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Vector Studio Part I -- Creating Cut Out Shapes in Illustrator, CorelDRAW and FreeHand

© 2000 by Gary Priester. All Rights Reserved.

Welcome to The Vector Studio. Any resemblance to this and the former Vector Workshop found in Publish Magazine is strictly intentional. I wrote the Vector Workshop for about a year and a half before Publish was sold and the new owners decided the column was not needed. Huff!

In this series of articles, I will take a technique or special effect and show how to recreate it, in Adobe Illustrator 8, CorelDRAW 9, and Macromedia FreeHand 8 (and soon FreeHand 9!).

For the first project, we'll create a cut out shape effect like the image shown at right. What is a cut out shape you ask? Imagine if you used a very sharp #11 Xacto knife and carefully cut out an object, like this quail for example, from a piece of white paper. Now if the paper was on top of another piece of paper, raised up a skosh, and the light source was to the top right, a shadow would be cast that would enhance the effect. This is a cut out effect. There are several benefits to creating this effect on the computer as opposed to using the Xacto knife. Deep and painful skin cuts are the first that come to mind. And also, if you actually were to cut this shape out of paper, how would you get the eye, the crescent shape, and the feathers to stand up? Huh?

With few exceptions, the Mac and Windows versions of these three vector applications work exactly the same. To avoid giving the keyboard shortcuts for both operating systems, which gets very messy, I'll give the menu commands, for example, Edit | Copy, instead of Ctrl-C or Command-C, and I'll leave translating the menu commands into keyboard shortcuts for you to do.

If there is a technique or effect you'd like to see covered in the future, e-mail me at garypriester@earthlink.net.

This Way to the Tutorial

Click here for Adobe Illustrator

Click here for CorelDRAW

Click here for Macromedia FreeHand

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