Instructions For Illustrator

Instructions for Illustrator will show you how to perform these tasks with the program: painting, moving and performing other broad transformations on shapes, detailed editing to alter a shape, and tracing photos. To develop proficiency in this program, use instructions for performing a particular task as a stepping stone from which to begin exploring the program's commands on your own.

Painting

You can use Illustrator as a painting program, as a sample task involving the Paintbrush tool illustrates. Click the paintbrush icon on the tool palette, then click a color to paint with as follows. Click the second drop-down gallery from the left in the area above the canvas. This action displays a list of colored swatches for the "Paintbrush" tool. Click a swatch whose color you want to paint with, then drag on the canvas to paint with that color. To choose the width of the brush, click the up or down arrows of the "Stroke" control, which is to the right of the color gallery just described.

Moving, Scaling And Rotating

Performing a move, scale or rotation operation on one of Illustrator's predefined shapes shows you how to perform the operations on any object. Click the rectangle icon from the tool palette to run the tool for drawing rectangles, then drag on the canvas to create the rectangle. Click the black arrow icon from the tool palette to run the Selection tool, which lets you move, rotate and scale objects. Click the rectangle to select it, then drag inside the bounding box that Illustrator displays around the rectangle. The rectangle will move to follow your mouse cursor. Hover the mouse cursor just beyond one of the bounding box's corners, then drag to rotate the rectangle. Click and drag on a bounding box corner to resize the rectangle.

Editing Shapes

Editing the shapes you make is essential to producing the designs you want with Illustrator. Editing shapes includes the operations of adding, deleting and moving the nodes of a shape. Nodes are points through which a shape's outline flows. To add a node to a shape, first select the shape to which you want to add a node by running the Selection tool, then clicking the shape. Click the icon on the tool palette that shows a nib pen with a "+" symbol, then click a point on the selected shape's outline. Illustrator will add a new node where you clicked. Delete nodes by first clicking the nib pen icon with the "-" symbol, then clicking a node you want to delete. Move nodes by clicking the white arrow from the tool palette, then dragging a node.

Tracing Photos

Illustrator lets you turn a bitmap image, such as that in a JPEG photograph, into a series of vector shapes, which you can then edit. To perform such a conversion, load a photo into Illustrator with the File menu's Open command, then click the black arrow icon from the tool palette to run the Selection tool. Click the photo to select it, then click the down arrow to the right of the Live trace button above the canvas. Click one of the color options that appears, such as "6 color." Illustrator will convert the photo to a group of colored objects that you can then convert into vector shapes. To perform that conversion, click the "Expand" button above the canvas. Illustrator will indicate the vector shapes by showing all their nodes, which you can now edit.

References

• "Illustrator CS5 Bible"; Ted Alspach; 2010