Creating Illustrator Droplets??

Question

I'm currently producing production art in CC Ilustrator but one of the many factories we work with has'nt yet upgraded (they will soon but in the mean time) thus requiring the need to save a legacy file. Can a droplet be created to spped up the process since we need both CC and CS6 files?

Answer 1

Hard Light is also a cool blending mode to use for water drops. JET's tutorial uses Lighten for the white parts and Multiply for the dark parts. Hard Light lets you combine those effects in the same object. Portions darker than 50% gray act like Multiply, and portions lighter than 50% gray act like either Lighten or Screen, I'm not sure which. 50% gray lets the lower image show through unaltered. So you can use a gradient that contains both shadow and highlight, and the whole thing works together.
There is a style in the AI 10 default styles that uses this technique. It makes a single drop on an army camouflage background, but you can delete the background and have a pure overlay drop.
This pattern fill contains a bunch of circles each filled with that de-backgrounded graphic style (actually, I lightened the edges of the gradient slightly to make the shadow less sharp):
Kind of boring like that, but here is how it looks on top of a photo image:
(I took this picture of a deer in Costa Rica in 2003. One might use the altered image as a photo charade of a "rain deer". ;) )