Illustrator tutorial

Although I’m quite familiar with Illustrator, it’s always good to get the chance to revisit all the basics to keep up to date on the knowledge. In session today we covered the main tools used within Illustrator and other tips and techniques to remember (hopefully!) e.g. changing the units, using the pen tool, using the direct selection tool, the alignment palette, the pathfinder pallet and many more. To combine all these tools, we created a colour wheel that would depend on most of those I mentioned. The idea of the colour wheel was to become used to using the shape tool, the alignment tool, and to then understand the colour swatches. Filling in the primary colours, we then had to do a bit of math and work out the colours in between and so on for the darker shades and then using transparency for the lighter ones in the middle. A short and sweet exercise that really helped.

Personally I favour Illustrator over Photoshop sometimes, mainly because of the Pen tool. It’s something I’ve come accustom with and in my spare time, really have improved my undertsanding as a whole of how to use it. Although I’m sure as I learn more about Photoshop, that opinion might change slightly!