Illustrator

I use Illustrator’s Align tools with every project. The Align to Artboard function is my favorite, because it is a fast and accurate way to center objects on a layout. To work correctly, Align to Artboard needs an artboard that is the same size as the layout. This is a really good reason to embrace the multiple artboard work flow.

TM & © 2011 Marvel Entertainment

Pint Glass for sale at www.taverncraft.com.

The graphics for this licensed product started with a black and white inked comic drawing. Comics are illustrated and inked on paper. The inked illustration is then scanned to a high resolution tiff file. The tiff file must be converted to vector art for product graphics like this.

Illustrator has some built in settings that make this conversion simple and easy to do. Here are the steps to create a clean vector art dawing from an inked comic tiff.

Recently I had the privilege of working on a music CD cover design with a friend of mine. My friend is a professional photographer and instructor. His Photoshop skills and eye for design are top notch, but he has minimal working knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. That’s where I came in. Working with him made me realize that some of Illustrator’s basic tools aren’t all that intuitive. My friend couldn’t figure out how to replace the linked Photoshop image with a corrected version. He inspired this article.

If you are unfamiliar or a little unclear about the differences between vector and bitmap art, it might be helpful to read When Vector Art is Really Vector before starting this tutorial.

Setting Up Your Files

Start by determining your art board size. If I am working on a wide format project I like to work in quarter scale. Illustrator has a maximum canvas size of 227 inches, so projects larger than that have to be created at a smaller scale factor. See Large File Format File Resolution for a guide to scale factors and resolutions.