September 17, 2009
Masking and Transparency in Illustrator
I came up with this tutorial as i was doing some reworks on merch for The Flatliners. I needed to quickly crop a portion of the text I was changing on the fly so i ended up using a transparency mask instead of pathfinder tools. It saved me a lot of time and it also reminded me of how big of a revelation it was when i learned how to use them a while back. I had always assumed that alpha channels were a luxury of working in raster editing software only. Turns out i was wrong. There are absolutely in Illustrator too and can be an invaluable tool.
This is just a brief overview of how they work, hopefully it makes sense. If you want to see more about this possibly doing some other effects or just need some clarification, hit me up in the comments. Sorry in advance for the shaky cursor and stuttering too, i think i had two huge cups of coffee at the time of filming.
PlayList:
Dillinger Four - A PYRE LAID FOR IMAGE AND FRAME
Mariachi El Bronx - Slave Labor
The Flatliners - July! August! Reno!
Top notch tutorial on an advanced topic. You guys continue to amaze me with the high quality work. I am going to write a guest post about this one on Color Overload.
Great tut, Duder! That’s a very useful trick. I would also love to see your process from raster to vector because zoomed in it looks amazingly crisp.
thanks guys. Kevin, i get a lot of questions about overall process. I think ill do that one pretty soon, but im using painter to ink with and cocoapotrace for vectorizing.
also the band went with the original text, ha!
Derek, that sounds awesome. I pretty much do the same thing only I’ve switched to Manga (only because I was dealing with a lag with high file sizes((weird brush issues)) otherwise I really loved painter) Realigning the separate vector layers back up in illustrator is a real bitch though.
Glad to hear they went with the original text. I liked it way better.
request for you to make a video of a project from beginning to end. that would be sick.
Awesome. Thanks so much. Yea, I didn’t realize there was all that depth in the program. I usually only dealt with masking, as you mentioned, in Photoshop. Thanks for the tutortial, the command F was really good to know too! Keep posting them.
Thanks Mr D - I usually use clipping paths and all that jazz..thanks for this!
Hey dude just a very quick question, umm what size do you normally use for a silk printing doc?
those are very helpful tutorials! btw cheers!
It’s me again…
again, just a quick question: how do you export from painter to illustrator..it just doesn’t work form me to do it like File->export->ai. and then opening it on AI..so please answer those questions.
thnx
@joe
you should consult your screen printer or client about screen size
I use an intermediary program called cocoaptrace that converts my raster exports to vector. Its available for free here http://mortimer.hp.infoseek.co.jp/iweb/
the site is in japanese but the program is english
Bravo my man. That was sick. Thanks!
Can you explain more the part about “physically knocking it out later”? Why can’t you screen print a mask? Is there not a way to expand the artwork and have that mask knock out the area for you? I thought that was the purpose of having the mask?
Can you explain more the part about “physically knocking it out later”? Why can’t you screen print a mask? Is there not a way to expand the artwork and have that mask knock out the area for you? I thought that was the purpose of having the mask?