Looking for tutorials for the daily design challenge, I came across this fun tutorial for a disco ball. This project took a little bit longer than some of the other challenges, I spent about 45 minutes on the disco ball. I also ran into some difficulties with the tutorial, which may be due to the tutorial author using a different version of Adobe Illustrator than I was using (I have Adobe Illustrator CS4). If you’re interested in creating your own disco ball, read on for some of the discrepencies I found…
- Being fairly new to using Illustrator, I could not find “Filter->Create->Object Mosaic” – in my version, I finally found this to be “Object->Create Object Mosaic”.
- After aligning the sphere with the circle, the instructions say “Release Clipping Mask and Ungroup tiles (Ctrl+Shift+G).” In Illustrator CS4 (and Windows platform), this is actually (Alt+Ctrl+7).
- The final problem I had may have been my fault for picking such a dark color for the disco ball in the first place. I originally started with black but found a dark grey to work better. However, when I came to the “Edit->Edit Colors->Recolor Artwork” step, I had problems with my dark color. I was unable to change the saturation (it was already desaturated) & brightness to get noticeable results. I was able to use the recolor artwork step for some sections, but the darker sections did not want to change their saturation, so I ended up manually changing the fill color (which didn’t take any more time than the recolor artwork step did, it just meant manually selecting the colors vs. automatically adjusting to harmonious colors).
