Gradient brushes in Illustrator

They said it can not be done but it can. Evidently you cannot use a gradient in an Illustrator brush.

First create your gradient within a small rectangle and then go 'Object ... Expand' and make sure fill is ticked and Specify say 200 steps. Grand ... and here's the trick, now look for the gradient object in the Layers pallete and see where is says Group, open that and another Group and you wil see a Clipping Path. Delete that Clipping Path.

Now when you drag your gradient rectangle to the Brushes pallete you will get no complaints about objects it can't use. These gradient brushes are obviously very heavy data wise so bear that in mind.

Importing a backup of Mac Mail

Many mac users backup their Mac Mail to disc. Importing it back into Mac Mail to retrieve some mail can be a confusing and frustrating experience. The 'Import Mailboxes' in Mail is looking for a .mbox file within the folder of your backup.

I've a dot.mac mail account and a cable pop3 mail account, backed up onto a dvd. Could I get Mail to import the pop3 account from the disc? Nooooo! It could get the dot mac stuff but the pop3 was all but invisible.

Ok, so Mail wants to be stoopid, I decided to keep it real simple and dragged the pop3 folder onto the desktop ... and then sent Mail to Import Mailboxes and look in that folder on the desktop and wonders of wonders it found it and successfully imported my pop3 mail backup.

Easy peasy psychedelia

The swirly colour background was created using the gradient tool in Photoshop. I used the Spectrum gradient preset ... and then, and here's the trick, I set the gradient tool mode to Difference, as opposed to the usual Normal mode. When you drag the gradient tool across the image area a few times, a colourful background starts to appear like magic. I then ran the Twirl filter and then in the Zigzag filter the pond ripples a few times. Wow! Instant 60's effect man!

Shrink PDFs with ColorSync Utility

Launch ColorSync Utility from your OSX Utilities folder. At the top, hit Filters ... and Reduce File Size ... and then View file with filter and go and look for your pdf file. Mine was 772k file for a small 45mm sticker art!

You can also click Duplicate and work on a copy.

Click the Details button and then ... Images and scale away. 50% got my pdf down to 444k. Yeah, yeah, I know it can be done in Acrobat or whatever and what with broadband and huge drives it is a bit of a pointless exercise but it is amazing what is tucked away in OSX.

Dots brush in Illustrator

The usual way to create a dotted line in Illustrator is to use the dashed line dialog in the Stroke panel. But just say that dotted rule had Outline Stroke applied to it. Yikes! Dots no more, just a single oval thing now appears. Expand apprearance does something similar, turns the dots into one long rectangle.

Here's a much more flexible approach to applying dots to rules, ovals and boxes. First create a simple dot shape. Now drag that dot into the Swatches panel, then drag the now swatch of the dot onto the desktop and then onto the New Brush icon on the Brushes panel and hit New Pattern Brush.

In the Pattern Brush Options set it up like so. You want to fill up those five boxes at the top by clicking on one and then clicking New Pattern Swatch. Set the Colorization to Hue Shift, so you can change the colour of your dots later by simply changing the stroke colour. Set the Size as below to begin with but altering them you can change the spacing between your dots later. Also altering the stroke size will increase the size of the dots.

Finally click Add space to fit will automatically adjust the dots applied to ovals, circles and boxes. Make a file with this brush, call it dots or whatever and dump the file into your Illustrator - Presets - Brushes folder, and when you restart Illustrator it will be available in your Window - Brush Libraries pull down dialog.

Now when you go Expand Appearance, the dots remain dots.

Barbed wire Illustrator brush

Keep it simple. A fairly realistic metallic feel can be created with three colours. The twisted wire I created using the Zig zag filter on a horizontal stroke, and then Reflected a copy. Ta-dah! Twisted wire.

Anticipate how the ends of your short section of wire will look once it starts repeating.

Once you are happy with your art, drag it onto the New Brush icon on the Brushes panel and hit radio button New Pattern Brush. Use the Hue Shift Colorization Method and then you can easily change the overall colour of the brush by changing the stroke colour of the path that you have attached the barbed wire brush to.

Opacity masks in Illustrator

This is a fairly complex illustration that I've been working on in Adobe Illustrator, describing the techniques of catheter insertion. The area of interest is the upper chest and neck.


I needed a way of soft masking the other areas in a controlled way. I have an opaque skin shape that would otherwise cover the underlying anatomy. To that skin shape I have attached an opacity mask. So I have a body skin shape and then I drew a box covering it, then I applied a black and white linear gradient to that box.


Next I selected both box and the skin shape, and from the side tab of the Transparency panel, selected Make Opacity Mask. Now in the Transparency panel you should see the shape and it's mask. Highlight the mask part and get up the Gradient panel. Now fine-tune the gradient to control mask the areas of your art.

But there is more than this to Opacity Masks in Illustrator. The mask I created for this illustration is just a linear gradient. It is possible to create a custom black and white raster image in Photoshop, save that as a tiff, and then place that in Illustrator above the illustration, select both and make an Opacity Mask. Or use a texture or a photo.

Repeat Transform Fractals

Create a Photoshop document, at whatever approx size you want your fractal to be. Add a layer above the background layer. Create a shape possibly with the Custom shape tool, change that vector shape into a raster shape and use a layer style to style like a gel. Create a layer under that and then flatten those two layers so they float above the background layer and gets rid of the layer style info. Multiple layers with styles will slow things down,

Next, use the Free transform tool, or Apple+T or Ctrl+T(pc) to enlarge or reduce the graphic, rotate it a bit and move it slightly away from it's original position. In the top blue image I first reduced the original graphic and in this rainbow image I enlarged it.

Great! Nothing special yet. Now use the keystroke Apple+option+shift+T or Ctrl+alt+shift+T(pc) ... and the graphic now duplicates itself onto a new layer but slightly transformed. Keep on repeating the keystroke and the pattern will build up. Flatten that group, flip it horizontally and you can see the potential for fractal-like patterns.

Fun with Gradient Map ...

A typical catalogue or brochure design may have a repeating device for each section, each one a different colour for each section.

One simple and quick way to do this is make a greyscale tiff of the section graphic, open that in Quark and colour each one for every section. But it is a bit crude and the coloured device can look very flat with no depth. A better way is to use Gradient Map in Photoshop. Create a black and white version of the repeat image if it is in colour. There is a number of ways to do this. You could use the Gradient Map with a black white gradient.

Ok you have a black and white image in a Photoshop file that you are happy with. Get into the Gradient Editor through the Gradient tool and set up the various gradients you require for each section. Back to the image file create an adjustment layer using Gradient Map... . Select the colour gradient you want and the image is coloured. Looks ok, but can be better. The Adjustment layer's color mode defaults to normal. Change that to Color. Looks better now. Not flat as before. Create a new Adjustment layer and do the next colour. But then maybe you want it to be flat because there is a heading running over the top of the image.

You can create a similar effect by simply putting a layer of colour over the top of the black and white image and setting the layer mode to color, but using the Gradient Map method it is possible to introduce subtle colour variations in the gradient, say a blue-ish hue in a mostly magenta. Also it is possible do something similar by creating a duo-tone of the image. The advantage with the adjustment layer Gradient Map method, is that it is editable. With a catalogue of say 15 different colour dividers there is always going to be some possible colour revisions.

Corel Painter line and colour

I dug out my copy of Corel Painter for a bit of arty fun. I had taken this photo of some glass paperweights in my recently constructed cheapo light tent.

When I opened the jpeg in Painter, the program threw up an error code. Something it didn't like. Maybe possibly wasn't happy with a sRGB jpeg as opposed to an AdobeRGB one. These pixellated artifacts appeared in the image. Woah! Cool! I'll try and repeat this later using sRGB and AdobeRGB images and see what's up.

And the pixellation became more obvious when I enhanced the image using High Pass.

Then I ran that image through the Sketch filter. The lines were not quite as meaty as I would have liked but I knew I could sort that in Photoshop.

So I then opened the High Pass version in Photoshop and the Sketch version, dragged the Sketch version ontop of the High Pass layer ... holding down the shift key to align it smack center. The Sketch version is a black and white image, and using Photoshop cartoonist's trick, set the layer mode to Multiply. The white disappears but the linework remains. I duplicated that layer to beef up the line.

Next I opened the original photo in Painter and created a traditional letterpress halftone line effect. I loaded up a paper texture called Simple Textures, which I think was part of a Goodies folder on the Painter 5 disc. Ok, so I loaded a 50 degree line texture and used the Express Texture filter, which turns it black and white and then you can tweak the line effect to ones satisfaction. Depending on the overall tone of the original image, you may get some darker areas going solid black whereas the lighter tones are just right. The thing to do is make two versions and combine the best parts.

Print a folders contents in Mac OS X

In Mac OS 9 this was very easy. In Mac OS X the way to do it is ... look in your Utilities folder, in your Applications folder, and launch Terminal.

Right after the prompt type ls -lhTR . Next type a space, then drag the closed folder that you want to print, onto the Terminal window, and like magic the path to that folder appears in the Terminal window.

Ok, then type a right facing arrow > , and then a space, and a quotation mark " , and then the name of your file with a .txt file extension, like myFolderContents.txt and finally another quotation mark " . Your Teminal window should look something like this:
[yourname:~] yournam% ls -lhTR /Users/yourname/Documents > "myFolderContents.txt" Now press return. ... and nothing much happens, besides the Terminal window now reads something like [yourname:~] yournam% followed by the prompt.

Go and look in your Home folder and you'll find it there. If not do a search. If you just want the file names and not all the other info regarding the files, just type ls rather than ls -lhTR.