There are a lot of rivets on the Knight model I’m working on. A lot.
Time to harness the power of Illustrator! The Appearance panel is a very powerful tool. I can use it to modify a simple dotted line making it more representative of a strip of rivets. Starting with a simple line of black dots I click on the add stoke button and add a dotted blue stroke slightly smaller that the black – 6pt vs 7pt
Using the fx button I add a small transform to the black stoke moving it down and left slightly, imitating a shadow for the rivet head.
I then add another stroke – this time white 2pt and move it up and right to simulate a highlight on the head of the rivet.
I finish off the rivet effect by adding a couple of solid stroke lines (light blue and dark blue) below the line of rivets.
To make the rivets easily accessible I save them as a new Graphics Style – Rivet Ribbon.
Sorted! I can now add the rivet effect to any shape I choose – That should speed up the art work for the Paper Knight considerably!
