Hi Again;
I realize that I'm trying to circumvent the normal method of learning CS5, but I am interested in knowing a bit about (I presume) brush tools.
The simplest way to explain this is to show what I'd like to be able to do. Here's my example:
Please forget about the slight curving of the lines, and pretend they're straight. I'm more interested in the fact that one colour stops in a less-than-sharp way, then becomes another colour. It literally looks like I dipped a narrow brush in paint, stroked it left to right across canvas until the brush started to run out of paint. I like this effect, because it's an artistic way of transitioning from one colour to the next.
If you had to make this, using Illustrator CS5, is this doable? Which brush or other tools would work the best for this?
Thanks for any help, and for helping with my previous Warp Effect question.
Cheers, Tom.
Hi;
I tried the brush, watercolour, it it worked very nicely. So I like the look of the stroke, and I can vary the width of each stroke.
Two bonus questions related to this, if I may.
First, how would I make each stroke fully coloured? When I did some drawing, the lines were grey, and I could only manage to colour a small percentage of the stroke, by highlighting it after. I'd like to be able to make a pattern very close to my example, and I suspect that it would be easier if I were starting off with a coloured brush, not trying to colour after the fact.
Second, these strokes are fairly wispy, and seem to be somewhat curved (even if I hold down the shift button while drawing). Can I crop part of the brush stroke, either ends, or top and bottom, while leaving the parts I want?
Thanks again, Tom.
Drag the brush from the Brushes panel and drop it on the document. Select each color/shade and change as desired. To crop you can select all paths of the brush and use the Eraser tool, holding Alt will allow you to erase with a selection rectangle. When done, select all paths of the brush and drag it back to the Brushes panel. In the New Brush dialog that appears select Art Brush.
Again, terrifically helpful gents. Thanks, and as always, I'll try this when I'm at my computer.
I'm not quite sure how to "Drag the brush from the Brushes panel and drop it on the document. Select each color/shade and change as desired." but I'll work on this and see, since it sounds quite literal. Without showing me, a fair bit of this will be a trial/error thing, but that's as expected.
The opacity thing has me asking this: if I use only Pantone Solid Coated colours, what happens to the overlap area of 2 Pantone coloured objects, especially if the objects are half opaque? Picture a horizontal rectangle, Pantone Red let's say, with a Pantone Blue rectangle lying over it. Where the two meet, what colour do we have? (Barney would say purple) Would it still be a Pantone shade?
The only reason I'm curious about this, is that my Dye-Sub printer is insisting on all Pantone Solid Coated colours, nothing else.
So, off to try it. Thanks again.
Pantone colors represent Pantone inks. Pantone makes and sells to offset printing shops 13 inks with basic colors and they also sell a swatch book called Pantone Formula Guide with all Pantone colors that can be made by the printing shop by mixings percentages of the 13 basic inks as specified in the formula guide. Each Pantone color is printed on the offset press by using a separate plate. If you send a file for offset printing with a transparent Pantone color overlapping another, the overlapped part of the underlying pantone color will be screened and the transparent pantone color on top will print over it with screening to. You can see that in Illustrator if you open the Separations Preview panel and hide (click the eye) of the transparent pantone color on top.
If you are using any other printer than offset press, you are not going to have pantone inks but CMYK or RGB values sent to the printer and your pantone colors will be converted at print time. Which is the same as using CMYK or RGB values converted for the color space of your printer from the pantone colors.
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