my little project

[crashwg]

So I'm working on this little project. 

The inspiration as some of you might recognize is from "Real Ultimate Power" which is a funny as hell book that if you haven't read you should check out.  Google it...

What I'm doing is making a custom playing card for a game called Munchkin.  Munchkin Fu is actually the specific version of the game that I'm making the card for.  I haven't worked out the specifics yet but the "Ninja Boner" will be a weapon usable only by males requiring no hands and most likely having an added bonus vs. females.  Again, if you haven't heard of Munchkin, Google it, find it, buy it, play it!  Fun(y) game.

[crashwg]

And now for the question...

I'm using Illustrator for the first time referencing Frosty's guide for basics and tips.

The way I am attacking this drawing is I'm doing all the "lines" which will really be a bunch of complex shapes.  In the Ninja Boner picture there are some "donuts" for lack of a better term.  I'm trying to figure out how to make them with a single shape vs. drawing a larger black circle which would have a smaller circle on top of it making it appear that the big one is just an outline.  Reason being is that I want to mess around with the colors of the ninja suit and I want the color inside the donut shapes to change with the rest...

So, any tips on how to go about this without having like 30 anchor points?

[crashwg]

Looking for a better quality pick on the web I came across this little beauty!  Should serve as a good color guide.

[BobbyG66]

And now for the question...

I'm using Illustrator for the first time referencing Frosty's guide for basics and tips.

The way I am attacking this drawing is I'm doing all the "lines" which will really be a bunch of complex shapes.  In the Ninja Boner picture there are some "donuts" for lack of a better term.  I'm trying to figure out how to make them with a single shape vs. drawing a larger black circle which would have a smaller circle on top of it making it appear that the big one is just an outline.  Reason being is that I want to mess around with the colors of the ninja suit and I want the color inside the donut shapes to change with the rest...

So, any tips on how to go about this without having like 30 anchor points?

I think I understanding what you are saying.
The best way to work in Illustrator is with layers.

Make your top layer the black line drawing.
Make a second layer under the top layer called color.
You can then lock the top layer and add color underneath it.

If you have a number of areas that are the same color, group those together.
That way you can change the color of the group in just a couple of clicks.

Also 30 anchor points is not real bad.
If you keep the file as an .ai file, it will be small. EPS is alot bigger file size.
If you want to reduce anchor points, there is a command called simplify.
Select the item then go to Object-Path-Simplify.
Click on the preview box and then try different settings to get what you like.

Good luck!
Bob

[crashwg]

Update!

Took a hiatus from this for a pretty long time.  Mostly due to formatting the computer and just not getting around to installing illustrator.  Got the bug again so I've been working on it a little bit the past few days.  Hopefully I can stick with it longer.

So here's where I'm at now.

While I'm posting...  For some reason the legs and boner are showing up gray now that I've upgraded to CS3 13.0.0 from regular old Illustrator 10 (I believe) even when I select them, change their color to all sorts of things, then back to black.  The transparency is at 100 also...  I just don't get it.

[crashwg]

I have solved the problem from my last post.  For anyone who might run into the same someday, here's what I did...

The legs and boner were "sub-layers" of "ninja".  While organizing the parts of said ninja, I noticed that when creating sub layers there was an option to "dim images to ***%".  I figured that this must be the problem so I clicked on the trouble layers, legs and boner, only to find that they didn't have this setting for some reason.  What I ended up doing was creating new sub layers to ninja and transferring all the drawing paths to these new layers.  Now everything is as it should be.

I can only assume that in the conversion to CS3 there was a little fluke with the sub layers where they were "dimmed" but the option wasn't there to return them to normal.