Expert: Tom Rouze - 3/6/2009

Question
Hello Mr. Rouze

I want to thank you for taking the time to hopefully answer my question and helping me out in the future. I am a big fan of adobe photoshop and adobe illustrator,etc..  Unfortunately i don't know where to start, my question to you is how can i become to be a great illustrator user and how can i learn the program itself. I have an understanding of what is used for but i don't know where to start nor the basics, can you please help me out? Thank you for your time.

Answer
Hello Michael,

I highly recommend Adobe Classroom in a Book for Illustrator. Same applies to Photoshop. They actually have a book for each program. There are project lessons and explanations to give you a nice grasp of what the program can do and how to do it. It's a very good start whether you're looking to get into design or production art. There are also tutorials that come with the software. I lean toward Classroom in a Book series because they're well written and easy to understand and it gives you lessons to work on so you can compare your file to the example file. Then experiment with all the tools, filters, etc...
The next thing is play and practice.
If you get stuck you can always come back here and I'll try to help.

Thank you,

Tom