What is Illustrator

An illustrator creates art in the form of drawings or paintings. She uses her talents and tools to produce images that are two-dimensional renderings of people, animals, objects and nature. The art may be black and white or have few or many colors in it. Various effects are created by the illustrator through her use of color, light and shadows. Her talents can be used in such areas as children's books, medical illustrating, fashion design and technical design industries, among others.

Illustrators are important to many mediums and industries. An illustrator is used in advertising to draw images for packaging, labels and advertising materials. The greeting card and wrapping paper industries also use illustrators to enhance their products. Most magazines and many books rely on the talents of an illustrator to generate pictures to accompany text or for cover designs.

Overwiew

Other popular areas of concentration for this position include scientific, medical and fashion illustration. Scientific illustrators generally have special talents in depicting foliage, animals, earth formations and planets. Illustrators who specialize in medical drawings normally excel in drawing human body organs and schematics of surgical procedures. Fashion illustrators typically demonstrate distinct talents in sketching clothing and accessories.

This is an overview of Illustrator CS2 designed to help you get started with Adobe's top illustration program. It mainly refers you to different pages of the Adobe site, but it will save you from doing some time consuming searches.

Features

The long-awaited addition of multiple artboards will be sufficient reason for some Illustrator users to upgrade, but Mordy Golding also discusses many other noteworthy features and improvements in Illustrator CS4 New Features. He demonstrates the improved Appearance panel, how to work with transparency in gradients, enhanced clipping mask behavior, and the all-new expressive Blob brush. This comprehensive overview includes a tour of the new interface, templates, and content. It also covers integration with Kuler and other services for creative professionals.