1: drawing from scratch, on a blank canvas
Very recently, in late 2008, Adobe released version CS4 of one of their main product suites. I reviewed a companion book about Photoshop CS4, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Classroom in a Book. So how does the current book on Illustrator CS4 compare?
The quick answer is that Illustrator is more about actual drawing using your mouse and keyboard. Here, you can start from scratch, with a blank canvas. The book shows how to draw simple curves, and goes on from there to more sophisticated methods. Thus we meet Bezier curves, that are drawn using control points. And there is are rich palette of colouring options. Along with a varied set of fonts.
Illustrator has a complex set of options that permits all this, and hides a lot of underlying mathematical complexity, that is relegated to the computer's responsibility.
There are certainly commonalities between the 2 books. Especially concerning layers. These let you compose very intricate final images from a variety of simpler images, each in its own layer.
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