Comprehensive Guide to all the brushes

Here is a very comprehensive guide to all the Brushes available to you in Adobe Illustrator.

Creating Repeating Pattern Swatches

Make a new document.

Make a square of equal height and width.

This will be your guide square for the repeating pattern. The main body of the pattern should lie inside the square and overlapping the square will be repeated elements.

In the layers palette you will need to temporarily lock this layer.

Make a new layer, this will be the layer you will draw your pattern on.

When you draw your pattern elements think of how they will repeat from left to right and top to bottom.

Where the elements cross over the edges of the square this is where they will be repeated.

Start by concentrating on all the elements on the left that overlap the edge of the square. These will need to be copied over to the right. In this example the red star and one of the blue rectangles.

Click on one of the elements and select Object > Transform > Move...

You will be moving the element Horizontally the same width of the guide square, 200 mm in this case. If you select Preview you will be able to see where it will be moving to. Click Copy to make a copy of the element. Repeat with any other shapes crossing the left side of the guide square. Tip: you can quickly repeat the last transformation by pressing Cmd and D.

To move elements from right to left type -200mm

You can now concentrate on the elements to move from top to bottom. To do this you will need to type 200mm Vertical and click Copy. Again any elements to move from bottom to top will need to move -200mm

You should end up with an arrangement of elements overlapping the guide square repeating left to right and top to bottom.

You will now need to unlock the guide layer and select the square guide. You can do this all from the Layers palette.

Remove all of the guide square fill and stroke colour and ensure that this object is the back most object by selecting Object>Arrange>Send to Back.

Select all of the elements including the guide square and drag them into the Swatches palette.

You will see a new thumbnail appear here that you can now apply to any shape as a fill pattern.

Test your new pattern. If you need to make any changes you can edit the original and add it again.

Here is a much more in-depth tutorial on patterns from Digit Mag

and here is the The Adobe manual explanation of patterns.

Effects, Alignments and Pathfinder video

Here is a short 8min video tutorial on using some of the Effects, Alignments and Pathfinder operations in Illustrator from a nice site, Method & Craft. He's quick so you may need to watch it a few times. Hopefully they will be adding more videos and tutorials soon.

The Pathfinder operations in particular I think will be most useful for creating more complex shapes in your drawings.

Zooming in, zooming out, zooming in...

Save yourself the headache of constantly zooming in to work on detail and then having to zoom out again to get an overview of the whole image.

Go to Window and make a New Window. This will give you a second view of the same document.
Make one of the windows zoomed in to work in detail and the second one zoomed out to work at a distance.

The clever thing is now to learn the keyboard shortcut to switch between the two.

Hold the cmd and tilde key, which looks like this.

You can then quickly move back and forth between the two with the shortcut and any changes to the drawing you make in one will be changed in the other. Nice.

Templates in Adobe Illustrator

If you want to draw over an image as a template or guide Place the image by clicking File, Place.. and locate your image file.

Once you have resized it to fit your document, click in the Layers palette submenu and select Template.

This will in one hit lock your image and slightly reduce it's opacity.

Now you just need to create a new layer in which to draw on.

Photoshop: Clipping Masks

So you have an idea of what a layer mask is and how it works (as illustrated below) and want to add another to your set of techniques.

The next one you might want to learn about is called a Clipping Mask.

A clipping mask allows you to show or hide selected parts of an image depending on the pixels above it.

Hold down Alt while click between the layers in the Layers palette. You need to be able to see the double circle cursor.

The Duck layer in this example has some transparent pixels. You can see this by the checkerboard design in the thumbnail behind the yellow duck.

The non-transparent pixels reveal the pixels of the layer above it. So the Kaleidoscope layer is clipped where there are no pixels in the layer below.

It might help to think of the pixels above being caught by the layer pixels below and everything else just falls away.

Here is the Adobe Photoshop manual explanation:
Clipping Masks

Photoshop: Layer Mask.

Rather than using the eraser tool to delete portions of an image (because once pixels are gone they are gone) why not use a layer mask.

Masks are a way to hide portions of an image on lower layers based on areas of black or white, including levels of grey.

Once you understand what the layer mask is doing and how it works you can achieve much more than just using the eraser tool.
The example below shows a layer mask that has been added to the top layer.
Click on the images to get a larger view.

The layer mask is the black and white thumbnail to the right of the image in the layers palette. It is important to notice when the layer mask is selected by the frame around it's thumbnail.

The black ink on the mask thumbnail can thought of as a hole that is cut through the image revealing the layer below.

This also works with values of grey. In the example above the gradient runs from black to white through grey values. So painting with grey ink will make the underlying image semi-opaque.

The mask becomes really useful once you realise that you removed something from an image you thought you didn't need. You can alway go back and paint with white to restore the image.

Look at this link for a fuller explanation of using the layer mask.

What is a layer mask?

Photoshop CS4: Layer Masks in Depth | by Jan Kabili

View this entire Photoshop course and more in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.