In this course, I teach basic and advanced skills for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to students with limited or no exposure to either program. Most students are in some concentration of design for their degree. Coursework is based on program skills and creativity. Learning the creative tools of each program and how the programs can be used in the real world is an essential outcome of this class.
Photoshop: Students will learn the basic tools and principles such as Move, Marquee, lasso, magic wand, healing brushes, cloning, brushes, dodge/burn tools, and type. How to use layers, channels, layer masks, groups, adjustment layers, linking and locking, and filters.
Illustrator: Students learn selection tools, pens, shapes, paintbrush, rotation, and scale. Working with layers, pathfinder, compound shapes, type, type on a curve or in a shape, color, swatches, strokes, fills, gradients, transparency, alignment, image trace, and brush styles.
Students learn how each of these two programs works differently and how you can use them together using native files. The final project is to create a redesign of a CD case and cover, based on the music they listen to on the album. The album art will be created using both programs together.
Student design projects include:
Fantasy poster, Photo restoration, Personal digital collage,
Personal monogram, Personal story infographic, Illustrated nature drawing, CD case redesign
Personal monogram, Personal story infographic, Illustrated nature drawing, CD case redesign
Student project examples are shown below
Student Feedback:
"I enjoyed the pace of the class while still meeting deadlines. I enjoyed that he implemented games as techniques to wake up our creativity. Overall I simply admired the teacher as a professor and as a person. I came into this class thinking it would be my worst class because I didn’t know what the heck I was going to be doing. I also came in knowing I didn’t like anything related to digital art and would be bad at it. I was wrong and the teacher along with the structure of his class changed my mind. I’m happy to say I’ve learned a lot and Photoshop and Illustrator are something I can add to my resume. Thanks to the professor"
"I really enjoyed having critic days since it helped me improve on my projects since all my classmates would give me advice on how to make my assignments look better as well as new perspectives. Another strength of this course was how the professor would show students other methods to make progress in their assignments."
"The strength of this class was that we were able to critique our projects when they weren't finished so that we could use the feedback to finish it up. I also think that one of the strengths of this course with the professor was we were able to ask how to use a tool that we hadn't used before or even show us an example before going on our own and doing it. Another of the strengths was that we had time to finish or work on the projects in class."
