For any Flash-to-Illustrator converts out there, the Illustrator CS equivalent of expand/contract fill is Object > Path > Offset Path. Phew. And, of course, it’s five million times more powerful than Flash. I feel like I’m having an illicit affair with Illustrator and cheating on poor old Flash. It might be love.
Here’s another quick Illustrator test. Er, yes, I do have an odd fascination with drawing vector paper, why do you ask?
I’m still not as quick/fluid at drawing straight in Illustrator as I am in Flash, but I’m gradually getting the hang of it. Gradient mesh looks like insane fun.
I’ve been using Flash to draw for ages and ages, so my Illustrator skills were getting a bit rusty. To rectify this, I thought I’d restrain myself to Illustrator for a while and freshen up on ‘dem ke-razy beziers and pathfinder doodads. It was frustrating going for a couple of hours (um, where’s expand fill? Psychotic bezier handles! Can’t I just grab a line and re-shape it?), but…hey, I’m gradually remembering. It’s definitely more versatile than Flash, although I need to un-learn all those little Flash tricks I’ve been using for years to make stuff look pretty. (Is there any such thing as expand/contract ‘fill’ - well, object - in Illustrator? Free transform obviously doesn’t cut it for scaling anything but regular shapes.)
Yes, there’s a wee bit of girly overload on this stuff, but I’m a sucker for these sort of colour palettes (that said, they’re a bit more vibrant in CMYK than these slightly washed out RGB jpegs).
Now I have a sudden urge to go bake cupcakes…
I have my second screen-printing class tomorrow evening, and I’ve quickly vectorized a sketch as something to test print:
I doubt I’ll get all four colours done tomorrow, but I’m looking forward to trying! This definitely won’t be my final image - I knocked it up fairly quickly and it’s pretty sparse, but I’d like to see how a vector illustration style translates onto ink and paper. I have some more evening classes and an entire Saturday workshop to go, so I’d like to work on something entirely shiny and new for my edition. I’ll have to run into town early tomorrow to get my plates printed onto acetate; I’ve run out of ink-jet transparencies but, hey, they’re not quite opaque enough for creating crackin’ exposures from anyway.
I am absolutely loving screen-printing. Okay, so it’s incredibly messy and expensive and long-winded and tiring, but…I think I’m addicted. I came home from my first class with ink on my hands and a grin on my face. I’ll definitely set something up at home, although I’ve probably been spoiled by all the lovelylovely professional equipment we’ve been using.
Speaking of Flash, I’m in the midst of a re-work of my portfolio, so I thought I’d post a couple of old Flash layouts that I stumbled across. Both pieces were completely drawn in Flash - the first was a background concept for the menu screen of a CD-Rom game, and the second is just a digital doodle from those down-time moments waiting for things to render and screens to update. Flash is great for quick vector sketches - I must do more.
