Kay Wolf, on 09 January 2012 - 10:46 AM, said:
You might think about working solely in RGB for the hair. It will certainly take a lot longer to do, but I think you'll get the effect you're looking for much more. As for the skin shading, have you thought of localizing the borders between shades and trying to apply a Gaussian Blur? There are also Smudge Tools, but you have to be enormously careful with those, and they take a good deal of time to do the work in.
Smudge is a pixel based tool, so is not available in Illustrator per-say. There is a series of Photoshop effects (which actually are available in InDesign too), one is a smudge tool 'effect', I have no idea how that will work, I don't tend to use any of them, as again, they are pixel based. I don't mind combining in some raster effects, but mostly then your losing the versatility of vectors. My work flow tends to be based around setting my main elements in vector, then working in Photoshop touching up and texturing at the end. Having the vector work separate obviously giving me the big advantage of blowing it up and down with no loss in quality.
I'm not tried using a gaussian blur, I'll have to play with that. The shading is built up using gradients and blend modes. I've attempted to work on the areas you identified however, and things are looking indeed better. Thanks for you feedback, and helping to improve this piece of work. I think that arms are looking better for it.
I don't know if your an Illustrator user yourself? But if so, I'd certainly enjoy to hear some further explanations on the techniques your describing, as I'm always eager to learn more about working with vectors in Adobe Illustrator.