Illustrator Tutorial: Part I

Transcription

1 Illustrator Tutorial: Part I This tutorial is designed to help you prepare you for the National Park virtual field trip project. However, it is not a standalone tutorial. Before you start: Tools shortcuts: when you see a letter in parenthesis next to a tool name that indicates the letter shortcut for that tool. In AI, simply press the letter in the keyboard to change the tool. AI essential shortcuts: Undo: CTRL + Z Redo: CTRL + SHIFT + Z Zoom in/out: CTRL + +/- Pan tool: space (while holding down) Document view: CTRL + 0 Actual size view: CTRL + 1 Ruler: CTRL + R Selection tool: V Direct Selection tool: A Zoom tool: Z Scissor tool: C Pen tool: P Join: J Change AI screen mode: F AI General Properties: CTRL + K 1. Launch Illustrator and open the basemap.ai file. When the document opens, you should see a screen similar to the one below.

2 When using illustrator for cartographic purposes, I think there are four important panels to have open; you should become familiar with these and always have them on the right side of your screen. These are the Toolbar, Color, Stroke properties, Appearance and Layers. Clean your workspace so it looks like the one above. 2. With the zoom tool (Z), draw a rectangle around a small area of the document. If you over-zoom, press CTRL + minus (math symbol) to zoom out of the area; CTRL + Plus. If you get lost, CTRL + 0 will bring you back to the document view. Try it out. 3. Layers: In the layer panel, notice that you have two columns next to each layer: Visibility and Lock. Use these to help you be more efficient. Lock the layers you are not working on, so that you don t select them by accident. Turn the visibility of certain layers off so you can see what you are working on more clearly. Notice the small circle to the right of each layer, click on this to target the layer. This means you make it active in editing panels and for other operations. Finally, notice how you can manage you layers in groups. This makes working with many layers much more efficient. You can select an entire group and apply formatting or edit it all at once. 4. To edit a layer, use the Color, Appearance and Stroke panels. If your layers are grouped, you must expand the group and select the individual layer (in our case, these are labeled path ). Remember, click on the small circle to the left to make it active. With a layer selected you can change the fill and outline color, outline line weight, among other properties. 5. Using the Selection Tool (V), double click on one of the provinces in China. You will notice on the top of the screen (just below the file menu) that there is a hierarchy of layers that you have entered. This is called Isolation mode, and it helps you edit one layer, group or path at a time. Now you can select provinces individually or in groups (by holding down shift and clicking on other shift select ). Try doing this and change the fill color on a few provinces. When you want to leave Isolation Mode, click on the left arrow in the layer hierarchy a few times until you don t see Isolation Mode in the layers panel and the arrow disappears.

3 5. You can also edit layers without entering Isolation Mode. You can simply lock all other layers and then do a marquee selection with the Direct Selection tool (A) (click and drag a selection box around what you want to edit). Try doing this to edit the size of the text for all the provinces (make the labels layer active). 6. OK, now let s look at one of the National Park maps. Go to: Enter NPS maps. Download the Illustrator and Photoshop Crater Lake files. The.ai file needs the.psd as the background layer. Open the.ai file in Illustrator. At the prompt, accept the font problems window. The National Parks have a proprietary font that we can't use. Illustrator will just substitute similar fonts. We will mostly be simplifying these maps to create a virtual field trip for the park. So, we will need to delete unnecessary features and labels and add points or stops along our virtual field trip. I am just providing some examples edits to help you get familiar with Illustrator. Here is what I want to do: First, I need to delete some features and text to make this map serve my purpose. Next, I want to make the part of the road that my field trip will follow around the lake have a different symbology. I want to label the sequence of stops along the trip. 7. Clean things up: Delete some unneeded layers (Pictographs, Callout, Green type, etc.) You delete a layer by dragging it into the garbage on the bottom of the layers panel.

4 8. We want to cut the main loop around the lake and join it to the road coming in from Kerr Valley. Use the Cut tool (C) to separate the part of the road we want. Zoom in very close on the part near Phantom Ship Overlook. Make the Red Roads layer active. Cut the line where to two roads intersect. When you hover over the line segment, you will see path highlighted in green. This is what we want to cut, not the anchor from the other line. Now marquee select with the Direct Selection tool (A) around the two segments we want to join into one. You will probably select the segment we just cut off, so hold shift and click on the segment you don t want to deselect it.

5 When you have the two segments you want selected, join them into one line with CTRL + J. You can now edit that line segment individually. Now you need to move this new segment to a new layer to apply a different appearance. Add a new layer: Now simply select the segment we want and drag it into the new layer by dragging the small colored square to the right to the Red Roads layer (should be a blue square) directly up into the same position of our new layer. This is how you move artwork from layer to layer. Next, we need the appearance values of the Red Roads layer in our new layer. Simply hold down ALT and drag the small circle (the target circle) from Red Roads into the target circle of the new layer and Illustrator copies the appearance values. Now, we edit this layer a little to make it stand out as the path our virtual field trip will follow. Relabel the new layer and change the overprint stroke to red, 4 pt.

6 9. Add some symbols for the stops along the field trip. You can either draw your own symbols or you can use the symbols library in Illustrator. First turn on the Symbols panel (Window Symbols), you will find the library in the options menu of the symbols panel. Make your Stops layer active and simply drag symbols from the panel into the drawing window. You can double click on the symbol next, and edit all instances of that symbol. 10. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done on this map. But, you need to get started on your own project. Browse the maps at Harpers Ferry and choose a good National Park for the project. There is more than enough information, history, photos, multimedia, etc. for you to create your virtual field trip. Created by GJM