Learning to use illustrator

I continue all the time to learn to use illustrator in a way that is useful. There is a part of my personality that drives perfection in these learning quests.

Although I am nowhere near that skill level with illustrator, I am continually trying to figure things out. Rachel first told me about symbols. When I draw a bead and save it as a symbol, I can then easily change an illustration by replacing a symbol or editing the symbol definition. Sometimes when I use replace symbol, the new symbol does not pick up the orientation from the existing drawing. It might change the rotation to be 90 degrees off. I haven't figured out why it does this sometimes and not others.

I know....I don't expect you to be keeping up here, just giving you a flavor of what drives me. I want to know why it works sometimes and not others. When it doesn't work I resort instead to edit symbol definition and change the color and that seems to work well. It's a nuance that drives me crazy.....I like to know these things for sure. I want to become a bead illustrator expert and then .....I want to bead.

So I need to examine my motives and the time required. In the meantime I experiment and I learn. Here are the three colors of Aelia. I only drew one, then I saved it as a different filenameand changed the symbols.

I think it is effort that will be positively received and that my kit instructions will be better for it. I will not however be going backwards in time. Going forward, we'll see.

Just for the record this is a very small subset of aelia directions, figure 1 out of 22.

Black Dark Silver

Gold Pacific Opal - by far the favorite color way. This year I took pre-orders on the kits and gold pacific opal was the choice for almost everyone! Who knew, not me, I seem never be able to predict the popular color.
Usually I do three colors of a design, sometimes more, but almost always three. The third color for Aelia is my favorite F460J purple blue matte with blue metallic and purple velvet crystal.

It's a good thing I learned how to rotate around a center, because it comes in pretty handy with this design. I think back to my early days when I would manually place beads around a circle like this and of course they were never very accurate. I've come a pretty long way since then.

Today I need to finish up the third set of directions. It is still quite labor intensive, after changing all 22 illustrations to the new color, I have to copy them into a separate file in order to export them to a jpg and then add them to the word file and update the text to refer to the new color/bead combination.

I still feel that in the end it will be time well spent. We keep Beading by the Bay designs exclusive until well after the event in fairness to our attendees. But the design will eventually be released in kit form and I think this process will definitely add value.