Synopses & Reviews
For decades, Sharon Steuer and her international WOW! team have been showcasing the world’s best artists and designers working in Illustrator. In this expanded edition of the best-selling and award-winning Illustrator WOW! Book, you’ll find hundreds of tips, tricks, and techniques derived from actual projects from top Illustrator artists. You’ll learn to use new features, discover exciting ways to create complex effects, and find fresh ways to use venerable old tools and¿speed up your workflow. This edition includes coverage of the 2014 release and is loaded with and lessons with stunning new artwork that feature:
- Painting and generating objects with raster brushes
- Harnessing Live Corners, Live Rectangles, and new ways to reshape paths
- Manipulating live type characters with the Touch Type tool
- Creating airbrush and neon effects with gradients on strokes
- Building complex styles with multiple lines, fills, and effects
- Composing complex repeating patterns
- Auto-generating corners for pattern brushes
- Incorporating transparency into mesh and gradients
- Building and modifying scenes in perspective and 3D
- Transforming raster art to Illustrator vectors
- Preparing artwork for animation and the web
- Integrating Illustrator with Photoshop and other apps
- Creating photorealism in Illustrator
WOW! ONLINE Register the book at peachpit.com/register to access artwork to pick apart and special PDFs from artists to you. Keep up with tips on the latest Illustrator features at WOWartist.com.
Review
”This book has the perfect mix of inspiration and instruction—I have yet to find a better motivational tool for using Illustrator to push the envelope and create art that forces people to notice."
Mordy Golding, Senior Director of Content, lynda.com
“Every Illustrator user should have a copy of the WOW! book. Period.”
David Blatner, co-publisher of CreativePro.com and InDesignSecrets.com
Synopsis
Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book is updated to help intermediate through professional artists and designers get up to speed on the more creative features of Illustrator and efficiently integrate workflow updates and improvements. With its practical, yet beautiful examples, this book focuses on real-world tips, tricks, and techniques extracted from the artwork of many of the world’s best Illustrator artists.
This 14th edition of the book will help you harness the most powerful creative features of Adobe Illustrator CS6 and CC (including the latest 2014 release), from painting and generating objects with raster brushes, to creating complex repeating patterns, and inserting Illustrator objects into an editable 3D perspective grid. You’ll learn how to incorporate the vast array of feature enhancements designed to improve object and text creation and editing, including Live Corners, Live Rectangles, the new Path Reshaping functions, and the Touch Type tool. In addition, you’ll discover how to add automatic corners to pattern brushes, apply gradients to strokes, prepare artwork for animation and the web, and use Image Trace to transform raster art to vectors. Through real-world step-by-step lessons and stunning artwork, you’ll be inspired to master even the most challenging aspects of Adobe Illustrator.
About the Author
Sharon Steuer is an artist who has been creating, writing about, and teaching workshops on digital art since the early 80s. The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book, which is in its 14th edition, has three times won the Benjamin Franklin Award for “Best Computer Book.” In addition, Sharon is the author of Creative Thinking in Photoshop: A New Approach to Digital Art, teaches courses in artistic painting with Illustrator on lynda.com, and is a regular columnist for creativepro.com. Her digital paintings and illustrations have appeared in numerous books and magazines and have been exhibited nationally. You can see her work and keep in touch with her via: www.sharonsteuer.com, facebook.com/SharonSteuer, twitter.com/SharonSteuer.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Your Creative Workspace
Chapter 2: Designing Type & Layout
Chapter 3: Rethinking Construction
Chapter 4: Expressive Strokes
Chapter 5: Color Transitions
Chapter 6: Reshaping Dimensions
Chapter 7: Mastering Complexity
Chapter 8: Creatively Combining Apps