Illustrator: Baby Steps!

I finally got around to installing Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is all about vector graphics (points, lines connecting those points, scalability without loss of quality, magical beautiful things). I've worked with vectors in Adobe Flash Professional. I loved that but it was never mathematical enough for me. I was hoping Illustrator would be like Flash on happy, mathematical (and legal) drugs.

I do not recall my first reaction to Illustrator, but it was far from comprehension. I decided I needed to find a tutorial. I came across this pen tool tutorial, which looked good. I learned a lot about short-cut keys from it, which turned out to be fantastic later on. However, my knowledge of actually using the pen tool, post-tutorial, can be seen reenacted in the screen shots below. All I wanted to do at first was connect lines to other lines. That should be simple, right?


In my mind I should have been able to connect any lines I wanted! Who ever heard of continuous paths, seriously? Okay, so maybe I have... [mumble mumble, CS degree, graph theory]. Also, you may notice that my two paths (those red and blue things) are conversing. I assure you this is normal. Either way, it turns out that Illustrator doesn't allow you (as far as I can tell) to make paths that branch in multiple directions. This is why Miss Blue Shape and Mr. Red Line can't be friends.

In response to Illustrator's error message in the above picture: if college (read: my HCI class) has taught me anything, it's that technology is always to blame! The idea is that if you cannot understand it, then it is poorly designed. Not reading that "huge" amount of pop up text shouldn't result in a damaged psyche, despite my sudden sense of shame that until now I didn't notice it contained useful information. Plus, "I'm a cat, I can't read."

After struggling to comprehend the pen tool for awhile and realizing ice cream should not be this hard to draw, I decided I needed to seek additional help.


I did some googlemancery* and found this tutorial claiming--in my own words--Illustrator was in fact not an evil seductress out to get my hopes up only to crush them in the end.

At some point during this new tutorial I discovered what the direct selection tool was, which may have made all my dreams come true or something similarly delicious. I tried another tutorial written by the same person, which I also liked, so I might look for a copy of his Illustrator book.

With my new found "ultimate powers" I drew a cat face and a t-shirt.


[The font used on the dino shirt is called Permanent Marker from Font Squirrel. I originally was using Rabbit On The Moon which is awesome, but it's only really free to try. Wah.]

Now that I have Illustrator skillz, I am working on a picture for a blog layout. More on that later!

P.S.: Digital artwork is definitely a craft.

*googlemancery: great word I came across in a fantastic interview about Coilhouse. I'd never heard of the magazine Coilhouse, but the interviewees struck a chord with me.