Before you get the wrong impression of this book, Illustrator Illuminated is not another user’s guide or pseudo-documentation. Rather, it is a collection of techniques and advice from seven graphic artists using Adobe Illustrator professionally. The author, Clay Andres, provides a peek over the shoulder of these artists at work. Showing how they approach jobs and use Illustrator to execute them is the mission of this book.
Each artist is presented in a separate case study as a stand-alone chapter. Different techniques are employed in each of these projects, giving the reader a number of ways to think about using Illustrator. Although the focus is on Illustrator and its tools, many of the techniques can be applied in other applications, such as Canvas or FreeHand. As a technical person who usually struggles with creativity in the form of art, this book was fun. An interesting look at artists at work.
The first case study is the publication of a colorfully illustrated children’s book created entirely in Illustrator. Key techniques presented are importing and exporting between Photoshop and Illustrator, hand tracing and scanning templates, and drawing with filled, un-stroked shapes as “cut paper” assembled cartoon-like.
Next we see a poster design. Here, placing images from Photoshop, distortion of objects and text, and Scitex prepress printing are described. The artist calls his techniques the 4th Dimension of Illustrator.
An in-depth discussion of complex blends highlights the production of a corporate logo styled after old travel stickers. The featured artist, Ron Chan, is often seen in MacWorld magazine. His style is notable for its use of many masked blends. Using custom type as outlines is also shown.
Adobe Illustrator 3.0’s introduction advertisement is the subject of the next case study. You many remember seeing these ads featuring a matrix of images using light bulbs to show off the new features in version 3. Many methods are used to produce this ad, and every new tool is showcased.
The creation of a magazine cover is next. Using carefully grouped objects and the paste in front/paste in back combination handle the need for layering in this project.
No look at Illustrator would be complete without a discussion of its application to technical drawing. Although no competitor to Claris CAD, Illustrator’s rendering abilities combined with the clever use of guides gives the artist the power to handle illustrations for an equipment catalog.
The final artist creates illustrations for The New York Times. This project required a semi-3D map and shows the use of shearing and distortion to give the illusion of volume and transparency, even in gray-scale.
Overall, the book was fun to read and the techniques shown give new perspective to the power of illustration on the Macintosh. The figures accompanying this article were created in Illustrator using some of the ideas in the book. As a novice to this field, they were harder to create than they might appear. Sometimes subtle effects are the hardest! Illustrator Illuminated is a valuable look into the trick bags of real graphic artists executing real world illustration projects. I’m sure I’ll refer to it often when I’m stuck and can’t seem to get a project to “look” right.
The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
