Learn to Draw With Vectors

If you ever wondered how those perfectly polished computer illustrations get that way without any wobbly lines, spills and the utter mess of not being able to produce even the simplest curves that would look smooth and half decent, after trying on your own, you must’ve decided all of THEM surely have a special drawing pad and are never using something as clumsy and impossible to control as computer mouse for any of their drawing.

Free-hand drawing pad aside, illustrators who are utilizing the blessings of the technological advancement are using vectors, mainly the Bézier curves for their work.

It was a French automobile engineer, Pierre Bézier, who introduced the use of these curves in computer graphics. The Bézier curve is the mathematical equation that represents lines in computer graphics and if you have ever used the ‘pen tool’ in Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, Fontographer, or any number of spline-based 3D programs, you have already used the Bézier curves.

So, vector graphics consist of points, lines, curves, and polygons all based on mathematical equations that we, thankfully, don’t need to worry about, because their use and application in computer graphics is entirely intuitive: you simply trace your own lines after scanning your drawing and fill the fields you’ve created by linking different curves with color afterwards. And you trace your drawing not by repeating entire lines and every bit of it, like you would do with the pencil, but by clicking (with the active pen tool) on parts of your lines — between the two click-points the Bézier curve will appear and you can adjust it to follow your line perfectly by manipulating the end points, or anchors. Once you get the hang of this, it becomes very easy and fast, and you end up with perfectly smooth curves and fields to fill up with color, gradient, pattern or texture you like.

Unlike raster graphics (the representation of images as a collection of pixels — dots), vector art can be resized into really large or very small images without any loss of quality (dreaded blurring or “pixelation”) and successfully used for print. A good quality logo, for example, that you can use on the web and print on everything from business cards and letterheads to posters and t-shirts, while keeping the same crisp quality, is nowadays unthinkable without vectors.

Although there are many demonstrations of Bézier curves available on the web, if you wish to really try producing your own vector art you should download Adobe Illustrator and utilize the one-month free trial (under “Downloads” > “Tryout”) of the best computer graphics program in the world.

And if it turns out you are not quite the Digital Picasso just like yours truly isn’t either, despite the high hopes and unyielding self-confidence, at least you will learn one more creative, beautiful thing — drawing with vectors.

My vector illustration shown here is created in Adobe Illustrator.

Posted by Svetlana at 07:33 AM | http://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/art_design/