Illustrator Competency
Level 1
Demonstrate skill with:
- Selection tool
- Direct Selection tool
- Pen tool (for both straight and curved lines)
- Shape tools (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon)
- Shape builder tool
- Intertwine tool
- Properties panel basics
- Fills and Strokes
- Creating and using Swatches
- Creating new files
- Navigating within a drawing (zooming, panning)
- Using layers (hiding, locking, creating new)
Level 2
Demonstrate skill with:
- Drawing tools
- Pencil tool
- Brush tool
- Curvature tool
- Shaper tool
- Blob brush tool
- Eraser tool
- Knife tool
- Color
- Swatches
- Gradients
- Eyedropper tool
- Transparency
- Live paint
- Color themes panel
- Advanced stroke settings
- Caps
- Corners
- Dashes
- Width tool
- The Appearance panel
- Adding multiple strokes and fills to an object
- Adding and editing effects
- The Blend tool
- Object>Blend>Make
- Different blending options
- Replace Spine
- The Type tool
- Envelope Distort
- Image trace
- Artboards
- Rotating and reflecting objects
- Alignment
- Grouping
Level 3
Learn 15 new tools or panels
The list below is not comprehensive. Learn whichever tools interest you most.
Optional Tools:
- Magic Wand tool and panel
- Pathfinder panel
- Perspective tool
- Scissors tool
- Mesh tool/Gradient meshes
- Symbols panel and Symbol Sprayer tool
- Actions panel
- Slice tool
- Making and editing Patterns
- Advanced typography tools and panels
- 3D tools
- Reshaping tools
- Clipping masks
- Integrating Illustrator with a Wacom tablet
- Graphic Styles panel
- Recolor Artwork
- Transparency masks
- Asset export
- Advanced view settings
- Print tiling
- Group selection tool
- Transform each
- Flatten transparency
- Graphing tools