November 12, 2006

Clear ... and fuzzy about Illustrator CS

I've been trying to figure out Illustrator CS, but still have not figured out how to apply shading in an efficient manner. The Illustrator help and tutorials didn't help, or I must've missed it somewhere. Do I have to path out every single shaded part and avoid overlapping of paths throughout? It is an extremely tedious process ... isn't there an easy way out like Freehand's 'paste inside'? (where I can etch out a general area of a darker shade and paste it into the confines of a lighter shade?) If you happen to have a solution to this, please, please let me know!

Took another piece of old work to do a Live Trace in Illustrator, it's a really useful feature. Again, I don't know how to go about shading it ...

7 comments :

Michelle Lana said...

Great characters! nice illos!

Cez said...

love your style...great illo!!!

Angel said...

You are not alone. I have a similar issue, basically I use layers for shading and then erase if necessary.

Unknown said...

Nice character illos!

carla said...

I don't use Illustrator very much...it's so complicated! I have had success shading using the gradient mesh tool, though. Live Trace is definitely cool! I love your characters.

constanthing said...

Thanks everyone for your nice words and advice, I'll keep practising ... though I'm pretty confused and mixed-up by all the different software's function keys by now. If only there's a single application that can do everything!

Anonymous said...

For a newbie to Illustrator CS you are doing amazingly well. Illustrator takes some getting use to. I use the Pathfinder (Divide) tools a lot when I do my shading and highlight work. CS2 also offers Live Paint which also can help with shading your artwork.