Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

If nothing else—and there’s more, as you’ll see—symbols are great

convenience tools. What other feature let’s you change your mind

and your artwork with such ease? Plus, there’s something to be said

for throwing together an illustration, however trivial, using some-

one else’s drawings.

Using the Symbolism Tools

In addition to how they facilitate the replication and transformation

of predefi ned artwork, the tie that binds brushes and symbols is

painting. Just as you can paint with brushes (as I demonstrated in

Video Lesson 9, “Freehand Painting”), you can likewise paint with

symbols. The symbol sprayer tool lets you lay down whole popula-

tions of instances. Seven more alliterative tools—each begins with

“symbol” and ends with another S word—let you edit these popu-

lations. Illustrator calls these tools the symbolism tools.

Figure 9-74 .

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Using the Symbolism Tools

1. Open my updated version of the artwork. Although

it was not my intention, Figure 9-74 suggests that our

original man Tiki may have aligned himself with some

new breed of dogmatic radicalism, which history has taught us

is a Very Bad Thing. Fortunately, Tiki has since grown in his

philosophy. To see how, go to the Lesson 09 folder and open the

fi le called Green Tiki with fi re lions.ai. As pictured in Figure 9-75,