AI Lesson 01

Graphic Design and Illustration with Adobe Illustrator

Introduction

Adobe Express Learing Journal

Test 1: How about your basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator?

Studie the domains

Adobe Illustrator backgrounds and theory

What is Adobe Illustrator?

The Pen Tool

The Bézier Game

Assignment 1: The Pen tool

Self Study 1: LinkedIn Learning

Introduction

Congratulations! You've achieved a significant accomplishment, and you should be proud of yourself. You've earned a certificate for Photoshop that is respected in the industry, and without exaggeration, this is truly a top-notch achievement that will shine on your CV. Were you not planning to apply for an internship soon? Well, the timing couldn't be better!

Now, let's keep up the momentum. Besides Photoshop, there are more tools that the business world—yes, those folks from the internship and such—would love to see you excel in.

You've chosen Illustrator and discussed it with your teacher, right? Since everyone in the class might make a different choice, it's now more about self-study. But no worries, because aren't you the one who has already done all this before? Exactly, you've got this.

Go through the provided theory, assignments, and suggested self-study materials for each lesson, and keep track of it in your learning journal on Adobe Express. Best of luck in earning your second certificate!

P.S. Did you know that if you have both Photoshop and Illustrator certificates, you also get the Visual Design Professional certificate? Three for the price of two, super nice.

Adobe Express Learing Journal

To proceed to the official exam, you need to complete a set of assessments, view LinkedIn Learning chapters, and accomplish a series of assignments. You keep track of your progress in a learning journal. By demonstrating your commitment to studying for this, you will be allowed to take the official test. This is done using a learning journal in Adobe Express.

Submit the link to your learning journal through the assignment on Microsoft Teams.

Test 1: How about your basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator?

This is a new course with a variety of students. In order to set a starting point, we will start with a test. The test contains basic questions about working with Illustrator. What do you know already and what do you need to succeed?

The test will be shared by the SOFT2 teacher during the first class through a Microsoft Teams assignment. Immediately after the test, we will review the answers together as a class.

Studie the domains

Throughout the next seven lessons, we'll focus on training across five domains. We assume you already have a good understanding of Adobe Illustrator. Our goal is to delve into specific details within these domains, which will be crucial for the final ACP test. Identifying areas where you need further knowledge is an essential part of the process. Take note of any aspects within these domains that are not yet fully clear to you. Don't worry—you have seven lessons to practice and enhance your skills.

Adobe Illustrator backgrounds and theory

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard in vector drawing—for everything from minimalistic logos to full-blown illustrations. The essentials of Illustrator start with the use of the pen tool, but also include artboards, workspaces, layers, and shapes. How do you make selections, draw and build complex shapes using the Illustrator drawing tools, and precisely color artwork with tools like swatches and gradient fills. How to organize artwork into groups and layers, combine and clean up paths, work with type and effects, export your work, and much more will be covered in the next few weeks.

The interface

When you first open Adobe Illustrator, you’ll come to a welcome screen. This screen has several useful things for you: easy access to recent documents, templates for projects, and quick links to open or create a new document.

Let’s go ahead and click Create New… on the left.

The New Document screen will come up. You’ll get used to this screen quickly. It has ready to use templates for different mobile, web, and print designs. There are also downloadable projects that you can alter and use.

For now, let’s just focus on starting a new document. The main field you should worry about for now are the Width and Height of your document. Here, I chose a width of 990 px and a height of 540 px, but it doesn’t really matter.

Not only should you choose the size appropriate for your project, but you can always change this later.

We’ll be talking about Artboards soon, but for now, just know that this will allow you to draw multiple images within the same document.

Now, your interface will likely look a little different than mine. You can customize your interface as you become more comfortable with your personal workflow. I love how customizable Illustrator is, and am always looking to make my process more streamlined. The less time I’m looking around for the right thing, the more time I can spend creating!

Tools Interface

On the left side of the screen, you’ll find the tools bar. I separate the tools into a few types:

Create objects
Manipulate objects
Text tools
Color tools
Adjust your view

Panels

On the right side of your screen are the panels. Panels extend functionality and add options to your workflow. If you want to see a list of all the panels, go into the Window menu (menu at the very top of the program). Again, in future tutorials, you’ll get experience with these panels. For now, I’ll just introduce you to the four that I use most often.

Color panel: change the color of objects
Text panels (Character & Paragraph)
Pathfinder panel: Alter objects, such as combining or subtracting
Align panel: Align objects to each other or the artboard

Just knowing these two simple things should make the entire interface a bit more comfortable for you.

The Pen Tool

The Pen tool, found in the Toolbar, is one of the most powerful drawing tools in Illustrator. With it, you can create and edit anchor points and paths.

Set stroke and fill before drawing

To start with the Pen tool, select the Pen tool in the Toolbar and, in the Properties panel, set the stroke weight to 1 pt, the color to black, and the fill to none.

Create straight lines

To create straight lines with the Pen tool, click and release to create an anchor point. Move the pointer, and you’ll see a preview of the path you are creating. Click and release to create another anchor point. You can continue clicking and releasing in different areas to create more anchor points for the path.

To close a path, move the pointer over the original anchor point and, when a circle shows next to the pointer, press the Shift key and click the end point. To stop drawing a path without closing it, press the Escape key.

Create curves

To draw a curve when creating an anchor point, drag to create direction handles, and then release. The more you drag when creating or editing anchor point handles, the more curve the path has.

Create corner points (change path direction)

To change the direction of a path while drawing, drag to create a smooth point (a curve). Release the mouse button. Move the pointer over the end of a direction handle, press the Option key (macOS) or Alt key (Windows), and drag the end of the handle to split them.

Remove direction handles

To remove a direction handle as you draw with the Pen tool, so that you can go from a curve to a straight line, click back on the last anchor point created to remove the handle. Then continue drawing.

The Pen tools to create lines and shapes. The Add-, Delete- and Anchor Point tool can be used to alter the line or shape after its creationg.

It's also possible to add these two Pen tools to the interface for easily adding and deleting points.

The Curvature tool takes a redesigned approach to drawing paths in Illustrator. While the Pen tool is more of a precision tool that requires you to think about where to place an anchor point and how to pull out direction lines to control line segments, the Curvature tool takes a more intuitive approach to drawing by asking the user to click along the path you want to create, while drawing along that path. Another big difference is the lack of modifier keys required to draw with the Curvature tool.

The Shaper tool helps you create complex and beautiful designs by drawing, stacking, and placing shapes together, and then simply combining, merging, deleting, or moving them.

The pencil tool is a great tool for creating freeform shapes and lines in Adobe Illustrator. Select it from the tools dialog box and click and drag to draw. ... This will reshape the line into the direction of wherever you began drawing your line. In this example, the pencil tool is used before the end of the original line.

Smooth Tool in Illustrator is one of the tools that the user widely uses. The smooth tool is used for making the curvy and rough edges of the artworks and objects that are generally present in the vector-based program smooth and glossy.

The Path Eraser tool lets you erase parts of a path by drawing along the path. This tool is useful when you want to limit what you erase to a path segment, such as one edge of a triangle.

the Join Tool is essentially a brush, but unlike other brush tools in Illustrator there are no editable parameters and the brush size is fixed. What it does do is join segments and points together quickly and easily.

The option to Simplify a path can be found from the menu Object, Path. It allows you to get rid of points you don't really need, it cleans up the lines.

The Bézier Game

Playing the Bézier Game while studying for Adobe Illustrator helps you practice hands-on with the Pen Tool, develop muscle memory for Bézier curve control, understand curve manipulation, learn efficiently in a gamified environment, transfer skills directly to Illustrator, build confidence in curve creation.

Play the game and make a screenshot for you learning journal at the final level you've reached.

Assignment 1: The Pen tool

Download the assets from Google Drive Lesson 01 folder.
Use the pen tool to replicate the examples as precisely as possible with the minimum amount of points.
Place your image on your Adobe Express page and describe briefly what you have done.

Self Study 1: LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning

As a GLR student, you can continue to develop yourself 24/7. The online platform LinkedIn Learning offers thousands of video tutorials and online training sessions, to which you have free access with your GLR email address.

Once you have completed the virtual training, LinkedIn Learning grants you access to a certification. You can then showcase your success on your LinkedIn newsfeed.

Hurry and visit LINKEDIN LEARNING, log in with your GLR email address, and get started.

Watch the videos from "Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Illustrator" chapter 1.

Note: At the end of SOFT2C, you need to submit the certificate you received from LinkedIn Learning to your teacher. Watch the assigned chapters every week.

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