Learning the tools: vectors and Illustrator

Last Wednesday dove into Illustrator for the first time... or I did anyway.  I had played with it before but mostly felt lost.  With the more formal introduction and Illustrator's ability to lay itself out like Photoshop I was able to find myself around a bit better.  This first image is what I did doodling around during class as we learned the tools.

Very simplistic, I know.  Keep in mind that I'm just learning the tools here.  Toward the end of class we were told that our assignment for the weekend was do draw out 5 scenes using the entire artboard in Illustrator.  The instructor suggested this would take between 10 and 20 minutes for each.  It took a lot longer for me.  I probably spent at least 30 minutes on each and still feel like what I made is pretty basic:

For some reason a few of these remind me of video games from the early/mid 90s.  The table especially conjures up images of old adventure games like Police Quest.  I'm not sure why.

I found the tools in Illustrator cumbersome and somewhat difficult to work with.  This was especially so when it came to cropping or deleting portions of an object I had drawn.  The process wasn't exactly difficult once I figured it out, but it was still a damn site more complicated than it strictly needed to be.  I still haven't figured out how to get the dropper tool working the way I expect it to.  I guess I need to keep playing.