Illustrator improved upon one of the greatest assests in Illustrator with the new CS3, the Dashed Line Tool.

I use the dash line tool so much it appears on almost every one of my pages, especially those with tech, or set in a sci-fi setting. Whenever I need to make interesting computer displays or GUI (Graphic User Interface) I make a bunch of random lines in the horizontal and the vertical way, and then I apply the dash line tool to some of these, randoming the settings in the Dash Line box. I make lines with small gaps and long lines, and long gaps and small lines, and all sorts of random goodness.

When I have something extremely cool looking with dashes and gaps, I go in on a Layer above that and create a few more random dashed lines in white to break up the randomness even more.

Once I have all that foolishness in hand, I ground it and then draw a box around it like a computer screen and place it on whatever open computer wall I have drawn on my page, and i use the Free Transform tool to stretch that yummy goodness into perspective to line-up with the “monitor” I have drawn.

NOW-this problem has come up before, ( I talked to Adobe about fixing this, and they finally did in CS3), the dash lines will not look right in perspective because they keep the horizontal and vertical line around the dashes that were right when I made them. AND THERE IS NO WAY AROUND THIS IN ANY VERSION PRIOR TO ILLUSTRATOR CS3! You can’t fix it by expanding or making outlines or nothin’!

But IN CS3 you select your dash line and presto, hit OBJECT>EXPAND and through the magic of little pixels Illustrator makes each dash you have created their very own individual item. You can now UNGROUP them if you wish, and delete one or two, or make some bigger, or smaller, OR THE BEST THING OF ALL, you can now use the FREE TRANSFORM tool to distort these items into perspective and it will look correct!!!

I’ll post another entry tomorrow with a bunch of examples of where I did this in Iron Man and it was wrong, and how I got around it in Illustrator 10. I’ll put up some version done in CS3 so you can see how cool this tool really is.

Try it on your own right now, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Now that my Iron Man Hypervelocity series is shipping from Marvel I’ll be able to show you some of the new tricks and techniques I’ve deleloped.

As a recap to some new folks who have linked to this blog, I’m showing how I have used Adobe Illustrator 10 to draw comic books. I draw directly in the program using a Wacom Intuos 2 on a PC. The best way to get the most out of this blog is to start from the beginning lesson. I cover all the basic things you need to do from the get-go to get up to speed using Illustrator. I cover all the tools and palette options that I use while drawing in Illustrator.

I’ve also stuck with Illustrator 10 for the most part because the pencil tool is better there than in later versions. It’s in wider circulation than the newer programs and won’t cost you a lot of money to get if you don’t own Illustrator already. I’m sure you can find cheap versions of Illustrator 10 on eBay.

While I’ve been drawing Iron Man:Hypervelocity for Marvel during the past year I’ve found a need to draw tons of speedlines in many different directions. There are many ways to create speedlines.

Here I’ll show you a really quick and simple way.

WOW! I still can not get over the new feature I’ve been playing around with in the previous post. I don’t think I have drawn a page yet since discovering this little gem without using it on each page.

One problem I have had working from Adam Warren’s layouts for my Iron Man book is to create brush like speed lines and motion blurs like Adam does. Problem solved!

Here’s what I do.

Create a CIRCLE. Any size will do. Hit the E button and hold the CTRL (on a PC) and stretch that circle to a real long shape. Now hit the E button again and shrink it down to a smaller size. Now repeat the stretching process again and shrink it down again. Now you have a really long ellipse. THAT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS MADE WITH A BRUSH!

Duplicate these but shrink some even smaller and place them right next to the large ones. This makes a really cool combination. Once you have a whole stack of them you can select “e” again and hold CTRL to stretch these brush looking speed lines into a perspective. I did it in the background behind a race car and it looks great.

I also duplicated these once they were in perspective and shrank them down even more. I colored them white on a black background and it created a “spacewarp” effect like in Star Wars or Star Trek.

I’ve also created one slightly bent line to match the perspective of a curved street. Then I duplicated that line into about 20 lines on top of each other. keeping them really close together, by the way. I used the “e” and CTRL to distort them. Once they started to distort they kept the curved shape but did it IN PERSPECTIVE. I just laid it down on top of my street scene and it looked like speed lines with a french curve. Something that would have taken a long time by hand was done in a few seconds with this feature!

A NOTE ABOUT LAYERING–
When I drew the street scene I had my street and background buildings on one layer. Above that layer were my curved speed lines. Above that layer was a layer I call WHITEOUT, which I use for small white dots and street cracks to break up the speedlines. Above that layer was the shadow of my car, including the wheelwell Above that layer was the rims of the car’s wheels. I did the rims with circles and then distort them, (Again using the “e” CTRL but holding down SHIFT as well to keep the distortions horizontal line straight with the other side.) The rims I am using on every page that the car appears on and just distort it to match the perspective of the car! The layer above that has the body of the car and the layer above that has the shines and white dots of streetlights on the glass.

Pretty cool feature! I can’t believe how much I use it now and how much I wish I knew it a long time ago!