Back To School - With A New Tool Box!

Wow.  I can't believe it is time to Go Back To School already.

Monday morning at about 5:00 AM my time, Lilla Rogers, working in concert with Beth Kempton of Do What You Love for Life, will post the first mini brief in the classroom, and it will be Game On for five very intense weeks.

Just like the class that took place in June and July, the roster of students is as impressive as it is, well, intimidating - artists from all over the world will be slinging paint and brandishing Wacom Pens at all hours of the day and night as we race the deadline to submit our assignments every Sunday at 5:00 PM.  A few hours to breathe, then 

it starts all over again on Monday morning at 5:00.

It is utterly Exhilarating,

 and a Powerful Blooming Time

 for every single student in this class.

I have new tools to use in this segment: for starters, a new Wacom Intuos4 wireless pen tablet that I am besotted with. 

LOVE.  LOVE.  LOVE!

And a new understanding of Adobe Illustrator CS5,

and a subscription to Lynda.com to answer any questions I might have at any hour of the day (or night) about how to do something in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Because Lilla and Beth are all about business -the name of the course is Make Art That Sells after all - I also have a brand new website :

And a new Facebook Business Page:

and a start on building my profile on the new 
Moyo Directory of Surface and Pattern designers:

Hard to believe how much I had NOT done to market myself before taking this class, and I have to say I've still not submitted to Art Directors, because I want all those websites finished before I do...what if they were to take a peek and say,
 "Well.  She simply doesn't have her act together.  Next, please."

The tools that I gained from the first segment in June/July would fill several tool boxes and are almost overwhelming - Lilla Rogers and Beth Kempton have packed these classes so full  that I'm still trying to absorb and put it all to use...and now, a new class begins!

Wowzer.  Time to go Get Cracking.
With my New Tool Box!!

Adobe Illustrator CS5 Live Trace

Now that the Snapping Turtle Saga is (hopefully) over, I can get back to work on Adobe Illustrator CS5.  The tutor, Jay Montgomery from WyzAnt came on Friday, and we covered the Live Trace function.  He was great!

Basically, Live Trace "traces" a raster image - a raster image is a photograph, (the Flower Photos from Colorado!) or a graphic created in Photoshop - in preparation for turning it into a vector image.  The resulting line of the trace is called a Path, with hundreds of little anchor points along the way.  In order to turn the raster image (groups of thousands of little colored squares) into one or more flat planes of color which have  numerical values which can be blown up to the size of a building,  Illustrator "Traces" the image and starts you down the Path to simplify the image and turn it into planes of solid color.

I won't run through the steps to get here - there are literally Hundreds of tutorials on the web about how to use Live Trace -  but essentially, this is the command center in Illustrator that begins the process:

Why do this?  Because if you were to take a photo (a Raster Image) and try to enlarge it to a Building Sized Image, it would get all Pixelated - blurred and confused with millions of little squares trying to be much bigger than they can be.

And this isn't even Near Building size - see what I mean?

 
You can simplify the image in Photoshop before you "Place" it into the Illustrator CS5 program by cleaning up the Noise, separating parts of the image so that you have individual components that make up the whole, and making sure to save it as a PSD image. 

Now, here is the most beneficial thing to come out of the Friday session - there is a tool in Illustrator CS5 that is so exciting, I can hardly wait to get proficient on it.  You see, when I upload a design file to either Spoonflower Fabric Printing or Adaptive Textiles Fabric Printing, to get the best color match I need to use LAB color. 

The color blankets are from Adaptive Textiles, the fabric swatch of Fishing Coral is from Spoonflower.

Since I normally work in sRGB mode (because that is the color mode the monitor is), I've had to calibrate the monitor to the printer as best I can and then print it out in CMYK color.  Because that's the color mode the printer is.  Then spend hours and hours trying to match the color on the hard copy to the color blankets that Adaptive Textiles sent to me.  Sometimes Days.

Well.  Illustrator CS5 has a little color wheel icon parked right in the upper toolbar that is Powerful, Powerful, Powerful!  When you select your artwork, you can click on the icon:

And it opens this function:

Now, here's the good part. I can change the color mode while I am in the Recolor Artwork Screen to LAB color mode.

There is a tiny little icon that lets you change the color mode to LAB.

And then, all I have to do is plug in the numbers from the Adaptive Textiles color blanket for the color I want, and BOOM!  I'm done.

How cool is that?  I mean, how COOL is that?  I'm off to practice now!

Rocky Mountain Flowers and Adobe Illustrator CS5

Here we are, back down close to sea level.  I miss the mountains and their clear air and astonishing vistas.

 Summer River running through Breckenridge.

 And I miss the Rocky Mountain Flowers that were bursting with brilliance and juicy with moisture.  Since I didn't take my Nikon (spur-of-the-moment-trip, you know) I had to settle once more with taking photos with my Iphone.  Which didn't do too bad.  Take a look:

Just look at the Juice in those Pansies!  Yumm.

Here's a group of very buttoned-down Daisies, with their white gloves on, hats tilted just right, and looking like they just stepped out of a Band Box:

All is right in their Daisy World.

Everywhere you looked, there were flowers.  Everywhere.  I took dozens of photos - how could you not??  What a library to work from for future designs...the colors are already worked out, and the shapes are divine.

The Hanging Baskets were great, because the flowers were looking down at you as you passed underneath.

If you take these shapes and colors, and reduce them to lines...Paths in Illustrator...then the sky is the limit for what you can do with the resulting shapes.

These Lupines were glorious - so happy in the cool Rocky Mountain air that they looked luminous.

So, back to work and the work is truly cut out for me now.  Realizing that it would take me months and months to figure out the vector tools in Adobe Illustrator CS5, I went online and started searching for local classes that I could attend.  And, I discovered a tutoring service, called WyzAnt.  There are tutors for Everthing - and they will usually come to your home.  The best part is, they are under $50.00 per hour, and you can get discount packages.

This afternoon, my new Adobe Illustrator CS5 tutor is coming to the studio to help me get my head around vector graphics instead of the raster images I'm so used to working with in Photoshop.  We'll see how far we get today.

Pansies Images Underway!

Rocky Mountain Sunset

I'll give you a full tutoring report tomorrow - if I can learn Adobe Illustrator CS5 in the comfort of my own home without breaking the bank, well - then - is this a marvelous world or what?