The Adobe Illustrator Wow! Booklet for June 2013 CC Release: Tips, Tricks, and Step-by-Step Techniques with the New Creative Tools

The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Booklet for June 2013 CC Release 21

GALLERY

Sharon Steuer

Borrowing elements from Illustrator art she

created several years earlier, Sharon Steuer rein-

vigorated the original calligraphic brush work

with the addition of a frame made with a Pat-

tern brush, invoking the look of a craft frame

made by children on a beach vacation. Steuer

duplicated, scaled, and rearranged the shells

and starfish. Dragging them into the Brushes

panel, she chose Pattern Brush, enabled Stretch

to fit (under Fit), chose Tints and Hues as the

Colorization Method, and clicked OK. For the

corner, she decided to use a photograph of a

real shell. After masking the photo in Photo-

shop, she placed it as an embedded image in

Illustrator. To add the photo as a corner tile

to the pattern brush, she selected the masked

shell, then—with the Brushes panel in Thumb-

nail view—held Option/Alt as she dragged the

photo to the far left “tile space”of the shell

Pattern brush. Checking that her settings were

still correct, she clicked OK. After applying the

brush to a rectangle to form a frame, she didn’t

like the position of the photo. To figure out

how to reposition the shell, she used the frame

on the artboard as a reference and positioned

a copy of the masked shell photo over the

original corner of the frame, rotating it into

the desired position. Holding down the Option/

Alt key, Steuer dragged the rotated shell onto

the previous corner tile in the Brushes panel,

retaining the other options. To make Pattern

brush variations, she worked with duplicates

of the original Pattern brush, changing the

Stroke weight in the Control panel and playing

with different colorization methods in Brushes

Options. To apply the color to vector objects of

the Pattern brush, she changed the Stroke color.

To apply a shadow to the frame she selected

Stroke in the Appearance panel, clicked on the

fx icon, then selected Stylize> Drop Shadow.

Some of the color and scale experiments are

shown above right.

STEUER

22 The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Booklet for June 2013 CC Release

GALLERY

Sharon Steuer

Sharon Steuer chose her photo of three rain-

bow chard leaves on a white background as

source material for raster Illustrator brushes. In

Photoshop Steuer used a combination of tools

to isolate each chard leaf from the others and

from the white background (her Photoshop

Layers panel above). She saved each leaf in its

own file in PNG format. In a new Illustrator file

she chose File> Place, disabled the Link option

(so the placed files would be embedded), then

she selected all three chard leaf PNG files in the

dialog (holding Shift), and clicked OK. Moving

her loaded cursor into her artboard she clicked

to place each of her images, one after the

other. Dragging the first leaf into the Brushes

panel, she chose Art Brush and clicked OK, but

received a warning dialog that the artwork’s

resolution was too high. She cancelled, resized

the three chard leaves, and then duplicated

them. Selecting one of the duplicates, she chose

Object> Rasterize, then enabled the Medium

(150ppi) and Transparency settings and clicked

OK. Dragging this downsized image into the

Brushes panel, she chose Art Brush and clicked

OK. This time Art Brush Options opened, where

she enabled Stretch to Fit Stroke Length and

the up-pointing direction arrow before clicking

OK. She then applied Rasterize to the other two

duplicates and made brushes for each of them

as well. With the three chard brushes prepared,

Steuer switched to the Artboard tool and cre-

ated a new artboard. She then drew a pair of

colorful rectangles as a background. Locking

this layer, she created another layer above for

the raster brushes. With the Paintbrush tool,

she painted with this set of brushes, creating a

simple chard forest.

STEUER