The definitive step-by-step guide to Adobe Illustrator! The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book showcases the work of more than 100 top Illustrator artists, walking you through their creative techniques from start to finish. Clear, step-by-step instructions, helpful sidebars, and savvy tips guide you through Illustrator 8's highlights, from the basics to sophisticated professional effects. For inspiration, you'll find lush, full-color galleries of the contributing artists' work. And as a bonus, The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book includes a CD-ROM with custom Wow! brushes and Actions, tutorials, samples of Gradient Mesh art, and more.
This is an outstanding full-color guide for a range of Illustrator users. As with other Wow! books, this one is a compilation of hands-on advice from a wide variety of accomplished artists with lots of experience with the software. The tips let you make the most of Illustrator's tools to create many different types of images, all quite professional looking.
The author, an award-winning artist herself, starts off with an introduction to the essential Illustrator features--from working with objects and palettes to working with transformations, views, color, image formats, Postscript, and output. The book goes on to offer more in-depth discussions of shapes, lines, fills, colors, templates, layers, blends, gradients, paths, type, layout, masks, special effects, external apps, not to mention Web, multimedia, and animation projects. As you work through many exercises and browse image galleries from the contributing artists, you learn expert-level tips and techniques. The book includes technical notes, company and artist information, publications, a glossary, and a list of keyboard shortcuts. The companion CD-ROM has Brushes, Actions, clip art, fonts, tutorials, and demo versions of Illustrator and other software programs. --Kathleen Caster
