Over next couple of months there are going to be a series of changes. Some will be small changes, more writing, more downloads and hopefully more visitors and comments. Others will be larger, the design will change, as will the intent of the site, which is to say, it will become more of a Portfolio site with bloggy stuff in the cracks.

I will be adding content into areas like Illustration, Print publications, Photography, and Identity/Logography to name a few. Please note that is will be a testing ground and occasionally it will look like a military proving range with lots of blown up stuff where it shouldn’t be.

To get things started, I will be posting a download a week for the next few months. Starting with the Cherry…

This is a demonstration of the Gradient Mesh tool that I will be creating a Tutorial for. When you download take note of the simplicity of the cherry mesh, this is the cornerstone of a good mesh, it’s simplicity. Even the top of the stem is reasonably simple with only one middle mesh bezier. This started as 5 squares with simple color and I added detail where it was necessary. Many people add cross curves to the object until it is so complicated there is no way to simplify it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Freebie time again. I found the blog, Brass Goggles, again the other night. I have quite a soft spot for all things steam punk, it suits my anachronistic nature. So in that spirit, I went to my library of brushes and found my cogs. I had developed a set of gears for a flash project that is still in development, and several hours of research is still necessary but this is an interim stage, that I would like to share.

In order to use these brushes, just open the file in illustrator and apply brushes to various circles and drawn lines. As illustrators brush engine doesn’t scale all that well, I recommend using trial and error to your settings. Feel free to pull out the pieces and edit them, just please don’t redistribute them without attribution.

Thanks, Mike.

Update: Hey folks, it seems there has been a few issues with how to set up the cogs. This is as much my fault as anyones, as I use my own technique instead of the official Adobe way of creating Brushes. Illustrator can be a bit snarky about bends and turnarounds, and as strange as it sounds, loading brushes backwards solves the problem in some cases. So here are some usage hints:

Start a new doc, creating a new ellipse to begin. I use arbitrary settings so that they can bite me in the ass after several screen caps.

Apply your brush to the ellipse. I choose the first one as I have experimented on it extensively as a proof-of-concept.

It is worth noting at this point that most of your questions start here. So this is where I didn’t provide enough info.

The fix is this: Use the brush options button to open the options dialog. This is where you can exert some power on the applied brush(make sure one is selected!).

Consequently, this dialog will appear:

Notice that it comes pre-scaled at 20% and I have the cursor over “Flip Across.” If the cog looks inside out, this is the setting you need to invert, ie. if it is flipped, unflip it. Notice my teeth are on the outside now.

Next, we need to make this cog solid, in order to use another brush inside it. So I will go ahead and create a .8″ ellipse inside it also.(It doesn’t need to be centered yet, I have intentionally offset it here to illustrate which piece is which.

Note the second is not much smaller, which is also to show how other brushes interact. Now we apply a brush to it, using Pattern Brush 22, which I like. It has a large center section and a bit of a curve to it.

Wow, that is really screwed up, but wait! You know how to fix it. That fun Brush Options dialog! I set mine to 30% initially with Flip Along Unchecked, and Flip Across Checked. Yielding this:

If you are unable to color your brushes, it maybe because of Hue Shift is not the option selected at the bottom.

Now it is up to you to make it nice. I did finally settle on 40% for my scale, and used the align palette to center the two original brushes and the new little white circle that I created. This is the final example:

If you are still having problems recreating the file, the above image is a link to download the source file.

Update no 2:Illustrator 8 Version

Good Luck!

What is it about working vacations that holds allure for me? I am not much of a jeweler, but I am learning. Distinguishing different cuts of diamonds is not easy, they are very blingy. While on vacation, I had the opportunity to go to a coin show. As a people watcher, I would reccomend this to arm chair anthropologists everywhere, as it is a facination slice of human strata. As most older currency is struck in precious metals, there is a bit of crossover between the coin dealer and the jeweler. This does not mean that the gradient is subtle. While walking through the hallway at the show, one may see the most hard-core anti-social geek wearing a shirt that reads something in Klingon; in the next moment you may see a woman, dressed to the nines who wouldn’t look out of place in Zurich. (more…)

In this tutorial we will take an oversized image and scan it in two passes. Once in PShop, we will stitch it together leaving it seamless.

Warning: I am using a drawing from my sketch pad. I am not an artist, thusly it is not an overly attractive drawing.

I am assuming scanner knowledge, if I use a word you don’t understand with regard to your scanner, consult your manual.

Step 1: Correct document placement

There are several sizes of paper in the US that are larger than a scanner, including, and this is my favorite, comic illustration board. It is important that we are on the same page, so-to-speak, with regard to what I am using for this. I have an oversized sketchbook that the drawing is coming out of, and it is about 60lb paper, so it is maleable. This will help with bending the paper onto the platen with the help of the lid.

I am going to put the paper on sideways to get 2 scans, there are several variations on this, depending on your paper size. You should ALWAYS have your paper on a straight edge or prefferably 2. I am starting like so:

The paper that I am using abutts the scanner on the bottom and one the left. There is no correct end to start on, just whatever you are comfortable with.

Step 2: Overscan

In this step, we need to look at our scanner dialog box and determine what is going to be our finished size. For the sake of swiftness let us assume 100% scale and 300dpi. Typically, it is a good idea to increase your resolution to 2x to 2.5x the finished size and then downsample. I am not going to do that, but I may cover super-sampling later as its own Tut. TURN OFF AUTO CORRECT AND/OR AUTO COLOR, and be sure that you are using the same settings for both. We have enough variables.

We must scan to the extents of the paper and over when choosing with the selection rectangle. This allows us some flexability in piecing the scans together. In my example, I can’t overscan the left or the bottom, so I am adding to the top and getting the entire width, even though the right is going to be messy because of the bend.

Step 3: Merging

Ahhh, the fun part. I can’t overstate the importance of good scans, but this is where the magic happens. Ok, maybe not magic. With both docs open, you must choose which you will merge into. You must not correct color or value yet, we have to have them to compare. I am choosing my first doc. So, since I am adding to the Right(I scanned upside down) I will open Image>Canvas Size like so:

What we want to do is make the document wider, and move the current art to the left making room for new. So we choose to anchor to the left and make the canvas 14 inches. Settings applied:

Note: I left the background color at the bottom. You can change this to whatever you like, some people like to use an incendary color to emphasize a semi-tranparent layer. I am not so hot on this idea, but to each his/her own.

Step 4: Copy/Paste

With our canvas larger, we need to select our other image with a click to activate it, and a Select All to select the extents of the doc. Now we Edit>Copy to pop it on the clipboard, and activate the other doc. Pasting it will result in a layers pallette like this:

We now use the Move tool to slide it to the right, and adjust our layer opacity to about 50%. This leaves us with a fuzzy image in the middle. But we are getting close to done.

Step 5: Alignment

Now we have 2 layers, and the top is 50% opaque, and the bottom is immovable, so lets move the top. Select the top layer with Select> Select All and we are going to move it to a specific point. As you can see from our illustration, we are very close to being aligned, so lets see where we need to be:

We use the nudge controls, which are the arrow keys to move the selected image until it lines up almost perfectly. Please note that you should not trust alignments that are made to close to either edge, as they are not always scanned linearly and will be slightly elongated.

OK, here we are closer:

This image is slightly askew, even with our attempts to keep it square. It won’t win however, we have a technique just for this. We bend it to our will using the Edit>Free Transform tool and setting the axial point on the aligned part.

Note the Axial point on the left, but not to close to the scan edge. The image is mostly aligned now, and the is an easy shortcut from here to finish up. I have read several scanner and pre-press books that discuss the laborious process of meticulous alignment. F-that.

Step 6: Layer Mask

Lets bring our opacity back up by selecting, in the layers palette, the top layer, and sliding opacity from 50% to 100 percent. While looking at out image, we notice that on the left we have a bit of an artifact from the scan. It is a gradient from where the paper didn’t fit and had to be folded. We can assume that this part of the image is elongated a bit as well so lets do away with it entirely. We click on the layer mask button in the layer pallette giving us this:

Notice that the layer mask is selected by default. This is good and will make our next task quicker.

Step 7: Gradient Mask

The gradient tool is what we will be using on the mask, so lets pick it and look at the options:

We must make sure that we are using Black and White in the gradient, and that it is linear. The mode is normal and the last 3 check boxes(not pictured) are UNchecked.

This yields a tool that will go from black to white in the gradient, which when used with the mask, will give us a transparency grad to the top image. Use it somewhat like this:

You should start the drag on the INSIDE of the scan edge, so that it will be totally invisible owing to the black part of the alpha mask.

Step 8: Correction:

When I zoom into my doc, I can see where my paper texture made it in the bottom scan, but not on the top, so I will have to use levels to correct this. Lets do it in an adjustment layer to ensure that we can change it or even add a mask to it. Select the bottom layer, this enables us to add the Adj. layer and it immediatly goes above the bottom, but below the top, so it doesn’t affect the top. Here is the Levels Adj Layer and the Dialog with the change:

Now my document is solid and looks seamless, but I still have a few more things to clean up. I scanned in color, mostly out of habit, but that ensures that I have maximum information to work with, just in case. With this drawing, I am going to 1-bit mode to save it, to keep the size down, and make it very sharp in print. But that is another tutorial. This is the finished product:

Thanks,

Mike Anderson

OK, this weeks assignment is to draft thumbs, a minimum of 10 for both John McCain for President and Hillary Clinton for President. In order to not make the same mistakes that previous candidates have, study a few winners, such as Reagan, Bush, Clinton… etc. as well as a few losers. As extra credit, think about what a worse-case design might look like, such as Hillary’s with obvious feminine qualities… or McCains with short, fat letters. Once you have a good bad idea design it also. These should be accompanied by a brief paragraph explaining your process through the thumbs; i.e. “I started thinking about Hillarys experience with the presidency so I wanted to express this thought Blackletter script…” etc.

Grades will be based on concept, statement and diversity of thumbs.

Addendum: Other candidates that you would like to design for are acceptable, please be sure that they are either signaling a run for President, or there is signifigant media speculation.