Using Adobe Illustrator On The Ipad

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Feb 6

Written By Stacey

Blood, sweat and tears y’all…blood, sweat and tears.

Let me tell you about this vector file that has been putting me through hell and back…

I’m sure it’s just growing pains. But, I’ve been working on this project for my husband for his birthday, Valentine’s Day, and BHM this month… and I just want to get it as right as I possibly can right now with my current skillset. But, I thought the best way to get a print that would work would be Illustrator.

Well, I would like to go on record saying that Illustrator must be the most complicated drawing program I’ve ever tried to understand. Ever. The learning curve is steep with that pen tool and the emotional toll is real.

According to many artists who work with lettering, vector files are worth it for the ability they give you to scale and resize your design as many times as you want without losing resolution.

But…

To me, at this stage in my development, it’s an exercise in avoiding becoming a basket case.
Case in point, I thought I had it figured out at this point.

I mean, it looks pretty good, right? Sure, it does…

…until you see this nonsense.

Look at that!

I don’t even know how that happened. Maybe I grouped the layers wrong or something. All I can say is…
I had to go back and delete all of those points on my filled in flourishes and try again. This time, I paid more attention to the fill and stroke settings.
Then, once I thought I had that figured out, I found out my counters were filled in too!

I think I did that inadvertently earlier on in the process, trying to make those letter forms look “right”. On a black background, with just the outline, you could see the flaws even more clearly.

But, if I wanted the option to print this on colored backgrounds other than white, that would be a no-go.
Now, I do have classes that will teach me to use Illustrator (notice the plurality). But, I have grading to do. I don’t have time to read the manual today…That’s a spring or even summer break kind of thing…and scrolling through the library of Google can get monotonous. But, YouTube University helped. You can find the tutorial I found on cutting objects from another shape here. Also, check out Creative Live and @threeologie on Instagram for some quick tutorials on this app.

Each pass through to fix one problem, I found others like clusters of points all bunched together or sharp, pointy ends. Ugh.

Until, finally, I have this file.