Happiness comes in minor accomplishments which pave the way for painting your dream life. As a creative, we can sometimes struggle to keep motivated if we stop riding the wave of creativity or drown in lack of inspiration. During the pandemic lockdown here in Ireland, I lost inspiration and motivation as there was a feeling of dread and uncertainty in the air. In one hand I found I had plenty of time to create and initially I did, but as the weeks and months went on and feeling that even the governments had no idea about what was going to happen week by week, anxiety and creative blindness took me over. So, what do you do when you lack inspiration and motivation? I turned to online study. At least I knew it would force me to get out of my head and give me actual deadlines and set goals that I would need to meet and I would have to find the inspiration myself instead of waiting for it to come.
Success!!!
So, I just finished this course successfully to update my creative skills in Adobe Illustrator. I am pretty happy with it. I have been using Adobe Illustrator for a long time now and while I initially preferred working in Adobe Photoshop as I found it much easier and preferred the finished look of it, I eventually started turning to Adobe Illustrator when I started teaching English. Using the vector program gave me more freedom when creating posters and games and flashcards for the classroom without worrying about resizing it on the school printer. Also, the kids responded well to the cartoon/style that Adobe Illustrator produced for me.
More Than Just A Logo Maker
In the last few years I have turned to Illustrator to create my coloring books and activity books and where once I just thought it was only good for making logos while I worked in a busy graphic design studio many years ago, I now see that it has a wide and varied use and it is probably one of my favorite programs now.
So, now I am officially an Adobe Certified Associate in Graphic Design & Illustration Using Adobe Illustrator. I feel I should start preparing my Oscar award speech next…. hmmm…and maybe start looking for a new dress.
I use the Adobe Creative Cloud which also allows me to use Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe In Design, Dimension, Acrobat, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Affects, Character Animator, Audition, Fuse, as well as many more, including the adobe mobile creative apps which also work on my Ipad and includes 100 GB of cloud storage. I create my coloring book art in Adobe illustrator and lay it out in Adobe Indesign and export the interior book pages as a pdf, I convert all the fonts to outlines in Adobe Acrobat. I create my book covers in Adobe Photoshop. I create my marketing images in Adobe Dimension to create 3D model mockups, and Photoshop to resize and to add the finishing touches.
It’s obvious that I am a huge fan of Adobe Illustrator and it is worth my monthly subscription.
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