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.

Typography Portraits

Check out 45 Amazing Type Faces...not fonts...human faces. Above are examples created in Illustrator by computer graphics I students.

Layers Magazine

Layers Magazine is a nicely designed magazine for Adobe Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Dreamweaver as well as digital photography.) What I like about it is that the purpose of the magazine content is education, not enticing you to buy more stuff. They also provide many tutorials online.

Illustrator Portrait Project

This lesson teaches drawing skills with Adobe Illustrator as well as the value tone scale and how to see in black and white. It also teaches patience and the importance of focusing and slowing down to improve craftsmanship. Ideally, a tablet is best, but I only own 2, so this guy drew his with his mouse. (Using LiveTrace is cheating! When you are done, you can have them try LiveTrace on the photo to see the difference between letting the computer make all the decisions and the artist doing it.) If you went to art school before computers, you probably remember doing a project like this with first drawing the portrait then using Color Aid paper, tracing paper, xacto knife, and rubber cement for the final.

1. Import a color photo.
2. Lock that layer and make a new layer.
3. On the new layer, make 1 small black square with no outline and copy it 7 times. Now, using the color palette changed to Grayscale, fill each square with gradually lighter grays until the last square is almost white.
4. Tracing the photo, draw a black shape where you see the darkest value tone. Use the eyedropper to choose the black square. Continue with the progressively lighter shapes.
5. Turn off the eye on the photo layer to see all the white spaces left.
6. Use the anchors to stretch the shapes to touch.
7. Add a border or fill the background with a gray. Delete the value tone scale you made in step 3, or if you want to see it for grading purposes, move it to outside of the print area.

Option: Make a copy of the finished file. Now select the highlight areas and change them to warm colors and the shadow areas to cool colors. Now you have a sort of expressionist portrait and you don't have to redraw the shapes.

Another Option: Now go into a studio room, transfer the image to poster board using the grid method and paint with acrylics. Now, they've learned to mix paint as well.

If you want a copy of my actual handout for the students, or have questions, just email me.