Christmas Light Tutorial

[Brice]

I followed the tutorial for Christmas lights and I have a few questions:


If you'll take a look at this JPG of the results of the brush I made you'll see that depending on the angle and tightness of a curve the bulbs get distorted. Corey's results don't seem to distort, although it's hard to see in the video. Any idea why mine might be distorting?

http://thewolfords.com/PSE/Bulbs.jpg

Also, what size should I have created these bulbs? I get pretty large bulbs at a size of 1 pt.

How can I save this brush to be used in other Adobe applications? Can I save it and use it in Photoshop?


Finally, don't make the mistake I did and close your document without saving the brush library. You won't like the results!

Brice

[maria]

I have been trying the christmas lights tutorial and all is well BUT when I come to do the 3D bit the bulbs change colour or the whole light becomes black:(

What am I doing wrong????

Maria

[Corey Barker]

Brice

The distortion is due to the size of the graphic. For my demonstration, my graphic was about 2 inches high. You can either resize your original graphic and then recreate the pattern brush or if you double click the brush in the Brushes palette. You can change the percenatge of the size based on your graphic.

To keep the brush permanent, you can go to the pull down menu in your brushes palette and go to Save Brush Library. This way you can import that library into any document you are working in.

Maria

Its probably going black because you have a black stroke on your object. Make sure that your stroke is set to empty and whatever your fill color is should show up just fine.

Corey

[Brice]

Corey, I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say your graphic was 2 inches. Do you mean each light or the entire work space?

Maria, Mine did the same thing. Some went black and other went gray. It turned out to be the stroke as Corey wrote. Just select the path before you revolve it and set the stroke.

Brice

[maria]

works great now....but I have Brice's problem so I will have another go and make them much smaller.

Been fun to do and have learnt a lot.

thanks Corey for your quick reply and advice.

Maria

[sarahj]

I did the tutorial and they looked great, I put the brush in the pallette and saved the library however when I opened illustrator and loaded the library the next time I kept getting an unknown error with PRAM at the end of the error message. any Ideas why i am getting this error message.

[Corey Barker]

What exactly does the error message say?

[sarahj]

It says.

An unexpected unknown error has occured: PRAM

[Corey Barker]

The Parameter RAM stores info about your system such as date/time, user setting and such this is powered by a small battery inside your system.

Usually just restaring your system will reset the PRAM you can refer here for more info. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

If the problem persists, it may need the battery changed.

Corey

[Jennifer]

Corey - It's a great tutorial but I have a problem with distortion. I changed the size on the brush to only 40% and some of the bulbs look great, others on the end or on curves get all long and skinny. Any other ideas?