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The Art of Line Art
You may be thinking about a career in graphic art, or maybe you already work in an advertising agency or have your own shop. The Art of Line Art will bring you up to warp speed in drawing black and white work for manuals, data sheets, packaging, instruction sheets, catalogs, web sites, editorial, and more. You spend a few hours getting to know the Pen tool, and other basic drawing tools. Then you dig into some real-life projects where you're drawing complex objects that are typical of the kinds of work freelance illustrators do. If you're already working in an agency or company art department, the chops you'll pick up in this course will enhance your value to the company, by keeping the illustration work in-house. If you work for yourself, you'll have a whole new bag of tricks to market and profit from.
There are more than ten hours of video in this course. It's all about black and white - no color at all (there's a rendering course in the works). You simply watch the movie, then draw on your own. Within a week or two - at only an hour or so a day - you can be up and running with line art. Beyond drawing, there are tips and tricks for Tools, Menus, Actions, and Keyboard Shortcuts that will serve you well in your job. You'll be able to draw bolts, nuts, threaded rods, shiny objects, springs and all sorts of mechanical objects that companies need in their advertising and customer service departments. Click the package on the right for more details about this great educational investment in your future.
You'll need a Mac or PC with a DVD drive, QuickTime to watch the movies, and if you want to follow along, Adobe Illustrator. You can get a free 30-day trial of Illustrator on Adobe's site. If you have a Wacom tablet, you're way ahead of the game - they're invaluable!
Casual FreeHand MX Course
If you're like a lot of us, you may not have upgraded your software suite in awhile. Maybe your company tries to keep a lid on costs and won't even think of letting you upgrade to a $400 program like Adobe Illustrator. This course was developed shortly after the Macromedia MX suite of programs came out. When Adobe purchased Macromedia, they more or less put FreeHand to sleep. That still bothers me because deep down I still believe it's the superior program. At any rate, there will be no upgrades to the program, and Adobe offers no tech support for it any longer.
That said, you can find FreeHand MX for sale at very reasonable prices on eBay and other outlets. It still works fine on all platforms. The work you can produce from FreeHand prints fine from PostScript printers, and you can still export files directly into Fireworks for web use. Files can be opened in Illustrator CS3 and CS4 with no problem whatever, although blends are torn asunder (it's an easy fix). The type handling aspects of FreeHand are far superior to Illustrator's, and there are many procedures that can be handled in three or four less mouse-clicks than in Illustrator. It also saves about 300% faster...
The course is not as much a project-oriented means of learning. Instead, you go through every menu item and tool as if you were on a FreeHand page. Each link provides an extremely detailed instruction set about that feature. Nothing is left out, good or bad. You learn not only what the tool/feature does, you learn why to use it, why not to use it, and when it's best to use something else. The course covers two packed CDs, and has an added set of display text instructions for logos and other special type applications. Click the package on the right to keep an old, reliable program running in your studio.
You'll need a Mac or PC with a CD drive, QuickTime to watch the movies, and if you want to follow along, FreeHand MX. If you have a Wacom tablet, you're way ahead of the game - they're invaluable!