ILLUSTRATOR alphabet soup OUGD403

Illustrator tutorial

For our alphabet soup module we have illustrator software workshops to learn different techniques and skills to help us produce our studio briefs. Also learning skills that we will use in the future and for other work.

We first did a work shop on pen tool exercises. I would say i am quite confident on illustrator but i haven't really used the pen tool that much so it was a good exercise to refresh my skills. We had to follow the steps and drag the cursor to the right parts of the shape. It took me a few goes on each shape until i got it right , and even though you follow steps to make the shape up i still found it a bit difficult. 

The next part of the workshop we traced over a letter 'G' that simon had created for us. We placed the tool into illustrator and make sure we had 2 layers. On the layer options we selected all the boxes on the base image and named it 'raster image' we dimmed the image by 50% and then lastly locked the layer. For the vector image we left it unlocked as that was the image we were working on to make the trace of the letter 'G'.

We went around the outside and inside of the image with the pen tool dragging and clicking to make the outlines of the letter. I found it quite difficult to make the lines match the original letter perfectly. once we had finished the outline we hid the background image so we were just left with the outline of the 'G'.

After we had our completed 'G' we used the white arrow tool and adjusted  our anchor points to get the a more accurate line trace. I think the anchors are so helpful because you can always adjust it if its not the right scale.

                          

We next created another letter 'G' using shapes we used the eclipse tool and placed them on top of each other using our previous 'G' as a guide. Once we were happy we selected all shapes and chose the unite tool which connects all the circles together.

We needed to make the gap in the ear of the letter 'G' , We selected the line where we wanted to delete it and double clicked until a small line of red dots appeared then we deleted the line. We joined up the gap using the pen tool. For the Circles in the top and bottom the 'G' we used the eclipse tool again.

When we were in the illustrator workshop , towards the end we got shown some examples of line drawing with a pen tool , and an image of the characteristics of a typeface. I found the characteristics image really helpful its easier creating a letter when you know its distinguishing features.