The Adobe Illustrator CS Wow- P6: Sharon Steuer is the originator of The Illustrator Wow! Books. When not working on Wow! books, Sharon is a painter, illustrator, columnist for , and the author of Creative Thinking in Photoshop: A New Approach to Digital Art. She lives in Connecticut with her cats, Puma and Bear, and radio star husband, Jeff Jacoby. She is extremely grateful to her co-authors, editors, testers, Wow! team members (past and present), Adobe, and Peachpit for making this book possible | Chris Bucheit DesignTime Musician and artist Chris Bucheit decided to show his graphic design class the step-by-step process of creating the CD packaging for his group s latest album. Bucheit began with pencil sketches that he scanned and placed in Illustrator. To lend a painterly look to the artwork Bucheit used gradient meshes gradients and transparency. For the mermaid s hair Bucheit created custom art brushes that tapered at both ends. To do this he drew a lens shape with the Pen that he copied and pasted to produce four objects. He filled the objects with gold brown and reddish-brown colors and then used the Direct Selection tool to select and move points on each lens object so that all four objects were of different shapes. He moved the objects together to adjoin or slightly overlap and then dragged the artwork to the Brushes palette. In the New Brush dialog box he specified Art Brush and in the Art Brush Options dialog he gave the new brush a descriptive name. After making several custom brushes he drew strands of hair with the Pen tool and applied the art brushes to them. Chapter 4 Brushes Symbols 125 Overview Adjust the Paintbrush toolsettings customize a Calligraphic brush trace ordrawyour composition experiment by using other brushes to stroke the paths. Ink Brush Strokes Making Naturalistic Pen and Ink Drawings The composite photo of Sylvie saved as TIFF and placed as an Illustrator template layer It s easy to create spontaneous painterly and calligraphic marks in Illustrator perhaps easier than in any other digital medium. And then after creating these highly variable responsive strokes using a graphics tablet and a pressure-sensitive pen-like stylus you can edit those strokes as paths or experiment by applying different brushes to the existing paths. This portrait of Sylvie was drawn using one custom Calligraphic Brush and a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet. Maintaining y rour pressure Only brush strokes initially drawn with pressure-sensitive settings
