The Joys Of Adobe Illustrator: Part One

A number of years ago, for no apparent reason, I decided that I needed to enroll in a certificate program at Bellevue Community College. Actually I had a reason, but I really didn’t realize it at the time: it wasn’t until some years later when I had the time – time be damned; it was the inclination – to reflect on what I laughingly have refered to as my life, that I realized that I had been subject to the subtle influences of “they”. You know, “they” say that one needs to network; “they” say that one needs to have a number of different resumés; “they” say that one needs to keep getting additional education – and all of that “they” stuff.

Somewhere I had heard that Bellevue Community College had a really good multi-media authoring certificate curriculum.

I had no idea what multi-media authoring might be. In spite of that fact it just sounded good.

This had occurred at a time when I was in the midst of teaching myself HTML, with the help of Laura Lemay and her amazing how-to book for HTML 3.2. I was fascinated by it. I had never encountered anything that resembled computer programming that had such an immediate positive or negative reinforcement component. Having completed a chunk of HTML code – using MS Notepad as the editor – all I had to do was save it as HTM or HTML, click on it and get an immediate “it works” or an immediate “what were you thinking?” back from the browser. I used Netscape in those days since MS Internet Explorer was so rudimentary that it shouldn’t have even been called a browser. (The distance Microsoft travelled in almost no time from that Explorer to the one that they unleashed on the market shortly after the morning that Bill Gates must have awakened and realized he was about to lose the whole game if he didn’t turn his company on its axis, was nothing short of amazing; but the Explorer available when I was in my HTML-coder days was a joke.) Anyway, I was having more fun than it ought to be possible to have building my first web site from scratch. I was otherwise employed as an entrepreneur running my own IBM Agent and Wholesale Distribution Consulting and Technical Writing business with my wife, but I had plenty of time – sometimes until three or four in the morning - to pursue the HTML wil-o-the-wisp.

Somewhere during that time I heard about the curriculum at BCC. Under what must have been the influence of “they” (“they” say that multi-media authoring is the next big thing – perhaps) I decided to look into it.

In almost no time I was attending the first night class of what was going to turn out to be one of the three classes that I had signed up for that quarter. Before I finally became a community college drop-out I had accumulated almost sixty credit hours, had an almost four point GPA, and had learned a lot of stuff that was going to prove to be a fortuitous addition to my life as I entered unemployed – some call it retired – old age. I had learned how to make movies with Adobe Premiere, how to invent my own world with Adobe Photoshop and, I wasn’t really sure to invent what, with Adobe Illustrator.

Premiere and Photoshop, each in its own manner – Premiere with aggressive abandon and Photoshop with a passive-aggressive turn of character – deal with raster files. Think of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s paintings and you know what a raster file is. Raster files are goldmines of possibilities: they can be cloned; they can be flipped; they can be warped and woofed and reflected and distorted; they can be gray-scaled and they can be RGB’d or CMYK’d; they can be overlaid with varying transparencies to reveal their inner meaning; they can be selectively cut and pasted. If they happen to come with sound and thirty frames per second they can be cut, overlaid, titled and faded to black or white or in some inventive flow of imagery be rolled over to; those are called movies. The possibilities are apparently endless. But they always end up being in some way or another, just a subset of what all those pixels were when one started to manipulate them. And that is the point. A raster file has to already exist to be dealt with.

But Illustrator is different. Illustrator generates vector files. Think of Albert Einstein with a black board full of equations to understand what a vector file is. Because each line, shape, color, font, line thickness or drop shadow exists only on the basis of its co-ordinates on their page and on the basis of the mathematical characteristics that have been told to tag along with those co-ordinates. With Illustrator one can start with a blank page on a blank art board and, with various tools, keys and drop down menus, create a world from one’s mind where only blankness had existed moments before. To do that, of course takes artistic talent.

Lacking that one can trace things. That’s what I do.

But even tracing takes some talent and some imagination. Illustrator gives one more brush strokes, line segments and polygonal possibilities than it is possible to absorb in one, or even many, sittings. So, as one stares at the template of some raster file that is about to be traced to its eternal improvement, the choices of how to do it become something of an exercise in itself. And once the choice for any particular piece of the tracing has been made, the actual execution of that choice can become a career in itself. Making just the right curve – a curve that perfectly overlays that which is being traced – with the Bezier curve tool (called the “pen” tool because if you can make the thing do your bidding it produces lines that flow as if they had been produced by the quill of an old fashioned ink pen) can take many tries and require one’s entire cache of colorful expletives.

In the world of vector based artistry, the world of Adobe Illustrator, one can swear and draw, swear and draw, and swear and draw. But in the end, if one perseveres, one can produce something almost from nothing.

And that is a good feeling.

Ultimately the raster-based world has the last laugh, however. The World Wide Web only understands raster files, and of those file types only a few of that large family of image file formats. Chief among those are the JPEG and the GIF.

So, if one wants to promulgate the work of an afternoon’s (or a month’s) vectorizing to the Web, one ultimately needs to bite one’s vector-based tongue and export the masterpiece to one of those formats that the Web understands. Then it can be uploaded.

Here is the first major tracing that I ever did.
Several Years later I did this one, which I posted last year on this blog.