Help 4U Digital or Traditional Art Media

I'm a career artist who has also taught & will try to help anybody with Digital Media questions: @ Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Quark, Flash & about a couple dozen other programs I have been using for two dog years. I'd like to answer mostly technical questions, as the creative part is yours.

I am busier painting now using Traditional Media. I never stopped doing it since I first smeared diaper rash cream all over my bedroom walls & then pretended I was asleep in my crib until I got busted. I can help you in most media & techniques. If I can't answer you immediately, feel free to email, but posting it publicly benefits a lot more people. I have a show coming up soon.

Below ~ Photoshop work done & uploaded to show what my last 3 fields were doing



One of my Watercolors



One of my Acrylics



Freehanded this in Photoshop



I also do surreal stuff & one piece was just stolen.

 

I had a feeling it was watercolor--watercolor was my first style too. But it's considered the most difficult. I was lucky enough to have watched my Dad who was awesome. He was a photographer by trade.

No matter what you become you will want to do something creative for rest & relaxation, so don't quit by any means. If drawing guitars is your thing & you make a living in the medical field, then it's still fun to paint guitars because you don't do it for a living. That's the problem with making a living at anything. It gets boring.

I've seen people who were dedicated go from that 12 year old style right over into an adult style overnight. That is a bridge over a deep chasm, but it's a very short bridge.

My theory is; drawing & art are basic to our nature. But people lose that childish abandon when they 'grow up'. Being an adult is about paying bills & worrying--too sophisticated for doodling & even though they did it as a child, they seem to forget how.

You can stand in front of a class of kindergarten kids & hand out paper & crayons & ask them to draw whatever & they all go to town. You are amazed at the results & interpretations they have. They are just living in the moment.

Do that to a bunch of highschool or college ages & you get a barrage of excuses & mental blocks or psychological difficulties & pride they have allowed to get between them & their childish fantasies about life.

If you're not bad at drawing try the method I learned by. Make sure you use board or rag content watercolor paper or a surface that will take wet media, otherwise you'll be frustrated by the media giving way & tearing up.

Get a decent brush or two. Another advantage I had was that my Dad used Kolinsky Series 7 Sables to touch up stuff at work. These are top of the line. But there are plenty of synthetics or natural synthetic blends that are much cheaper than natural bristles like that. But get a good brush. I see kids trying to use those Crayola brushes or cheap ones & garbage in--garbage out.

Brush Rules: The brush should hold water & hold it's shape at the same time & the ferrule (metal band) should never come loose. When cleaned a good brush should dry back into the shape you make it into & it should not shed hairs on your painting, after the first time. If you are using thick media, hogs hair (cheap & sturdy) even works since you are just pushing paint around. If you are doing watercolor or working very thin, you need a very soft brush since you are mopping or dragging the paint around & sometimes soaking it back up.

Pen & Ink wash. Take your finished drawing & either work on it or ink it. Don't use a rapidograph--too stiff if you decide to ink. Instead get a crow quill pen handle or two & some nibs & a shallow porcelain dish. Use 100% India ink for the base drawing.

When you are finished & it's dry, make a light wash out of the ink 20%. Slowly build the shadows & let it dry. When you get there you'll be amazed. People go wet into wet & mess up all too often. It's a slow medium.

Painting with colored pigments is a little more tricky than India ink because colors are all made out of different stuff. If you take some time to read up on the makeup of paints you'll notice that some are easier to mop up than others. For instance Hooker's Green is a staining color. The minute it hits the paper it starts to grab hold, like food coloring does to an Easter egg. Watch out for these colors. Some just thin out & show grainy pigment. Others are easy to mop up & don't stain. This is one reason a lot of watercolorists shy away from using green from a tube at all.

I much prefer using blue & then yellow on the paper. I get all the colors in between. I hardly ever use tube orange, but rather mix my own. You get that great rainbow array of colors in between & your eye just mixes them. Also the rule with mixing colors is that if you mix more than 3, you get mud. That's something to avoid by letting each layer or glaze dry before adding another. If you are working wet into wet with watercolor though and mud is your problem, just mix a couple of colors at a time & then let them dry before using others.

Tricks : 1. If you listened to the part about good rag surface, you can literally soak up most of your paint with a paper towel. Paper towels do not shed like tissues.
2. Keep a blowdryer on an extension chord if necessary on a low setting, not necessarily heated right on the desk you work on, so you can grab it.
3. If you make a mistake: If you want you can remove paint with the wet end of a paper towel. The trick here is to soak up what the pigment & paper allows while it is wet & not to rub it until it is dry. If you compromise the sizing or surface of the paper, while wet, that can be a problem.
4. But, if you wait until it is dry (blowdry) you can use a an eraser, cue-tip or even an exacto-blade to add highlights or fix something. If you screw up that bad, you can also burnish a scraped or rubbed surface (of good rag paper) so that it flattens again like the surrounding paper & no one will be the wiser. Traditionalist watercolorists believed scraping out was an acceptable method. However, the use of opaque white was considered a foul. So plan ahead.

:H

 

That's beautiful work.. I like you water colors.. That's really all the color I've worked with.. My calling seems to be black and white portraits.. My friend is a muralist also.. She's been letting me mix paint and watch her work. So Im learning.. I'm sure I'll be using this thread often.. Thanks for offering your help.

 

Thanks a lot, Skoozy. I've done a charcoal portrait on commission. Wow--it seems to be the season for Murals. I & my best friend did some murals back in Italy. He also did one up in Seattle, 70' X 10'. I met some Nigerian guys here recently who wanted one done & so I put some questions to them in order to bid the job. He'd fly down for that, but I usually go up there in the summers. But I have a lot going on, and a show in August & he's finishing a commission. It's just caught on that I am recruiting people, mostly local, but not here. People kind of blew it off on this site, a lot of skeptics. I just tell the truth, come what may & if people second guess my motives, it's not my problem--I can't control that.

Here's my surrealistic style that is hanging in town



"Mermaid on a Cell Phone"

 

hey skycanvas, i've got a question for ya - i do print illustrations, and text layout work - my files end up HUGE and it's a real pain in the ass sometimes, getting the work to the print shop. is there any way to minimize the file sizes? besides the obvious winzip, which doesn't make much of a dent. of course i have to deal with print specs so whatever dpi they ask for is what i have to give em. with illustrator i use linked files sometimes but if i don't know the printer well i don't like giving them raw files, i'll jpg/pdf it so they can't screw up the layouts/fonts. any ideas would be helpful, right now i'm working on a book cover illustration - the illustrator file is 69m the pdf version is 5m - smaller, but still takes forever to email cuz i'm on a MODEM - argh! no dsl in my area yet!!!

love your paintings, i haven't painted in sooooo long i keep thinking i will start again sometime but these pesky kids of mine take so much of my time

here's something i made up just to goof around with photoshop... a before/after pic

 

File-size Problems with Illustrator & Apples or Oranges

Hi,

Oh, yeah...that size is massive to throughput by modem. What are the typical dimensions of a piece of your work & what specs are the printer asking you to conform to? Are you using a separate layout program or is this all with Illustrator? Are you using other Apps you haven't mentioned, or is this all in AI? True, WinZip or Stuffit sometimes don't make a hill of a difference.

Do not neglect to Preflight finished work going out to make sure that any illustrator program is going to be able to find everything for reproduction on the other side. Also the Illustrator version they are using at the shop is sometimes different which can be a problem. Some places have older versions & are lagging behind individual artists.

If you don't trust the printer not to screw up & allow font substitution which will mess the whole layout up, make sure to store everything in a single folder & include the fonts you used & if you have linked files, put them there too. Linking images results in smaller layout document sizes than imbedding them, but then they're subject to misplacement. Changing names & locations can screw it up of course. That's a weakness that often breaks down on the print end. Run a Preflight program on it. At least you can tell them you preflighted it & say with confidence it is in there & they ought to be able to find it & if they print it wrong it's their fault, not yours.

Make sure you include a low-res screen comp to size so he can take a look at how it should be. You should send that in .pdf, including fonts in the layout so he can't misread it by not having the fonts again. Label everything, just remembering that these guys have never seen it before. Is this what you meant by jpg/pdf-ing them, sending a lo-res & a hi-res? I'm not sure if that's what you meant there, but you have to watch out about sending jpg formats for print.

The joint photographers compression results in a lossy format that is bad about what it throws away because it's not there when opened up again. Ever notice they are asking you how much you are willing to lose in order to make the file size the size you need when saving as or saving for the web as a jpeg?

If you compromise that, the loss will definitely show up when it is reopened. It's like throwing cargo overboard to lighten a ship in a storm--only this cargo is digital information, which would be color gradients or something else important. Mainly jpg is great for the Web where gif used to be smaller & quicker, (usually but not always) and looks better than jif/gif.

You're following whatever specs they tell you, right--so what's the image dimensions on the Illustrator cover, for example? Illustrator defaults to 800 dpi but you can change it.

The point is how come your Illustrator files are so big, when they're usually tiny vector graphic files? That file size is puzzling, unless you are doing huge CMYK graphics. You must already understand the concept of vector vs raster, but for the others who don't I'll explain.

Vector images (Illustrator) are short equations for points in space, color fills & gradients & now a lot of filters. Simple files are surprisingly small. It's telling the machine to head down 8.5 inches & turn left 3 X & back here again. Now, fill it with this CMYK color. Done. It lends itself to cartoons & logos. They've included filters & some 3D that crosses over, but that is the basic concept. You can do raster graphics in it, but that's not its specialty.

Raster images (Photoshop) are where every single point is recorded & mapped in the file, bit by bit. That's a whole lot more information. It lends itself better to Photographic Images & screened continuous tone subjects. You can do paths & vectors in it, but that's not its specialty.

So Adobe is selling both Apples & Oranges. (Illustrator & Photoshop.) So they are making money off of selling you a bag of each. So if they come up with a hybrid fruit, they are going to sell you maybe only one bag. So I don't expect too many operations of one to appear in the other program. But they do cross over.

And if you've included all your fonts, they shouldn't have a problem in either native AI (.eps) or especially the more reliable pdf. Are the files swelling to those proportions just when you convert to .pdf? Just saving as a pdf file from Illustrator should not increase the file size. In fact if you save directly as, it may even be smaller.

Have you Rasterized them? Or are you exporting them to Photoshop in order to keep them from getting changed? If you got jpgs going on, you must be rasterizing or involving Photoshop in some way because how else are you getting Illustrator to save to jpg format. You'd have to export to Photoshop in the jpg format. That explains your big files.

Also if you are using a lot of complex, overlaid transparencies & gradients, your stuff will have a hard time printing correctly & be 'blotchy' because the math involved between the layers is not as efficiently interpreted by your home printer as those on a single layer & you'll get a lot of postscript errors on a postscript printer if you have one. You're probably bypassing that by doing pdf's. Chances are they have a fiery engine at the shop, but maybe not.

If you are using the Flattener Preview palette, the act of flattening is another Rasterization & results in a compromise between slim vector graphics & swollen raster graphic images. The latter are much larger.

Sounds like one of the above, so check your procedure against that to find out when your files are swelling up in size.

I been there--yeah, too bad there's no DSL in your area. You are able to burn, right? Is it possible to overnight these to the printer on a CD? Yeah I know the kids running around the home studio deal. I only let the calm kid hang around, the one interested enough not to get rowdy. I kept the rest out. There are other obstacles which will manage to get in the way of your painting, though. You'd be surprised! Thanks for the compliment on the art.

—Hope some of that helps. Have a better one.

 

I can't seem to blend well in painting, or get the shading right, i'd like to think i can draw well with pencil but painting isnt easy for me at all got any tips. heres some of my works

 

if you look at my other threads you will see my latest painting its a watercolor or in my gallery its my difficulty i'm having

 

Hi, Crystal, you know-- I did notice you had a thriving gallery & it was real interesting to me. You've been working hard! I don't mean to put you off, but that last post took me a while & I suddenly realized that I have an appointment at 2pm today & it's 1:25 & so I have to go. But I'll reread your post & look at the watercolor & let you know anything I can as soon as I get back, 'K?

 

size really depend on the project, anything from a postcard to posters - I guess the biggest thing i've done so far in illustrator is a convention booth, 3 panel full color ALL PHOTOS! and every print provider wants it different, depends on who i'm sending it out to but most want at least a 300 dpi. i'm using photoshop, illustrator & pagemaker for the layouts of the books i do.

thanks, yup, i do that - i try to use good file names, seperate folders, they still goof it up!!! just sent out some files for a classroom curriculum... the handouts, the teacher guide and the cover to the teacher guide. 3 pdf files. clearly marked. written instructions on finishing... still they totally fubared. guess that's why we give 'em time for proofing...

aint dat da truth! i have to send out pagemaker files to the editor who is NOT a computer person - i have to do the files directly on the c drive so she can just put it there on her computer and not relink everything... me, i have a couple of extra hard drives and don't usually like to put anything large on my c drive - i just like to keep my computer clean.

thanks, yup - do that too - actually, my biggest client wants everything in word! so i make the low res jpg, place it in word, and send 'em that...

ahhh, the cover is a wrap-around for an 8.5 x 11 book, so it's 11.25 x 17.25 (full bleed) - 300 dpi, but photos for the covers too. i've only got one that has vector illustration but it still has photos!! yes to the cmyk - musts haves the appropriate corporate identity colors....

that's what usually happens, the pdfs are way smaller but still huge

you can export directly to jpg from illustrator and choose your dpi/mode (cmyk, rgb, greyscale) - i mostly use that when i'm not so sure about the capabilities of the end users, like magazine ads & whatnot. it's way easier for them to just get one file & drop it in wherever they need it, less chance for goofs. i am sometimes amazed at the amount of hand-holding i have to do...

thanks for that too, but i already learned that lesson - lol!!! pdf sometimes fixes it, but if it's something i really want to get tricky with i do it in photoshop and link it over to illustrator.

guess there's no easy way around it - i don't use a lot of clip art or vector stuff, full color photos mostly even for backgrounds... just was hoping there was something i was overlooking.

yeah, thanks so much - at least i know i don't completely have my head up my ass... lol!!! cuz everything you suggested is what i'm doing already. yeah, i got a couple of cd burners & a ups account, so i can send stuff out - just is sometimes right down to the wire with some of my clients. and i'm moving soon, hopefully the new place has dsl. i had a t-1 at my old job - only thing i miss about that place.

as for letting only the calm kid hang out??? hahahaaa!!!! our baby's 10 months old, he's my partner right now - i quit my day job to stay home & work. so far i've been doing ok, i get a lot of stuff done at night or nap time. infant care is just so expensive and i was gone way too much of the time... figured i'd just try to live cheap and watch my own kids.

yeah, and i don't think i'm gonna start painting any time soon... too much stuff laying around for King Joey to get ahold of. been drawing some though, i am a little rusty but not too bad considering how long it's been

thank you sooo much for your very thought out response... and i'm always having a better one do you have a portfolio online? that's gonna be my next project. i got a couple of questions about that too, but i have to run this cd over to the print shop.... story of my life, lol!!!

 

hey crystalstarr, those are beautiful drawings. have you ever tried colored pencils? my mom draws with those with amazing results, they LOOK painted, sometimes.

 

If everything checks out, and if your image is full cover size, then I don't think you've done anything wrong at all. I've done fairly complex pieces of art in Illustrator that would not print to a high end Postscript Printer. The file size was only 800K. So I opted to print by exporting it to Photoshop & after the progress bar disappeared, it had become 80-90 MB!

The only file size solution I see for you is not to use Photoshop at all, but just to save it as an Illustrator pdf. Also printshops fear layering in different programs, so I avoid that as much as possible. They can be exceptionally slow to adapt. Perhaps, why you choose to go to Photoshop from Illustrator at all is a better question & possibly that can be worked around to reduce file sizes & help with uploading.

It's just the fact that whenever a vector image is rasterized, as I mentioned in those two scenarios above, the file is written a different way. I'm not left-brained at all, and neither are most graphic artists, but I've learned, used & taught this stuff a lot, so I can help people picture it, but not precise mathematically speaking--so a programmer is going to laugh at this below:

Vector-Illustrator is a shorthand format compared to Raster-Photoshop. (It doesn't necessarily have to describe every pixel of an image. It deals with placement of areas & fields of color & dimension. It's like looking down on farmland from an airplane.)

Illustrator code is small, maybe sounding like: He's drawn a circle with a radius of 4" Hal & its filled with C=100%; M=50%; Y=10%; K=20%; stroke of 1 pixel width same color. Redraw it on screen. OK

Imagine that, that is an entire color image. = 2K!

**************

When you export that vector image to Photoshop it is rewritten in a format where the rule IS every single pixel position, dimension & color is written out in longhand. Every pixel. No more generalities here. No more birds-eye-view: It names every blade of grass.

Photoshop code is large, possibly sounding like: <image dpi=300> The page size is 8.5" X 11". This is the composition of the first pixel & it's placement on the image. <bpixel #1< x= 0; y=0; ><color = C=100&; M=50%; Y=10%; K=20%> <bpixel #2< x= 0; y=0; ><color = C=90&; M=40%; Y=0%; K=10%>pixel = diamond< bpixel #3< x= 0; y=0; ><color = C=20&; M=80%; Y=0%; K=5%>pixels = square shape...yada yada. How many bits to a byte & a million of those to 1 megabyte, so you can imagine why the file swells up, because maybe one page of binary code is only describing 10 pixels.

Why? Cause every single pixel needs to be described with Photoshop-raster graphics in this way because of the fact that if you look real close at a high resolution screened image, such as a photo, you are looking at what? DOTS. When you screen a continuous tone film photo print by scanning it, you are again looking at an image broken up into dots. Pretend that on a monitor, those translate to 1 dot = 1 pixel; though, not always-- only if it's 72 dpi.

And about getting your portfolio online: That last sentence is why when you take an image 2" x 2" @72 dpi & place it on the web & then take the same image, also 2" x 2" but at @300 dpi, what happens? Do you get a more concentrated, better image? No, the first image is small & the screen resolution is the static factor in displaying the second image of 300 dpi, so it spreads out & displays way bigger than the first image & you may not even see the entire thing on your screen--you'd have to scroll to view it all.

OK, hope I didn't bore you. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the size of your files now.

 

OK, I'm looking at some incredible pencil drawings, I'll be right back to include more after I look at your link. (I'll look in a minute)

The immediate thing that comes to mind is a person who's a very good artist, and is relatively sure of themselves, but feels safer with dry media, so that bugs them because it's out there & it's a classical style. I'd say the medium is not the message here. Although some types of media definitely lend themselves to support a particular kind of subject more than another will. And I definitely also matte & frame drawings for sale. I would not diminish the worth of something because it is simply not paint. I've had galleries ask for these & in fact just had one stolen right off a wall in a very nice place.

Some people just feel more sure with a pencil than a brush. But if you want to cross that bridge:

First, I'd recommend you use watercolor pencils to start the transition. These you can wet after applying them, provided you buy some good stock that is not going to curl up & dissolve on you. Watercolor paper hot pressed (smooth) heavy weight (#300 lb) or better yet buy some Crescent Board. Cheaper, but good for the price, it's not watercolor board (trop cher!) but it will hold up against watercolor pencil that's going to be applied dry then wet. Crescent tends to be a little smooth but it's good. Or buy a wet multimedia board. Make sure it's for wet. OK? When finished with a little sketching (because it's going to obliterate most detail) use a spray bottle that is small enough to control to wet different parts of it. Have a paper towel (not a tissue) in hand & the roll nearby. You can also have a blowdryer plugged in that you don't have to walk to. Watch out that you don't wipe it clean. If so, let it dry throughly before adding more pencil or you'll tear it up. Even 100% rag won't take that punishment unless dried first.

Second, after mastering this, I'd get me some Brush-tips. I'd go to town with those & get used to the long end of the brush tips. Very dye-oriented, so it's almost impossible not to get your hands marked. Then do some light pencil drawings & use the brush tips to shade them in. Brush tips (Staedler) are not cheap, but cheaper as sets.

Third: Get you a crow-quill pen holder & some nibs (not calligraphy) of different sizes & a bottle of India ink, water, shallow porcelain dish & some paper towels. Do some sketching & make sure you don't catch the board by going backwards since the ink will splatter. When that's dry, make a wash out of the India Ink. (Pen & Inks my friend is presently doing he's getting $100 for each of 50. Not bad. This is something I learned on. My Dad loved it & that's how I got into painting at all.)

Then you get a good brush. Check out my second posting, I think, that deals with selecting brushes. Get a couple good synthetic blends, not too expensive, maybe three. But Decent. Winsor Newton makes good expensive brushes, but their moderately priced ones I like are Scepter Gold that are a sable synthetic blend. They shouldn't blow your pockets away. The Scepter Gold Series I was a little better than the Series II. The first were made in England. Some of the newer ones are made in Japan for them. I dislike Rembrandts for various reasons. Even when brushes are on sale at the Art store, they are way cheaper online.

You're going to do your shading with a 20-25% wash of water & India Ink. Go a little lighter & wait for it to dry, always beginning at the top & working down so as not to mess up. And build those shadows just the way you did those drawings you posted. Very nice, sellable work for display there. I'm still gonna look at your portfolio. But I'll post this first.

Fourth: Color. No--not watercolor & not oil color. Acrylic color. I'd use this. I wouldn't use Gouache because it is more like poster paints & you want to learn to blend. Although some people go that route, they're much too opaque for learning to shade with a wet medium. Get a set of basic colors, there are many palettes & tastes, but stay basic. I'll list them later.

Keep a different set of brushes for each type of media you use. One set for watercolor/wash; another set for Acrylics & even a third if using oils in the future. Now for Acrylics, you can get by with some of the cheaper hogs hair bristle brushes, as long as they do not shed. Eventually you'll want the white Synthetic or Synthetic Nylon rounds, flats, filberts & at least one fan brush is needed: Small to Big.

You can get these middle quality, from Dick Blick or some of the other online sellers like ASW. Order a catalogue online. These are your biggest bang for your buck Art stores now, though I've seen some cheapening in Blick's generic merchandise pricing & also quality just in the past year. I think this is due to outsourcing. Been overseas & they would really skimp on materials because the manufacturers abroad needed to hire chasers to make sure they weren't short-sheeting them & by that time it was too late. I've seen some White Nylon brushes made in China whose hairs were inert (not falling out) but the entire ferrule would come off after one to six uses because they used hotglue between a high gloss wood finish & a chrome ferrule. Easily fixed, but a hassle, since they were better before & why didn't the maker used better glue? Buy Name brands if you can afford them, like WN, but also watch out for these Big Brands when they begin outsourcing. If it's a good company they'll watch their back, but if you buy generics, beware. Companies figure they're now selling us water & throwaway cameras...so who give a shit? Japan, Yes; Singapore Best; Taiwan 85% China 50-50, no, Korea...?

I've been to Daniel Smith in Seattle & I've memorized the stock at Asel, etc., & shopped art places overseas, but these onliners are by far the cheapest/best. Over a certain amount is free delivery, so I try to group my purchases & wait for their sales. Lots of those at Blick.

When you get to using your Acrylics, use a canvas panel. Buy several--these are $1-$2 each. Cheap. Go thin with it, because you can either layer it or cover something up. It's an additive concept. You don't thin too much, but must mix it with Matte or Gel medium. I prefer Gel (gloss) medium. I stopped drawing out my Acrylic paintings a long time ago. This is because I'd cover up the lines I'd drawn straightway. You just gotta wing-it! (I still draw my watercolors first in pencil, though, but no shading on your pencil for the same reasons. But you can still erase pencil lines under watercolors after the painting is dry.)

 

Whoo thank you so much, yes i did buy some watercolor pencils i felt a bit more comfortable with those . I'll check into those types of brushes and thanks for the tips on the spray bottle and blowdryer.

 

hahahahaaaa!!!!! not to laugh at you, but with you!!! been there, done that and end up yelling at both the printer and the computer! of course, yelling at the equipment ALWAYS makes it work, right?

i'm pretty much committed to the pdf now - it gets good results almost always. got acrobat professional so i can even convert word docs into pdfs - i've had to do mucho layout work in word, believe it or not...

to avoid the font issues i will outline the fonts - but you always have to check to make sure it doesn't end up jaggedy (?-is that a word?) i use the photoshop for the piece work, doing color correction and a little touch up here and there, taking glare off faces or fixing the hair - but then link it all back into the illustrator files.

loved your vector/rastor explanation!!! clients just get that blank look in their eyes when i try to explain anything to them, so i tell them 'don't worry, just a technical detail - you don't really want to know' - lol!!!

thanks, no, not a bore at all - it's nice to be able to talk to somebody about this stuff. even at my ex-job, i was the only one doing this type of work and had no one to bounce ideas off of.

thanks, skycanvas

 

So, this is the graphic stuff you are doing in Illustrator & then linking it to your Photoshop files? But you're sure you aren't rasterizing the whole layout in Illustrator or Photoshop when you don't need to? Just out of curiosity, why don't you add up how many megs the photos are & how many megs the layout in Illustrator is & see if it checksums.

Well, yeah, I confess I have some business cards I did that way, CMYK but print better as RGB (?) But lost track of how many times I went back & forth since it was an old piece I kept redoing. They are a big AI file.

I mean but when I do stuff in Pagemaker or QXP & only link the files to those I've edited in Photoshop, the layout is not that big. It should only be the sum total, unless you are rasterizing all that white space.

Really--I did a 200 page book for the UN in French with all sorts of stylesheets & font changes, tables & footnotes, flow charts... OK, not photos, but Freehand Illustrations, a Photoshop cover with their Logo & fonts galore. I can still fit that whole thing & all the fonts, etc., plus the raw copy I received & all the guy's tables, and all in Postscript onto a 'floppy disk.'

I don't have that much trouble in either Pagemaker or Quark with that stuff. I'll check an art brochure color-tri-fold two sided with 14 photoshop graphics. QXP demands Tiff. Gee, but I don't think it is that big at all.

Are you sure it just isn't Photoshop-Illustrator combo or the Word-Photoshop or Illustrator combination that's giving you those huge files because somehow inadvertently you are rasterizing type & white space by going back & forth? Exporting to Photoshop means rasterizing each & every whole page? It would have to be something like this. I go in reverse. The layout program is the base app that I am going to print from & photoshop or Illustrator Graphics are only placed into it. That way you are using a layout program as the ground zero and just dropping some bigger pieces of art into it. I did a 64 page tabloid size magazine for a while in QXP & dropped Ads (PSD) & black & white corrected photos galore into it. Quark kept the layout really small. I'd have to see how big that whole magazine wound up--except the ads were on film dropped in by the printer. But it had a color cover & plenty throughout. Now there's InDesign which is sort of like Pagemaker back from the Dead. Ahh, it's late.

But hey if you can get good print from pdf which wound up a panacea for a lot of print-nightmares, then go with that? Are you getting sharp type? Photoshop has type you can rasterize now & that should cure the jaggies if you get them to size before doing it. Photoshop used to suck at type. It was only bitmap, stairstepping jagged type. Now it rocks. Although AI is more eps minded--resizable to the moon.

Oh yeah, the morons in those shops. It's amazing how they even got hired. They don't know thing One. They just look busy & are fast at doing the minimum. If you come in there & try to organize & fix things & ask for equipment or software & are a troubleshooting hardware/software mechanic, they will let you do it & then say you aren't doing enough production & you'll be the first one out of there. And those morons will still be there when you leave. Maybe it's nepotism, I don't know... :H

 

Yeah, I saw all your other stuff, but I couldn't see the first one, the painting you wanted advice about: Mother's Day...so I can't say anything about that one. If you really want help, can you post it or email it to me? I figured you might have taken it down since you're working on it. Or it may just be my browser acting up that won't allow me to see the last three fields on my profile. Evidently somebody had me down as Islamic, but at least I'm a liberal, hetero one so they got that right. This is the only site or via this site that I have trouble with.

I like the one watercolor, I did see, called 'Beautiful' I guess you are still a little wary or shy to put much color on. Um, I think having seen that, what I said at the bottom of the post to you dealing with watercolor, more or less last might help. Not to shade it but to use paint for shading. (Like water for chocolate Your pencil is so rich, your paint would be ruining it. So make a pencil line drawing to paint, but read it. I think your Jimmy Hendrix Poster sings. It like it's alive & no I'm not high. O, gosh, redheaded/ faeries... and artistes. I like the little girl fairy, is that your daughter?

Are you drawing/painting from your photo or is that art itself? I like photo. (My Dad was a photographer.) I love your 'Find your Light' I like the piercing & the butterfly. It tells a story & that's the best art. I dig Yoda. My best friend, also did a Yoda, too. Yeah, this is a tough area for Art. Even though I have a show coming up, it still is a culture with its mind elsewhere.

Sorry I'm so long winded everybody, I just type fast & talk a lot. I just hope I have something worthwhile to say. I'm just that way, very open, not that anybody cares, and sometimes it freaks quieter people out. But I also have a reclusive side that is just as scary--so BOO!!!

 

nope, i do it the other way around - futz around with the pics in photoshop & link to illustrator/pagemaker layouts

my layouts aren't too big in pagemaker, the books i do are usually 100 to 300 pages. every left page is an illustration - the whole 'right brain/left brain' thing... the biggie files are the illustrator layouts for color print work - but like i said, it's almost all photos, even the backgrounds for the color work.

yeah, i can see that fitting on a floppy -

yeah, i do it the way you do, the layout program is where i create stuff & just place the pics as links. color photos jumps the files soooooo much it's unreal. color text doesn't make much difference. even color illustrations aren't bad. and i just use word to send out low res samples - some of my clients don't know what to do with a jpg - lol!!!

a lot of the big stuff i do is for conventions, so even if i need the pic to be 2"x2" this week for the mailer, next week i might need the same pic to be 2'x2' for the poster so i have to keep all the pics big, editing image size each time for the space i need them to fit.

i don't export my illustrator files to photoshop, and i don't rasterize the white space - that's kinda just no space anyways, it doesn't export unless it's included. i DO sometimes export the whole illustrator file as one jpg, it comes out the size of the artwork, although it includes area that is masked out. if that happens then i crop it down in photoshop. then there's no chance of goofing up something and i can make sure the printer is getting something they can use. mostly though I use that on smaller stuff - sometimes i even do business cards as a one picture item.

yeah, i pdf almost everything now, even excel graphs - makes the whole mac/pc issue a non-issue too, which is a huge help. i do some text in photoshop, mostly if i want certain effects, but then it's no longer text anyways - but other than that i do all text layout in some other program. i haven't had a font issue with illustrator in a while, i do the outline text before pdf'ing it - but you have to "save as" when outlining text in the file, cuz once the text is outlined you can't edit it, each letter is an individual illustration. but the output always looks right!

hahahahaaa... sorry, just so glad i quit my job... they had me doing all the troubleshooting, virus crap, networking, installation, upgrading, etc. for about 80 offices - i guess they figured i knew how to use a computer so i must know how to fix 'em - and i still had to maintain a billing quota of design work each month. they did give me a nifty little plaque though... i felt so fullfilled

 

This shop talk is making me tired...LOL...Where's the beer & chips? We're talking all current versions on all of these, right, I mean not CS2 though, but CS? Well, Yes. You can export an object drawn in ai to photoshop but it goes there as a path which is easily flattened & if not the white space is cropable. But if you rasterize a full page art-piece from AI into PSD, which is usually what I'm doing in AI anyway, it's gonna be huge. Now, I understand more where U'r working from & where you are going to more now. So you're just exporting as paths then. No, vector paths aren't big at all.

Yeah, I found that business card approach to be the surest, too. What dpi is the resulting jpg they're getting to print with?

Oh, yeah, I've been a Macophyle since day one. That's still an issue but PDF is solving it. I found that useful with QXP 6 the other day, which I haven't used much, but prior versions extensively; but one page with a color photo was still 5.8 MB but then I found the option to optimize it for .pdf right in QXP 6 & it took it right down to 80K. Thing is, it was meant as a tutorial for screen reading & not to print. But I'd imagine that it made a low-res jpg out of it & the print would be degraded a from the tradeoff.

Um, what version? Sometimes you can get around that, Styles vs Effects because some are shared by both, editable in one but not the other. That was sort of a vague one for students to grasp when being taught. Also, sometimes with CS it's just asking if you want to rasterize it but not making you do it--other times it's a must. When that happens try selecting the layer & going back & forth between the text tool & the move tool. In early versions it used to be damned near impossible. It wanted to rasterize type every time you stopped a word or line. But then back in early versions you had to manually make your own drop shadows. But I always save non-rasterized text layered versions nowadays where storage isn't an issue. Always work in steps & never cut yourself off from making edits/changes by backtracking, even if you wind up with 25 versions in a folder of the similar thing. But you know what I mean.

If you're using CS, you can export an AI to Photoshop as a Photoshop document while still preserving text editability & even layers. But yes, true about Pdfing it. I guess if you're using bitmap fonts that's true & not EPS. Mac had truetype fonts that were an attempt to solve that which got abandoned. EPS is resizeable to the moon, but bitchy with printers & then they started EPS 2 & 3 which were not usually backwards compatible so that sucks. Right, whatever works on the print end.

Whew--this is starting to feel too much like work. I'm getting rid of all my volumes of software manuals, the ones that can't be sold, as we speak. A few are keepers, but the rest go the way of all upgrades. Later & have a good weekend.

 

All very talented indeed, you might want to check out the Maiden Rock Thread. It's not something & created but it is cool. Tell me what you think.