Thursday, July 14, 2005

COMPOUND SHAPE-Ta-Da!

Ta-Da!

It's our new COMPOUND SHAPE! I placed a red star on a lower layer so you can see the magic of the Compound Shape.

Once you create the compound shape the previous 2 seperate layers named PAGE and PANELS now merge into one single layer.

You can rename this layer something dramatic, something silly, or you can keep your stuff well organized and just give it the plain jane monicker GUTTERS.

Place this sucker on the TOP LAYER and don't move it!

Draw everything in the panels on the layers below it. You can sperate your art into seperate panel layers if the mood strikes you.

If you are into a goth book, or want your stuff to look like Ultimates you can fill your GUTTER with a BLACK FILL and BLACK STROKE. To do this just touch the Compound Shape with your Area Selection Tool, the black arrow at the left corner of your TOOLBOX. The set the Fill and Stroke to black.

I have this Compound Shape set to a WHITE FILL and a 1point STROKE.

What's that? You don't know what the heck I am talking about? You are new to Illustrator you say? Allrighty then, next lesson--the Quickie Illustrator tutorial

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I used to draw exactly to the edge of my square frame until I started on Darkness last year and by accident I made a Compound Shape. My brain started ticking and I remembered seeing Sienkiewicz pages with White Tape over the gutters and Eureka! I had the idea to place the Compound Shape on top and draw under it.

It helped to that David Lapham wanted white gutters for the Darkness. Then I couldn't fake it and have black gutters hiding all of my overlapping artwork.

I was so glad to figure that out. It sure saves a lot of time by trying to draw exactly to the edge of panels.

Anonymous said...

This is the one thing I've been struggling to get working from your tutorials. it says < Compound Path > in the layers palette, and all the path objects group together on that, so i assume it worked, but if I place an image below I see it through the "gutters" insted. Know what I'm doing wrong?

Dave

Ps I'm surprised you don't get more comments. Perhaps theres not enough people working this way yet. I only know 3 other digital artists.