The Right Way to Use Photoshop and Illustrator For Jewellery Design and Rendering
6 August, 2012
A commercial illustrator named Richard Wilkinson has found a way to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to stunning effect for jewellery illustration and digital painting. Each example makes for a marvellous example of how to create and present jewellery as a 2D digital painting.
If you want to learn more about how to do this kind of work in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, you should sign up for my Adobe Illustrator for Jewellery Training.
Daily Telegraph Fashion Article – Rock stars: the world’s most famous jewellers reveal their favourite pieces
WRITTEN BY
Jack Meyer
Bespoke jewellery designer, and specialist in jewellery CAD/CAM and emergent technologies that affect jewellery.
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Do you have any tutorial or idea how he designed these jewelry pieces with illustrator and photoshop? Tutorial links would be appreciated or a tutorial from you explaining how such can be achieved would be great as well.
Dear Madd:
That’s a good question. There isn’t a tutorial for this yet so far as I know, but I can give you a place to start when working on this:
So far as I can tell, he combines vector drawing work with Adobe Illustrator with Photoshop texturing and colour effects.
More specifically, I reckon he starts with actual photographs of the jewellery and the objects he’s trying to capture, and he then uses one of two routes:
1.) He uses LiveTrace on Adobe Illustrator CS6 to convert the photo into a series of vector line shapes, which he then simplifies and tweaks with Direct Select (the white arrow) and the Union tool under Pathfinder to combine shapes into simpler ones. If you look closely, you’ll notice how none of the gemstones are a standard consistent shape, and all of the details are pure blobs of colour. This supports my theory.
2.) Alternatively, if the LiveTrace doesn’t work, he divides the photo into a jigsaw puzzle of fields/blobs of analogous colours, and trace each blob of colour individually. This would be a much more tedious process, but it would definitely get there in the end.
Hope that helps. I’ll have a closer look at seeing what I can do for a tutorial when I have time.
If you cannot wait though, and what I said doesn’t help enough, perhaps you could ask the illustrator directly? If you do, let me know what he says– I’d be really curious to know his response.
Regards,
Jack
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Kylie