istockphoto.com
Gardening Vector Illustration
February/12/2010 09:48 AM
This morning I took an old sketch and made a new vector illustration for my iStockPhoto.com portfolio. I live in Provo Utah. It’s an understatement to say that the popularization of “Folk Art” into mainstream “craft” is big in these parts. The craft style of has gained its force because homes need decorating. House wives can band together. Craft business can create ready made projects that can be made in groups. Crafty style passed down from mother to daughter. The craft style is approaching kitsch. Scrap Booking has taken a similar path in recent years and it’s a very popular past time in the Utah County area. I shouldn’t be stereotypical and point to only females, because I made this illustration this morning. But I don’t have many guy friends that like the crafty style.
I drew this sketch in the late 1990’s. I found it while going through my very old stuff. I scanned it onto my computer and did the ink drawing below.
I inked it in Painter 11 at 300 dpi, then brought it over to Adobe Photoshop and made it a two color bitmapped image. Once a black and white bitmapped image, I used a photoshop brush to clean up my inking. I believe that viewing it as a 2 color image and touching up line thickness and adding details in the 2 color state, will give me better results when I vectorize my inks. I have the flag-heart crossed out because I want this illustration to be used by designers from other countries. The heart serves no purpose in a garden anyway. lol
Here is my final Illustration. It’s crafty enough for me, although some uber-crafty folk may scoff.
One interesting note is that this time I did some inking in Flash. I usually have some type of smoothing on the paintbrush to smooth out the vector strokes. This time i turned smoothing way down and when I was inking while zoomed in on my illustration, it behaved more like ink than I expected. I prefer an efficient vector stroke, but if it looks too clean it’s recognizably vector. (not always a good thing). Contrary, if a bitmapped black and white image is not at a high enough resolution for it’s physical size, then vectorizing it can cause optimizations of paths that will look blatantly like..optimized vector paths. (not always a good thing either).
If you’re reading this and are new to flash, then here’s an important tip:
Tip: The closer you are to an object, the more control you have on that object. This way of working is fundamentally different from Adobe Illustrator and if you are new to flash it may drive you nuts at first.
Here’s an example:
You want to rotate a graphic and you’re looking at the stage at 100%. The graphic you want to rotate is an inch square. You go to rotate and it snaps at odd times. You just want to rotate it a little. However if you ZOOM in on that object and THEN rotate, you will have much better control. The surprising thing about flash is how deep this modal kind of thinking goes. It’s pervasive and to be honest, I like it. So no matter if you are drawing with the pen, brush, rotating, scaling, auto tracing and a host of other features. The more zoomed in you are, the more control you have.
If you use the brush to make a stroke with your stage at 50% and then zoom into your stage at 300%, then make a similar stroke... you’ll see the point I’m trying make. Vector painting or Inking gets to be tricky if you like to zoom in and out, because ink thickness and smoothness can change depending on how close you are. I use CS3, so maybe this has been changed, but I doubt it because it’s so deeply used in flash and I’m not always against the way it works. It just took some time to get used to how drawing in flash behaves.
Joey
I drew this sketch in the late 1990’s. I found it while going through my very old stuff. I scanned it onto my computer and did the ink drawing below.
I inked it in Painter 11 at 300 dpi, then brought it over to Adobe Photoshop and made it a two color bitmapped image. Once a black and white bitmapped image, I used a photoshop brush to clean up my inking. I believe that viewing it as a 2 color image and touching up line thickness and adding details in the 2 color state, will give me better results when I vectorize my inks. I have the flag-heart crossed out because I want this illustration to be used by designers from other countries. The heart serves no purpose in a garden anyway. lol
Here is my final Illustration. It’s crafty enough for me, although some uber-crafty folk may scoff.
One interesting note is that this time I did some inking in Flash. I usually have some type of smoothing on the paintbrush to smooth out the vector strokes. This time i turned smoothing way down and when I was inking while zoomed in on my illustration, it behaved more like ink than I expected. I prefer an efficient vector stroke, but if it looks too clean it’s recognizably vector. (not always a good thing). Contrary, if a bitmapped black and white image is not at a high enough resolution for it’s physical size, then vectorizing it can cause optimizations of paths that will look blatantly like..optimized vector paths. (not always a good thing either).
If you’re reading this and are new to flash, then here’s an important tip:
Tip: The closer you are to an object, the more control you have on that object. This way of working is fundamentally different from Adobe Illustrator and if you are new to flash it may drive you nuts at first.
Here’s an example:
You want to rotate a graphic and you’re looking at the stage at 100%. The graphic you want to rotate is an inch square. You go to rotate and it snaps at odd times. You just want to rotate it a little. However if you ZOOM in on that object and THEN rotate, you will have much better control. The surprising thing about flash is how deep this modal kind of thinking goes. It’s pervasive and to be honest, I like it. So no matter if you are drawing with the pen, brush, rotating, scaling, auto tracing and a host of other features. The more zoomed in you are, the more control you have.
If you use the brush to make a stroke with your stage at 50% and then zoom into your stage at 300%, then make a similar stroke... you’ll see the point I’m trying make. Vector painting or Inking gets to be tricky if you like to zoom in and out, because ink thickness and smoothness can change depending on how close you are. I use CS3, so maybe this has been changed, but I doubt it because it’s so deeply used in flash and I’m not always against the way it works. It just took some time to get used to how drawing in flash behaves.
Joey