Adobe Illustrator Help

[markronz]

Hello, I am new to Adobe Illustrator, but I'm working on the side art for my arcade machine and I was hoping that someone would be able to help me out.    I've attached the AI file for my art.   Basically I got the AI for the Mario Brothers side art from the localarcade website and I've modified it slightly.   I just changed the colors and I also added a new title.     I want to print this via the Mame Marquees website. Since that won't be cheap I want to make sure I do it right.   Questions...

-  How can I tell the measurements (in inches) of the artwork in Adobe Illustrator?
-  If necessary, how would I resize the file in Illustrator?   Or would I not need to since it's vector art?   Would I just need to know the proportions and pick a size that would meet those proportions?
-  Anyone know what file type I need to submit to mame marquees to have them print it?  Is .AI ok?

I'm open to other suggestions if you see something weird in my art work as well...

Thanks!

[thatitalian]

1 - Go to file then document setup. Look at the file size (I generally use mm as the measurement for accuracy). If the document boundary is bigger then the actual art then scale it bigger.

2 - You go to select all, then you need to scale the file. Normally you can use % so increase it by 1% or whatever but you can change it by actual size (mm). I would suggest deciding on the size you want the CP to be then setting the page size to those dimensions. Then scale the image to fit exactly around the document border (it will be the black line surrounding the image). Zoom in as much as you can and get the image as close to the line as possible. By specifying the scale size (mm) you can get an exact match to the document size.

3 - ai is fine as Scott has illustrator (I think), anyway he can definitely do it as I submitted an ai first time round!

Hope that helps!

Your artwork is nice!!! Well done! Only thing I can suggest is put a small stroke (maybe white) around the blue text to make it stand out more and maybe make it slightly taller. Leave the shadow.

On the crab, it has a green reflection, maybe change that to white.

[markronz]

Thanks a lot!  That was very helpful!

[markronz]

Ok, so I changed the color of the reflection for the crab, I agree it should be white.
I also changed the text so that I had a white border around it too, I definitely like that as well.

I still need some help resizing the art to fit inside of the document boundary though.   I want the document to print 20" from left to right.  Then I want whatever length up and down that comes to.  Same proportions as it is now, just 20" left to right.    Do you think anyone would be able to resize the document and fit it into the document boundary for me and then either post it on here or email it to me please?    I couldn't get it to work, but I just want to get it printed as soon as I can.

I've attached an updated .AI file here.

Anyone?   Pretty please?


My email is mark@markronsman dot com if you don't want to post it here for some reason.

[Blanka]

I opened the file, but you need to do 1 thing first. Select the black text and choose "convert to outline". The font is not on my system.

[markronz]

Ok, sorry about that.    I converted the black text to outline.    Try this one...

[Blanka]

It asks to choose the document colour mode. Is it CMYK or RGB? What is the printing method? Have a colour profile for the printing device?

2 things I don't like:
- the mouth of the bug is red without border, and lies on top of the eye-contours. That's not very nice.
- The huge difference in line thickness. The turtle and bug are very thin lined, Mario and Luigi very fat lined. are Mario and Luigi scaled up from a small pic, and the bug scaled down? Problem is the contours are outlines, not line with a thickness, so it is very hard to alter this.

[thatitalian]

- the mouth of the bug is red without border, and lies on top of the eye-contours. That's not very nice.

Agreed. Black outline and send the layer behind the eyes or scale it down by 2-5%.

- The huge difference in line thickness. The turtle and bug are very thin lined, Mario and Luigi very fat lined. are Mario and Luigi scaled up from a small pic, and the bug scaled down? Problem is the contours are outlines, not line with a thickness, so it is very hard to alter this.

It will be hard to alter this but it still looks ok IMHO. Really everything has a different line thickness in that pic (like background, characters, pipes, etc), although they are significantly thicker than the rest.

I don't mind resizing, unless Blanka is doing it already!

[markronz]

Ok, first, I added a black outline to the bug's mouth and scaled it down a bit.  That looks good now.

The line thickness around the different characters doesn't really bother me.  So that's fine as is.

Blanka, I plan on sending this to mamemarquees.com to have them print it off for me, so I won't be doing any printing myself.

Now for the bad news...
As I said before I'm new to this, so I wasn't really sure what CMYK and RGB were.   My document WAS in RGB before.   I asked a guy at work and he said that it needs to be in CMYK to print it.    I changed the color type of my document to CMYK and it seems to have messed it all up.   First, it changed the colors, albeit slightly.   I've tried to change them back to the other colors, but haven't got it right quite yet.    But the biggest problem is that some of the lines of my picture are not as clear as they used to be.   If you look at the newly attached document you will see like a weird white line around the blue parts of Mario.   The black circle around the end of the tube is also much less smooth.   It looked amazing before and now it looks horrible. 

#1, can I get it to use the same colors as before even though it's now CMYK?
#2, is this all a lost cause because everything is all weird shaped now?   Or is there some way to fix this?

Help please, I'm really scared my document is worthless now...

[Blanka]

RGB is a bigger colour space than CMYK, so you can get your extreme colours back, but they won't print. If you design in CMYK, the chance is your screen colours will be closer in the print. Apply the Iso coated profile for best generic CMYK display.

[markronz]

OK, so I figured out my mistake.  Once I changed it to CMYK, I then started to change all of the colors to the old ones, and that's what caused the picture to not be smooth any more.    So what I did was just start with the RGB version and then re-convert it to CMYK again.  This time I left all the colors to what they were automatically converted to.   The colors aren't as vibrant as before, but I can definitely live with what the look like now.  At least everything is still smooth!

Then I readded the line around the bugs mouth.

I still need help resizing the document frame to fit around the entire picture, and then to resize it to 20" left to right.  Could someone help me out with that still?  I've attached the latest copy of the file again here.

Sorry to be a pest about this, I really do appreciate the help.  Not sure what I'd do without this website...

[markronz]

Nevermind actually.   I was able to get it resized by someone at work.  So I'm all set.  For those who are interested at all, here is the final product.

Thanks again everyone for the help!