Illustrated Landscapes: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

In this beginner-friendly class, you'll learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to create vibrant, stylized landscape illustrations. Discover basic tools, techniques, and design principles as you explore vector drawing, color gradients, and layering. Perfect for anyone looking to dive into digital illustration! Digital illustration is a versatile tool used across various industries. It plays a key role in graphic design for branding and marketing, animation and game design for creating characters and environments, and children's books or graphic novels for vibrant storytelling. It also enhances advertising campaigns and helps in visualizing concepts in fashion design. Digital illustration brings creativity to life in countless real-world applications!

Brian Gibbs, a Charlotte native, practially grew up at the African American Children's Theatre studying visual arts, theater, and dance. He graduated from Northwest School of the Arts and North Carolina School of the Arts as a dance major. After graduating college, he moved to San Francisco where he had early success as a choreographer/director working with top tier artists from across the globe. Gibbs went on to start his own company, The Artists Group San Francisco. The company's work and collaborations helped pioneer the "dance film" genre. Gibbs also worked for Carol H. Williams, an African American ad agency, doing broadcast and junior copywriting. Gibbs' works have been featured onstage, in film, and commercials, and most recently in Oscar award winning film Eyes of Tammy Faye.

With a degree from Central Piedmont Community College's graphic arts program, Gibbs has figured out how to seamlessly incorporate his education with focus on motion and movement into a new medium, animation, that he taught himself during the pandemic. He currently works for brands, social media and institutions around the country specializing in stop motion animation/motion graphics with focus on community and education. His work has been published and commissions include NBA all star weekend, Street League Skateboarding, Nitro Circus, Nike Go Skateboarding Day, Charlotte Ballet and others. With a diverse background, Gibbs finds it imperative to encourage students in their creative pursuits and highlight the many options available as long one remains open and curious.