Adobe Illustrator Paint Style Trick

FontSite Archives Main Page     NOTE: You may have already noticed that the Paint Style palette is from Illustrator 6.0. Usually I like to keep up with the newest version, in this case Illustrator 7.0, but while I’m working on a somewhat slower system, I prefer to use the earlier version. If you are using 7.0, the technique works the same.

This month I talk about a little-known Adobe Illustrator trick concerning the Paint Style floating palette. First we’ll look at a problem you might encounter creating colors, and then examine Illustrator’s unique feature to solve it. Part of the process of illustrating is defining a color palette. All Illustration programs allow you to create a user-defined list of colors — sometimes called custom colors — that you can apply to graphic elements. Generally these custom colors are applied at 100% of the color. There are, of course, times that you need to apply a tint or percentage of a color. Most programs also allow you to adjust and set these percentages if you are using a custom color (PMS colors or other pre-defined colors can also be defined as percentages). However, if the custom color is defined as percentages of CMYK or RGB colors, you lose the ability to adjust the color as a single value because the color is already defined as percentages of multiple colors. To get a lighter tint of a CMYK color you need to calculate new percentages based on the current ones. That means you might have to do a little math (sorry to use the ‘m’ word). It’s easy if you need 50% of a color — simply divide all percentages by half. But what happens when you need a color at 32% or 80% of the original color? Time to scroll through your Apple (or Start) menu looking for that clumsy calculator? Well hold on a sec! Enter Illustrator’s cool color modifying feature. This handy feature lets you adjust one color’s percentage, while at the same automatically adjusting the other colors accordingly. This means that as you modify the cyan value, for example, the magenta, yellow and black color values are modified in relation to it. I believe this is a feature unique to Illustrator as I have not encountered it in any other program. If you know of another program that does this, send me an e-mail. Here’s how to perform this wonderful color-crunching stunt that will amaze both family and friends: As you drag a slider in the color palette, hold down the Shift key. That’s pretty much it. Amazing, huh? The Shift key. The one key we all thought was only good for capital letters. Holding down the Shift key while dragging a slider forces the other sliders to move in relation to it. Hold the Shift key down and click one of the sliders. As you drag the slider, the others move relative to it.

Eye Candy by Alien Skin   Purchase Information for EyeCandy

Photoshop plug-ins are everywhere these days and it’s getting harder and harder to decide which ones to buy and which ones to ignore. Eye Candy from Alien Skin Software is definitely one to buy. It’s not just one filter; it has several very cool and very useful effects. I include the statement ‘very useful’ because there are a number of plug-ins available for Photoshop that, on the surface anyway, look pretty cool but just aren’t very practical or use on a regular basis. Eye Candy is easy to use and gives great feedback, via a preview area, as to how your artwork is going to look when you apply the filter. Click the Alien Skin Software icon to get more information about Eye Candy and other software products by Alien Skin. PRODUCTION NOTE: The type in a circle at the top of the quarter was created with Eye Candy’s Carve filter. I created the type in Illustrator to align in along a path, copied the outlines to the clipboard and then pasted the type outlines into Photoshop and turned it into a selection. I then selected the Carve filter for the Filter menu, adjusted the controls to my liking and applied the filter. No special channel work was needed.