Peter Beach, a technical illustrator with over 25 years of freelance experience, wrote in to share his blog The Business of Freelancing Creative. There Peter has a wealth of wisdom, including his 21 Practical Tips to a successful illustration career, and candid essays on finding your niche, work-for-hire, copyright, pricing and stock illustration.
I’ve only started reading through, but it’s already proving to be a valuable resource for those considering a career of freelance and seasoned professionals alike.
If you have a site or resource to share, please visit the Suggest page.
Originally published internationally by McGraw-Hill, this 500-page full-color text is a comprehensive look at vector-based technical illustration. Several software products are featured including Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk’s AutoCAD and 3ds Max, but the procedures and approaches are easily transferred to CorelDRAW, inkScape, Maya, and Blender, among other graphic tools. This text also features numerous illustration tips and case studies of illustration taken directly from business, industry, and commerce. Written in a conversational manner and full of explanations, The Complete Technical Illustrator is a welcome addition to your illustration resources.
Dr. Jon M. Duff has written about and taught technical illustration for forty years and is Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Arizona State University. Greg Maxson has been a professional technical illustrator for over two decades and operates his own studio in Urbana, Illinois.
This is a very quick and easy tutorial for creating an isometric grid in Adobe Illustrator, which you can then either work directly over in Illustrator or print out for freehand sketching.
If you want to skip the tutorial and get working in isometric right away, download these completed grids in PDF format, ready for printing or import into Illustrator or Corel:
If your new year’s resolution was to learn how to bring your illustrations to life with motion and interactivity, you are in luck. Below I’ve gathered some resources, tutorials and inspiration to get you started on your journey.
Adobe Flash
For better or for worse, Flash has been around for 15 years. While rival technologies may be digging its grave, Flash remains the most intuitive animation tool for users of Adobe Illustrator — and 15 years worth of online tutorials and forum discussions make for an easy learning curve.
Both made by Adobe, Flash and Illustrator work pretty well together (although, not as well as you might expect). Like Illustrator, Flash is vector based and can import .AI vector artwork along with bitmaps and video files. Illustrator can export .SWFs for Flash, and later versions (AI CS3+) can even include symbols, animation clips and dynamic objects.
In addition to animation tools, Flash also has a programming language called ActionScript (AS) with which you can make your animations interactive. There are three versions of ActionScript (AS1, AS2, AS3) which are not cross-compatible, each more esoteric than the last. I find AS2 to be the right mix of natural-language programming and breadth of possibilities, and seems to have the most tutorials too.
AE is a beast of a program; it’s like the Photoshop of video. It’s used for 2D & 3D motion graphics, editing, compositing, post-production and special effects for video, TV and film. And like Photoshop it can be used to create entire projects from start to finish, but its real strength is in manipulating and compositing assets made by other means, such as Illustrator and 3D applications.
AE takes just about anything you can throw at it — AI, EPS, PSD, PNG, PDF, MP3, WAV, AVI, MOV, even camera movements from popular 3D software — and spits out a wide variety of video formats.
Although AE does allow you to control animations and effects with scripting, it only exports video meaning no interactivity with AE alone.
Ai to Canvas is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator produced by developers at Microsoft. It enables Illustrator to export vector and bitmap artwork directly to a new HTML5 web element called a Canvas. Canvas-enabled browsers (latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) can then interpret and render that content for viewers.
The advantage over simply exporting images for the web is that artwork in a Canvas element remains vectored and can be animated and manipulated with JavaScript code. In fact, Ai to Canvas allows rudimentary animation simply by renaming your layers.
The fact that Canvas doesn’t rely on a browser plug-in (like Flash does) means that your animation & interactivity will run regardless of the viewer’s installed components. This means content presented in a Canvas element are viewable on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, since they disallow browser plug-ins. I made this HTML5 demo to try it out.
You don’t necessarily need a fancy program to create rich animated and interactive media. Photoshop is equipped with an animation palette suitable for creating flipbook type animations; Here’s a primer.
Failing that, try to be creative with the tools you have. Here are two web pages that feel animated, using only static assets:
Following up on the previously shared How to Draw Hands, it seems illustrator Joumana Medlej has a slew of tutorials including Human Anatomy, Feet, Movement & Flexibility and more! Joumana has even compiled them into a book for off-line reference. Really great summary of anatomy and life drawing executed in clean, confident lines that make it very applicable for technical illustrators.
Looking for some lineart to practice your rendering? Or maybe some plans and elevations to practice a perspective or axonometric drawing system? Check out Google Patent Search, a searchable database of patent applications including the supporting technical drawings.
Quality of the drawings varies, but some digging may save you some drawing if all you really want to do is paint.
This came to me via a guy at my work. You can download the psd files and see how they were created. There are some nice looking files on here, tons of buttons, icons, web stuff and some nice examples of creating illustrations in photoshop. Dig in people.
Technical Illustration: Techniques and Applications
Marc Gellen was looking for recommendations for books on technical illustration on Twitter, but ended up providing me with the recommendations. Fortunately, all three books he suggested were available from my local library. I thought I’d give them a brief review here for the benefit of anyone whose public (or private) library might be lacking on the subject.
It’s that time of the year when we’re blessed/cursed with another release of Adobe’s Creative Suite software and the inevitable question of whether or not to upgrade. For those of you teetering on the edge, here’s the push you may need to break out the credit card.
Brand new to Illustrator CS5 is an embedded perspective grid and all the accompanying tools you’ll need to streamline your perspective drawing work flow. I was lucky to be part of the beta testing for this tool, along with fellow TechnicalIllustrators.org contributor Cody Walker, and I have to say I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
Anil Ahuja of Adobe has posted a tutorial that shows most of the features of the perspective grid. Have a look at it here. Check out the PDF at the bottom – it goes into more detail regarding how the tools are used. A sample of the file is there as well, but you’ll need a copy of CS5 to open it.
The grids come in default one-point, two-point and three-point perspectives, but you can tweak everything – vanishing points, origin, grid size, the height of the horizon and much more. When the grid is active, the shape tools all conform to a plane (chosen by you with the 1, 2 and 3 keys). Once objects are on the grid they can be copied and moved perpendicularly through the space as well.
However, for me the true power of this tools comes from the ability to transfer flat orthographic drawings directly to the grid. The only drawback is that raster images are not supported – only vector shapes can be applied to the grid.
The new tools will not obsolete or undermine our abilities as technical illustrators. Rather, as Anil states:
“…please understand that Perspective Drawing in Adobe Illustrator CS5 is NOT a 3-D environment. It is an extension of traditional perspective drawing technique. An artist will have a capability to define a perspective grid (one-point, two-point or three point), define a relative scale, move the grid planes and draw objects directly in perspective or attach flat art onto them by dragging with the new Perspective Selection tool.”
Also, all the old quirks of working with a grid are still there – so don’t throw out your techie toolkit just yet!
I highly recommend downloading and trying out the new version of Adobe Illustrator cs5. A 30-day trial is available on Adobe’s site.
While working on a recent freelance job, I stumbled upon a great website, MY Ink BLOG, with some realistic texture tutorials for grass, wood, stone and water. Andrew Houle, the creator of the site uses various filters in each of these tutorials to achieve the desired results.
Specifically, the following are the texture tutorials:
The site has a great selection of Photoshop tutorials as well as so many other resources for Illustrators and Designers, that could be valuable in future. Make sure you check it out!
Do you know any good websites for creating textures or have any “tricks” you use to save time on your illustrations?
