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!
My recent article for CreativePro.com, Illustrator WOW! Techniques: Flexible Shading and Highlighting Effects, is now posted on their website. It expands on the coloring process using the Adobe Illustrator vector art Shapebuilder tool described in my Gallery page in the Illustrator WOW! CS6 book.
I just posted this screencast video on YouTube where I critique vector art created by a beginner Adobe Illustrator user. These critiques apply to any vector art software.
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.
This sexy bail bondswoman cartoon character design was created for—you guessed it, a bail bondswoman. The client wanted a woman character design that was sexy, but not too sexy, and had to be professional-looking as well.
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.
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.
Sharon 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…