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I have an abiding respect for artists who manage to get the best out of Illustrator or its Macromedia equivalent FreeHand. I came late to vector drawing and there is a residual sense of some unfathomable mystery about it to me.
So I was hoping for some mystic revelations about Illustrator and its relationship with Photoshop when I opened the pages of Photoshop and Illustrator: Light and Dark, but sad to say only Jemma Gura, famous for her Prate website, actually uses Illustrator here, although Sean Donohoe does use Auto-Illustrator in his project.
Auto-Illustrator is a RealBASIC application made by Adrian Ward, an artist/programmer featured in Friends of ED’s Generative Design: Beyond Photoshop, and was created by him as software as art, and software with which to make art. But Auto-Illustrator is a far cry from Illustrator—more a parody of it in fact. As Sean Donohue says, “… think of it as Illustrator gone punk rock.”
So, I am considering this book through a veil of disappointment that 3 out of 4 co-authors failed to keep strictly to the brief. Look to Jemma Gura to supply some Illustrator content and she does not disappoint in her chapter, where she pushes the KPT Vector Effects plug-in as far as it can go.
KPT Vector Effects, or Vex for short, is one of the unsung treasures of the vector graphics world. You can use it conservatively, humbly obeying the dialog when it throws up a message prefaced by the word Careful, or you can use it in the spirit that Kai Krause and Sree Kotay built it, throw caution to the winds and go wild.
Gura does just that, and that is her secret. She takes an innocent-looking bit of type, throws it into Vex, distorts the perspective alarmingly and then chops out the paths that she doesn’t want. Then she’ll do it again and again, generating different radical distortions each time, finishing up by fusing them all together in a coherent and surprisingly expressive composition.
If only the other authors’ contributions were as intriguing and as useful. KPT Vector Effects, by the way, was acquired by Corel as part of its purchase of many of MetaCreations’ best 2D and 3D graphics assets.
The Book:
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