Illustrator 101
Jessica Wade
An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicated concepts or objects that are difficult to describe textually, which is the reason illustrations are often found in children's books.[1]
Illustration is the art of making images that work with something and add to it without needing direct attention and without distracting from what they illustrate. The other thing is the focus of the attention, and the illustration's role is to add personality and character without competing with that other thing.[2]
Illustrations have been used in advertisements, architectural rendering, greeting cards, posters, books, graphic novels, storyboards, business, technical communications, magazines, shirts, video games, tutorials,[3] and newspapers. A cartoon illustration can add humour to certain stories or essays.[4]
Use reference images to create scenes and characters. This can be as simple as looking at an image to inspire your artwork or creating character sketches and detailed scenes from different angles to create the basis of a picture book world. Some traditional illustration techniques include watercolor, pen and ink, airbrush art, oil painting, pastels, wood engraving, and linoleum cuts.
John Held, Jr. was an illustrator who worked in a variety of styles and media, including linoleum cuts, pen and ink drawings, magazine cover paintings, cartoons, comic strips, and set design, while also creating fine art with his animal sculptures and watercolor, many established illustrators attended an art school or college of some sort and were trained in different painting and drawing techniques.
Traditional illustration seems to have made a resurgence in the age of social media thanks to social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.[citation needed] Currently traditional and digital illustration are both flourishing.
Universities and art schools offer specific courses in illustration (for example in the UK, a BA (Hons) Degree) so this has become a new avenue into the profession. Many illustrators are freelance, commissioned by publishers (of newspapers, books, or magazines) or advertising agencies. Most scientific illustrations and technical illustrations are also known as information graphics. Among the information graphics, specialists are medical illustrators who illustrate human anatomy, often requiring many years of artistic and medical training.
A particularly popular medium with illustrators of the 1950s and 1960s was casein, as was egg tempera. The immediacy and durability of these media suited illustration's demands well. The artwork in both types of paint withstood the rigors of travel to clients and printers without damage.
Computer illustration, or digital illustration, is the use of digital tools to produce images under the direct manipulation of the artist, usually through a pointing device, such as a tablet or a mouse.
Computers dramatically changed the industry and today, many cartoonists and illustrators create digital illustrations using computers, graphics tablets, and scanners. Software such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Corel Painter, and Affinity Designer are now widely used by those professionals.
The low hanging fruit is creating a multi-page PDF export of all your layout pages with layer support (PDF supports layers and other illustrator capabilities). The advantage of adding full illustrator editability to PDFs is that you can also open those multi-page PDFs in Indesign, or PowerPoint (Adobe Acrobat exports PDFs to PowerPoint and works really well). So you can create entire presentations/documents in Rhino with live geometry and export/publish to a 2D documentation package when you are done.
Views
Material assignments
Layer visibility
Object visibility
Curve Shutlining on/off (important for design variations)
Named position
Active clipping planes/Section views
Active foreground/background images
Grasshopper configuration states
We could also have options for make2D at export time. So you can work with live 3D models creating all your views, fully editable, nothing becomes obsolete; then flatten&vectorize them at the last minute in one shot.
If you like the idea tell @bobmcneel. @RhinoFabStudio and I have been nagging him for a few years on this, we have him almost convinced. It might take a few more years or a bunch of people voting this up to give it priority.
I think before a global export can be created, a global save/recall of all possible states of a model into what makes a unique view needs to be implemented. I know the need and some conceptual ideas have been clearly identified and demonstrated to some folks at McNeel. I also think this has broad user appeal, for pretty much all industries if you need to either present or document your work.
I mean, you can tweak line weights and clipping planes and layer states all you like, but an export of a wireframe view is simply not the same thing as a usable drawing. Even if it was in an editable format, it could take hours of work to clean up each drawing. And McNeel obviously know this, because the layout documentation is conspicuously based on flat 2D geometry only.
I like just about everything in Affinity designer except the Layers palette. My question is, do you have any plans to make the Layers behave like Illustrator? Or am I missing something and I can make Designer act like Illustrator layers?
In Illustrator, I lock other layers and draw my lines all on the same (top) layer. I know I can click to open the layer and see every object on a sub layer. But that seems to be the default in Designer, that is what I find difficult to work with. For example, how can I quickly copy a shape to the level below and change it's colour. I want all my coloured objects to be on a layer of their own.
I should say that I have worked with Designer for about 3 months but I have had to return to Illustrator for now because I can be productive without the confusion in the layer palette. I find nearly everything else in Designer superior for my purposes.
Thank you for replying. Those details help describe what's different and Serif should look at. I can recall one feature request, the TGA export, where members hammered with the need this, the +1s ect. Suddenly one of the Devs basically asked for some sort of detailed reasoning, was presented with same, and the TGA export feature happened.
I hope I am as fortunate. I would think that most migrators from AI would notice this difference pretty quickly. But I have not seen many posts objecting to the layers palette in Designer. If there is a detailed reason required, I'd be happy to write it.
What I find helps for more of an illustrator layer workflow is to create and name your layers first using the "add layer" button on the bottom of the layers panel - ie line, colour and sketch, than before you create an element make sure you "target" or click on the layer you want the element to be on in the layers panel. It will put the element on the layer you clicked on. Same goes for artboards. If you have artboards, target or select the artboard before creating the element and the element will reside on that artboard.
To move an element from one layer to another layer, cut (Cmd or Ctrl X) the element from one layer, select the layer you want it to be on and paste (Cmd or Ctrl V). It will remove it from the unwanted layer and place it in exactly the same place on the desired layer.
This works for me logically and If you think about it, what Adobe Illustrator probably does is hide the myriad of layers to make it look like it's on a single layer, but, if you consider that each object is an individual element that must have it's own layer because they are separate and distinct then all Affinity have done is not hide the elements layers.
Umm... as I fight one Designer project right now I notice grouping objects to a layer-group severely limits how I can choose objects within a group. So using a "layer-layer" makes them behave better but it has its own issues...
I probably haven't explained it very well. In illustrator because of layer1 it appears that the objects are all on one layer when in fact they have merely been placed in a layer container. In Affinity Designer, initially, there is no such container and you have to create a group or layer after the fact.
Upon opening a document, you create a group or layer container, affinity expands that container to show its content, whereas the layer1 container in Illustrator doesn't, this is what I meant by hidden.
Affinity doesn't assume you automatically want a layer container but within document creation it would be nice to have the option to have a layer or group created, much like you have a choice to start with artboards instead of a canvas.
As far as the user is concerned I struggle to see any difference here. I'm one of those people who don't care how the thing works, just as long as it keeps on keeping on. It may be that any layer is, for a software developer (which is what I think underlies your point(?)), no more than a convenience for the benefit of the user. But as a user, it's a layer; there are things I can do with and to a layer that I can't do to a straightforward object and vice-versa.
Also, because those first objects are 'layer-less' (because I still forget that if I want one I have to create it first), they clutter up the palette and I later (when I remember) have to spend time organising them. It seems an unnecessary complication that has no value to me as a user. I will, with enough practice, become accustomed to the concept, but I doubt I'll ever prefer it.
93ddb68554