Welcome to the final installment in my six-day, cradle-to-grave,  Halloween-induced extravaganza, in which I finish off the large-format pirate flag that I’ve been making all week. I begin by enlarging the skull and sabers in Illustrator. The result is a work of infinitely scalable razor-sharp line art that I could not have possibly matched had I upsampled the original pixel-based image in Photoshop. Then I adjust the color scheme and modify the placement of a few paths—if for no other reason than to demonstrate that what began as a sketch is now a pliable collection of vector-based outlines that I can modify as much as I want.

Here’s the official description:

In this exclusive preview of his upcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced, Deke McClelland shares six phases in the creation of an authentic five-by-three-foot pirate flag. In this final installment, Deke uses Illustrator to enlarge, recolor, and edit a group of paths to create a finished piece of vector-based art.  Look for the full course to be released in its entirety later this year.

Topics include:

• Using the Scale tool to resize a piece of art
• Selecting and recoloring a collection of paths
• Moving a few subpaths to perfect a piece of art

Don’t forget, members of dekeOnline can download the pirate flag artwork files by going to this link. (What would you like to see next?)