How to soft ambient hue adobe illustrator

I got this nice ambient transparent hue on an image by doing the following:

White rounded corner square

Transparency 80% (Window / Transparency)

Slide and apply over image. They select the ‘Hue’ option from the Transparent dialog.

How to cut a line segment in adobe illustrator

Select your line segment.
Slice it with the eraser.
Ungroup it if necessary.
Delete the portion you don’t want.

How to convert an image into vector illustrator

When copying or converting images, it’s very handy to create uneditable opaque layers to trace over. You do this by:

Creating a new layer

Then make it transparent

Then you can start tracing

Links that help

How to stop illustrator from smoothing your brush lines

Adobe Illustrator brush tool is great in that when you draw something, it smoothes your lines.
That’s great if you want that. But sometimes we want illustrator to respect the jaggedness of your drawing, and not smooth things out so much (like if you are drawing a box by hand).

To reduce the smoothness, double click the brush and drop the fidelity down to 0 (or as low as you can go).

This will remove the smoothness, and make your lines less smooth, and more jagged.

How to cut a circle in half with illustrator

Say you want a semi-circle and you want to split it in half.

Here’s how you do it.

Draw your circle

Select the knife tool

Holding down the ‘Option’ key on your Mac, with your shape selected, drag the knife across the circle in a straight line.

Now you should be able to drag one shape away from the other. Except this doesn’t always work for me (sometimes the whole shape wants to move).

In that case bring up the ‘Path Finder’ Window and with your newly cut shape highlighted select the ‘Minus Front’ option. That should cut away the bottom half of your shape.

And Voila! Half a circle with a nice contour around all the edges.

Links that help
http://jenniferbrowndesigns.blogspot.ca/2010/04/knife-tool-in-illustrator.html

How to add curves to a straight line in illustrator

Say you have a shape that you want to add some curves to.

Here I want to add some curves to the bottom straight line (it’s the outline of a super hero cape). Here’s how you do it.

1. Add some anchor points.

Select your shape, find the straight line you want to add a curve to, and add anchor points where you want the curves to appear.

First select the ‘Add anchor point tool’

Then add your anchor points by clicking on the line where you want them to appear (more dots should appear on the line).

See where the straight line used to have no anchor points between the ends. Now it has two.

2. Add some curve.

Select your direction tool (shortcut – A)

then select the anchor point(s) you just added, and pull them in the direction you want your line to curve.

See how that bent our line? Next let’s smooth it out.

3. Smooth it out.

If you want jagged lines, you are done. If you want these to be curved, we need to convert these anchor points to ‘smooth’.

Using the same selector tool (short cut – A), select the anchor point you want to convert and then go to the top Illustrator and select ‘Convert Selector Points to Smooth’.

That should now smooth out your line and give it some nice curve.

Happy drawing!

Links that help

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/illustrator/cs/using/WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-6246a.html#WS49B38026-E630-4b8e-8ABF-2AA6C629AE59a

How to make a cropped image Adobe Illustrator

Say you want to draw a shape in Adobe Illustrator

and you want to do it by drawing one picture, and then subtracting another from inside it.

Using the pen tool…
draw your outside image
draw your inside image

Go Window -> Path Finder



Select both paths

Select Minus front

Done

How to create background color gradient using adobe illustrator

To create a repeating background for your website using a gradient affect that looks something like this:

do the following.

Adobe illustrator CS5

Draw a square.

Open the gradient window (Window -> Gradient)

Click the gradient box (will apply black to white gradient).

Open the color pallette (Window -> Color) and get both the color and gradient window on screen at the same time (tricky because Adobe UI is terrible).

Once you’ve got them both up, click and drag the colors you want for your gradient from the color palette down to the ends of the gradient.

Transform and slim the gradient until your happy. Save this image somewhere you can access from your website. Remember to reduce the size of your canvas (Shift -O) to make sure your image is slim when you export it.

CSS

Now apply the following CSS to the body of your website:

body {
		background-image: url('../images/bg_body.png');
		background-repeat: repeat-x;
		background-color: #c9efed;
		height: 100%;
}

This takes the gradient we just created, and repeats it across the screen and applies a default color to anything below your gradient image where is runs out.

Voila! That’s it. You’ve now got a nice background to build off of.