Illustration: Best way to create...
topStyler (16 points) | Fri, 2005-05-06 19:34Hi all,
I've just signed up to CreativeBits and what a cool site this is. GOD knows why I didn't stubble on this before now. Any way down to business…
I've seen a number of designs in the past and now recently on this site that incorporate a sun beam type layer. My question is what is the best and easiest way to create this effect?
Have a look at the main image for the topic The Dog Exercising Machine on this site, the link is: http://creativebits.org/The_Dog_Exercising_Machine. I've seen better version but this is somethign at hand I can show you lot to give you a rough picture of what I mean. Ignore the dog and the machine. How do you create that kind of background?
I know I could create a tapered rectangle and clone & rotate it and then fill with gradients or something, but isn't there some other simpler way. I don't know something like draw a star and apply some filter that sort of inverts it's points or something? Thanks in advance :o)
Regards,
— topStyler
PS. Any one got any links to cool illustration sites with intermediate to advance tutorials?
http://creativebits.org/2005/04/ps-polar-coordinates.html
Hope this helps. There are many ways to create this effect. This is just one of them. Maybe if you give a better idea of what you want to create exactly we can give a more precise solution.
Btw. Thanks for the kind words!
Well I was the one that made that. It would look a bit swankier with some soft gradients but was kept flat to keep the size small as a gif.
I just took a vector shape of a sunrise I had downloaded from Adobe Studio Exchange....expanded the rays beyond the canvas....altered the colour to a lighter shade of green et voila.
To brush it up a bit you could add some soft gradients to the rays and the background colour but keeping it relatively restrained.Maybe a softer edge to the rays as well....
You get the idea with these....very easy to alter the width of the rays
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Afterglow, do you happen to know the name of that custom shape set you got from Adobe Studio Exchange? I would love to add that to my arsenal. Thanks!
I think it may be iconsandmore but I'm not 100% sure. Let me know if that works...otherwise I'll try and source the set. I downloaded so many of the buggers, it's hard to keep track
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Ah so that is the trick hey. Nice one afterglow and I wasn't in any way saying your version isn't nice just that the ones I saw somewhere else used soft gradients (pastel like colours) and just appealed to me but I see why you went for a flat fill.
Thanks for post.
topStyler
I'm off to check the Adobe site for the files...
I didn't see a starburst effect like that in iconsandmore. sorry. If you can find out for sure, afterglow, I would be much abliged!
Craig,
Send me an email and I'll export my custom shapes back to you.
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Create a very lengthly triangle, then repeatedly rotate the triangle around it's most acute corner. Just click the Rotate tool, and then Command+Click (I think) on the corner that you want it to rotate around. A small rotation glyph should appear there, and then the Rotation dialogue box should pop up. Type in the angle that you want to rotate by (take the number of rays you want to have and divide it into 360) and hit "Copy." Then just hit Command+D to repeat the transformation until you have all of the rays. Then just create a circle shape and center it over the rotation point to complete the look.
That's how I'd make it.
And the best way to replicate/rotate that acute triangle would be to first create it using paths. Fill the paths when you've finished replicating them. This way you're not repeatedly transforming pixels, which would be subject to cumulative—and ugly— blurring.