paths

This week, I shift back to Illustrator. In which I explore one of the oldest---not to mention, one of my favorite---features in that particular piece of software: blends. These things were introduced waaaaaaaay back in Illustrator 88 (which came out in 1988, when I was a mere child of 26 and Guns N' Roses played its best hand with "Sweet Child O' Mine," not that I was paying all that much attention to the song thing because I was a nerd using Illustrator). Between you and me, blends were originally Illustrator's bizarre response to FreeHand's automatic gradients (which Illustrator didn't add until a few years later). These days, you probably won't use blends to make an everyday-average gradient backdrop. I mean really, what the feck's the point? But blends're useful as a sack of srewdrivers for creating all varieties of intermediate objects. Which are precisely what we need to fabricate this week's topic, shooting stars.

Assuming you're still with me, here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Most of Photoshop’s top features are expressed as tools or commands. But some are more conceptual, meaning that they have almost no interface associated with them. Seriously, it goes from your mind to your hands to the mouse to the keyboard to Photoshop.

Selection calculations are a fantastic example. Want to make a new selection? Just drag. Add to an existing selection? Press the Shift key and drag. And that, my friends, is only the beginning. Read more »