Recently my son sent me an email with this raster image – it was a bitmap (bmp) file. He asked me if I could work any magic that would improve it. At least that was what I interpreted his email to say. Emails from Joe are always terse to the point of incoherence. But that is what I interpreted him to be asking.
Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.
So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.
With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.
In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.
Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.
Here is the finished product.
Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.
So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.
With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.
In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.
Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.
Here is the finished product.
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