Re: Fireworks 2 Illustration expert :)

Gina Anderson wrote on April 16 of trying to draw the interleaved shape at
> http://w3.one.net/~ginakra/logohelp.htm

You're right, that is difficult in drawing programs, because in that design
a single shape goes both above and below another shape.

It might be good to start with a simpler composition, of just two ovals,
before moving up to the finished design. This will let you test the
principles first.

In drawing tools there's a definite stacking order... you can't have one
object both above and below another object. Therefore we'd need to actually
have two objects which together look like one object.

Here's a 1-2-3 to make a basic case of interleaved ovals:

1)  Open Fireworks, new document.

2)  Draw oval, give it a red charcoal stroke, no fill.

3)  Clone this oval, give it a green charcoal stroke, and rotate 90 degrees.
    (Result: Green oval will overlay red oval.)

4)  Select red oval again, clone, and Bring To Front.
    (Result: Two red ovals will sandwich the green oval.)

5)  With Knife Tool, cut the top red oval at each vertice.
    (Result: Four individual pieces of red oval on top.)

6)  Now delete two kittycorner slices of red ovals.

Result: The green oval will appear to wind in and out of the red oval. You
can now group these pieces, put them on their own layer, make them a
symbol, whatever.


Your eventual design is more complicated in a few ways: there are more
shapes, and some of these join together, and you're also trying to fill
each curve with a bevel-like gradient, and there also strokes around the
lines too.

There could be a couple of ways to go:

--  You might want to AutoTrace the original scan in FreeHand, and then
import these PostScript curves to Fireworks to quickly get the desired
geometry. (You can use other drawing tools, too, but FreeHand has one of
the best tracing tools in the business.)

--  In Fireworks 2 you can use the "Expand Strokes" option to turn your
simple curves into filled shapes. This lets you use a normal beveled fill
for the overall design.

--  If you do actually use beveled fills for the bands themselves, and then
add stroking, then you'll likely see internal lines on the shapes where a
patch starts and stops. The way this is usually handled in drawing tools is
to have a second patch, unstroked, to handle the need for both stroked and
unstroked overlay patches.
    (The above is likely hard to read, but I think that if you actually lay
out the over/under design you'll see it.)


Summary: That type of design you show is traditionally a bit difficult to
achieve in drawing tools. Using an AutoTrace is one way to quickly build
the complex curves, but you can also manually overlay little patches to
give the illusion that one shape is both above and below another shape.

jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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