I’m actually doing art-ish stuff for a change. I just spend a few hours copying and pasting paths from Photoshop to Illustrator, pretty much rebuilding “muse” from the ground up. (You should see how it looks if I just import. There’s a crap ton of layers, and none of the vector layers import as objects, thank you very much Adobe. And this is CS2, I thought when they announced Smart Objects that Photoshop wouldn’t be all gimped out when it comes to vector art, what happened?)

I’m listening to No Holds Barred on NHB right now, and I think some of Damon’s vitriol is rubbing off on me. By the way, if you, due to some debilitating illness, use iTunes as your music player, NHB is on the Radio tab, under Spoken Word. Give it a listen, and for the love of god get a better media player.¹

Anyhow, the reason I’m doing all this crap is to try out Gradient Mesh, which seems like a really fun tool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show for my trouble later tonight, as well as my thoughts on Illustrator. Thus far: half the stuff that’s giving me trouble is just because it’s handled differently than Photoshop at a fundamental level. The other half is due to Illustrator being fucking backwards. The only way I’ve found to set a swatch is by applying that color to an object. Stuff that was second nature in Photoshop four generations ago, like right-clicking on a layer, are missing. And if you set a custom color for the layer (the color the path is rendered in, not the fill or stroke colors), it uses the Windows color picker. I can’t even use the eyedropper to grab a color. That is inexcusable, but the layer’s color isn’t especially important anyhow, you don’t really need to bother changing it from the default in the first place.

One thing that threw me was the New Document dialogue. I went nuts trying to find the DPI setting. Vector art is resolution-independent, so an Illustrator document has no DPI, for all intents and purposes. I feel dumb for not realizing this sooner.

One thing that shows promise is the brush tool. It works pretty much the same as the equivalent in Photoshop, except it’s vector-based. Illustrator can smooth the stroke out a bit, and if need be I can modify the path manually, so it oughta be useful for inking via tablet, because god knows my tablet work is sloppy.

¹ Nothing against iTunes, it’s great for buying or ripping music, but it’s second only to Windows Media Player² in being overbloated and underpowered as a media player.
² Not to be confused with Media Player Classic, a great barebones video player. Pretty worthless for music, though.