Jenner's House

I saw an advert in the paper yesterday that cut out words from a rectangle and I just had to check I could do it too in Adobe Illustrator. It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. Effect-Path-outline stroke allows blending of text colours but it is still text and not an object. Eventually, after realising this I found the correct way to do it: Type-create outlines. Then I was able to subtract the text from the box.

I have used a photograph I took on a fascinating visit to Edward Jenner’s house earlier this year. This small building, in his garden, is where he vaccinated the poor against small pox.

Bee-Card

I’m trying to create a Christmas e-card for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and all my carefully drawn bee delicacies need to be shrunk so small I'm losing all the detail I have poured into them. It is hard not to waste time doing too much detail in a drawing and to think about the bigger picture. So here they are (not so small) in a bouquet for bees.

Doing the bee-card I realise I have flowering currant, plum, clover and lavender in my garden but need to plant some thistles and foxglove.

More Sweat than a Squiggle

Last week’s Adobe Illustrator drawing was a replacement for the slide I use to describe the role of skin in thermoregulation. I needed a diagram showing a hair shaft for insulation, a nerve ending for detection of thermal changes, blood vessels that dilate to release heat and a sweat gland for heat loss via evaporation of sweat.

I thought drawing a sweat gland would be easy; draw a fat squiggly line and then make it into a solid object with a line around it (object-path-outline stroke). But, as you can see on the left, this didn’t work quite how I had intended since it outlines the outer boundary of the squiggle rather than the squiggle itself. So I had to cut my next squiggle up then outline the pieces and layer them so that the ends weren’t visible. Sorted.

Autumnal Clipping

I thought Effect>pathfinder>intersect would do the same job as a clipping mask for this but it didn't seem to work. I always struggle to remember how to do a clipping mask because it relies on getting the path and picture in the right order. But it is kind of fun.