vectors

If today's graphic looks like last week's, it because today builds on last week's theme. But the topic is fresh. Today, I show you how to construct rays of soft, blurry, and entirely fabricated light using none other than vector-based shape layers. In Photoshop. With the help of the Polygon tool and the Masks panel. And the Linear Dodge blend mode.

So much sweetness, so little time. Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Today's free movie examines a masking technique. And for once, we won't be using the image to select itself. After all, this is a light bulb, with fragile, translucent edges and very little in the way of color or luminance to set it apart from its background. Happily, it's man-made (gender-neutral, could be woman-made, don't give a crap), so its edges are entirely geometric, as if created with a French curve, protractor, and abacus. By candlelight.

In such situations, your ally is the Paths panel. Most folks associate paths with the Pen tool. Which makes sense. You can draw paths with the Pen tool, but let's be honest: Even if you love the Pen, it has a sharp point that will, on a regular and unfailing basis, poke you in the butt. (Meaning that it's not always that fun to use.) The better solution: Trace your object with a few dozen ellipses, circles, and rectangles. After all, whether you're tracing an old-school light bulb or a new-school smart phone, ellipses, circles, and rectangles are what our wonderful world of glamorous gadgets are made from.

Here's the official description from lynda.com (which includes many more colons): Read more » 

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 » 

Welcome to the final installment in my six-day, cradle-to-grave, Halloween-induced extravaganza, in which I finish off the large-format pirate flag that I've been making all week. I begin by enlarging the skull and sabers in Illustrator. The result is a work of infinitely scalable razor-sharp line art that I could not have possibly matched had I upsampled the original pixel-based image in Photoshop. Then I adjust the color scheme and modify the placement of a few paths---if for no other reason than to demonstrate that what began as a sketch is now a pliable collection of vector-based outlines that I can modify as much as I want.

Here's the official description: Read more »