Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Adobe Illustrator - trial 1 - Canadian landscape


When I see what people can make with Adobe Illustrator, I wonder how it's possible!
Who knows! maybe it's supereasy...and I started to try it out.
Here, in a first attempt, I restricted myself to the use of the most basic shapes, rectangles, triangles and ellipses, while still trying to put some depth and motion in it.
Already, I couldn't obtain exactly what I wanted because I encountered several problems:
Especially the gradient tool frustrated me. How do you create a gradient of transparency? By clicking on the gradient sliders, you have to choose a color out of that color bar, which is really not precise! Can't you select somehow an exact color, for example that you had already in the illustration? And can't you set also a percentage of transparency to the gradient sliders?
Another problem: how do you export only what is inside the limits of the "artboard" to for example a jpeg file. Or how can you cut out a rectangular selection of the illustration (without bothering about the original shapes)? Finally I just erased what came out of the artboard with the eraser tool. Very unprecise, and moreover, I couldn't change the stroke of the eraser tool.
And finally, how do you export an illustration to a jpeg file without losing resolution?

All suggestions are more than welcome.

I hope that more and better Adobe Illustrator posts will follow soon.