Monday, August 2, 2010

Illustrator vs photoshop

Illustrator is vector - does not use pixels. Pretty difficult to make Illustrator pixellated.
Vector - not made of lots of little dots as in photoshop. Vector is more mathematical - all just lines - can be very small or very big. Flat, clean print.
Don't do text in photoshop, artwork in photoshop then moved to illustrator.
Illustrator is set up to be the same set up as photoshop.
Add colours to layers to make sorting easier - double click on layer and set colour. New layer? Click on top right bit and hold down.
For squares, use rectangle tool, hold down shift to keep in proportion.
Zoom out as much as you want - all this is useable - you simply select the area you want to use.
Use black arrow tool to transform - don't have to do edit/transform.
Little white and black squares - the black background one does an outline - you can change the colour. If you want to get rid of the outline just hit the button with the red stroke.
Eye turns layers off and on - can lock layer now as it is finished.
Create new layer - template.
3 ways to get template into file - for now open with illustrator - it's now a new document, can be moved around with the lovely little black arrow.
Don't have to worry about which layer you are on to select - will always grab the one you are aiming for. Hooray!
apple C and apple v to put into the DDS library.
Put template layer under grey layer.
Go back to background layer, unlock, down opacity until you can just see template. Lock template and coloured background layer. Turn little eye off on template.
Add new layer, label class work.
Go to pen tool. Click down - options! When you are about to start, there is an x - meaning it is ready to go. Start to notice symbols that go with pen tool.
Open window called stroke - 2 pt is standard outline stroke. Details smaller. Change weight.
The colour you selected for the layer is the colour your dot will be. Make a line. Add a curve in in the usual photoshop manner. Fill colours will appear between your dots - that's why the background is grey, to remind us that the lines have a colour and have to be joined properly to fill in neatly. Fills automatically. Illustrator does not need alt key to delete. Hover pen tool over anchor - use this to deselect bottom handle bar. Simply click on anchor point and handle bar disappears!!!! There is now no direction.
Hover over point you started at - this shows a circle symbol - this is asking you if you are finished. Click on this and the shape will be closed. From here there will be the little x to show that the pen tool is ready again.
If you want to leave a shape - little black arrow, click out.
To go back in - get pen tool, hover over where you left there will be a slash (/) symbol, asking if you are wanting to restart there.
To move handlebars - use black arrow, white arrow. Play with this to get your shapes.
If you only want to alter one curve - press alt - you are only using the one handlebar, thus altering one curve.
Hover pen tool over part of line - plus symbol - add something?
If for some reason it isn't giving you the plus sign, clicking on pen tool gives you all those options. This selects a tool that just does that.
White arrow selects last part of line, select and press delete.
HOMEWORK - red as outline colour, click on template, trace template with pen tool. Turn fill colour OFF, jus want red outline. At the end we can fill, but for now it's better to leave it off. There is no history, just use apple z.

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