I love Adobe Illustrator.
Thats because of my 20 years in Graphics and I`m also doing art for
living. IIllustrator (or Photoshop which is mentione) is not easy to
learn at first sight, but when you learn it, it does feel almost
like what you can do with your pencil…and more. The tools are
flexible and easy to understand. And it is SO controlled by points,
you can decide thickness and work with the design in scale many
times original.
I am sure you can use it for bead design, and print it perfect to
scale, as the rulers and help lines and how you set preferences in
mm, inches or points is your choice and your own control. And it
draws perfect. Sure its for grafhic designers and design, and I
have even drawn my new house with it. The architect was quite
impressed. It was natural for me to grab those programs when I
started silver again. ( Im so sorry my digital camera is out of order and I cannot make new websites that explains this until its
back. grrr…things take time! )
I use version 10 for PC and 7 for Mac, but the the program is
getting bigger and bigger, it’s almost getting too big. CS is the
last version. I
think it flows a bit easier on the Mac btw, more smooth… even
though its the same thing.
Macromedia Freeehand is almost as good, I used it earlier, easier to
learn, but that one is also growing and does lots of things one
seldom need. Photoshop 2 is much too old! It has nothing to do with
the program today. There are trials to download at Adobe, and there
are lots of tutorials on the web. You can export images from
Illustrator and work further on with it in Photoshop, as I did on my
scetches at http://www.justliss.com/filigrantegning/ All of those
are snaps from screen in Illustrator, during the drawing process.
The main tool is to make own pattern for lines and understand
vectoring the lines. Copy, paste, reflect, group and align, its
there… Evrything is in the menues and in the toolboxes behind
clicks or to open boxes for details. The ones with color is
manipulated in Photoshop, I made a gold and silver background, and
changed colors, put on highlights…all done in no time.
WHY use computers to draw? Because it is so much faster, and you can
change so fast, reflect, scale, change curves, thickness in lines,
scale, color in no time. AND you can regret a couple of hundred
times backwards, or save a copy on a design half way, and work in
different directions on the same image… I used about 90 minutes
for my first slangesolje with the computer, if I had drawn it by
hand with a rotring or so, I had used at least 6 hours. And its
perfect. I can measure wire and count all the pieces and that saves
lots of time whien I build it up in silver. It saves materials.
Check www.adobe.com for the programs. (this is
acvertising…arrggh…) You cannot save from the trials, but
scale it to fit the screen, snap the screen and paste the image into
something you can crop it and print, That works till you know if
you`ll buy it.
Lise
http://www.justliss.com
http://www.voringfossen.com