Where have all the artists gone?

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Long time passing. Yeah, there was a time when men and women sat down at their drawing boards and created art. Real art. From scratch. There was no undo. No button to add a drop shadow. No transparent backgrounds. Nah, back in the good old days we actually created something: Work.

See, most of us couldn’t do everything. I could take a picture, make a drawing, write some copy, create a layout, and get it to the printer, but in-between there was a lot of work done by other people. The photo lab processed my transparencies and made prints from my negatives. The type house would convert my marked-up, typewritten pages into galleys of type – hot or cold. Then the printer would shoot negatives, make masks, create screened colors and do a whole lot of work that we take for granted today.
Today I don’t even make roughs anymore. I look at the words and lists of photos that are going on the job and just do it. I read the text to figure out the object of the project. Then I shoot all the pictures I need – and then some – with my digital Nikon. Thirty or forty seconds later those photos are on my Mac. If the customer wanted, they would have provided the text electronically, but most times people are lazy. They’ve typed it out, but I get to retype it. No problem. While I’m typing, I think about fonts, and by the time I’m done, I have a general idea of the look I’ll be going for. I open Illustrator (or InDesign) and start the general layout by importing the text. Headline goes here, subhead looks like that, and here’s a good spot for the body copy. I’ll drag out a couple rectangles to get sizes for my images, then open Photoshop. My RAW images come into Camera Raw where I optimize them for exposure, white point, shadow detail, saturation and more. Back in Photoshop, I crop the image and retouch any blemishes and add the requisite logos and other enhancements. Once sharpening is done, the image is ready for importing to the document.
Since the images have been resized and rotated and cropped and clipped already, there’s nothing to do but place them on the page. A few minutes of fine-tuning, and the job’s done. Total time? Maybe three hours. In the old days, the same project would have taken at least a week or ten days because of all the people involved.
I’ll continue this some other time – I have some work to do right now…

How to make a stroke with a variable width

The Blob Brush makes calligraphic lines, and this may be the simple answer to the viewers search. There are many options in its options panel (double-click the tool in the toolbar) - explore it for now, come to the beanillustrator.com site in a few weeks for a full explanation.

This is a loaded question. It came in about the Line Segment tool, so I'll take care of that first. You can't. Ahhh, don't fret, it's not that bad. I do it six or twenty times an hour. The thing to do is to use a Zen approach. Take the word "line" out of the situation, and you have a long skinny box (Line Segment tool only makes straight lines). To make life easier, give the path a stroke width equal to either the thin or thick end you want (I assume the searcher wanted to make a long skinny wedge shape). Now go to Object>Path>Outline Stroke. This removes the stroke, per se, and leaves a really skinny rectangle in its place. It may not look like what you expected, because sometimes you end up with a stroke around the rectangle. Isn't that just ducky? You wanted something exactly so wide, and now it's got a fat old stroke on it. Well, just delete the stroke by selecting the Stroke marker in the bottom of the toolbar and click the None color. Now the stroke is gone. Go to the end of the "line" that you want to make thicker or thinner; choose the Direct Selection tool (white arrow) and click one point on that end of the "line." Move it in the direction you need.


Considerations: I can't see what you've done, but assuming you raised one point. If you just grabbed it and moved it, it may not be aligned with the other point. Use the Align palette or the Align menu on the Control Panel to line them up again.

Curved Path, variable stroke: Now, you may want to draw a cartoon-like path - say one going around a duck's or dog's head. They usually start out thin, get thicker in the middle, and thin out again. We call that a thick-and-thin line, say it's dynamic, and look at it with glee when we've created it. How's it done? It's along the same line (no pun intended) as the approach above. Draw your path, or a whole bunch of paths, using any line weight you want. I usually use something like a 2-pt line, but that depends on how large the drawing is... At any rate, get the job drawn in single-weight paths. Then select them all and go to Object>Paths>Outline Stroke, same as before. But now the work begins. For a simple setup where you want heavy lines on the bottom and thin at the top, choose the Group Selection tool (white arrow with plus sign) and click the inside or outside edge. Move it appropriately (I like using the keyboard arrows, myself).

If you want to go with the cartooney look, I usually leave the inside more or less sacred so the shape remains recognizable. Then, one-at-a-time, I move points with the Direct Selection tool (white arrow) and adjust control handles to create the appropriate curves. It seems like a lot of work, but you get into the swing of it and it is well worth the effort.

Line Segment Tool

Boy, this is either the most misunderstood tool Illustrator has, or maybe people just don't know what to look for. At any rate, we get constant directory searches for the subject. I thought it was pretty well covered in the Free Information page of the beanillustrator.com site. Guess not.

Here's what I can guess people are looking for:
Q • Can't see line segments.
A • A line segment is the path between two points. The first place to troubleshoot is to select the Selection tool (solid black arrow) and drag a box that encompasses the whole page. I'd say to drag over the area where you think the path is, but you may have changed the view in such a way that it's off the screen. So zoom all the way out and drag a selection. Another approach is to go to View>Outline (Cmd/Ctrl+Y). This takes all the colors and stroke weights away, and gives you a black and white view of all the elements on the page - even the invisible ones. If you go into the Outline view and see your path, it means that the Stroke has no color, or weight. You don't have to have anything selected for this suggestion. With either method, get back into Preview view (Cmd/Ctrl+Y), select the object that's been giving you fits and go to the Stroke palette (Cmd/Ctrl+F10) and see what the stroke weight is. If that box is blank, enter a point weight, or select one from the drop-down menu. If your object still doesn't have a stroke, then look at the Fill indicator at the bottom of the toolbar. Select a fill color from the Swatches palette, or create your own.

The only other instance I can think of that would cause this kind of problem would be that you have the artwork on a layer that has a dark color indicator that might be covering up a 0.5-pt or 0.25-pt stroke. That would only apply while you have the object selected, though.

Final thought: When you start to draw something, Illustrator uses the last fill and stroke that you used - you or the dude that keeps coming into your cube and messing with your computer. So if you had a drawing with a 3-pt stroke with an RGB color of R95, G254, B200, and a CMYK fill of C30, M14, Y55, K10, and started setting text you wouldn't notice anything (at least with the text). If you then selected the Rectangle tool to draw a circle (I'd send you home) and dragged out the rectangle, it would have that same stroke and fill color. The same is true if you've given the stroke and fill a color of None. When you start drawing again, you won't see your work. You have to keep an eye on the color indicator boxes at the bottom of the tool bar. At first, it may be confusing because you might want to change a fill color and just click a swatch only to find that the stoke changed color instead. That's the breaks - you either like it or get used to it! (My mom's philosophy about broccoli.)

Illustrator tool tips

On my website, http://www.beanillustrator.com, I regularly see searches for situations that aren't covered in the site. Also, I constantly get emails from people who are slightly or totally confused about how to work in Adobe Illustrator.

The premise of this blog will be to answer as many of those questions as I can, with the hope that people who didn't find the answer before will search again and find it here. If you have a question about how Illustrator works, post it here and I'll do my best to help you out. Keep in mind, though, that I'm not an Adobe employee, and this is done on my free time. I also don't know ALL the answers, but I can usually figure out one way or another to get the job done.

So with that introduction, here we go!