Digital Illustration Advanced
Create pro-quality illustrations using Adobe Illustrator
Digital illustration is a challenging and expressive area of graphic design. Working in Illustrator, you can develop your unique personal style as an artist.
In this 6-lesson course, you'll learn advanced illustration and Adobe Illustrator techniques for communicating your creative concepts.
Through detailed, step-by-step lectures, you'll learn how a professional illustrator approaches creating editorial illustrations, icons, retro poster designs, 3D illustrations, and restaurant identity designs.
Open-ended projects will help you develop portfolio-quality illustrations. You'll develop your own style and artistic flair, making your work more powerful and distinctive.
Course Tuition
Course Instructor(s):
Requirements:
- Computer with Internet connection (56 Kbps modem or faster).
- Adobe Illustrator CS3 or CS4.
- Basic experience in drawing and the software packages needed for this course.
Prerequisites:
Course Objectives:
- Create editorial illustrations, icons, retro poster designs, 3D illustrations, and book title designs in Illustrator.
- Develop and sketch illustration concepts to prepare them for digital creation.
- Use shape and freehand drawing tools to create complex shapes and patterns.
- Use gradients to create lighting and shadow effects.
- Import bitmap and vector art into Illustrator and create guides for illustration.
- Create simple iconographic illustrations and shapes.
- Develop proficiency in drawing or tracing using the Pen tool.
- Create illustrations inspired by 1930s era WPA-style posters.
- Create objects with 3D proportions and lighting effects and place them in perspective on a plane.
- Create a sequential illustration that repeats certain features and colors over a series of frames to maintain a consistent look.
- Design a symmetrical title or identity that integrates repeated graphic elements and typography.
Course Outline
LESSON 1 Conceptual Composition
Lesson One explores the challenge of editorial illustration. You'll explore how to define a concept, brainstorm ideas, and sketch options. Then you'll open up Illustrator and follow an illustration project that incorporates basic shapes and transformations, gradients, importing line art into Illustrator, lighting and shadow, chrome effects, iconographic shapes, and accents. The exercise will challenge you to develop an editorial illustration of your own.
LESSON 2 Pen Tool Studies
The Pen tool is your favorite tool, right? If not, Lesson Two will give you a thorough workout in using this indispensable Illustrator feature. You'll begin with a fun but extended tracing project that will stretch your Pen tool prowess and give you techniques for reworking bitmap images in Illustrator. In the second half of the lesson, you'll examine the process of creating simple, iconographic illustrations (icons) that are easy to recognize in black and white at different sizes. The exercise that follows will combine both elements—you'll create a basic guide from a bitmap image then reduce it to iconographic simplicity.
LESSON 3 Color and Interpretation
Illustrators are often asked to work in retro or period styles. Lesson Three takes you back to the 1930s as you recreate a poster in the WPA style. You'll use basic lines and different Pen tool techniques to create stylized line art and enhance it with color and shading, lights and darks, and midtones. You'll set your illustration in a dramatic context and add art deco typography too. In the project, you'll create a WPA design of your own—a whole New Deal!
LESSON 4 Light, Shadow, and Perspective
The Renaissance artists captured light, shadow, and perspective in their representations of three-dimensional form. In Lesson Four, you'll explore techniques for creating 3D objects and effects. First, you'll create a template for drawing objects in one-point perspective. Then you'll create an object, comparing how to simulate three dimensions through traditional highlights versus 3D effects. Finally, you'll learn how to place objects in the foreground or background of a composition, scale them proportionally using perspective lines, and add realistic shadows. The exercise will a study in perspective and proportion.
LESSON 5 Illustration in Sequence
Sequential illustrations are like the panes in a comic strip. Each frame has some common characters, or elements, and yet each depicts a different action, or even just a continuation of an action. Lesson Five focuses on creating a series of related drawings, a task that a designer is often called upon to do. By creating a character and repeating colors and other visual elements through a series of scenes, you'll create a sequence that is both consistent and varied. In the exercise, you'll apply the techniques you've learned in creating a short storyboard.
LESSON 6 Theme, Repetition, Symmetry, and Type
What good are great illustrations without a unifying theme or composition? In Lesson Six, you'll put it all together—you'll develop a theme, and using colors, symmetry, repeated elements, and type, create a unified illustration for a restaurant logo design. This lesson integrates everything you've learned in the course and explores the challenge of making imagery and typography work together. The final project will be a show-stopper for your portfolio, as you develop a book cover title illustration.
