Illustrator or Adobe Draw ?

[merrillc65341461]

I have recently started a digital illustration course using Adobe illustrator and a struggling with the pen tool to draw.

I want to create hand drawn looking illustrations and don't have the time to become proficient with Adobe illustrator and don't find it intuitive.

Adobe Draw seems much better for hand drawing style. Is it just as good to produce great print worthy illustrations? Or should I persevere with Illustrator?!

Any advice or thoughts welcome!

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

When preparing vector artwork for print, you might need the CMYK color space, which Illustrator Draw does not offer. It's up to you to decide if it's necessary - depends on how your artwork will be printed.

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

Are you using the Pen tool because the course concentrates on it? If so, you might need more of a high-level view of which tools to use.

Most courses place a strong emphasis on the Pen tool because it has always been a primary drawing tool in Illustrator, from the very beginning. The digital drawing revolution represented by the Pen tool is that it eliminates the imprecision and roughness of trying to draw perfectly straight lines and smooth curves with a mouse. It is for that reason that people love it.

But perfectly geometric lines are not what you want, if your goal as you said is to create hand-drawn illustrations. You're not doing graphic design or creating precise technical drawings, so the Pen tool is not what you want to use.

Instead, study and experiment with Illustrator tools such as the Paintbrush and Blob Brush. Focus your study on and look for courses that have good sections on these tools. They are intended for creating more organic, freeform strokes with that hand-drawn look. You can also use them with customizable brush presets (in the Brushes panel) that have different looks such as rough, tapered, and calligraphic strokes.

You can use those brush tools to make your hand-drawn look even more expressive if you use them with a pressure-sensitive stylus, because then you can use stylus pressure/tilt/rotation to vary stroke widths, angle, or other attributes as you are drawing.

You will probably still use the Pen tool when you actually need to draw with machine-like precision, but any time you want to draw more as you would with a real pencil or brush, you want to use something other than the Pen tool.