Create a good line?

[jer446]

Im not sure the best method of designing this.. I am making a board game for school.. and will be making the game in photoshop.. But i cannot figure out a good method to drawing the big segmented squigley line in photoshop... Anyone want to help me out here? Also, maybe someone here has a layout of a board game on their computers, like a psd, so i can modify it to fit my needs? Or a large resolution image of any good board game would be good...

My game is going to be similar to candyland.. this is a math project btw..

 

[jer446]

please? Anyone..

 

[Lau]

I would imagine Illustrator and the pen tool is best for this, but I'm struggling to understand what sort of "big segmented squigley line" you want to draw. Do you have a picture of what you want to draw? We might be able to help you if you gave a few more details.

 

[MagicWok]

If you sketch out your ideas and upload them as a jpeg, with more explanation as to the concept and this 'squidgey line', then more help will arrive...

 

[jer446]

Sorry the squigley line i was talking about is:http://www.lscheffer.com/CandyLand.jpg or

My game is going to be similar to that..

 

[MagicWok]

lol for some reason the picture didn't help loads.

But, I presume the squidgey line, is actually the path on the board game?

If so, you're much better doing a lot of the work in illustrator, then finishing off in photoshop if you must, via saving as an eps file.

 

[HiRez]

Yeah, I would use Illustrator, create your path using the pen tool, make the stroke the width you want (I used 20 pts in my example on a 200x200 px canvas). Duplicate that layer twice. Do an Outline Stroke on the original so it's a whole shape, not just a stroke, then fill it. On the copies, select both and narrow the stroke down (this will make your original layour your border/outline). On the top path apply a dashed pattern. This will create your squares which wrap to the curves. Color these something differently, then you can export to Photoshop and use the selection tools to start colorizing the individual squares the way you want.

This is just one way of doing it, and frankly it would be even better to do as much as possible in Illustrator before moving to Photoshop (as MagicWok said). For starters, you could export the layers separately from Illustrator for PS import. Or even better you could create your path and then still in Illustrator use the path intersection boolean tools to cut out the individual squares (maybe using a dashed path as a guide). That would be cleaner and more flexible than doing the coloring in Photoshop although it's more work up front to set up.

 

[RiseAgainst]

The easiest way would be to make a pattern brush in Illustrator. All you would do is have to draw two squares, make a pattern, and then draw a single path. The whole process would take 5 minutes. Just do a Google search for 'Illustrator pattern brush'.