Replicate grain shading effect in illustrator

[davemurrayillustration]

Hi, all;

I have been working on a project where I have been asked to have the output file be 100% vector. My usual workflow is to build up my shapes & design in Illustrator, and then use a custom brush in Photoshop to apply my "grain shading" - see below for an example of my previous work, and for the effect I'm trying to replicate.

The most accurate way I've been able to replicate this in Illustrator is to build out my shapes as usual, and use autotrace to create vectorized versions of my "shading", which I then colourize & apply to each shape with clipping masks.

This is creating some seriously large files that are also VERY, VERY slow - I can imagine that the thousands and thousands of tiny little shapes that make up the "spray" are the culprit here.

Can anyone suggest a more efficient way to accomplish this? 

[michelew83603738]

You might want to look into the AsuteGraphics plug-ins. It might offer you a much better workflow and file size. http://astutegraphics.com

[Kurt Gold]

I'm wondering if the person who asked for that actually may not know that using "100 % vector" in this case is rather nonsense from a technical point of view.

[michelew83603738]

True, but the poster isn't asking to output to vector, but is being asked to output that way. Not sure why.

[Kurt Gold]

I think I understood that, Michele. Was just trying to say that it is not advisable to do that purely with path objects, given the specific drawing style and the obvious performance issues.

Some clients are just not aware of the procedural issues that may arise.

[Bobby Henderson]

Astute Graphics' plugins are going to work only so well. The Texturino plugin essentially creates raster-based textures that are masked into the vector shapes. The Stipplism plugin can generate purely vector-based fills. But if the dot sizes in the textures are too fine the end result could be pretty difficult to work with and print successfully.