Adobe

High-Contrast Line Art Illustration Style: Self-Inspiration

| George Coghill

Sometimes (and probably most of the time) merely seeing how an effect is achieved will offer no clues as to what it’s like to create that effect for yourself. Copying or mimicking the effect can help, but those moments where it works within your own artwork should be explored the moment they happen.

When these chance moments appear, when you have that ‘a ha!’ moment, be sure to dig deeper. I’ll share with you a recent ‘eureka’ moment I had while working on a t-shirt illustration project for a client.

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The Beziér Artist’s Liberation Front: Adobe Illustrator Feature Requests

| George Coghill

Adobe Illustrator logoAfter an engaging exchange on Twitter with illustrators: Garth Bruner and Von “Vonster” Glitschka, who are constantly Twittering about their frustrations with being forced to switch from Freehand to Illustrator after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, things reached the point where all involved thought that we need a way to band together and get some feature requests implemented in the next version of Adobe Illustrator.

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Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS Studio Offers Duotones,Vector Halftones, Filters, Live Effects Color Adjustment & More

| George Coghill

Halftone dots exampleAdobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS offers in-line embedded image editing, color checking and separations, duotones and vector halftones, filters and live effects color adjustment. Looks like a pretty great plugin for Illustrator users who do a lot of bitmap image placing.

Personally I do any layout work in InDesign, and not much of my work requires having bitmap images in the Illustrator file outside of placing a template for tracing. However, the halftone and separation features look like they might be really handy. 

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Essential Adobe Illustrator Plug-in: Select Menu

| George Coghill

Adobe Illustrator Select menu screenshot with ‘Select Menu’ additionsA plugin that I always forget to tout, since the functionality it provides seems so intrinsic to Illustrator once it’s installed, I forget it’s a third-party enhancement.

Select Menu for Adobe Illustrator (Mac and Windows, free) from Graffix Software is available for every version of Illustrator from 8 on up to CS3. It adds additional selectable items under the Select -> Objects menu.

This plugin really comes in handy at the production stage of prepping your art, allowing you to find all sorts of items that you need to preflight. It especially comes in handy after flattening transparency, such as when you export art to an older version of Illustrator. I find lots of klunky and open paths all over the place after flattening transparency, and I couldn’t imagine how much of a pain in the neck it would be to clean up art without Select Menu.

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