7 tools illustrator beginners will be interested to use

I usually use illustrator for manual vector work (when I say 'manual', I am referencing the new image trace features in CS6) but I love to design colourful website backdrops, especially using these awesome tools. If you you are a beginner with Illustrator, I'm sure you will love this.

1. Bring up the sub menu of the icon that looks like an upside down moustache and select a tool. Here's a demo of those tools. (in order)

Warp Tool

 Twirl Tool (one of my favs)

 Pucker Tool

 Bloat Tool

 Scallop Tool

 Crystallise Tool (good for comic book stuff)

 Wrinkle Tool (makes for good sound-wave pictures)

 Enjoy!

Below is something I made using a few of these tools.

Fotor: A good enough replacement for Photoshop.

Fotor is free at the moment on the mac app store... grab it. I know a lot of people have written about it online but when I tested it out myself I had to share.

What Fotor is: A good and powerful way to edit photos WITHOUT adjusting any sliders or graphs, panels and colours. It's probably what you would imagine if you mixed Elements 10, with iPhoto and the Snapseed iPad app in a big mixing bowl...

It has an easy drag and drop interface:

A huge selection of well described menu items:

And another sidebar for selecting different sub menus, and export features:

It has gained its place next to Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock. On the whole: I think this is a great app for on-the-go photographers who don't have the time to open Photoshop and setup for an editing sesh.

Cool Cartoon Eye In Illustrator

Want to make this cool eye in illustrator?

Level: Begginer/Moderate

Skills needed: Pen Tool, Pathfinder Tool

Heres how:

Make a circle:

Then, using the centre of the circle as an anchor, make a triangle in the top left hand of the circle, at a 45° angle.

Use the pathfinder tool to cut a hole into the circle.

Draw another circle.

Change the circle you have just drawn to whatever colour you want the eye to be, and the 'pac-man' shape to black. 

The blue circle is on top of the black circle so if you right click > Arrange > Send to back

Alternatively, you can move the circle onto a new layer and drag that new layer to the bottom.

then move the black shape onto the blue circle.

Open a new document and make a circle, then copy and paste it so you have two identical circles.

Move them on top one another so they look like a venn diagram.

Their edges should touch the centre anchor of each other.

Then use the pathfinder tool > intersect. this makes a shape that is made from the overlap.

Take this new shape and turn it exactly 90°. You can do this by holding shift and rotating it with corner 

'rotate' icon. this appears when you put your mouse on the corner of the shape object box.

Now make it white and use the selection outline to see where you are putting it, (you wont be able to see the actual shape)

Then once you have positioned it, Add a cartoon skin tone, I opted for pink but you can match it to your comic book character.

The pink box will be in front of the eye, so again, right click > Arrange > Send to back.

with the pen tool, Draw a curved, skinny triangle in the left top corner. Make it the same colour as your eye, but a tiny bit lighter.

Add a small white circle on top of the black shape.

Go to the toolbar at the top and find Effect > Stylize > Feather. this will bring up a small box. Set the radius to 7px. Press Ok then draw a similar shape to the light blue one, or you can copy and paste this, then mirror it, but that is more difficult. Make it black.

Huzzah.