Product Description

The definitive full-color book on mastering Adobe Illustrator — now fully updated for Illustrator CS3

For years, Sharon Steuer and her international Wow! team have been reaching out to the world of professional illustrators to showcase the range and quality of work these artists are doing in Illustrator. In this revised edition of the best-selling and award-winning Illustrator WOW! Book, youll find tips, tricks, and techniques derived from actual projects from more than 100 of these top Illustrator artists. Using Adobe Illustrator CS3, Sharon shows you how to perform magical color changes using Live Color, and prepare animations for Flash. You'll not only learn how to“think in Illustrator”with the Zen of Illustrator lessons, you'll also master the newest, hottest, and most challenging techniques.

This edition is loaded with new lessons on these subjects, and many more:

Using the new Live Color features
Creating animations and integrating Illustrator with Flash
Working with Live Trace and Live Paint
The basics of using layers, templates, the Free Distort tool, and more
"Opacity Mask 101” based on the cover image
Applying blending modes and transparency to raster images
Masking with live type
Simulating ink and watercolor paintings
Working with live fills, multiple strokes, and Live 3D
Basic to advanced blends, gradients, and mesh
Colorizing photos
Demystifying photorealistic mesh

NOTE:
User Level: This book is for Intermediate through Professional-level Illustrator artists and designers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50154 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
Award-winning artist, author, teacher and digital art guru, Sharon Steuer has been a major force in the digital art world for more than two decades. Her traditional and digital artwork has been exhibited widely, with awards for painting including the national Faber Birren Color Award and Windsor Newton Painting Award. Sharon is a regular columnist for creativepro.com, and is author of Creative Thinking in Photoshop: A New Approach to Digital Art as well as all editions of the best-selling Illustrator WOW! Book, which has twice received the Ben Franklin Award for best computer book. 

Customer Reviews

Good Book
I really enjoyed this book. I have been teaching myself Adobe Illustrator and finding a good book to work through has been a challenge. This book does that you work through the exercises and also get tips from people who work with adobe and create amazing art. The book has been very helpful. A little long winded at times but helpful. I would recommend this book.

The Adobe Illustrator CS3, WOW! Indispensable: A Critical Review.
The Adobe Illustrator CS3, WOW! Indispensable: A Critical Review.

I bought this book several months ago as a part of a three-book purchase in order to get a grip and master the Adobe CS3 premium suite. This book is phenomenal. There are many reasons why one should own this book. First, it is a great compliment to The CS3 For Dummies, as Dummies is essentially a reference book that explains the use of the tools and what CS3 is capable of. Dummies, unlike this book, WOW and another that I'm recommending, How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS3 , Dummies does not give you real-world examples, nor in color, nor does it provide you with a CD rom of extras which this Wow! book (and, Cheat in Flash) does.

To say that this entire production suite enables one to create artwork, create animation,repair photos, design brochures, create and publish websites is saying alot, All of this is possible (and more with this Design Suite.), but there is a steep learning curve with all of the applications, if you're fully interested in doing really amazing work. This is why all three books are essential.

WOW, Illustrator, is essentially a reference book filled with essays by artist whom have produced work with the Creative Suite and want to share the process of some of their work. This book is fairly detailed and aside from the CD rom, each of the chapters has the essay plus-- along the margins--color step by step, before and after pictures of each step. So, if there are 7 steps to a project, the margins will have a total of 14 pictures that accompanies the written text. And, going through a few of the exercises, it really helps to reinforce the material.

The main author, Sharon Steuer, suggests that after one graduates from this book to purchase Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3. It may or may not be necessary, but certainly, if you want to enhance your ability to work in vector-based objects, transfer jpg, photos or "rasterized" images to vector, create logos or as a part of a project to transfer to Flash, InDesign or Dreamweaver, this book will be of great service to you. Again, I strongly suggest picking up a copy of CS3 for Dummies, first then adding this book, WOW!, to have a strong command of Illustrator (and Cheat in Flash) for the Flash software. If you're like me, and a lot of ideas are circulating in your head and you've wondered how expensive it would be to pay someone to do it, then these books will be a lifesaver.

Strongly recommended.