If you want to bring your illustrating game to the next level, then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I collected some helpful tips that will facilitate your workflow and improve your skills. You don’t believe me? – Convince yourself! (Find out more about Illustrator here)
1. Clean Curves: Create as few points as possible with the Pen Tool and use the handles to achieve clean curves and a smooth look. A sketch as a template can help you to get the shapes right at the first try. Of course, it’s always possible to adjust your curves at any time during your illustration progress.
2. Basic shapes: Try to built up your illustration with the basic shapes you can create with the Rectangle-, Rounded Rectangle,- Ellipse- and Star Tool. If you want to bypass the Pen Tool and make sure that your forms look smooth and symmetric, this is the easiest way to get the basic structure.
3. Hand drawn-look: You can give your illustration an inky style by using the Width-Tool (Shift+W). It works best when you apply it directly were your anchor points are. The advantage to just changing the brush stroke is: You have complete control about the amount of weight your adding to your lines and they look less uniform and more handmade.
4. Rounded corners: As I already mentioned in my other article ”Simple illustration-great effect”, you can easily adjust the rounding of every corner in your illustration by using the Direct Selection Tool. Just create a Rectangle for example, select it with the Tool and double click on the little points which appear in the corners. Thereby you got the possibility to give each corner an individual rounding.
5. Global Swatches: Save your colors as global swatches in the Swatch Panel to save all the colors used in your artwork and to modify colors all at once. Just select your finished artwork and click the little folder item in the window to save all the colors you used in your illustration. Make sure that ”Convert Process to Global” is selected. When you’re now clicking on one of the swatches and change its color, it will get adjusted in your whole illustration.
6. Harmonic colors: If you’ve got trouble choosing harmonic gradations of your colors, you can use the function Color Guide which you can find under “window” in the top menu. If you select a color of your illustration, this tool offers you color tones that work in harmony with your selection. That’s quite helpful when it comes to picking colors for your shadows.
7. Multiple side shapes: You can easily create multiple side shapes by selecting the Polygon Tool. Click and drag on the canvas and press the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to change the amount of sides you want to use.
I hope I could show you some new features and make your life a little easier! Have fun trying them out and let me know what you think!
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