Exploring Adobe Illustrator

(Entry 1: 07.01.2014)

Hello everyone, long time no see! Hope you all had a Happy New Year, because I'am back in college and today I have been working with Adobe Illustrator. I've been playing about with the tools to make some shapes, and for the next couple of weeks I will be playing with them even more. So anyway, here are some examples.

To make these shapes, I had to use the pen tool a lot, to make the shapes, by clicking on the board for the squares, and click and drag for the squiggly shapes.(And the additional circle that my tutor helped me with as a demonstration.) I had only used the selection tool to move the shapes around the board.

I had filled in the shapes with colour by selecting Windows and used the Swatch bar. I then had to fill in the Strokes (outlines) with colour as well, after I had made them thicker by increasing the Stroke weight.

And now I have to get going now, but I will be back next week to fill in some more information about  Adobe Illustrator and what tools to use. So I will see you next week. Bye!

(Entry 2: 14.01.2014)

Hello everyone, I'm back! And I'am now going to show you what I have been doing today using Adobe Illustrator. So I have been using the pen tool to make more shapes. (Square, circle, pentagon, triangle and star.)

I had some trouble making the circle at first, but soon I had almost gotten the hang of it.

Of course I was trying to slightly fix the circle by using the eraser tool to little success. So I just left it.

These are the final results of the square and circle pen drawing with the last line selected.

This was when I used the Selection tool to move and re-size the circle.

This was when I used the Selection tool to select the triangle, right after I had drawn it.

This is my drawing of the pentagon, already selected right after drawing it.

This was my first time using the Rectangle tool to draw a square. I was playing around with this tool to draw rectangles. This was after I had drawn a star on the bottom using the pen tool for the last time.(For now.)

I had to get rid of the second rectangle because it wasn't needed, as I was just trying to draw a square. I had clicked on Edit then Cut and I managed to get rid of the rectangle.

In order to draw an exact circle, I had to shrink it downwards so that it didn't look like a rectangle any more. I also had to move the square next to the Pen tool drawn square, using the Selection tool again.

Here are the final squares, one drawn using the pen tool and the other drawn using the Rectangle tool.

Using the Elipse tool, I had to draw a circle. and then I had to move next to the circle drawn using the Pen tool.

Using the Star tool, I had managed to create a star. I had increased it's size for a brief moment, then I shrunk it down and put it on the bottom next to the star I had previously drawn using the Pen tool.

There I go, using the Polygon tool to draw a pentagon, right after I put the star next to the Pen tool drawn star. Also the green line indicates the width and height of it's subject matter.

Underneath the triangle was the pentagon that I had selected (I think).

I had selected the Pen tool drawn pentagon because I was trying to downsize it and move it around a little.

I was also moving around the square a bit as well. Notice how similar these squares are by comparison

Now to make the triangle, I had to decrease how many sides there to make using the Polygon tool again.

After making the triangle, I had it turned over and near the edge of the page.

I had to downsize the triangle and then move it next to the Pen tool drawn triangle.

Now it was time to thicken the outline of the Pen tool drawn shapes.

All I had to do was increase the shapes Stroke by 6% (originally 8% for the square at first) and change the outline to whichever colour I chose.

I would increase the outline of the shape, it would usually start out as black.

Then I would choose a random colour from the Colour settings.

And there you go, a cerulean blue triangle.

And here are all the other shapes already coloured in with the star already selected.

And that's all I have for today, so I will continue to experiment much further with this project and show you what else I have done with Adobe Illustrator. So see you all next week, Bye!!!!

(Entry 3: 22.01.2014)

This week I had been drawing over one of the photographs that I had taken last week. I had drawn simple shape using the Pen tool and during my spare time I had updated the picture using the Paintbrush tool and here is the result so far.

As you can see I haven't finished this picture yet, so I may need to have it finished by next Tuesday.

 Last Thursday I came to college to practice using Adobe Illustrator so that I may have practiced my skills ready for when I have Graphics by Tuesday. Here are some pictures that I had made.

(Entry 4: 11.02.2014)

Last week I was experimenting with the brush tools to add in more details to the foreground of my picture.

I added in some detail into the bushes by creating a new layer, toned down it's opacity, used the calligraphic brush tool to paint in the details for the bushes and due to fact I used different shades of the same colour on each bush, I used select >same>fill colour to move around the dots.

I also tried using the charcoal brush tool to draw in the branches in the bush without it's leaves. I also used the mop tool to draw the clouds in the sky.

At first the clouds were small because I was drawing in bits of the cloud one by one.

 But then I decided to redo the clouds by increasing the stroke of the mop tool and redraw the clouds again.

Unfortunately the clouds wounded up looking like swirly squiggles, so they just ended up looking messy.

So today (11.02.2014) from taking my tutors advice I had to get rid of all the squiggly lines, left one line in just so that I could try making it wider and thicker, but it didn't work so I got rid of it. So instead I increased the brush tool stroke, drew in three new lines for the clouds, and moved them around and that was it, the clouds were finished and the picture looks almost done.

(Entry 5: 13.02.2014)

(Writer's note: Even though it's today is the start of half-term, I have come back to work on the rest of this blog post for my tutor. So here is the rest of my evaluation on Adobe Bridge.)

By the time of writing this post, I had not finished of my townscape picture on Adobe Bridge, but I did however drawn a simple picture by using Pathfinder.

I had drawn a simple circle using the ellipse tool.

Added in a pentagon by using the Polygon tool.

And last, but certainly not least, I used Pathfinder, clicked on one of the Shape Modes and combined the two shapes into one entirely different shape all together.

And that for now concludes my exploration and evaluation of Adobe Illustrator, stay tuned for when I get around to updating this post when I get back to college after the half term holidays.

(I'll be of to Swansy in Wales with my parents in case were wondering.)

So until then, I'll see you later. BYE!!!!