Adobe Illustrator for Quilt Designers: A Few Things To Start With

Adobe Illustrator: A Few Basics To Start With

As we get started, there are a few basics you will need to know before working with Adobe Illustrator. Things like how to create a new document and how to work with the a few tools in the tool bar. For some really useful video tutorials, visit the Adobe Illustrator Tutorial Page from Adobe. If you are not an Illustrator newbie and already know all this handy stuff, we'll be diving into creating blocks and things in the next tutorial.

Creating a New Document

Choose "file" from the top menu bar, then new.

Once you select "new" from the menu a new window will come up that lets you choose all sorts of options for your new document. Since we are working on things that will be printed (rather than on the web) choose "print" from the "new document profile" pull down menu. For all of these tutorials you will want to work in inches, so from the units pulldown choose "inches". Click "OK" to create the new document. There are lots of other things to change here, but these are the two biggies for this use.

A Few Handy Tools

The Adobe Ilustrator Tool Bar has a heap of really, really cool tools, but let's start with the basics:

• The selection tool which, well, let's you select things.
• The line tool for drawing lines
• The shape tool - the default is a square, but if you click the little black triangle in the corner there are other shapes too
• The resize tool to help out with making things bigger and smaller.