Illustrator WOW! CS6 Tutorial Book — Now With More Coghill!

Just a quick news item: the Adobe Illustrator CS6 version of the superb Illustrator WOW! tutorial book series for Adobe Illustrator will feature a lesson by yours truly.

I was approached by the author, Sharon Steuer, to contribute an advanced technique to the book. We decided to present a unique method of quickly applying color to your line art using Adobe Illustrator’s Shape Builder tool.  The cartoon logos and cartoon characters you see on my website and blog are created using this technique.

Continue reading

Adobe Illustrator Video Tip: Quickly Add Smooth Transition Anchor Points

In this video, I am sharing with you a vector path creation technique to speed up the process of creating curved paths by adding intermediate anchor points after your corners have been created. I used to create my anchor points as I was following the curve of the shape I was tracing. Instead, with this technique the anchor points are added to your vector path after your corners have been created, allowing Illustrator to approximate the length of the curve handles for you with much greater accuracy the first time around.

Continue reading

Zen Of The Pen

Vector pen tool icon artSharon Steuer’s free “Zen Of The Pen” PDF is an excellent introduction to the inner mysteries of the vector pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

Update: Sharon has kindly asked me to remove the link to that PDF, she’s working on an updated version. I highly suggested you head over to her website and sign up for updates. Sharon is the mastermind behind the excellent Illustrator WOW! vector tutorial books for Adobe Illustrator.

The pen tool is one of those obscure graphics programs tools that everyone tries once, and then gets so confused by that they never get any further with it. And understandably. It looks like a fountain pen, but it doesn’t act like one. Click and “draw”, you get weird “handles” sprouting out from a dot. Ignore that, and some annoying rubber band line gets stuck to your pen tip, all distorted out of — not even a straight line! Right there most Illustrator users think to themselves “this program sucks”.

But they couldn’t be further from the truth…

Continue reading