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Tuesday, 1.24.06: Tackling Illustrator... again
I figure if my sister Kathleen can be valedictorian of her Adobe Illustrator class, there is hope for me yet.
Did you ever keep butting your head against a wall trying to learn something? That's me and Illustrator. What bothers me is that in my early days of computer graphics, I got my start on vector-based* programs -- Corel Draw and what is now Microsoft Visio. Usually what you start with is where your brain sticks.
When I started to do graphics on the web I had to switch to a bitmap* graphics program -- first Photo-Paint, then Photoshop. It felt so loosey-goosey, so unstructured. Took me forever to adjust to a new paradigm.
I invested in Illustrator -- maybe when I got interested in cartooning and animation (another of my lost causes) -- because it was touted as the creme de la creme of drawing programs.
Unfortunately, it hides all its charms.
To me, learning Illustrator is like joining the Masons or a cultish religion -- you can't truly partake until you learn all the secret handshakes and arcane rituals. You can do anything in Illustrator -- as long as you've memorize the secret key combinations.
So I got out my Illustrator books and decided to start from scratch and actually learn the basics. We'll see what transpires...
*Vector graphics: lines are calculated mathematically and can be easily scaled up and down. Think hard-edged drawing. Bitmap or pixel-based graphics: more like paint over the pixels in your screen. Think photographs.
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