My artist/author copy of the Adobe Illustrator CC WOW! advanced vector art techniques book arrived. In addition to the one Gallery section I had from the last edition, I now have two more.
Thanks again to Sharon Steuer for the opportunity to be involved!
The CS6/Creative Cloud version of the superb Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book with advanced vector art techniques is now available. Along with my earlier technique contribution to the Illustrator WOW! CS6 edition last year, this updated edition has some more tips and techniques where I reveal the arcane secrets of my vector art workflow to the unsuspecting reader!
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.
Working color vector art for a mascot character project. The ogre will be used as a mascot for a video game portal website. We needed a prop and I suggested a video game controller, the client wanted to go with an old-school Atari 2600 controller, which I think looks great. it’s such an iconic design it really reads well, which is important for smaller sizes.
For longer than I can remember, I have been flustered with the Flatten Transparency feature in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and CS4. Very often I use the excellent Layer Targeting feature introduced into recent versions of Adobe Illustrator, however I found that when using the Flatten Transparency feature, it seemed to ignore the attributes of the Targeting, which forced me to find lengthy workarounds to solve this. Turns out there was an approach to solving this that I had overlooked…
Here are a few handy keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop for those of you out there like me who spend an inordinate amount of time in the Creative Suite primarily using Illustrator. These are not keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Illustrator, but rather are keyboard shortcuts providing methods of doing things in Photoshop that you are used to doing in Illustrator that at first it might seem isn’t possible, like click directly on an object to select it, drag to a new layer, etc.
It’s happened to all of us digital creatives. The dreaded day when you just cannot get one of your Adobe applications to launch. Usually there’s a deadline looming (of course). You’ve restarted your computer (three times) and still you cannot get Photoshop to launch. You’ve tried a few tips from some Google searches, but still nothing. Your geek cred is showing it’s limitations. And your deadline isn’t getting any further away.
What if I told you this could be avoided, virtually forever? And also, that you can get back to work with all your settings just the way you like them?
Another brief video in my series introducing some great new features in Photoshop CS4 for artists, cartoonists, illustrators and anyone else who sketches or draws using Photoshop.
This video features the excellent new keyoard shortcuts that allow you to drag-resize the size of the brushes using the mouse pointer.
Hold down the Option key when erasing using the Eraser Brush, and you’ll get a marquee that you can drag to erase a perfectly rectangular area.
Bonus Eraser Tool tip: edit the keyboard shortcuts so the Eraser uses the “E” key, and remap the Free Transform tool to Shift-E (essentially swapping the keyboard shortcuts for the two tools). Seems much more intuitive this way.
Both tips via FreeTransform