Adobe Illustrator Advanced
Course Outline
Advanced Level
Illustrator might be a vector program but that
doesn’t restrict it to plain-looking artwork. With a little know-how you can easily put some extra life into flat graphics with creative gradients, masks, photographs,
special effects, and even 3D rotations, with professional
illustrative flair.
Useful to you if:
- you need to produce or amend any basic graphic items from the list above.
Before the course, you should:
- be able to produce accurate bezier shapes;
- have some basic prior experience of the Illustrator package;
- be familiar with the main Illustrator palettes.
At the end of the day’s course you will:
- have produced an iconic graph, a designed map, a stylised illustration from a photograph, and a 3D object;
- be armed with some tips on how to improve workflow;
- be comfortable with complex blends, gradient meshes, symbols and brushes.
- know some expert-user keyboard shortcuts.
Course contents (may vary slightly):
- Recap of principles
- Preferences, displays and cursors
- Measurement units
- Tool palette overview with options
- Navigation
- Paths
- Maximising pathfinder
- Divide objects below
- Clean up
- Splitting
- Editing
- Brushes
- Painting, applying, new
- Libraries
- Options
- Colour
- Patterns and tiles
- Inverting and complementing colours
- Swatch libraries
- Gradients and meshes, warping meshes
- Transparent meshes
- Trapping options
- Advanced stroke options, effects
- Smart Usage
- Smart guides
- Turning shapes into guides
- Envelope distortion
- Actions: playing, editing and recording
- Special Effects
- 3D extrude, 3D rotate
- Bevels, importing bevels
- Graphic styles and libraries
- Images
- Using a clipping path on an image
- Sampling from an image
- Colour adjustment
- Graphs
- Entering and controlling graph data
- Map conversion
- Importing Excel data
- Editing and applying 3D effects
- Applying pictographic effects
- Transparency
- Object transparency, blending modes, opacity masking
- Blend isolation
- Transparency flattener
- Output
- Legacy files
- With transparency
- Export options
- Exporting paths
- Best formats for inDesign import
- File formats (and transparency support)
- PDFs
- Printing: considerations
- Colour separations
- Page tiling
- Custom start-up file
- Templates
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Project achievements:
- Graph with icons
- Map with graphics
- Stylised illustration from a photograph
- 3D object