Transparent gradient? Any other way?

[tuomash]

Hi,

I need help in this minute. I'm making illustration for newspaper and I've stuck with transparent gradients. It seems to be that the illustration I'm making is somewhat impossible to make with Illustrator if you don't have hours and hours to spend.

Here are part of the illustration - or the outlines of it:

http://www.kolumbus.fi/tuomas.harju/glass.jpg

There will be something in the background of that glass so the glass should be transparent. What I need to have now is transparent gradients which are oh so easy in Photoshop but so damn difficult in Illustrator.

I've read this http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/transparent_gradients_in_illustrator_cscs2.html

To do those things mentioned on that site it takes for ages to make this glass look like real glass and not just outlines. If I set for example one shape to blue and then try to copy the shape, paste the shape over it and then make it transparent opacity mask, it is not just somewhat difficult but it is impossible with the picture I've made. That's because before I copy the shape out of the picture I have to group the whole thing for Live Paint. If I try to separate one shape out of the Live Paint group with magicwand it just chooses the outlines of the whole picture, it doesn't choose the one blue shape in the middle of it which I want to choose.

So I can't even imagine how complicated it is to have transparent colors in this picture. Do I have to make all those shapes separate, then compile it together? It would mean I need to cut every shape out of that picture, color it separately and then compile it back together. Holy crap! That's all I can say.

For this I have time about three hours left. So I'm pretty much dead now since all the time will go for this glass and I don't have time for the rest of the illustration. It could be so simple if gradients worked in Illustrator like the work in Photoshop.

If someone has some really fast GOOD NEWS for me, I would be very glad.

[tuomash]

Ok. I make it with Photoshop. Coloring the spaces between outlines seems relatively easy with Photoshop.

[LSR84]

Ciao!

How I see you are not very familiar with Illustrator. So there is one very short way to solve the problem.

1., Create the glass in Illustrator and don't panic about any transparency...Copy/Paste it to Photoshop and there put the image you want into the background. Cut that part of the image, that is coved by the glass. Copy/Paste it in front of the glass and make it transparent, add a blur effect and distort it a bit if you want.....So you're gonna make it like it was behind the glass.....This is one way if you are really in hurry....

With the tarnsparency.....I just can say that's the way it goes...I'm sorry...Once you get used to it is gonna work very good, you can make your work easier adding actions to the command...So with one button-click you can create an opacity mask....I can help you out later maybe with this if needed!

Ciao!

[CRWPitman]

What I usually do to at least partially achieve what you want is to make regular transparencies and use the multiply, darker, lighten or screen transparency settings (depending on whether you want the light or dark to by the visible portion). It's not the same, but you may be able to pull off what you want to do by doing so.