Learn the Ins and Outs of Illustrator

Learn from a real-life illustrator. Build your portfolio.

Struggle through boring software tutorials no more. Learn all the Adobe Illustrator tools, tips, and tricks you'll ever need to start producing your own digital artwork. In just about 2 hours, you'll learn how to recreate any digitally illustrated ad of your choosing—from scratch. Not to mention, all the keyboard shortcuts will save you hours on your artwork in the future. Learn fast, and create better work faster.

Learn by doing. 

Recreate one of your favorite prints from advertising history to give yourself a first-hand look at why the piece was so successful. Come away with a finished piece of artwork of your own. Check out some image resources here. 

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Class Outline

• Welcome to class. As Adobe Illustrator tutorials go, digital illustrator, Brad Woodward’s is one of the most thorough. Brad will introduce you to Illustrator and extol the benefits of working with vectors.
• Getting started. Brad will introduce Illustrator’s interface along with some key terms and tools you’ll need to know when designing in the program. These tools include guidelines to help you align images in your work and layers that let you separate out different parts of your design.
• Preferences. You’ll learn how to position objects in relation to each other using tools like the “snap to point” feature. Brad will also show you how to make changes to your artboard, which is your digital canvas in Illustrator.
• Freeform building. The pen tool can be frustrating, but Brad will teach you how to make it work for your design. You’ll learn how to strategically position anchor points and make curves using the pen tool.  
• Building with shapes. If you don’t feel like using the pen tool, you can build your design with shapes. Brad will show you how to size shapes in Illustrator, how to adjust their edges from sharp to round, and how to use subtraction and negative space to create shapes that Illustrator doesn’t offer. Ultimately, you’ll see how to turn an image you upload into Photoshop into a collection of discrete shapes.
• Strokes and lines. You’ll explore drawing and painting in Illustrator by manipulating lines, exploring different brush tools, and learning the uses for each brush tool. You’ll also learn to duplicate shapes and how to bring together your shape building and brushwork to form a single, cohesive design.
• Color. You’ll take a look at the preset swatches available on Illustrator and learn how to set a hue by playing with saturation and darkness. Brad will also go over the eyedropper tool and show you how to create your own color swatches and gradients.
• Typography. You’ll learn different techniques for adding type to your image in this mini Illustrator logo tutorial. Brad will show you not only how to adjust letters individually and in groups, but he’ll also stress how to do it without harming your original font. Lastly, you’ll see how to type in the form of shapes, like circles and wavy lines.
• Exporting and final words. You’ll learn how to prepare your work either for a printer or for fellow artists looking to collaborate on your design.
• Bitmap textures. Brad will teach you a quick, easy trick for unifying color palettes. You’ll also learn how to add textures you create in Photoshop to shapes in your Illustrator design.
• Vector patterns. You’ll learn to automatically tile vector images and establish a hierarchy in your composition in Illustrator CS5 (CS6 has a tool that will do this for you, but that’s for a different Illustrator tutorial). Brad will show you how to create a pattern that you can repeat throughout your design, and you’ll watch him align the same pattern in two different shapes.