shape, colours, scale, pen tools, type, rotate, scale, place, ruler, guides, gradient, layer, type etc. I will talk about some of these tools in more details later on. There were also other important basics, such as saving our work, creating outlines, and not to mention, the very important "layers".

One of the key components to drawing a picture on Adobe Illustrator are paths. Creating paths are essential to determining the shape of the picture, and how u maneuver the path skillfully will in turn determine if you can create the picture that you want. A path is made up of one or more straight or curved segments. The beginning and end of each segment are marked by anchor points, which keeps the segment in place. A path can be closed (for example, a circle), or open, with distinct endpoints (for example, a wavy line). To change the shape of the segment, we use handles, which can be seen by hovering your mouse over the anchor points. By holding and dragging the handles, we can create curves and other desired shapes.

Here is a picture depicting some of these terms:

Components of a path

A.

 

Selected (solid) endpoint

B.

 

Selected anchor point

C.

 

Unselected anchor point

D.

 

Curved path segment

E.

 

Direction line

F.

 

Direction point

Source: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/illustrator/cs/using/images/sdw_path_components.png


As earlier mentioned, there is another very important tool in Adobe Illustrator, and that is the layer(s). Sometimes, as I found out the hard way today, a smaller item or picture can get overlapped or "hidden" by other larger items which were introduced into the drawing later. As a result, it can become quite difficult to isolate the item that you want, in order to do further touch-ups on it. What can we do? We set layers.

Setting layers is done through the layers panel, which can be accessed via the windows tab in Adobe Illustrator. There are four columns under the layers panel, although we only had to use 2 of them during tutorial. Those are the 1st and 2nd columns, which are called the visibility column and edit column, respectively. You can create new layers simply by pressing the "create new layer" button at the bottom of the panel. If you want to edit an item, without the hindrance of other items on the drawing, simply "lock" the layers with the other items( you do this by pressing the space beside the layers, under the edit column), and then uncheck the visibility column( make sure you don't see) for the other items' layers. You can now safely edit whatever and however you want, without having to worry about affecting other items on the drawing, or have them affect you. Its that easy!

All in all, this week was really fun and informative. Learning all about a new software, even if its just the basics, is akin to learning a new skill, and I am happy in the knowledge that I walk away from class with a new set of useful skills under my belt. Of course, it wasn't easy by any means, in learning this new skill, but luckily we had the guidance of a skilled and experienced teacher, who led us on with confidence and success.