Illustrator

Beginners in Illustrator or any form of drawing platform would know just how difficult it is to draw the eyes of their character. I particularly suck at it, and I've recently figured out how to do a simple eyehack, if you will. I've cheated and used this same technique many many times in my illustrations.

First of all, using the Ellipse tool, draw out a circle about 50 pixels in diameter. The size does not really matter since they are vector eyes and can be resized infinitely. It just depends on how big you want your eyes to be.

Pick a nice colour to fill the ellipse. I picked a nice shade of green. Keep the border to be black.

Next, using the ellipse tool, draw a smaller circle, which is black inside and out.

Position the black circle somewhere in the middle of the green circle. It does not have to be exactly in the middle.

Finally, draw another ecllipse, make it slightly oval this time, smaller than both the ellipses. Fill it with white. The border should be white too. Position it such that it overlaps the black and green circle.

There you have it, one eye! Simple and easy.

Duplicate the technique to create the other eye but place the white ellipse in the other direction so that they won't look weird. Here's an example of what it looks like on my cartoon character.

Illustrator isn't just used for sketching and drawing, it can also be used for drawing maps and floor plans! Adobe Illustrator CS4 is pretty neat for close-to-accurate illustrations as it has dynamic smart guides to speed up positioning and alignment of objects.

Anyway, recently, I had to do a floor plan for one of my assignments in my university. My current assignment is to perform a safety audit with my group members, on the biochemistry laboratory in my school.

Since the floor plan was not available, we had to manually draw it by ourselves.

I thought Adobe Illustrator is quite useful and efficient for this task.

I just scanned in the hand-sketched plan into my computer, placed it in the first layer, and drew over it on the second layer. Pretty fast and easy!

The final product:

I realised, it can also be good for drawing maps! For example if you wanted to lead someone to your home, but it’s not very well known to be recognised in google map like other landmarks, you can easily use the same technique i used above to illustrate a map to your destination.

For example, my house is the one circled in red above and I wanted to lead people there because I am having this majorly awesome party. Problem is, no one knows how to get there because it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Just print screen that map in satellite format in google maps, and place it the first layer in Illustrator.

Open up a new layer and place this above the map layer. Draw major landmarks, highways, housing areas, major buildings and ignore bushland and terrain. Oh and remember to label what you draw.

Add in arrows to give direction.

After you’re done, just delete the first layer, and you have your map!