Illustrator: Quick Tip of the Week #2

A lot of people seem to struggle with the difference between the Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool (the black arrow and the white arrow respectively at the top of your toolbox).

In simple terms, the Selection tool (black arrow, hit 'V' on your keyboard to use) is for moving, rotating and scaling whole objects or groups of objects, while the Direct Selection (white arrow, hit 'A' on your keyboard to use) is for manipulating objects within a group, or individual points or segments of a line within an object.

But you can also use the Direct Selection tool to extract elements from a group or a merged object without ungrouping or releasing.

Assuming that you're using the ALT-Add Shape To Area version of the Pathfinder merge (which leaves the elements of the merged shape as individual objects, rather than creating one new shape) then you can pick up one element of a group with the Direct Selection tool, then cut and paste, which will remove the element from the group and leave the rest of the group intact, which is much quicker than ungrouping, selecting, moving or deleting an element, then re-selecting the remaining objects and re-grouping/merging.

Illustrator: Quick Tip of the Week

Illustrator is a strange piece of software, full of not-very-obvious features and counter-intuitive processes. I've met people who've used the application for years and were unaware of tricks and techniques I thought everyone knew…! By the same token, I've talked to people who've only been using Illustrator for a relatively short time who knew things that had passed me by completely…

So… I'm going to post an Illustrator tip every few days until I run out of things to say! Feel free to ask questions or offer tips of your own in the comments. I'm running CS6, so also feel free to correct me in the comments if any tip I come up with works differently (or doesn't work at all) in different versions.

ALT-DRAG

ALT (option) DRAG any object, or group of objects to create a duplicate. The layer(s) of the original item(s) will be preserved in the new versions.

Why not just copy and paste?
Because ALT-DRAG doesn't use the clipboard. If, for the sake of argument, you already have the text you want to use copied to the clipboard and you want to duplicate a balloon and text box so you can just paste the text in, this is the method for you.

Also, copy and paste just dumps a duplicate slightly offset from your original, which you then still have to drag to where you want it. ALT-DRAG eliminates the need for the copy/paste, incorporating the copying into the same action as positioning the new element.

I keep forgetting to hold down the ALT key before I drag…!
You can add ALT to the drag operation at any time right up until you release the mouse button to end the dragging. By the same token, if you change your mind and release ALT at any point up until you release the mouse button, the operation will revert to a normal 'move' instead of a copy.

You See Right Through Me… Illustrator CS5 Tip

During the course of my Illustrator tutorials, I briefly mention transparency effects and advise against relying on them, since I have found that they can output unreliably.


There is one exception to this, which is when you are outputting final lettered TIFF files of the pages yourself, since you will have the opportunity to review the finished bitmap image and will be able to judge for yourself if the effects are working correctly.


However, although I do this for a number of clients, I still rarely use transparency effects, mainly for the following reason…


Here's a panel from Matthew McLaughlin and Matt Soffe's story "A Pleasing Symmetry" for FQP's Something Wicked #6 …


I wanted the effect to be ghostly, but it really needed a stronger stroke to help the legibility:

To the best of my knowledge, the easiest way of doing this was to have one copy of the effect with a transparent fill but no stroke, and then another copy directly on top with no fill but a white stroke:

(I've separated the two elements here to show you what I mean…)

This is all well and good, but it can make selecting the bottom element a bit fiddly, and if you wanted to mask off part of the effect then you have to group it, create a mask, and the whole thing quickly becomes more trouble than it's really worth!


However, changing the opacity from the Transparency palette only allows you to apply a global value to the whole object, right?

Well, not quite. Create the SFX with both a stroke and a fill and leave the opacity at 100% in the Transparency palette.

Instead, now go to the Appearance palette…

…and click on Fill.


Now, if you go back to the Transparency palette:

When you change the opacity value, only the opacity of the fill changes, meaning that you can set the opacity values of the stroke and fill independently of each other.


Maybe I'm the last person on Earth to figure this out, but I genuinely didn't know you could do this, so perhaps this hint will be of use to somebody out there!

Sunday Surgery: Zig-Zag Tails

A big thank you to Emperor, for noticing that I haven't actually explained how to produce a zig-zag balloon tail, despite having used one when illustrating what a breakout balloon is:

These tails are also commonly used in combination with radio balloons, which were covered in yesterday's Non-Standard Balloon section of the Illustrator guide.


The easiest way to create one of these involves a tool we haven't used before: the Knife tool.


Create a balloon and tail as you would normally, but don't merge them yet:

Select the tail only:

Now that the tail is selected, switch to the Knife tool.


In CS3, the Knife tool is found as an option under the Eraser tool:

IMPORTANT CS5 NOTE:

In CS5, this this position on the toolbar is occupied by the Slice tool, which looks very similar but is most definitely NOT the tool you need.

In fact, the Knife tool still lives under the Eraser, but it has moved positions within the Toolbar:

With the Knife tool, you can drag a line across an object, in this case the balloon tail…

…and the Knife will cut the existing object into two:

You can now change to the Selection tool, and move the bottom portion of the tail so that it is offset:

Use the Selection tool and SHIFT-click to select both parts of the tail, then use Pathfinder -> Add Shape to Area to merge the two sections:

Merge the balloon as well, and we're done:

Apologies to one and all for the oversight. When I compile all these posts into a new PDF, I'll include this post as part of the Non-Standard Balloon section.

Emperor also asked about 'Telepathy' balloons, but those will have to wait for another day…

Wednesday Surgery (ahem)

With apologies once again for the delay, here's the Illustrator tip I promised.


Acknowledgement is due to Italian letterer Jolly for this post to the Digital Webbing Lettering Forum, which links to this article from the excellent Real World Illustrator blog. The post below derives much of its content from Mordy's excellent hint, albeit in an expanded form here.


This is fairly advanced Adobe Illustrator stuff -- if you're working through the step-by-step guide, this will probably make more sense to you after the section about sound effects, which is coming next week. There's a little bit of overlap with that piece, but this hint is also of value to designers and AI users in general so I thought it was worth separating out into a post of its own.


(If everyone else already knew this, then I apologize, but it was new to me and I had to investigate a bit and then share it.)


When creating SFX, many letterers will convert the text to outlines and then do all the manipulation of the SFX afterwards.


Because my background is in setting type, however, I like to format a lot of my SFX with the typesetting tools. I'd certainly recommend trying it, even if you don't stick to using the technique. For me, it helps to keep the SFX in my mind as a word, as well as a graphic element to be placed on the page.


So… we start with some text, utilizing upper and lower case…

… to give some variety to the letterforms when we change to font to an FX font:

At this point, we could just hit CMD-SHIFT-O and change the whole thing to outlines, or we could set to work on it with the typesetting tools, changing the point size of the characters and nudging them up and down with the baseline shift:

You can highlight an individual character and then reduce the tracking to pull the character which follows back towards the highlighted one -- reduce tracking is CMD-SHIFT-[ (open square bracket key):

With a small amount of practice, you'll very quickly be able to knock up pleasing arrangements of letters in short order.

And here's where we get to the tip. Ordinarily, we would then have to convert to outlines in order to add decent stroke and fill effects, which isn't a problem, except that the text ceases to be editable.


However, if you click on the text with the Selection Tool (black arrow) so that the text is selected as an object, you can then go to the Appearance palette and click on the unassuming little triangle shown:

… You can add a stroke to your text.


Big deal, I hear you say, I can add a stroke to my text from the Stroke palette.


Yes, you can, but read on!


Now, you use the same menu to add a Fill to the text:

I can tell you're still unimpressed, since you can Stroke and Fill your directly from the relevant palettes already.


However, if you look at the Appearance palette, you'll see that by using this method, you have your fill above your stroke and when you change the Fill colour to, say, white:

…The characters appear merged, even though they're still editable text.


It gets better, though, because you can add increase the stroke weight and it will only expand outside the characters -- the Fill masks the part of the stroke that would otherwise appear inside:

I wouldn't recommend adding more than a couple of points of stroke weight using this method (at higher values, the behaviour of the paths can become a bit unpredictable), but the results are quite acceptable at lower values.


You can change the fill to a gradient:

And then edit the gradient fill as you would any other, altering the angle:

And the colours:

SFX created like this can still be masked to create 'cut out' effects so that they appear to be in front of or behind elements of the artwork, but all the while remain completely editable with the text tool:

Whilst this isn't a universal solution -- you'll still need to convert to outlines for a lot of the fancier distortion and perspective effects, if you're doing a first pass through a book for a client who (let's say) frequently asks you to change the spellings of SFX, then this technique could well end up saving a lot of time.