walkies (2)

So on the Illustrator subreddit, a challenge was issued: what can you do with just one circle?


Well, I can do this. Custom brushes were allowed for this particular challenge as long as they were a single color, and I abused that – there’s some tricksy things going on with 0% opaque shapes in the “tunnel line” brush to help it overlap less messily.

It’s a reimplementation of this piece I did back in 2021 at the behest of someone asking “how do I make a tunnel effect in Illustrator”; the original version was pretty minimal, and honestly I wouldn’t want to do it with any fewer paths than I actually used. But hey, sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

And just for laughs here’s what I get if I use the same appearance stack on a couple different shapes…

Not how I was planning on spending an hour and a half of my work day, but, well, sometimes when a challenge is issued you just have to take it.

Source: walkies.ai

experiments, 2023

I just spent a few minutes going back through the ‘experiments’ tag in my filesystem for this year, which is where I store the results of playing around with techniques, sometimes because I have an idea, sometimes because I saw a ‘how do I do this in Illustrator’ post that felt interesting enough to open up Illustrator. Here’s a few I’m especially happy with.

variable width line + zero-length dashes with curved endcaps * transform effect with multiple scaled/rotated copies

zig zags + rounded corners * blend * stick it in a pattern brush and vary the stroke width = this is so much less tedious than using a Spirograph

there are so many strokes rendered on each of these paths, omfg

I’m really pleased with this randomized rainbow mosaic, it is a gradient stroke with the dotted-line trick going on and a lot of roughening to produce a somewhat randomized rainbow, then a halftone effect on top of that to turn it into grids. I should use this as a background for something sometime.

That’s it without the halftone.

 

I’m not happy with this one yet, it’s an attempt to create some randomized fire. I’ve got perfectly fine effects stacks for fire and energy crackles but it’s worth playing around.

from the effects tag: luminous overlapping squares

There’s been an image floating around on the Illustrator subreddit (a still from this looping animation, it turns out) with a lot of stabs at duplicating it in Illustrator. Today, a pretty good recreation got posted. I followed their instructions and got a pretty decent version, then decided to see if I could squish it down from four overlapping blends of two squares to one blend with some complicated Appearance stacks, so it would be a lot easier to re-use.

I think I did a decent job; here’s my source file. All basic Illustrator for once.

And this was the results of trying those complex Appearance stacks on more arbitrary shapes. The one on the left has “knockout group transparency” turned on, which is the default when blending shapes together. Looks like some kind of sex toy, really.

fixing an Illustrator bug: blend open paths with a spline

Illustrator has this annoying behavior where it only generates a spline for a blend if one or more of the paths being blended are closed. My working method is such that I almost never generate closed paths, so this is super annoying.

There is a simple workaround, but it is annoying to do: swear, undo the blend, close the first path, make the blend, open the first path. You would think the swearing is optional but in practice I find it to be mandatory.

Today I got annoyed enough at this behavior to write a script to do it for me.

blend with spline.jsx

Throw this in your Illustrator scripts directory, and assign a hotkey to it via whatever method you choose – I used Alfred to bind command-alt-shift-b to a ‘launch apps/files’ action, which is the key I used to have assigned to object>blend>make. Now blends Just Work for me.

(And maybe go upvote the relevant uservoice issue if this annoys you too, I’d really rather have this choice something switchable in Illustrator without this kludgy workaround.)

 


Also, huge thanks to Past Me for setting up a workspace in Nova that points to my collection of Illustrator scripts and lets me hit command-R to run what I’m working on in Illustrator, damn. I stuffed an alias to Illustrator’s Javascript docs in there too so that Future Me has absolutely everything she needs to hack up a script without going looking.

Pride flag brushes for Adobe Illustrator

I needed this, and I couldn’t find it within five minutes of searching, so I went to Wikipedia’s list of LGBT pride flags and snagged all the SVGs and turned them into a bunch of Illustrator brushes. All of these files seem to be Creative Commons so this is, too.

Grab this and put it with the rest of your brush files: pride flags.ai – go forth, and draw the queerest fucking things you can think of! I sure needed it for some super-queer art.

Illustrator: repeating lines cropped to a shape.

Here’s another of those “someone asked an interesting question on the Illustrator subreddit” posts. They wanted to know how to automatically fill a shape with a pattern brush that looked like embroidery stitches.

This is one of those things that seems like it should be super simple to set up as a live effect in Illustrator but turns out to be impossible. But a little abuse of some third-party plugins makes it doable! Astute’s WidthScribe lets you make a bunch of lines with the Width Stamp effect, and then you can use the Appearance palette to apply whatever kind of stroke you’d like to those lines – here I’m using a custom brush, but you could do whatever your image needs.

First, draw some shapes, and apply the Width Stamp effect.

Then, go to the Appearance palette and add a new stroke to the whole Width Stamp group. Not to the individual paths inside it.

 

You can generate more complex “stitch” patterns by changing the width stamp’s settings. 

 

embroidery stamp.ai – 152k, requires the Astute suite.

grainy blur effect

I saw a post on /r/adobeillustrator asking how to make something like this. It’s pretty easy.

  1. Draw a shape in dark grey.
  2. Opacity: 20% screen.
  3. Effect>pixelate>mezzotint. I used “grainy dots” for the setting.
  4. Duplicate the shape. Move some points around so it’s smaller, leave some points unchanged, or very close to the original locations.
  5. Make it a much lighter grey. Maybe change the opacity level to something like 70%. Keep it on Screen mode though.
  6. Select both shapes. Object>blend>make.
  7. window>transparency, double-click its title bar until it opens all the way, uncheck “knockout group”. Setting the checkbox to – is fine too.
  8. Play with blend settings until it looks smooth.
  9. effect>document raster effect settings may be useful here, I usually keep the effect resolution at 150dpi but in this case 300 seemed to work better. You could also help avoid the tendency for the repeated mezzotint shapes to develop repeating patterns by adding effect>rasterize to both shapes in the blend before the mezzotint effect, and having different DPIs on the two shapes; I did this in the file attached here.

Please pardon the shitty point placement, there really should be at least one more point in the curves but I was doing this on the trackpad and just wanted to finish it. :)

grainy mist blend.ai

graphic styles for comics production

So right now I am working on a 13-page comic about a lady magician and her demon sidekick getting into trouble at a rave that 2016 me roughed out. 2022 me found it recently and decided it’s still good, so I’m finishing it.

Today I did an important part of bringing it up to 2022-me’s standards: I’m making Graphic Styles for everything in the model sheet. This took about two hours total; the model sheet contains a generic version of these two characters (seen above), as well as them in Magical Rave gear, and Khebunassvem (the demon) in Combat Mode.

This is no small amount of fiddly bullshit; it takes time to pack all this stuff up into named swatches, and time to think about the most efficient way to make Illustrator draw a bunch of shit for me. This was two hours on top of character designs that were 100% done by the standards of 2016 me. Plus a few design revisions, Chloe used to have straight hair but I decided curly felt better.

Two hours is nothing to sneeze at. But this is the payoff. These are the paths I have to draw, using these various styles. Illustrator then does a bunch of stylistic stuff to it and makes it look cool. I don’t have to fiddle with drawing any of those ragged edges, or even remembering which brush I use. I just say “I’m gonna draw Chloe’s hair”, find the right section in the Graphic Styles, click on the appropriate style, and draw a loose shape that Illustrator noodles a bunch of curls around. Kheb’s tail and its little spade is just one line. All that Kirby Krackle in Combat Kheb’s wings and aura is done by Illustrator around simple shapes. Doing most of the rest of this comic is now gonna be super fast; I just look at my roughs and quickly flesh them out into full drawings, without ever having to fiddle with trying to remember what brush I used at what size and in which color. If I ever draw another story with these two then I can reuse all this work. Probably with a little time to design new costumes for whatever situation they’re in.

If you wanna have a look at the Illustrator source and see what kind of crazy tricks I used, it’s over on Patreon.

paintbrush full of stars

what’re you up to peggy? oh nothing much, just getting stoned and making a pressure-sensitive star brush out of Astute’s Stipplism effect and their Dynamic Sketch tool

not shown: stroke is a circular gradient fill set to go along the path via the path-alignment controls in the gradient window, from (cyan at 100% opacity) to (cyan at 0% opacity).

if I turn off the stipple effect it looks like this:

so all these stars are coming from a few quick vector lines that I can easily push around in a bunch of ways

and I think that’s pretty cool

 

anyway back to being stoned and drawing <3