Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
STEUER
Sharon Steuer
Illustrator & Photoshop
After creating a chard leaf forest from raster art brushes (see her “chard forest”
gallery in the
Mastering Complexity
chapter), Sharon Steuer was able to quickly
correct an error and then make a new variation on her composition. When a friend
spotted a mistake in the mask of a leaf, she opened the original leaf in Photoshop,
repaired the mask, and saved the new file. Back in Illustrator, she selected the
problem leaf, opened the Links panel, clicked the Relink button, and selected the
new image, which then automatically resized to match the original dimensions. After
applying Rasterize to this version at 150 ppi, she held Option/Alt as she dragged
the repaired leaf over the original. After making sure her Options settings were
correct, she clicked OK and then enabled Apply to Strokes to automatically update
all instances of that brush. To create a variation on the composition, Steuer first
duplicated her chard forest artboard. She opened the Brushes panel, then selected
each leaf and clicked on a different brush to apply that brush to the selected path.
By nudging a few paths with the cursor keys, using the Bounding Box to scale or
slightly rotate a leaf, or moving a leaf up and down in the stacking order using the
Layers panel, in just a few minutes she was able to create a variation on the chard
forest arrangement. In the image directly above she also used the Pencil and
Smooth tools to create hills; applied gradients to copies of the background
rectangles (Fading Sky for the blue, a customized Foliage gradient from the Swatch
Libraries menu for the greens); and adjusted the angle and range of each gradient
using the Gradient tool. Finally, locking the background layer, Steuer selected all the
leaves and enlarged the leaves as a unit using the Bounding Box. (For links to
movies demonstrating this process with a 7-day free trial, go to
sharonsteuer.com/
lynda
.)
