Transparency effects open the door for designers to create eye catching effects. You can add transparency to drop shadows or apply blending modes to objects to enhance your illustrations. Adding Transparency You can add transparency in Illustrator by lowering the opacity of objects so that underlying artwork becomes visible. Go Window>Transparency to open up your Transparency [...]

As you start working on complicated illustrations, layers will start to build up. And you will have to group and arrange them so that you can move and edit the layers easily. I will show you an example of an illustration I did so that you can see how I name and group my layers. Layers [...]

Filling Color Using Swatches To fill an object, open up your Swatches Palette. Select your object and pick any color from the swatches. Filling Color Using Color Picker Another way to fill color is by double clicking on the Fill in your Tool Palette. A Color Picker window will appear and you can pick your color. Changing Fill and [...]

Almost all objects in over daily life can be built with basic shapes. By drawing shapes using our basic shape tool, we can use compound path to combine or subtract shapes to create what we need. What is Compound Path? Compound path is made out of at least two objects. You can add, subtract and [...]

Templates.com has come up with a new contest for coming up with the best slogan for their company this month. The idea of the contest is simple. Everyone is welcome to think up of a slogan for their company, leave a message in comments to the blog post, and stand to win $100 [...]

Using the Brush Tool, you can add styles to your lines. It can also be used to mimic calligraphy, crayon and brush strokes. This will help you add more life to your line works. Applying Brush Stroke Select the Brush Tool and draw your object. Then go to your Brushes Palette and select the crayon brush to [...]

The Path Tool will be the hardest tool to learn in Illustrator. It usually take weeks to learn and beginners always end up in frustration while figuring how it works. So don’t give up and practice it every day and soon you will be able to draw any shape. Drawing Straight Lines Select the Pen Tool [...]

We can quickly draw shapes and lines quickly using the Pencil Tool. This lesson will show you some of the tricks in drawing smooth and fluid lines. Drawing a Line Select the pencil tool and click and drag to draw a free hand line drawing. Closing Paths with Pencil Tool To close a path, hold Alt/Option as your [...]

In this lesson, we will look at how to use the shape tools to draw our basic shapes in illustrator. But before we start, we will look at how to select a basic shape so that you have no problems in selecting and editing shapes in Illustrator. Selection Tools There are 2 types of selection tool in [...]

If you haven’t gotten your Illustrator, you can download the 30 days trial from Adobe’s download page. After installing, we will run Illustrator for the first time. Create New Document Go File>New Document to create your first document. Type in a Name for the document and click Advanced to select RGB for Color Mode as [...]