Opinie
Description
Our digital illustration course is designed to help you take your skills to the next level. Study at your own pace, from the comfort of your own home with this 100% Web-based course from Gatlin International.
Digital illustration is a challenging and expressive area of graphic design. Working in Illustrator, you can develop your unique personal style as an artist.
In this 6-lesson digital illustration course, you'll learn advanced illustration and Adobe Illustrator techniques for communicating your creative concepts.
Through detailed, step-by-step lectures, you'll learn how a professional illustrator approaches creating editorial illustrations, icons, retro poster designs, 3D illustrations, and restaurant identity designs.
Open-ended projects in digital illustration will help you develop portfolio-quality illustrations. You'll develop your own style and artistic flair, making your work more powerful and distinctive.
Outline
LESSON 1 Conceptual Composition
Lesson One explores the challenge of editorial illustration. You'll explore how to define a concept, brainstorm ideas, and sketch options. Then you'll open up Illustrator and follow an illustration project that incorporates basic shapes and transformations, gradients, importing line art into Illustrator, lighting and shadow, chrome effects, iconographic shapes, and accents. The exercise will challenge you to develop an editorial illustration of your own.
LESSON 2 Pen Tool Studies
The Pen tool is your favorite tool, right? If not, Lesson Two will give you a thorough workout in using this indispensable Illustrator feature. You'll begin with a fun but extended tracing project that will stretch your Pen tool prowess and give you techniques for reworking bitmap images in Illustrator. In the second half of the lesson, you'll examine the process of creating simple, iconographic illustrations (icons) that are easy to recognize in black and white at different sizes. The exercise that follows will combine both elements you'll create a basic guide from a bitmap image then reduce it to iconographic simplicity.
LESSON 3 Color and Interpretation
Illustrators are often asked to work in retro or period styles. Lesson Three takes you back to the 1930s as you recreate a poster in the WPA style. You'll use basic lines and different Pen tool techniques to create stylized line art and enhance it with color and shading, lights and darks, and midtones. You'll set your illustration in a dramatic context and add art deco typography too. In the project, you'll create a WPA design of your own a whole New Deal!
LESSON 4 Light, Shadow, and Perspective
The Renaissance artists captured light, shadow, and perspective in their representations of three-dimensional form. In Lesson Four, you'll explore techniques for creating 3D objects and effects. First, you'll create a template for drawing objects in one-point perspective. Then you'll create an object, comparing how to simulate three dimensions through traditional highlights versus 3D effects. Finally, you'll learn how to place objects in the foreground or background of a composition, scale them proportionally using perspective lines, and add realistic shadows. The exercise will be a study in perspective and proportion.
LESSON 5 Illustration in Sequence
Sequential illustrations are like the panes in a comic strip. Each frame has some common characters, or elements, and yet each depicts a different action, or even just a continuation of an action. Lesson Five focuses on creating a series of related drawings, a task that a designer is often called upon to do. By creating a character and repeating colors and other visual elements through a series of scenes, you'll create a sequence that is both consistent and varied. In the exercise, you'll apply the techniques you've learned in creating a short storyboard.
LESSON 6 Theme, Repetition, Symmetry, and Type
What good are great illustrations without a unifying theme or composition? In Lesson Six, you'll put it all together you'll develop a theme, and using colors, symmetry, repeated elements, and type, create a unified illustration for a restaurant logo design. This lesson integrates everything you've learned in the course and explores the challenge of making imagery and typography work together. The final project will be a show-stopper for your portfolio, as you develop a book cover title illustration.
Additional Info
- Languages
- English
- Course Length
- 60.00 hours
- Duration of Access
Enrolled students have access to the class for six months. During this period, questions or assignments may be submitted at any time to the instructor. Each course lesson requires an average of 10 hours of study time.
- Instructor
Andrew Shalat is an author, designer/illustrator, educator, a Mac expert and an expert in digital illustration. Since 1985 he has been designing and writing articles about Macintosh, Mac software, and publishing technologies that have appeared in Macworld, maccentral.com and macweek.com (for which he was a columnist writing "Shalat's Web"). He has been a regular speaker/faculty member at Macworld Expo since 2001 and has written three books: How to Do Everything with Online Video (McGraw-Hill, Osborne), Do It Yourself Mac Projects (McGraw-Hill), and MacDesign Out of the Box (Peachpit). Andrew is a regular contributor to design and Macintosh related sites including Inside Mac Radio, InDesign Magazine, and Creativepro.com. His design work covers a large range of media including book, CD and DVD covers, brochures, catalogs, outdoor signage, print ads, artwork, logos, Flash and Web design, and grocery lists. Over the past two decades, Andrew has taught literature, writing, Web design, and print design.
- Prerequisites/Audience
The digital illustration course is designed for adult learners interested in building skills and portfolio for a design career. To take the course, students simply require a computer (PC or Mac), an Internet connection (56 Kbps modem or faster), and any required software. For courses with software requirements, computers must meet software manufacturers' system requirements.
- Requirements/Materials Included
To take the digital illustration course you'll need Adobe Illustrator CS4 or CS5 and basic experience in drawing and the software packages needed for this course.
- Certification
3 CEU’s
Sessions College is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). Certificate programs are accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools.