Once I had a core set of colors, I selected them (selecting the first new color, then holding Shift and clicking the end color in the Swatches panel) and made them into a color group (clicking the New Color Group button). I knew that I wanted to use a limited palette of colors, and that I might make adjustments to the colors as I worked, so I created custom global color swatches in the Swatches panel. When I felt as though the initial sketch was somewhat in place, I created a second layer below the base for the color. I turned the template on and off as I worked:ĭrawing into the “base” layer, I continued to move about the artboard (using the Hand tool), and zoom in and out using the scroll wheel on the tablet. I selected the word “Salon” before I squished it horizontally with the Bounding Box. One of the benefits of drawing like this is that Illustrator’s strokes are objects, so when I realized it would be difficult to write “Salon” legibly and thin enough to fit, I drew it, selected the word, switched to the Selection tool and scaled it horizontally using the Bounding Box (disabling Scale Strokes and Effects in Preferences). With my Photoshop composite in place as a template on a locked layer below, I zoomed in on the focal point of my artwork and started to draw with the larger of my two calligraphic brushes. With Paintbrush Tool Options all ready to go, I clicked OK. Now I could use the Command/CTRL key to select the path, then draw near the path redraw it and not merely place an additional path. When this is enabled, attempting to draw each subsequent path simply redraws the previous (selected) path).įinally, to make it fairly simple to redraw paths if needed, I made sure that Edit Selected Paths was enabled. With this setting off, after drawing each path, it would be deselected. To draw a sequence of adjacent paths, I disabled the Keep Selected option. Double-clicking the Paintbrush tool, I adjusted the tool options so that it had the minimum Tolerances set for Fidelity (.5) and Smoothness (0). I needed to adjust Brush Options to be able to draw with maximum fidelity and reduce the amount that the stroke would smooth out on its own. This setting let me control the size of the brush stroke by the amount of pressure I exerted using a Wacom Intuos4 tablet and Art Pen. The settings for the two customized calligraphic brushes that I had already created used “Fixed” for both Angle and Roundness, with each varying 2 points in size in the Pressure parameter. Illustrator automatically added the brushes to the panel. On the right, the Brushes panel after I pasted in objects created with custom brushes. On the left, Illustrator’s default Brushes panel. I wanted to use the custom Calligraphic brushes I created for this previous artwork. After I deleted the pasted objects, the new brushes remained in the file and the Brushes panel. Closing this file, I pasted the copied portion of the old image, which also pasted into the new file my custom brushes. To load those brushes, I opened one of my completed images (Place des Vosges with Noah) that contained those brushes, selected a bunch of objects in the image (to make sure that I’d grabbed objects made with any of the used brushes), and copied. I had previously created custom Calligraphic brushes that I liked. Double-clicking Layer 1 in the Layers panel, I renamed the layer “base” and clicked OK. The initial default setting for the template is viewed at 50% opacity, and I kept that as is. I opened Illustrator and chose File > Place, located the composited photo, enabled Template, and clicked OK. I also love the editability Illustrator offers in terms of quality of line, and the editability of individual strokes and lines separate from each other. I decided to create an ink and paint version of the corner in Illustrator, not Photoshop, because I wanted to draw with crisp, ink-brush like lines, and I wanted to be able to scale the image both small and large while maintaining the crisp resolution. I joined multiple photos in Photoshop to create an invented viewpoint that served as a reference image for my illustration. In a process I call “compositional brainstorming,” I combined multiple photos of the corner in Photoshop to construct an invented viewpoint I could use as a reference image. My first blog post focuses on one of the micro-hoods of San Francisco-actually, it’s just a corner-that might look devoid of anything delicious and yet contains great eateries. The food and culture blog has launched a San Francisco portal, and I’ve signed on to contribute an artist’s food perspective on the endless hidden wonders of eating in this city. This before-and-after shows the evolution of a photo into an ink and paint illustration of the “invisible” restaurants at the corner of San Francisco’s Mission and 18th streets.
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