Please help a newbie out !!!!

[dward1]

Hi Everybody-

This is my first post here and am brand new to Illustrator. I am soooo facnitated with Illustrator and want to learn all I can, but at the same time I am absolutley clueless as to what I am doing. I have been using Photoshop for some time and have a good handle on that, but Illustrator throws me a curve ball.

Can anybody out there give me some advise as to some good books or magizines and video tutorials where I can watch and read about learning Illustrator???

Also, I am wanting to make a DVD case for my family Florida vacation. I am great at video editing and adding effects, chapters and the like. I have two DVD's burnt and now want to make some art for the case. My idea is to make a gradient backgroud with a fading color and I want to add some swirls in Illustrator on top of that. I also want to make the colors of the swirls different colors to match the background and kind of bring it all together.

So my next questions is can anybody suggest some tutorials or advise for this newbie on how to make and color and place the designes in Illustrator. Please remember that I am VERY new to Illustrator and pretty much all the tools are greek to my and what they do so you will have to be caear with your instructions. Thanks for taking the time to read my post and I am sorry that I kind of rambled on, I have a tendcey to do that but I just want to communicate well so you get a good understanding of what I am asking.

Thanks for your time and look forward to hearing for you all soon !!!!

Sincerely Thankful to You- Doug Ward

[Scott Weichert]

Hi Doug,

You might want to start with www.layersmagazine.com

[micke]

There are templates in Illustrator that you can use to create CD and DVD cases, covers, labels, booklets (and lots of other stuff, too). You can open templates via the Welcome pane. If you don't see it when you open Illustrator, look under the Help menu.

micke