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hello all, youve always been so helpful and i have a few questions
What I'm doing:
With pencil and paper ive drawn out my logo. I scanned it into illustrator and traced it. (the logo is strictly lines, and i love the different pen strokes in illustrator). Anyway, I traced over my drawing in illustrator cs3 and added the penstokes that I like.
Questions:
1. The pen strokes are all black and when i change the color the stoke goes to gray, including the little color palette on the tools tab, no matter which color I select. What setting do i have on that is not allowing me to change the color of my strokes?
2. How can I export ONLY my strokes from illustrator. When i export via file>export and save, it opens in photoshop with a background. So that whenver i lay the logo over an image, it overlaps with a white box that surrounds the logo. All i want is the strokes to export, not the background as well.
3. also, not that important, but when i open the newly saved image file that i exported from illustrator, the placement of the image is always funny, like in the bottom left of the picture viewing screen, when i started creating the image smack in the middle of the screen in illustrator.
Thank you!!!
Last edited by prayforsurf; February 6th, 2009 at 01:43 PM.
1. My CS4 doesn't do this, could you be more explicit?
2. Try exporting to Web as a gif with transparency.
3. Should be cured by exporting as gif, I think it's picking up your artboard.
I have never had this problem before...In black I used the pen to create my lines. Each letter in my logo I put onto a seperate layer so I could edit it independantly. When I select on of my paths and then click on the color palette to select a color the normal color picker window shows up. However, after I've selected a color and click OK, the path turns gray instead of the color I've selected. I'm in CMYK mode.
One thing I didnt mention. When I open my saved .ai file I get this message
"Your current color settings honor CMYK profiles in content, but profiles were set to be ignored when this document was created."
I never selected to ignore anything! Thanks again for your help.
Go to edit>colour settings
[IMG]file:///C:/Users/Support/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-3.jpg[/IMG]RGB Adobe (RGB) 1998
CMYK US Web Coated SWOP v2
RGB & CMYK Preserve embedded profiles
Tick the mismatch boxes.
Is the document CMYK or RGB, not the same as having your swatches as RGB or CMYK.
1. Not sure about this either. The brush you are using may not be set up for tints/colors. If your design is complete you might want to try expanding the brush strokes into shapes. Object/expand/expand fill and stroke - then delete paths with no fill and stroke by setting fill and stroke to none, choosing select/same/fill and stroke and then pressing delete. Once you've done this select all of your brush strokes and in the flyout menu of the path finder choose make coumpund shape, then press expand.
This will make your brush strokes into a filled, compound shape and from this point you will be able to color till your heart is content.
This is a "destructive" change, so be sure to save this version as a different name, incase you need to come back and edit your original paths at some point later.
2. Don't do file/export. Try just copying your design in illustrator, after you have copied it switch to photoshop and open a new document, in the size dialog you should see an option for "clip board" - click ok and paste your artwork into the newly created photoshop document.
Alternately you can try just opening the illustrator document in photoshop by using file/open - this will import and rasterize the illustrator file.
From either of these scenarios you should be able to achieve a layered PSD and a transparent background.
3. If you are doing file/save for web be sure to un-check "clip to artboard" then click "apply" in the save for web dialog.
Exporting Paths from Illustrator 
