September 2006
Art is for losers.
Best not to read too much into these.
Toon-a-day 2
zoom.
Strange Irony
The “Live Paint” feature in Illustrator CS2 is one of the most powerful additions to Illustrator in years. It’s one of those “duh” features that makes you wonder how you ever got around in Illustrator without it. I’ll do a tutorial on how to use it for real later, but for those of you who already know how to use it, try this on for size: creating 100% vector pixel art! Oh, the irony.
Toon-a-day 1
Illustrator: Symbols
Okay folks, now that we’ve got a basic idea of how this kind of thing stacks up, we can look at some alternative methods, and time-saving tricks. One of the most powerful features in Illustrator is the largely-ignored “symbols” palette. They bill symbols as a cutsie way to get lots of hokey stars all over your screen, and I think that’s why most people haven’t realized their power. When combined with global swatches (covered in the next tutorial), your illustrations can be incredibly robust. We’ll also cover some little-known quirks with the rotate tool.
Illustrator: Chiaroscuro
NOTE: Some of the techniques in this tutorial are now out of date. Most of what is done as separate objects here could be done with the appearance palette as a single object.
Illustrator is a great tool for very tight rendering rendering if you know what you’re doing. In this tutorial we’ll go through some of what I think are some of the best tools in Illustrator (and most under-utilized). We’ll look at opacity masks, a few common filters, and one of many ways of achieving simple smooth shading. (more…)