Description:
This glossy full-color guide teaches you everything you need to know to perfect your artwork in Adobe Illustrator 7.0 for Macintosh and Windows. You'll first learn how to use the Illustrator interface effectively--via keyboard shortcuts, grids, and layers, for example--and how to use Illustrator with Macromedia FreeHand, another vector-editing package. There's also an extensive guide to using Extensis VectorTools 2.0 for Macintosh, a set of plug-ins for improving your productivity in Illustrator and FreeHand, and a guide to using other Illustrator plug-ins, including ones for special effects and CAD work.Next the author, Ted Alspach, delves into the essentials of using Illustrator for serious commercial and fine art. He offers tips and techniques from many Illustrator artists, supplying images of their work and explanations of what they did to create them. Various projects teach you how to create the illusion of depth via layering and other techniques, use strokes creatively, work with blends and gradients, create interesting type effects, add texturing details to enrich drawings, and work with patterns, textures, and backgrounds. The final chapter is a gallery of artwork by some of the contributing artists along with brief descriptions of the tools the artists used. Finally, there's a guide to the contributing artists and their contact information. In all, the book is best for intermediate and advanced users, since most of the projects assume you know Illustrator fairly well. The included hybrid CD-ROM has demonstration versions of Adobe Illustrator 7.0, Adobe Photoshop 4.0, Adobe Dimensions 3.0, and Adobe Streamline 4.0 as well as demo and full versions of several plug-ins (most of these are for Macintosh). --Kathleen Caster
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