Where would we be without the ingenious bezier curve? Without our love-hate relationship with the Pen Tool? Is the flat illustration style the new black? These are pertinent questions to be sure, but they cannot reduce my affection for the art and the considerable craft of illustration.

I love illustration, but I don’t consider myself an illustrator. What I really love is using Adobe Illustrator to get the job done. It is such a great tool, particularly for wanna-be illustrators like me who can draw, albeit crudely, but fall short in the craftsmanship of traditional media. The latest versions of Illustrator have some great tools for easily making complex and compound shapes.

The good folks at Envato Tuts provide hundreds of Illustrator tutorials, and I have slavishly used them to learn useful shape-making techniques. The illustrations displayed below are the results of my working through their tutorials, that is to say, I did not create these designs, I simply used Illustrator to render them.

Gallery

I did create a few illustrations for a personal project on modular synthesizers. For these I sketched freehand or found source material, scanned them into Illustrator and worked them up from there. Here’s a few samples: