Design – Hi, I'm Julie

How easy it is when you know why!

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Julie

I’ve been working with Illustrator for a while now (ever since the downfall of Freehand) but have never really understood why my text box would not resize without resizing my text. It got me so frustrated I’d delete the text draw the text box to the size I needed and then start again, after which the text box would resize without resizing the text.

Today I took some time to look into this and thanks to a post by Craig on graphicdesignforum.com I have an answer.

If you simply click and type, your text will [resize the text when you resize the box]. However, if you create a text box and type, it will allow you to resize the text box without resizing the text.

Thank you Craig. You’ve made mad woman sane!

(Ed) Photoshop has been giving me the same problem and I’ve identified that that the tool selected when editing the text box influences the resize behaviour. With the text tool selected the box will resize leaving the text with its dimensions and when the move tool is selected the both the box and text is resized.

A Traditional Art Form in a Modern Setting

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Julie

When I was a teenager I loved to roll strips of paper into pictures. I still have all my original work (barring the cards I made for family and famous people!) including a beautiful dragon that is not quite finished.

This is the traditional art form of Quilling or Paper Filigree and today I stumbled upon the website of an illustrator Yulia Brodskaya (www.artyulia.com) who uses this idea to produce exquisite designs. Definitely worth a look.

She’s inspiring me to dust of the dragon and finish him off.

Handy Techniques For Cutting Out Hair in Photoshop

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Julie

Just found this fantastic tutorial for cutting out hair in Photoshop. It’s a hellish job to do if you don’t use Photoshop often and this provides a couple of methods and takes them step by step. Brilliant!

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/handy-techniques-for-cutting-out-hair-in-photoshop

Illustrator Page Corner

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Julie

Working on a page corner curl today. Creativity was flat and so was my curl so I went on the hunt. And a very painless hunt it was too!

This Illustrator file provided exactly what I was looking for. Go take a look see. http://www.kematica.com/tutorials/illustrator_page_curls.html

It’s A Knockout

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Julie

What was needed?

A knockout to allow for an inner glow with the image behind free to be manipulated.

Solution?

Create a cornered rectangle in front of a slightly larger rectangle and place both within a group.

In Blending Options: Custom > Advanced Blending choose Knockout value of Shallow.If layers are not placed in a group the knockout works on all except the background layer.If Deep is used all layers below the group are knocked out.