Possible to get pencil tool to have softer edge? 1

[fileman0000]

Hi, is it possible to get the pencil tool (or other drawing tool in Indesign) to have soft edge to resemble a brush stroke instead of harsh square edges WITHOUT going into photoshop/Illustrator to import?

Thanks

Fileman

 

[eugenetyson]

If you're in CS3

Draw a Line and make the stroke 10pt

Open the Effects Panel (Window>Effects)

Double Click the Stroke in the Panel

Put a basic Feather of 5mm on it

Put an outer Glow on it
Blend Mode>Normal> Opacity (the lower the number the less black the line will be)


That's a basic type of Stroke

You can use Outer Glow, Basic Feather,Directional Feather and Gradient Feather.

On the Directional Feather, Choose First Edge only and change teh CHOKE to 100%, see what interesting things happen there.

Gradient Feather is great too, it will feather out to the edge of the stroke into nothingness.

Play with these settings until you understand them and most of all...

Enjoy,

 

[eugenetyson]

Oh and save the style in Window>Object Styles

So you can apply them over and over and over again.

 

[eugenetyson]

You can also get great effects by Bevel and Embossing, just choose a larger Basic Feather, experiment with different settings.

 

[fileman0000]

Wow Eugenetyson,

great advise and samples. Awesome work.

question: how did you get to insert the drawing/demo right into the message?


Fileman

 

[eugenetyson]

You can upload an image to somewhere like

http://www.imageshack.us

Then you can use the last field to copy the link

insert then link into here and put a "img " around it

so it looks something like this

"img

http://samplefile.jpg"

just use [ and ] instead of quotation marks.

 

[eugenetyson]

Don't forget that InDesign has different strokes too,

so you could use dots, wavy lines, etc. and get interesting brush like strokes too.