Expert: Amy - 9/20/2006

Question
Hey,
Thats pretty close, is there anyway of making the dots more dense? so theres almost no white?

Thanks, Alex.
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Followup To

Question -
Hey,

I can only use black on white,thats it. Where I've seen the effect im looking for before, it looks like a bunch of tiiiny dots to give the effect of a shadow. Basically all I need are realistic shadows and shading that are not solid colour. Hellpppp! :P

Thanks, Alex.
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Followup To

Question -
Hey,
This might be a hard question to answer but it's worth a try. Okay, so Im creating a design on Illustrator and I want to create shadows and shading, but i can ONLY use black and white, how can I create an airbrush effect so the colour isnt solid? Any help would be awesome :)

Thanks, Alex.

Answer -
Hi Alex,

Can you use shades of gray or must you use strictly black?

If gray's okay, I'm leaning toward suggesting using one of the raster effects to blur/hatch/splatter a solid-filled object or black stroked path.

Let me know and I'll play with them to see which gets the best result.

-Amy

Answer -
Okay,

I got it, I think.

Under Filters, there's a Pen & Ink > Hatch Effects filter.

[x] Match Object's Color
Hatch Effect:Stipple Medium
Hatch: Dots
Density: 100%

You can play with the other settings in here but it's pretty close to what you're looking for.

Let me know if it's close enough?

-Amy

Answer
Okay UPDATE- I found a better much easier way!

File > Document Color Mode must be RGB.

Select object and apply Effect>Pixellate>Mezzotint.

Then with object selected, choose Effect>Rasterize>Raster Effect Settings

Color Model: Grayscale
Resolution: High (300 dpi)
...and don't select anti-alias.  That will make it stick to black and white.

Looks great! Very black.

What do you think?
Amy

Well, the way it works is it creates a mask of your object shape over a field of dots.  You can select that entire field of dots and copy/paste/shift/maybe rotate it to fill in the white space?

Or you could possibly apply several hatch effects to copies of the same shape, layered on top of each other? Use different hatch settings to make sure the dots aren't all in the same place.

Just remember to manually delete all the dots that are outside the masked area to reduce the complexity of the document.

If you come up with something better, let me know, because now I'm curious!

-Amy