A guide to Adobe Illustrator for beginners- Part One- Empentis Training

A guide to Adobe Illustrator for Beginners: Part One

Adobe Illustrator is regarded as one of the essential tools for a designer, as it can be used for a variety of projects including graphic design, web design, fashion design, and more. Illustrator is a tool that allows designers to visualize their ideas and designs in a way that is similar to sketching in a notebook. It is a vector-based program, as opposed to Adobe Photoshop, which is raster based. Vector based art is best for designers as any elements created can be scaled exponentially with no loss in quality.

However, many designers, particularly those in their early careers, believe Illustrator is confusing and difficult to learn. Adobe Illustrator CC is required for this guide. If you haven’t already, you can install the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator by clicking on the Creative Cloud icon in your computer’s toolbar, or by downloading a 7-day free trial here. https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/illustrator.html?mv=search&sdid=KCJMVLF6&ef_id=Cj0KCQjwsLWDBhCmARIsAPSL3_0BZTSbV2wTa_g2dKfvxk4rVUX-2sMdzc7e-ewQ9C0haJ99sfs_J7kaAi9hEALw_wcB:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!3085!3!441704131411!e!!g!!illustrator!1426208085!56320331672&gclid=Cj0KCQjwsLWDBhCmARIsAPSL3_0BZTSbV2wTa_g2dKfvxk4rVUX-2sMdzc7e-ewQ9C0haJ99sfs_J7kaAi9hEALw_wcB

Navigating your way around Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is broken up into different sections and areas, such as tools, swatches, panels etc. Familiarising yourself with the software interface will aid you when creating.

This Diagram gives an overview of the basic sections that you will need/ come across.

1. Artboards

A good starting place is to learn about Artboard panels. This is the board on which you draw your artwork. Think of it as your canvas. Simply click on the Artboard symbol on the right side of the window to open the panel.

You can view multiple pages in the same document using the artboard panel. This is useful when creating multiple vector arts, such as business cards and posters, because it allows you to copy and paste logos, for example. You can also rearrange the artboards in the panel by dragging and dropping or using the arrows at the bottom of the panel. You can resize, rotate, move, and delete images using the artboard tool, which is located on the left side of the window.

To add an artboard, simply click the new artboard symbol at the bottom of the panel, that looks like a dog-eared page. You can see all of your artboards on your canvas by zooming all the way out with the zoom tool (hotkey – Z) and holding alt. The symbol inside the zoom symbol would also change to a minus sign when you hold down the alt key. This method shows the canvas (the dark grey area) on which your artboards are placed. Simply double-click to focus on a specific artboard, and Illustrator will zoom in on the clicked artboard.

2. Swatches

Swatches are predefined colours, gradients, and/or patterns contained inside an Adobe Illustrator document that can be applied to any given form.

The app has its own Swatches screen, which stores and monitors all of the current document’s colours, gradients, and patterns, making them easier to access while working on a project.

The Swatches panel is located in the right-side panel classes, but it is only available if you are using the Essentials Classic workspace. If you are using a different set-up, go to windows> swatches to enable the tab.

Each new document you build comes with a default collection of swatches, which, as you can see, can be used individually or in groups. The panel by default uses the Thumbnail View, which gives us a simple overview of all the various available colours, gradients, and patterns. You may adjust the size and orientation of this panel. To either the list view or the colour form (spot colour/process colour), RGB/CMYK values, and so on. Moreover, you can filter swatches based on the colour, gradients, patterns and groups. As well as this you can search swatches too by turning on the Show Find Field, which should prove to be a fast-targeting method as long as we know them by heart.

How to use a Swatch?

To use a swatch, whether it’s a colour, gradient, or pattern, we must first pick a shape or group of shapes, and then simply click on the desired swatch, which should automatically add it to the Fill and/or Stroke.

If we want to add a particular colour group from a swatch library to the Swatches panel, we can do so simply by clicking on the little folder icon located in front of it in the swatch library’s panel.

If added, the library will be added to the current document’s “default” swatches, which ensures you won’t have to load it again as long as you save the changes.

If we want to add a gradient or pattern swatch from the library tab, we can do so simply by selecting it and dragging it over to the Swatches panel.

How to create a colour swatch:

Since colour swatches are essentially custom specified values that are associated with a specific document, we can still add new ones, but they will only be noticeable inside that document.

The Click-and-Drag Technique

To make a new colour swatch, first choose a colour from the Colour Picker / Colour panel, or a custom-coloured shape, and then drag it into the Swatches panel.

For instance, let’s draw a small circle and colour it in with #8086F9, a light purple. By dragging the circle over the screen, we can easily convert the colour to a swatch. Alternatively, we can click and drag its colour directly from the Colour Picker / Colour panel to achieve the same result.

How to remove a swatch:

The process of removing a swatch is, as one would expect, very simple.

We can easily delete a colour/gradient or pattern swatch by first selecting the desired swatch or swatches and then clicking on the small Delete Swatch button.

Any of the newly generated swatches, as well as any of the default ones, can be removed.

3. Layers

Layers allow you to control all of the elements that comprise your artwork. Consider layers to be transparent files containing artwork. When you reshuffle the files, the stacking order of the objects in your artwork changes. Objects can be moved between folders and subfolders can be created inside folders.

Layer structure in your document can be as plain or complex as you want. All things are arranged in a single, parent layer by default. You can, however, build new layers and transfer objects into them at any time, as well as move elements from one layer to another.

The Layers panel makes it simple to pick, cover, lock, and adjust the appearance of artwork. You can also make template layers for tracing artwork and swap layers with Photoshop.

Layers panel overview:

To list, arrange, and edit the objects in a document, use the Layers panel (Window > Layers). Every new document has one layer by default, and each object you build is classified under that layer. You can, however, add new layers and rearrange objects to better fit your needs.

The same colour appears in the bounding box, direction, anchor points, and centre point of a selected object in the illustration window. This colour can be used to easily find an object’s corresponding layer in the Layers panel, and it can be changed to fit your needs.

The Layers panel provides columns to the left and right of the listings. Click in a column to control the following characteristics:

Visibility column

Indicates whether items in the layers are visible or hidden (blank space), or whether they are template layers or outline layers.

Edit column

Indicates whether items are locked or unlocked. The lock icon indicates that the item is locked and cannot be edited; a blank space indicates that the item is unlocked and can be edited.

Target column

Indicates whether items are targeted for application of effects and edit attributes in the Appearance panel. When the target button appears as a double ring icon (either or ), the item is targeted; a single ring icon indicates that the item is not targeted.

Selection column

Indicates whether items are selected. A colour box appears when an item is selected. If an item, such as a layer or group, contains some objects that are selected and other objects that are unselected, a smaller selection colour box appears next to the parent item. If all of the objects within the parent item are selected, the selection colour boxes are the same size as the marks that appear next to selected objects.

You can use the Layers panel to display some items as outlines and other items as they will appear in the final artwork. You also can dim linked images and bitmap objects to make it easier to edit artwork on top of the image. This is especially useful when tracing a bitmap image.

4. Shortcuts

5. Exporting

When you’re finished, click the file button in the menu bar to either export your file or save it in its current state so you can return to it later.

JPEG and PNG are both file formats used to store files. JPEG uses a lossy compression algorithm, which means that the image may lose some of its data, while PNG uses a lossless compression algorithm, which means that there is no image data loss in PNG format.

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. JPEG image is generally smaller than PNG image of same image. JPEG does not support transparency in images and a JPEG is usually used for photographs and a PNG is used for icons etc.

Summary

These are just a few of the resources available to help you get started. Illustrator is a collection of functions, tools, and effects. If I wrote about all of them, you’d be reading a 10,000-word essay and would probably become bored.

This just covers the basics of Adobe Illustrator, by using these steps it should help you to get some impressive results fairly easily, but importantly, get you started in learning illustrator. As you gain confidence and try new things, you will realize that the possibilities for what you can create are limitless. The best way to learn is to Practice. Experiment with different tools and try new things. Set a goal for yourself and try to achieve it using the tools listed above. Watch online videos that go over a specific tool in depth and read more tutorials and blogs.

Check out part 2 here.

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