http://egypt.urnash.com//Tips/ Tips & Tricks Feed http://www.sgal.org/ http://egypt.urnash.com/Tips/Gettingstarted Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:26:00 -0700
h2. Fixing hidden defaults

!>/albums/Tips/images/getting-started-pencil-settings-1.jpg!

First, you'll want to double-click on the pencil tool (shown over there on the right). You'll get a secret settings dialogue. It will look like this, but will have different values entered in it:
!/albums/Tips/images/getting-started-pencil-settings-2.jpg!

The one that really matters is the combination of 'Keep Selected' and 'Edit Selected Paths'. With both of them on, the pencil tool is nigh-useless - you're constantly editing what you just drew by accident. I find that being able to edit paths with the pencil tool is more important than leaving them selected when I've just drawn them; play around and see what works for you.

The brush tool (just to the left of the pencil tool) has the exact same settings dialogue, and the exact same unusable defaults. I strongly recommend doing the same thing to it.


h2. Palette layout

Next on the list is the palettes. Some people like to hide them away, having the screen full of their artwork. I prefer to have the ones I use out and available at all times:
!/albums/Tips/images/getting-started-palettes.jpg!
I'm constantly flipping values around in these. The ones I use less are piled up in tabs; the ones I use a lot are by themselves. If I still had a large desktop screen, I'd probably have all of these palettes constantly visible, but I'm on a laptop these days, with space at a premium.



h2. Cleaning up the startup documents

This last bit is a little on the hardcore side. I've included it because it's one of the things I do every time I get a new version of Illustrator. Feel free to skip it and get on with the less finicky tips!

If you look at the color swatch palette of your copy of Illustrator and compare it to mine, you'll probably see a lot more swatches in yours. I've gone into the documents Illustrator uses as its models every time you say 'file->new' and deleted almost all of the swatches. This is part of how I've developed my color sense: if I want color in my work, I _have_ to think about what I want, instead of just clicking on the first bright color that catches my eye. In my opinion, the highly-saturated default palettes of most art programs are an attractive nuisance that draws me towards naîve hues and harmonies. If you want to do the same, load up the 'Adobe Illustrator Startup' files found in your plug-ins folder.
!/albums/Tips/images/getting-started-startup-docs.jpg!
You'll see a bunch of stuff in there - color swatches, art brushes, symbols, graphic styles, fill patterns... I say nuke them all! Mix your own colors as you need them, craft your own styles. Clear these files out and save over them - though you might want to make a backup of the original ones first, in case you decide my austere ways are not yours!

CS3 stores these files somewhere differently, buried inside the program. I still use CS2, so if you're on CS3, consult its manual about changing the startup files.

Oh, and if you're wondering how I have the old-school Botticelli toolbar in CS2, try typing 'venus' at any time in AI. The flower will vanish, to be replaced by the traditional imagery. ]]> http://egypt.urnash.com/Tips/Mybasicprocess Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:34:00 -0700
I usually start with something I drew in the real world. I just think more fluidly on paper. Sometimes I spend more time nailing things down that way; sometimes I don't.

!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-initialscan.jpg! In this case I pretty obviously didn't spend a lot of time on the drawing. It's something I scribbled out in a small book, direct in pen. I scanned it at 300 dpi and played with the levels to get a crisp, workable image.

(In passing, one useful Photoshop trick for scanning is to scan in color, then either go to the 'channels' tab to drop out colored pencil underdrawing, or notebook lines, or play with the channel mixer. You can drop out colored pencil behind an ink drawing without bothering to erase. In practice I rarely use this, as I almost never formally 'ink' my drawings.)

Once I have an easy-to-read copy of my sketch, I turn it into a 1-bit image. Image->mode->bitmap; use a halftone screen. Why a halftone screen? I like the way it blurs out my lines; I _will_ have to think about what's going on when I'm making shapes in Illustrator. If I don't think, I'm bored, and if I get bored I probably won't finish the piece.
!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-scanprep-1.jpg!
!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-scanprep-2.jpg!
!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-scanprep-3.jpg!



h2. Illustrator.

The bulk of my process, of course, happens in Illustrator. I flip over to it (AI is pretty much _always_ running on my machine, unless I've just rebooted) and open up a new document.
!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-newdoc.jpg! The page size usually doesn't really matter beyond a vague suggestion of the overall composition I want. The color mode does. I prefer to work in CMYK, rather than RGB - in the event of printing something out, I won't have to worry about losing the luminous colors something drawn with light is capable of. Unfortunately, this also means I can't use most of the bitmap filters, as they only work in RGB documents. I find that most of them just end up wasting time in fooling with parameters for a half hour, then hitting 'undo' and just drawing something myself, so limiting the filters to a handful of blurs and noises is probably a good thing for me.

!/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-place-rough.jpg! The very next thing I do is file->place and bring in my tiff. Note that 'link' is checked - this means that AI will just store a pointer to the tiff, rather than including the entire tiff in my file. This makes for smaller, faster-loading and -saving files. If the tiff is a part of the final image, I'd probably want to embed it in the file before moving it off of my machine, but that's an incredibly rare thing for me.

!>/albums/Tips/images/basicprocess-place-rough-2.jpg!
I size the rough to fit the page, and give it a color that I probably won't be using in the image. Then I set it to 'difference', lock off the layer it's on, and name the layer 'sketch'. Now I can keep this layer at the top of the stack, so my rough is always visible, without obscuring the shapes beneath too much. I'll turn it off when I want to see things with no interference. Since it's 'difference', I can see it no matter what's beneath it - dark, light, it always contrasts.

Why a 1-bit tiff if I'm going to use opacity effects? Well, for one thing, I developed this habit back in AI8, before AI could _do_ transparency. AI treats 1-bit tiffs differently from other included images: black pixels are drawn, while white ones are transparent. And the black pixels take on whatever color you assign the image. If you place a greyscale image, it will show up as an opaque rectangle. Nowadays? If I do this to a greyscale image, the white parts will still interact with stuff underneath if I use 'difference' mode. And I can't tone it. I still usually use a 1-bit tiff. (If I'm being lazy and working from a jpeg I'd scanned for posting in my 'sketchbook' section, I'll turn it into an opacity mask for a colored, difference-mode rectangle so I can still keep it at the top of the stack.)



h2. To be continued...

There will be a few paragraphs about my basic ways of piling up paths here, once I write them. Complete with images. I got caught up in just finishing the piece I started here, instead of documenting its process! ]]> http://egypt.urnash.com/Tips/Artbrushes Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:00:00 -0700
I will discuss the basic application of art brushes, and the creation of a few that I keep in my default documents because I find them incredibly useful. ]]> http://egypt.urnash.com/Tips/Creatingtexture Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:02:00 -0700
This will be about ways to create texture in Illustrator. And why you'd want to do it. ]]> http://egypt.urnash.com/Tips/Pentooltechniques Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:52:00 -0700
Short version: Play with apple, alt, shift, and space. Avoid more than 90 degrees of arc between points. Also holding 'space' while the button's down will always move things. Try it! ]]>