Help with Guilloches and other things?

Question

Heya, i've used Illustrator before for a few things, but i'm still quite new to it. Hope you can help.
Ok so what im trying to do is make bank note from scratch. Dont worry, its for a college project and it'll be an entirely new design so theres no chance of anyone mistaking it for real money (althought I do want it to look real)
I wanted to include Guilloches in the design. These are the lines found on bank notes to make it harder to counterfeit:
I've experimented using shapes made of lines and using the blend tool to create multiple lines in between them, but it doesnt give the same effect. Is there a better way to achieve these results?
The other thing is cross-hatch shading. I want to include my own photo into the design (vain, i know ). Ive also found no way of doing this. Can you help me?
Thanks

Answer 1

Sorry, but Illustrator is really not ideally suited to banknote design.
I designed the current series of Icelandic banknotes so I know all about the problems involved.
You can make something that "looks" more or less like a banknote, but doing the actual artwork for a banknote is a totally different kettle of fish.
Illustrator (although a vector application) has pixel-based output (rip), whereas real banknote designs never use pixels, only lines.
In addition, the colour-banding used in real banknote printing (not gradients as such but specially mixed bands of colour inked onto up to 4 offset plates for each side of the note) makes line work extremely difficult to produce.
You can do guilloches with blends, repeat rotations and all kinds of distortions, but getting them to "ink" properly in 4 separations using gradated bands of colour is extremely complicated. It will cost you much hard work to produce a passable semblance of a banknote if you use only Illy.
You mention cross-hatching in a portrait. This again is fiendishly tricky to reproduce in Illustrator because engraved lines in intaglio are not of a constant weight. You can get part of the way using various brush strokes, but frankly I would advise you not to attempt it unless you are prepared to spend several weeks doing the job. It takes a skilled engraver up to three months to do a good portrait (with a burin on a steel plate, a few lines per day). I have always sent photographs or detailed pencil drawings to the engravers. Specialized applications are available that can produce a semblance to hand engraving, but they are really not very good and the outcome invariably involves a lot of manual tweaking. If you are good at drawing it might even be better to do the portrait by hand, but copying the style of engraved lines is very tricky unless done in considerable oversize.
May I suggest that it is considerably easier to produce colour banding effects using gradients in Photoshop. Copy Illy line work into Photoshop, lock layer transparency and colour with gradients. To do things correctly you will need 4 gradients - one for each offset separation plate - for each side of the note. Calculating the colour range for each plate will prove much more work that you suspect. And remember that each gradient should run the whole width of the note and only horizontally.
Depending on how real you want your "banknote" to look I suspect you need to study security printing carefully before you embark on this job.