Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Notice the red line that appears around both artboards. The red line indicates the bleed
area. Typical bleeds for printing are about 1/8 of an inch.
What is a bleed?
Bleed is the amount of artwork that falls outside of the printing bounding box,
or outside the artboard. You can include bleed in your artwork as a margin of
error—to ensure that the ink is still printed to the edge of the page after the
page is trimmed or that an image can be stripped into a keyline in a document.
—From Illustrator Help
Working with basic shapes
In the first part of this lesson, you'll create a house using basic shapes, like rectangles,
ellipses, rounded rectangles, and polygons. You'll begin this exercise by setting up the
workspace.
1.
Choose Window > Workspace > Essentials (if it's not already selected), and then
choose Window > Workspace > Reset Essentials.
2.
Choose View > Rulers > Show Rulers, or press Ctrl+R (Windows) or Command+R
(Mac OS), to display rulers along the top and left side of the Document window (if they
are not already showing).
Tip
You can change the units for the current document by right-clicking
(Windows) or Ctrl-clicking (Mac OS) the horizontal or vertical ruler and
choosing a new unit from the context menu.
The ruler units are inches because you specified them in the New Document dialog box. You
can change the ruler units for all documents or for the current document only. The ruler unit
applies to measuring objects, moving and transforming objects, setting grid and guide
spacing, and creating shapes. It does not affect the units used in the Character, Paragraph, and
Stroke panels. The units used in these panels can be changed by choosing (Edit > Preferences
> Units [Windows] or Illustrator > Preferences > Units [Mac OS]).
Understanding drawing modes
Before starting to draw shapes in Illustrator, it can be helpful to understand the different
drawing modes available. Notice the three drawing modes found at the bottom of the Tools
panel: Draw Normal, Draw Behind, and Draw Inside.
