June 22, 2009

Monday Illustrations: All tutes, all the time

• Veerle Pieters offers up some nice Illustrator tutorials:
  • First up is using Illustrator swatches & blends to make a quantized gradient background.
  • She then puts Illustrator’s blending modes & masks to good use in creating a lovely poster, step by step.
• From Layers Mag:
  • Corey Barker shows how to get some slick results using Illustrator’s Live Trace, symbols, and brushes.
  • Dave Cross maps a vector logo onto a t-shirt, keeping it scalable & editable even when rippled via the Displace filter.

Stop-motion excellence, rodeo-style

If a wee bit of the old Copland* doesn’t get your juices flowing on a Monday morning, then you might want to check yourself for a pulse, my friend. Check out the following (clicking the full screen button highly recommended):

Of this very cool project, creator Eleanor Stewart writes, “I created a music video for the classical music work ‘Hoedown’ from the Rodeo Suite by Aaron Copland. It is a stop motion animation in which various characters, inspired by Cowboy and Western films, come to life from the musical score. It was made for my final year degree in Visual Communication at the Glasgow School of Art.” [Via]

* Extremely tangential, ostensibly bonus info: The Photoshop team includes a few veterans of Apple’s mid-90’s Copland OS effort & the subsequent switch to OS X. In talking about “demoware,” I recently asked engineer Russell Williams, “Didn’t you guys do Mac OS Copland in Director? ;-P (That was always the half-joking rumor, anyway.)” He replied, “No, it would have been much smaller and faster if we had. :-) Also, the early developer releases of ‘Rhapsody’ (roughly OS X minus Carbon, or Classic plus Cocoa) were shipped on the Copland kernel, so it actually worked.”