The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book [Paperback]

Sharon Steuer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 1998 | Series: Wow! Series

The definitive step-by-step guide to Adobe Illustrator! The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book showcases the work of more than 100 top Illustrator artists, walking you through their creative techniques from start to finish. Clear, step-by-step instructions, helpful sidebars, and savvy tips guide you through Illustrator 8's highlights, from the basics to sophisticated professional effects. For inspiration, you'll find lush, full-color galleries of the contributing artists' work. And as a bonus, The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book includes a CD-ROM with custom Wow! brushes and Actions, tutorials, samples of Gradient Mesh art, and more.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is an outstanding full-color guide for a range of Illustrator users. As with other Wow! books, this one is a compilation of hands-on advice from a wide variety of accomplished artists with lots of experience with the software. The tips let you make the most of Illustrator's tools to create many different types of images, all quite professional looking.

The author, an award-winning artist herself, starts off with an introduction to the essential Illustrator features--from working with objects and palettes to working with transformations, views, color, image formats, Postscript, and output. The book goes on to offer more in-depth discussions of shapes, lines, fills, colors, templates, layers, blends, gradients, paths, type, layout, masks, special effects, external apps, not to mention Web, multimedia, and animation projects. As you work through many exercises and browse image galleries from the contributing artists, you learn expert-level tips and techniques. The book includes technical notes, company and artist information, publications, a glossary, and a list of keyboard shortcuts. The companion CD-ROM has Brushes, Actions, clip art, fonts, tutorials, and demo versions of Illustrator and other software programs. --Kathleen Caster

From Library Journal

Illustrator 8 is the latest version of Adobe's excellent vector program for image manipulation and creation. Vectors are lines of art in which Photoshop is a matrix of colors in rows and columns. Vectors are much easier to manipulate than a matrix of colors; they allow you to select areas of color easily for color change or line-size change. All these books are solid titles for folks trying to upgrade to Illustrator 8 or learn Illustrator for the first time. Alspach's and Weinmann's books are fine for starting out; Pirouz's and Steuer's works are for advanced users.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (December 23, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201353997
• ISBN-13: 978-0201353990
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,462,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

(Visit her at: http://www.facebook.com/SharonSteuer)
Sharon Steuer loves collaborating with other creatives--and working with the Illustrator WOW! team, and the contributing artists to the Illustrator WOW! Books, provides endless wonderful opportunities for collaboration.

For more than two decades, Sharon has pioneered the merging of traditional and digital art forms. Sharon's recent artwork weaves together her oil paintings, drawings, digital paintings, photographs, and personal artifacts to explore and reflect fragmented memory. Awards for her artwork include the national Faber Birren Color Award, a Windsor Newton Painting award, and an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

In addition to the 11 editions of the Illustrator WOW! Books, Sharon is author of "Creative Thinking in Photoshop," and has been a contributor to creativepro.com, as well as many other books and articles. She lives with her husband, sound artist and SFSU professor Jeff Jacoby, in San Francisco, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really shows off what I8.0 can do, but glosses over details, October 17, 1999

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book (Paperback)

I am a proffessional graphic artist, and I thought I knew Illustrator inside-out- WRONG! This book showed me just how powerful a tool Illustrator can be, from being able to do simple graphics to photo-realistic art. My only problem with the book and CD Rom (and it's a big problem) is that there is not enough explainations given on how to create some of this fantastic art. For instance, one tutorial advises you to create a scatter brush pattern using art that has a blend in it- but I couldn't figure out how that can work. I just kept getting an error that said it could not be done. I looked on the CD, and there was no example of the art I was trying to re-create- fustrating! I can't imagine that this book would be good for anyone new to Illustrator, as some of the techniques are very advanced. But if you have already mastered the basics, this is a great book.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wow ! I wish I could do that with Adobe Illustrator, March 1, 2000

By 

Paul Simone (Fayetteville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book (Paperback)

Let me start by saying that this is a beautiful book. I drool every time I flip through its pages. Imagine being able to do artwork of this caliber with a software program.

Unfortunately imagining is still all I can do after reading this book. The steps or processes given to accomplish what is shown just didn't help me get there. Some of the steps were outright ridiculous. It reminded me of a joke that went... "3 easy steps to make 5 million dollars: step one - Get yourself a million dollars" I won't tell the rest of the joke; you get the idea.

The odd thing about the book is that every time you pick it up and peruse it, you wish it would help you emulate the artwork shown. Too bad. Mind you, I wouldn't give the book up for anything. I love looking through it.

I guess the bottom line is buy this book if you want to see what can be done with Adobe Illustrator 8. If your already semi-pro at using Illustrator you most likely will gain more "Tips and Tricks" as the cover touts. For the rest of us it's 'too bad, so sad'.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book you need to get more out of Illustrator 8, May 21, 1999

By 

Angel Lee "Liocorno Amethyst Moonstone" (Cleveland, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Illustrator 8 Wow! Book (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book for anyone who wants get more pizzazz out of Illustrator. From just starting out, to obtaining advanced effects, it guides you step-by-step with both text and color examples. Though this book does a nice job of covering the basics, where it really excels is in its coverage of advanced techniques. I learned to create painterly effects with gradient lighting and how to make a complex pattern. It also showed me how to create a truly realistic reflection, & produce shadows. The tips and techniques really helped me to learn to use Illustrator more productively. The resource and artist directories were a nice plus as well. The CD included is also quite spectacular. It includes some awesome brushes, Wow! actions and clip art. It also contains images to pick apart and trial programs. There are even some great tutorials on the basics of Illustrator.