Training Course
Illustrator Advanced

Adobe Illustrator puts any conceivable vector art objective at your fingertips. But most digital designers only scratch the surface of Illustrator. To make a splash, one must delve deeper.

If you've mastered the basics in Illustrator and you're ready for the next level, this course is for you. Move beyond the prickly Pen tool to explore gradient meshes, symbols, actions, filters, and exciting new features like Live Color and Live Trace. An industry-leading professional will guide you through projects you never knew Illustrator was capable of.

In this challenging hands-on course, you'll create photo-realistic illustrations, complex patterns, rich designs, and learn how to speed your efforts with helpful workflow features. You'll build on your existing Illustrator skills to tackle high-end projects with depth, dimension, and wow-power.

Michael Hamm is a freelance designer, Web developer, and creator of Points&Paths.com, a Web site devoted to all things vector ... get bio

Develop an enhanced Illustrator workflow using color swatch libraries and advanced color sampling and filter techniques.

Create photo-realistic color transitions and artwork using gradients, blends, and meshes.

Create and modify transparent objects and set up transparent documents for print output.

Apply opacity masks and 16 different blend modes to add depth and convincing lighting to photo-realistic illustrations.

Use the Extrude and Bevel features to create three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional illustrations.

Apply special effects and filters to blend, distort, and manipulate existing shapes.

Create complex designs and seamless tiles using custom brushes and pattern fills.

Use custom and preset symbols to create patterns, manage artwork, and maintain low file size.

Use clipping masks to frame or shield areas of an illustration.

Manage artwork attributes efficiently and record frequently-used commands.

Create compound paths, fill rules, and multi-strokes for added flexibility during illustration.

Combine Illustrator with other technologies to produce Web pages, Flash animations, and PDFs.

Use Live Trace to create stylized vector illustrations based on bitmap images.

Outline:

LESSON 1 Advanced Color There's more to color in Illustrator than the fill and stroke boxes. In this lesson you'll pick up techniques for sampling colors and using swatch libraries, and learn to develop color schemes with CS3's Live Color. You'll blend colors with gradients, the Blend tool, and the Mesh tool, adding more dimension and even realism to your work, and wrap up with a look at adjusting color through special color commands. In the exercise, you'll use meshes to create realistic objects.

LESSON 2 Transparency Sophisticated transparency techniques can make your work more multi-faceted and intriguing. Lesson two covers techniques such as opacity masks and knockout groups, along with a detailed look at each of Illustrator's 16 blending modes. Finally, you'll see how transparency features can be handled by your printer for accurate output. In the exercise, you'll use transparency techniques and blending modes to create a photorealistic music player.

LESSON 3 Filters, Effects, and Shape Manipulation A piece of vector art can become a sophisticated 3D object with the techniques that kick off Lesson Three. You'll take a thorough look at blends, effects, and filters that can randomly or precisely re-shape your Illustrator designs and amaze your viewers. You'll put these to work in the exercise, designing a product label and applying it to a 3D object.

LESSON 4 Brushes, Patterns, Symbols, and Graphing The latest versions of Illustrator help you streamline your workflow by providing the ability to customize features and quickly reuse repetitive designs or objects. First, you'll look at complex brush techniques including art and scatter brushes that can "paint" with your own designs. Next, you discover how Illustrator allows you to create patterns with precision and ease. You'll explore symbols, an indispensable feature enabling you to reuse common elements. Finally, you'll check out Illustrator's graphing tools before jumping into the exercise's exploration of patterns.

LESSON 5 Masks, Graphic Styles, and Appearances This lesson tackles more ways to speed your workflow, as well as an important method for masking or framing artwork. This method is the clipping mask, key to encasing artwork within other shapes. The Graphic Styles and Appearance palettes are explored, giving you greater control over the appearance of any object. You'll wrap this lesson up with a look at actions, a feature that allows you to "record" commonly-implemented tasks, then repeat them whenever needed. In the exercise, you'll try your hand at map drawing, extensively utilizing Appearance features.

LESSON 6 Tracing and Technology Adobe Illustrator makes it easy to work with other common design programs like Photoshop, Flash, and Word. This lesson explores those modalities and looks at other technologies that Illustrator can handle, import, and export, including basic Web graphics, Web slices, and even dynamic data driven content. You'll also learn how to take images from bitmap to vector using Live Trace technology. You'll keep working on Live Trace in the exercise as you develop a poster with stylized photo elements.

Tuition: $829 US