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Trying to learn to color a vector image
So, I’m not sure entirely what I’m looking for. I’ve gotten comfortable in Illustrator drawing vector paths with the pen tool and tracing line art, but I don’t understand color in Illustrator at all. I can find different colors in the palette library but when I try to assign them to shapes they don’t seem to assign.
And what I wanted to do tonight was to copy my solid colored vector shape into Photoshop, apply a gradient and some filters, and bring it back into Illustrator. OR, apply photos/JPEGs as textures so I have more control over texture and shading. I want the object to look like a bitmap but be controllable and movable like a vector, I think.
I tried rasterizing a vector and applying a filter and then when I pasted the result back in Illustrator I either got a white background rectangle around it or it split the object into a simple mesh of four stacked rectangles.
Any advice would be really helpful!
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4 Replies
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The good news is, everything you want to do is basically doable. However, there are a lot of potential topics in your post 🙂
Create a bunch of rectangles to the side of your artboard, as color swatches:
Try applying colors to them first. This will verify that you can apply color swatches.
It’s difficult to say why you’re having trouble applying swatches.
It could be that the color is being applied to a mask and is behind the raster.??Based on the artwork that I see, the paintwork appears to be stipple shading, which you can do totally as vector in AI with a custom Scatter Brush and a clipping mask.
For the white background, I think you’ll always get that when you paste artwork.
Use placed images instead of pasted images, with File / Place. Only paste rasters into AI if you need to, for some reason, which you may.Create a project folder with a ‘src’ folder inside it:
My Project folder
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+– my-project.ai
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+– src folder
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| +– placed-image-1.tif
| +– placed-image-2.tifFor a transparent background you should use a placed file that has a transparent background, such as a PNG or TIF or whatever.
You can knock out the white with a Clipping Mask or an Opacity Mask. Clipping masks are easier:
Here, the red circle is the mask and the blue object is the subject.
There’s a lot to say about making textures and tiles in Illustrator. This would be a situation where you might paste images. You might paste in a texture tile pattern image, then drag it into the swatches palette. You now have a raster tile pattern that you can apply to anything.
Just some initial thoughts.
Vince
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An article on stipple shading:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/245/861611
Vince
*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.
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Thank you so much, this is exactly what I needed to take my Illustrator skills to the next level.
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adobe illustrator course enable effortless resizing and editing of photos without compromising the quality. Once you create a design making use of other applications such as Adobe Photoshop, for instance, you would not manage to enhance a small picture properly. Should you make a mistake, you could decide whether or not to use that deformed picture or start anew. With the help of vector pictures, you can alter everything you can while keeping the quality intact. Even a small picture can be scaled to fit a huge tarpaulin!
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