I finally got around to updating my website of all the floral illustrations I've drawn over the years. I think it's too big to put them all on this cubits thread. The link is to the home page where you will find links to the Cubits gallery which is all the most recent drawings, the prairie flower gallery, a daylily gallery of the daylilies in my yard, and a prairie flower poster which I had professionally printed and is for sale.
Everything in the galleries (except the daylily gallery) were drawn in Adobe Illustrator software. A couple vase drawings are combinations of Photoshop (the vase) and pieces and parts of several Illustrator florals I placed in the vases. The vases are on two Photoshop layers (front and back) with the florals placed on layers in between the two vase layers. It gives the appearance that the florals are in the vase. I put drop shadows on the front most drawings to give it some depth.
Name: Janet Colvin Z8~Beaumont~Southeast Texas Proud member of Cubits.org
Diana,
These are outstanding! I'd love to put them into a free flowing article so they can easily be shared with the rest of Cubits. You've been hiding that talent too well. With all of the gardeners we have here, they'd love your illustrations!
If you are interested, let me know and we'll get together so it can "happen".
Thanks Liz. I've been away from drawing for a few weeks. I'm stuck on an illustration of Heuchera 'Creme Brule'. Just can't capture the color I want, and Illustrator tells me there are too many points to make a gradient mesh. Made an overlay with less points, still don't like it. Have to walk away from it and try a different approach.
Try Gimp. You might like it. I used to use Photoshop and Illustrator, but I've found Gimp to be an excellent substitute. Best of all it's FREE and loaded with features. I'm working up a CSS website with it and am really pleased with the results. Give it a try.
I looked at it Liz, it doesn't seem to support vector (.ai) files. If I change my drawing to another format like .jpg then it's not a vector anymore, it's a photo. Am I missing a step or something?
You would have to alter your work to the .jpg format.
You may achieve a more personally satisfying outcome, if you apply some smoothing to your designs.
Experiment! That's the fun of creativity!
Visit me at A Little Bit Of Paradise for info about Brugmansia, Passiflora, Amaryllis and tropical plants!
I played around with my vector drawing of an Iris. I saved it as a png for transparency, and opened in Photoshop, added a layer and put my parchment background on it. I used the texturizer tool on the canvas setting and applied it to each layer separately. Then I saved it as a psd file and brought it back into Illustrator to add more detail to the leaves. Then saved it as a jpg. for web viewing. It looks ok, I guess. Irises are very hard to draw. I should have started with something less complicated.
Name: Janet Colvin Z8~Beaumont~Southeast Texas Proud member of Cubits.org
I really appreciate you taking the time to list your actions step by step so that others that may want to attempt this can have a "map". I always appreciate having instructions when I try things.
The graphic below is another Illustrator and Photoshop work. It's kind of a pain working with both softwares open at the same time (memory hogs), but each one has their own special feature that I like to use.
I started with a 300 dpi photograph of my metal vase cleaning up all the background junk in Photoshop (PS). Opened a new PS (.psd) 300 dpi document with the vase always on the top layer. Using Illustrator (AI), which defaults to 300 dpi, I selected parts of vector flowers and leaves from previous artwork, pulled them over to the PS document and started filling the vase. Using the transform tool I twisted, turned and flipped the objects in the vase to form an arrangement. I also changed the color of the Lily from orange to red. Using the eraser tool I got get rid of parts that fall outside the vase on each layer. This can be achieved in AI also, but is more complicated because it involves selecting and deleting pen points in objects with the -pen tool. I saved the document as vase.psd which keeps all the layers in case there's an addition or change.
When I was satisfied with the look of the arrangement, I linked the layers I wanted to keep and selected "merge linked objects", (not flatten), and "saved as" vase2.psd keeping the original vase.psd with all it's layers. By this time the document was 26MB. If you use "flatten", the document is no longer on a transparent background. The History palette in PS is helpful if you make a mistake. In AI and PS the Apple + Z key (or Control + Z on a PC) will take you back to previous steps. PS's History palette is limited, but in AI you can go backwards to the point when the document was opened. I've gone backwards 80 steps in the past. AI remembers everything you've done in an opened document.
I used AI to draw the window, table, table cloth, mirror, rug, teapot and cup. I opened vase2.psd in PS and exported the transparent document placing it on the table_scene.ai Illustrator document, and applied drop shadows to some objects. The scene outside the window is a photo of my crab tree. Then I used the "save for web" feature to reduce the document to 72 dpi, for web viewing. I opened the document in PS, reduced the image size from 20" tall to 9" for posting on Cubits.
Adobe makes a powerful set of softwares. I've been using Photoshop and Illustrator since they were introduced in the early 90's (provided by my employer). InDesign, desktop publishing software, came aboard later as did Dreamweaver and Flash, etc. There's no better computer for graphic designers to use than a Macintosh. There's just something about the clarity on screen and the intuitiveness of the machine. Didn't mean this to sound like a Mac commercial. It's just my computer of choice.
I'm by no means an expert, but if anyone needs help with PS or AI, I'll try to help.
I made two other rooms but didn't post them here. This is the latest one I finished yesterday. It was probably the hardest and most time consuming one so far (30 hours). I had to make the wallpaper then turned it into a swatch which then filled in the area I outlined for the walls. It's a big memory user. The wood grain on the couch, table, and chair was a free download. The site had many scans of different wood samples and they are also huge memory users even though they only filled in small areas. The floral arrangement is something I did a while back. The pictures behind the sofa and outside the window are mine and were dragged into Illustrator from Photoshop. The rest of the drawing was done in Illustrator. The final drawing ended up being 442 MB. Needless to say it took over 10 minutes each time I saved, which was done frequently. I only had Illustrator crash on me once, thank goodness.
Thanks Janet, I think I'm on a roll. Maybe someday I'll have enough scenes drawn to have note cards printed and try to sell them to one of the little shops in town. Dream on!
Nancy they are gorgeous aren't they? 
I think you've got lots of potential to do just that!
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