I Love Illustrator!

I absolutely LOVE using Illustrator. As a kid I made pictures in Paint all the time and Illustrator is basically Paint on steroids. It’s no surprise that I took to Illustrator much quicker than Photoshop. I use them both, but I prefer the workspace in Illustrator over Photoshop. I could easily spend all day just doing fun things in Illustrator.

Illustrator has given me an amazing tool to create. The days where I spend the majority of my working hours creating in Illustrator are good days. The months after school will probably be full of many hours working in Illustrator because #22 on my Master List is, “Design 100 fabric prints to sell on Spoonflower” and I really want to do that soon. It’s a lot, I know, but I just love creating new textile designs. Digital Textile Design and Surface Design were two of my favorite classes in school.

I took the Digital Illustration (Illustrator) class my second quarter school in winter of 2017. My instructor for the class was Tiki, he’s an amazing artist. I learned so much in his class and I gained a lot of much needed confidence in myself too. After the class was over I kept using it a lot at home for personal projects and as a result I become more proficient over time.

I found there were some limitations to the software, but in the March 2019 update Adobe gave us a new gradient tool. The Freeform Gradient! I am now obsessed with it! The Freeform Gradient tool is more user friendly than doing a gradient mesh, in my opinion anyway. I still need to practice using it though. It does take a little bit of time to get used to. I think I spent a good four hours the first time I discovered it and I got frustrated a lot but by the end of the practice session I had the hang of it.

The portait above is the final we had to do for the Digital Illustration class. It was very difficult for me to do because I have a hard time filtering details. I limited myself to only five colors and went to work. I spent so many hours on it and was relieved when it was finally done. Turned out pretty good, huh?

Tell me: What tool do you love to create with?