Loving the New Abobe Illustrator CC

Well, it’s been awhile from my last post. I needed to carve out time for an ill relative while still teaching. But, now I am excited about sharing again. I hope you are all lucky to have access to the current Adobe CC products. The new Illustrator is pretty wonderful. It even has an eraser that, while not perfect, works pretty well. I developed this Adobe Illustrator lesson for my students who are all about digital illustration. (I can’t believe how well they draw using the touch pad!) This project involves tracing and simplifying a sketch or photo and then “inking” it. It covers Layers, fine tuning brushes, the color fill, expanding, merging and isolating shapes, and using short cuts to zoom in and out and increase and decrease brush size. I start by having them use the technique on simple shapes, like the pears above, or a shoe or guitar. Then they do a portrait of themselves or friend. The top example shows one with strong light and shadow. This is a more demanding illustration, but worth the effort. You just need to explain this before they take their photos. I uploaded the editable Word file to my TPT shop. It has screen shots for almost ever step, making it 31 pages long. (Leaving it editable in Word means that the page breaks might not be in the right place in your file, but folks prefer being able to edit easily.) It turns out most folks want the screen shots, although I have always felt that it is valuable for student learning and collaboration to not make it quite so easy every time. Sometimes a demo, written steps, and watching the students help each other makes my teacher heart sing. But I still have screen shots for many of my projects. Here is the link.