First Illustrator work

Awesome

I also see a faint trace of red...
great work man

How do you blur in Illustrator? And how is that scalable? I guess I don't use Illustrator much, so I don't know - should start doing my vector work there. It's just that the layout and everything is so different...

tom

Vector art use mathematical equations in the background. So, for example, you made a circle. Instead of just storing in the file how many pixels you color and where, a vector image stores the color of the circle and it's radius. So when you expand it, you expand the radius not the pixels. Thus the image doesn't get all pixelated.

Only in this case, and most, the equations are much more complicated than a circle.

Wowza, Hyp. For a few hours work thats ok ....


WTF, man. that is awsome. For a few hours work. Am speachless.
Also see the trace of red and the jaggedy shadow, but who cares at this stage in development. Goody, goody...keep on posting.

Alright, I redid the image and uploaded over the original so you should see the updated version in my first post. (if you do not see a small stroke around the cup hit refresh a few times)



I found out why the original hard shadow was jagged. It appears I tried using a gradient to make it look like the left and right side were softer but the center was hard. Where the color shifted it made a jagged line with the blurred layer. To correct that I made one blurred shadow solid color, and another one on top of it which was darker, blurred, and the transparency was lowered.

PS: to make a blurred layer in Illustrator go to the Effects drop down menu and and it should be under blur and then Gaussian. Illustrator adds the blurs on the client side, so it is still scalable and it does not rasterize the layer.

I also added a .50 stroke at 50% transparency around the cup to help define it a little bit more. The reason being is if I want to have a realistic image I could have just used Photoshop, The stroke is small enough to not be obnoxious, but large enough to help give the cup definition it lacked before.

As for the red issue, this is weird. I did all of the design work on a PC. I then uploaded the .AI to my website (the image was 43MB! and me without a CDRW) and when I got to school I just downloaded the file. I opened it up and I was like damn, its pink. What the hell. So honesly I don't know what happened between PC and Mac. It is possible that when I exported the .AI to EPS form that I had it in CMYK or that the original had slight highlights of pink which when I took color swatches from it became more visible. This new image that I uploaded should be B&W except for the cofee and foam, so if you are still seeing red its on your end.

Well, thats about it. Thanks for the help and suggestions.

hey - hyp - thats awesome
so convincingly real - makes me wanna have another coffee..

greta stuff
keep it up
cheers
heathrowe