Design Center Tutorial
Working with tools of mass distortion
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Painting with distortion: The Liquify tools
- Getting into shape: Envelope distortion
- Featured Match-Up: Envelopes vs. the Warp effect
- Adjusting envelope distortion settings
- Editing envelopes and their contents
- Releasing and expanding envelopes
Painting with distortion: The Liquify tools
In your average box of classic toys, you’d surely find an Etch A Sketch, a Slinky, a collection of Tinkertoy parts, and undoubtedly, a plastic egg filled with Silly Putty. For those not familiar with the popular toy, Silly Putty is this gooey plastic substance that looks much like a wad of chewing gum. Once you’ve flattened the plastic out, you can press it firmly on newsprint (we always used the comics section) to transfer the images or text to the plastic surface. Then the fun begins; you can pull and twist and stretch the plastic to distort the pictures or comics.
Figure 1: The Liquify tools appear grouped together in the Toolbox and offer a wide range of distortion effects.
If you’ve missed out on all of the fun over the years, fear not, you can perform the same distortion to your artwork using Illustrator’s suite of Liquify distortion tools (although your hands won’t smell of Silly Putty afterward). The Liquify toolset includes the Warp, Twirl, Pucker, Bloat, Scallop, Crystallize, and Wrinkle tools (Figure 1). Each of these tools allows you to “paint” with distortion effects by simply clicking and dragging over vector art. The tools feature a brush size, which helps determine how large of an area is distorted (Figure 2). You can change the brush size for any of the Liquify tools interactively by holding the Option (Alt) key while dragging with the tool. Adding the Shift key while dragging constrains the brush size to a perfect circle.
Figure 2: Changing the size of a Liquify brush allows you to control how much a selection becomes distorted with each drag of the mouse.
You’ll have to be careful when using the Liquify tools, because they exhibit different behavior based on your selection. If you have artwork selected before you start dragging with a Liquify tool, only the selected art becomes distorted. However, if you have not made a selection, clicking and dragging with a Liquify tool distorts any path that you touch.
The Liquify tools don’t work on live text (you’ll need to convert text to outlines first), but the tools do work on embedded images. As you drag a Liquify tool over an embedded image, Illustrator creates a mesh that is used to distort the image beneath it (Figure 3). In fact, if you’ve created a gradient mesh object, using the Liquify tools on the mesh object produces interesting effects as well.
Figure 3: Although you can’t change actual pixels in Illustrator, you can apply Liquify distortions to embedded images.
Controlling the behavior of the Liquify tools
Double-clicking any of the Liquify tools in the Toolbox brings up a dialog offering a variety of settings. The top half of the dialog features Global Brush Dimensions settings, which control the size (width and height), angle, and intensity of the tools. In addition, if you are using a pressure-sensitive tablet, you can choose to control the intensity with pen pressure by checking the Use Pressure Pen check box. Any changes you make to the Global Brush Dimensions settings are applied to all of the Liquify tools (Figure 4).
Figure 4: If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, you can achieve greater control over the Liquify tools.
The bottom half of the dialog offers options for the specific tool that you double-clicked. Most tools offer Detail and Simplify settings, although the Wrinkle tool offers many additional options as well. The changes you make to each of these tool-specific settings only affect the tool you double-clicked.
