Shade it using layer masks.ĭuplicate the shading layers. I start with a vector drawing in Illustrator.Įxport it to Photoshop at very thin line widths. I don't have a problem with shading in Photoshop, I am just trying to figure out if there is a way to avoid reinventing the wheel and having to reshade the same image over and over again every time if the image has to change, or if I want to have the same image at a different line thickness.ĮDIT: Based on the comments of several users, here is my workflow with pictures

I'm wondering if I'm going about this the wrong way, and there is some more efficient way to shade vector art in Illustrator. The shape of the fin and it's shading was completely unchanged, but I couldn't use the old shading because I couldn't easily match the old shading up to the new lines. This meant I had to reshade the fins from scratch because even though I had separate masking layers for the fins, they had been translated and I couldn't translate the shading where it easily looked natural. This isn't as dire as it always sounds, for example in some cases I can get away with just altering some parts of the image, but quite often I can't salvage large parts of the previous image.įor example, I had a picture of a marine animal where I made the body too short and had to move the fins back. This is something that happens a lot in my field, as images always have to be adjusted as new data becomes available or if old drawings depict the animal's anatomy wrong and have to be fixed. Create third group of outlines with no color, because with highlights sometimes black outlines are lightened.Ī related issue is if I have to adjust the image at all, that means I have to go back and reshade the entire image again.Import into illustrator as layer, position as layer on top of existing image.Perform shading using layer masks for highlights and shadows, and sometimes using multiple layers of highlight and shadows when three-dimensionality is present (e.g., limbs obscuring body).Export vector image from Illustrator at minimal line thickness as.However, if the lines are not very thin it means the shading has a halo around it when exported back to Illustrator. For this what I have been doing is three-tone shading in Photoshop. However, I also want to have shading for these images to show three-dimensionality of these animal reconstructions.

I want to be able to reuse these illustrations in various contexts, and that means using vextor illustrations in which I can resize line thickness, easily edit the image, etc. I am making the drawings using vector illustration in Illustrator. I am doing artistic reconstructions of several animal species for a research project.

Vector drawing in illustrator