Expert: Amy - 2/18/2004

Question
Hi Amy!

Do you know how to make backdrops in illustrator, so that the work you produce can be placed on top of it (similar to a photographer taking a portrait of someone standing in front of a colored backdrop).  I have seen a lot of advertising were you will see a product placed on top of a simple textured or faded surface (that looks like a backdrop) and was wondering how this is done. My old Corel Draw used to have libraries of this kind of thing, but can't seem to find the same thing in illustrator. If I have to make my own backdrop, are there any simple instructions or hints you might be able to give me?

Thanks a million!  

Best wishes,

Mark


Answer
Well, that's really something that you'd make in a raster program, like PhotoShop or PaintShop. Just make a solid color document, whatever size you need, at about 144dpi, add some noise or some paint splotches, whatever, then play with filters and effects like twirl.  You'll get something cool.  Altering digital photographs by applying effects to them also gets unique results.You'd place the PhotoShop PSD, TIF, or JPEG file into your Illustrator document.

Also if you look around the web for "web textures" or "web backgrounds" you can find tiles to use as patterns in PhotoShop.  But there's less and less free stuff on the internet everyday, so you'll really have to look.  There are cheap "clip art" and stock photo CDs that are full of backgrounds. At a previous job, I used to have a set that had hundreds.

Illustrator has filters and effects but it just doesn't have the same rasterizing capabilities.... and any vector backdrop you made would be huge and impossible to work with.

Cheers
Amy