How to Make Ice Water in Illustrator

Photographers have a tough time with ice water. A good photograph needs good lighting, which, in turn, melts the ice too quickly. A simple solution would be to photograph the water and illustrate the ice later. You can add ice in minutes with Illustrator's vector tools.

Instructions

1. Place a photograph of a water glass. Use the File Menu "Place" command. Lock the photograph layer by clicking on the "Toggles Lock" icon.

2. Create a rounded rectangle in the water area. Hold down the "Option" and "+" keys, and set the corner radius to 1 or 2 pixels and the height and width to make a square.

3. Fill the rectangle with a radial gradient, dark at the edges to lighter in the center. Set the edge color to 60 percent gray and the center color to 30 percent gray.

4. Extrude the rectangle into a cube with the 3D transform command (in the Effects menu.) Set the extrude depth to the rectangle height/width. Set the surface to plastic shading.

5. Apply the Plastic Wrap filter. Tweak the settings until you're happy with the look. Keep the highlight strength, scale and the detail toward the middle of the scale.

6. Set the blend mode to "Overlay" with the Transparency palette. Adjust the opacity to suit you.

7. Duplicate and move the ice. Change the 3D rotation with the Appearance palette and scale the copy to add variety. Make as many copies as you want. Vary the layer transparency settings to create an illusion of depth.

Tips & Warnings

• Use the Roughen effect (Effect menu, Distort and Transform submenu) to make the ice appear to be melting.

• You can change the hue and tint of the ice by switching the document color mode from RGB to CMYK (File Menu.) CMYK will add a slight blue tint to the ice.

• Vector graphics programs can create realistic effects, but for true photorealism work with an image editor like Photoshop.