For this 2D drawing assignment using illustrator, I chose to attack a pulley system. This PDF shows the initial drawings given in the book for imitation.
As a beginner, I started out with just about the only tool I remembered from the brief intro into illustrator – the shape tool. Some shapes that I thought would be quite complicated turned out to be simple shapes that required manipulation of anchor points and addition of radius to the edges. As for the others, I took every shape that was given to me and broke it up into simple component shapes that built the basis for each of the more complex ones.
After watching some tutorials on manipulating shapes/making composite shapes (many of them outdated), I was introduced to several general tools that made the rest of the work quite simple. The use of pathfinder (essentially manages different shapes that are piled up on one another), shape builder (combines modularly built shapes into one), and keeping organized using the different functions of the grid (snap to grid/snap to point) were essential to this assignment’s completion.
Below is a screen shot of my final shapes along with a link to the illustrator file itself. After fiddling around and exploring its different tools, you realize that illustrator does give you leeway to manipulate the shapes yourself and hack a shape out, but it also provides you with ways of creating almost anything you want quite methodically.
I look forward to continue hacking away while I continue to try developing these methods.
