AoC Design Blog
Illustrator
These are designs made with Illustrator CS4
Spaceship (Illustrator Tutorial)
Feb 5th
Another tutorial picture. Expect several of these while I try to get the hang of these programs. I plan to do some drawing too, but I’m recovering from tendonitis in my dominant hand, so it’s hard.
I liked this one a lot better. I got a better feel for how tools work then the other one and I changed it a bit from the suggestions in the tutorial to “make it my own” as they put in on American Idol.
NIEVA Bottle (Illustrator Tutorial)
Feb 4th
Today we have a half completed Nieva bottle. Why is it half completed? Because it was a sub-par tutorial (link below).
First, I have a copy of CS4 Design Premium on my laptop, so I will be posting my practice pieces here as I learn everything that is not Photoshop. I even learn new things about Photoshop all of the time. Anyone that has messed with Illustrator knows that it is set up completely differently from a paint/photo program because it need to be able to do more. I’m trying to learn what it can do, and how to do some of the things I can do in Photoshop in Illustrator.
Now, I was a little surprised when I saw something so complicated described as a “basic” tutorial and once I saw the finished example I had confirmation. If you check the link below you can see what the final is suppose to look like and the text looks okay but the artist really tried too hard to get the gradients to do extra work. It reminded me of what Poser lovers have started to do is “paint” the hair in Photoshop after rendering so fix lighting/texture problems that are just impossible to fix in Poser. This would be better to make the basic bottle in Illustrator then switch to Photoshop for touch up. What it did explain, it didn’t explain well. It was a lot “do this” but not much “this is why”. For much of it it didn’t even explain what part of the design we were doing – which always helps.
Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to do the cartoony finishing work and I know how to manipulate text. Some of the stuff I skipped I would have liked to learn, but it wasn’t really being explained so why bother. I try another later after my arm feels better.