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Vector Water Drops in Adobe Illustrator

This tutorial was written to teach you how to do quick and simple vector water drops in Adobe Illustrator. Water drops are something that many people have problems with for some reason, but they can be quite simple. Today I’m going to show you a simple way to make these with very little hassle. Lets get started.

1. First open up illustrator, and start a new drawing. Go to your gradient pallet, set the type to radial, and change the black to blue.

2. Select your ellipse tool from the tool pallet, and draw and ellipse on the screen.

3. We need to make some changes to the gradient here, so select your gradient tool, and select the bottom of the ellipse and drag until you reach the center of the ellipse.

I should look something like this when your finished.

4. Now we’re going to add a highlight. Select your ellipse tool from the tool pallet again, and draw a small ellipse in the upper left of our water drop.

Set its fill to solid white. Transform the highlight until it looks right to you. Then change its transparency to about 30% Here’s what mine looks like so far.

5. We need to actually change the transparency of the main water drip to about 40%. This will show anything below through the drop, and soften our blue. By the way, grey works well or even better on some surfaces.

6. Now that we have something that more resembles a water drop. We need to add a slight shadow to the main drop. Select the main body, then go to the effect menu and select Effect->Stylize->Drop Shadow.

Mode select depends on the surface, but since we’re working on a white background, I’m just setting it to Normal. Set the opacity to around 75% with offsets of 1 pixel, and a blur of 2 pixels. Use a dark blue color for the shadow.

7. Wow, it’s starting to look like a real water drop! To bad water drops are not perfect, but we can fix that.

It’s time to grab the good ol warp tool, and mess up your hard work. Set the size and hardness to what works best for you. I used three different warp sizes; 100px, 75px, and 50px. Pull your shape around until it looks a little more like a water drop. Water drops can take on any shape, so use your imagination. If you get an edge that’s a little to jagged, use the Path Simplify command in the Edit menu. Don’t forget to move your highlights when your finished! Here’s how mine came out.

Source: http://designermill.com/2008/04/17/vector-water-drops-in-adobe-illustrator/#more-656

Adobe Illustrator Floral Tutorial

This tutorial will show you the basics on how to create florals in Adobe Illustrator CS3. Illustrator is the perfect tool for these types of graphics, and your about to see why. Lets get to work.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator and create a new drawing. First of we’re going to need to set our fill to transparent, and our stroke to some color. I’ll be using green for this tutorial.

2. Next were going to select the spiral tool from our tool pallet, and draw a spiral on the screen. If you can’t see it, hold down the left mouse button over the line tool, and select it from the flyout menu.

3. Now that we have a spiral on the screen, we need to make a copy of it, and paste a second spiral. Select the first spiral then select edit->copy from the edit menu. Then select edit->paste in front from the edit menu. This will give you an exact duplicate of the original spiral at the same location.

4. Now we need to transform our duplicate spiral so that we can make a fill later. Rotate and scale your spiral until the center of the spiral touches, and the end points of the spiral are slightly apart. Make sure you don’t have any parts of the spirals touching, or our fill won’t come out right.

5. Now that we have our two spirals, we need to join them together so that we can fill our floral. Select the Direct Selection Tool from the tool pallet, and draw a window over only the two end points of our spiral. Remember to only select the two end points or you won’t be able to join the ends.

Then go to the Object menu and select Object->Path->Join This will join our two end points together. Repeat this step at the center of the spiral also.

Once you have joined your paths set your fill to the same color as your stroke. Once your done you should see something like this:

That’s it your done. From here on out you can add more spirals, and vines, to make nice floral patterns like the ones below.

To make a light weight floral change the fill to white and lighten the stoke. Then add a colored drop shadow. Like this:

Illustrator can save you large amounts of time when making florals, and with a little imagination you can come up with some great designs.

Source: http://designermill.com/2008/04/17/adobe-illustrator-floral-tutorial/#more-655

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial : How to Draw a Simple Daisy

Introduction

This tutorial is to teach you how to draw a simple flower, or in this case, a daisy using Adobe illustration. This tutorial can be completed in just a few minutes using Illustrator 9.0 and above. Lets get started.

Part 1 The Pedals

Open up Adobe Illustrator and start a new drawing. Any size drawing will do for this tutorial. I’m using my standard web template sheet which is 980 pixels x 600 pixels.

First thing we need to do is turn off our fill, or set it to white, and set our stroke color to black. Now we need to draw a polygon. Select your Polygon menu item from the tool pallet.

You can place your polygon anywhere, any angle, or even size you want on the screen. Just give yourself some room to work. Here is what mine looks like.

The polygon is going to be the basis for our flower pedals. In fact you can apply this method to a vast number of different shapes to get flower or flower like effects. Now, in your File menu go to Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Pucker & Bloat You will see a dialog like the one below. Slide the transform slider to the right until you reach the desired setting.

I found my optimal setting at around 78%. When finished select OK. You should now see an outline of your flower pedals in black.

Now it’s time for a little color. Gradients work best for these types of flowers so I’m going to apply a simple orange to yellow radial gradient. Here is what mine looks like now.

Play with colors to see which work best for you. Try using different colors and strokes. You can even turn them off if you want. Experimenting is where I have come across some of my best work. When your ready, move on to Part 2.

Part 2 Building a Better Flower

Now that we have our flower pedals we need a allergy filled center, and of course a simple green stem. Start by selecting your ellipse tool, and drawing a circle in the center of your flower. Remember to hold down the shift key as your doing it to get a perfectly semetrical circle.

Now that we have our circle, lets apply a dark to light brown gradient. Select the Gradient window tab and select radial from the drop down menu. You can select whatever you like for starting and ending colors. Since I’m thinking daisies, then brown is it for me. Here is what I have so far.

Looks good so far, but what is a flower without a stem? Using either the Pen, Arc, Line, or Pencil tool draw a simple line from your flower onto the white space. Set its fill to transparent and it’s stroke to a forest green color. It should be a little thin, so lets fatten it up a little by changing the stroke width.

My stem looks best at about 5 pt. Depending on the size of your flower this can change drastically. Best just to play around with the size until you get something that your happy with. Since you already have your stem selected we need to send it to the back of our drawing so we can hide the end underneath our pedals. Right click over the stem and select Arrange -> Send to Back This simply puts the stem to the back of the display order.

Once you’ve finished you’ll have a flower like the one below.

See, told you it was simple. I wanted you to see some variations so move on to part three to see what we can do with our little daisy.

Illustrator Floral Vine Tutorial

Introduction

This is an extension to my original Floral Tutorial. It should offer a better understanding of how to do florials that are a little more detailed then simple vectors. Since there is a lot of material in this tutorial I’m going to move through it as quickly, and painlessly, as possible while attempting to keep it at a beginner level. However, intermediate level users may still find it of interest too. Depending of your experience, and how much you like to play around, it can take you from 15 min to an hour to finish with Adobe Illustrator 9 and CS. Lets get started.

Part 1 – Drawing the Vine

Before we even start drawing our vine you need to take a couple of things into consideration. In photography you will learn that photos require structure to make them interesting. It’s all a matter of directing the the eye towards the subject. Drawing a single line and giving it a simple flat stroke will not work in most floral drawings. The stem of our vine gives our entire drawing not only a foundation, but it directs our attention toward a givin direction. This direction is usually towards the end, but it can also be towards the center. I like to scratch out a design on paper before ever starting my drawing, but that is not required of course for this tutorial. The 3/4 rule applies here also. So keep all this in mind as you create your vines.

Now that we have considered our vines structure and path, lets open Adobe Illustrator and create a new drawing. Any size drawing is fine. First start by going to your tool pallet, and selecting the Pencil Tool. Draw a freehand line in the desired shape on the screen. I want to direct attention to the upper left of the screen so I’m going to draw my line from the lower right to the upper left. Notice that that I added more detail towards the tip. Don’t worry if your lines ruff. We will fix that in a moment. I drew mine with the mouse instead of my trusty tablet just for illustrative purposes. Here’s what it looks like:

Now that we have our line, we need to smooth it out a little, and make our vine. Select your line and go to Object -> Path -> Simplify in the File Menu. You’ll see a dialog like the one here. Depending on how well, and in what shape you created your line, you may have to play with the settings until you have a nice smooth line in the desired shape. Once your happy with the shape of your line select OK.

Make a copy of your line with Ctrl + C keys then paste a new line directly on top of the existing one with with the Ctrl + F keys.

Now grab the new line with the Selection tool and move it slightly off the original. Arrange the paths until one end of your path comes to a point, and join them together using the Direct Select Tool. If you can’t remember how to do this then go back and read my original Floral Tutorial. Remember not to cross the lines or your fill will have a flat spot. When done give it a green fill and move on to part two.

Part 2 – Drawing the leaves

Most people think that drawing leaves in Illustrator is really easy until you actually try it. One benefit of vector drawing applications though is that we can re-use our leaves as a pattern once their created. So, lets make the leaf that will be copied across our vine.

Leaves are rather complex shapes, and there are several methods to drawing them in illustrator. Since this tutorial is for beginners, we are going to start by drawing a rectangle. Go to you Tool Pallet and select the Rectangle Tool. Draw a rectangle anywhere on the screen. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfectly square or not, just make it large enough to work with. Now select your Add Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet. We need to add points to all four sides like the picture you see here. The point here is not to be precise. If we wanted to be precise we could have just rotated our rectangle.

Now that we have our 4 new anchor points select the Delete Anchor Point Tool, and remove the rectangles original corners. You should now have something of a diamond like shape.

Now we need to make it look a little more like our leaf look more like a leaf. Select the Convert Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet and round the two sides and top of our square like shown. make sure to leave the point at the bottom of your leaf. Once your happy with the shape of your leaf move on.

Now it’s time to add our leaves to our vine. Most vines alternate leaves along the stem, so that’s what we’re going to do here. Resize your leaf until it reaches a size that is appropriate for your vine size, then place the leaf somewhere along your vine. Placement and frewuency are a matter of taste and, don’t worry about changing the leaves shapes as you go. Get the placement right first. Make copies of your original leaf using Crtl + C and paste copies of the screen with Ctrl + V. You should get something Like I have here.

If you draw your vine the same way I have, you will need to push the back leaves under the vine like I’ve done above. Select the leaves you want to put behind your vine then Shift + Ctrl + [ This will place the selected items at the bottom of the drawing stack. I’ve colored the leaves in back slightly darker for you to see here.

Part 3 – Leaf it or Not, Styling your leaves

Time for some vine education. When altering your leaves you need to keep a couple of things in mind. The first thing I should mention is that the leaves on most vines are pretty close to the same size until nearing the tip of the vine. Usually the last two or three leaves are incrementally smaller. Another vital thing when your altering your leaves shape is that vines, and all plants for that matter, will grow with the largest part of the leaves surface facing the available light source. It’s not necessary to follow this rule when drawing vines for a website, but if your planning to apply some sort of lighting effect it may make or break your drawing. Finally, if your vine looks similar to mine, you should make the leaves in the back slightly smaller to give some dept to your drawing.

Now that we have a flat vine, and a little vine education, lets add a little styling. Use the Warp Tool from the Tool Pallet as you go along to give your leaves a little character. You can ajust the size and strength of the Warp Tool by double clicking its icon in the Tool Pallet. Just like people, no two leaves are the same. Don’t be afraid to make them interesting. Note that it’s better to add more detail towards the focal point of your vine rather then along it’s entire length. If you roughen up a leaf too much you can always use the Path -> Simplify tool, or make yourself another copy and start over. In the end styling is a matter of taste. The immortal words of my art teacher “Go Wild!” apply here.

Once your leaves have the shape your looking for, select one of your foreground leaves and apply a green radial gradient using the Gradient Window. Now select the rest of the foreground leaves, and using the Eyedropper Tool from the Tool pallet, select the leaf you styled to apply the style to the other leaves. Now that we have the colors for our foreground leaves we need to look at the background ones. We can either make them darker or lighter to differentiate them from the foreground ones. I’m using white as my background, so I’m going to go with a slightly darker gradient. You can also apply a stroke color if you like. Apply the color across the background leaves like you did the foreground ones. You can very the gradient as you move along the vine, but I prefer to do this later in Photoshop via a color mask. You should now have something like mine here:

For most uses, and for the scope of this tutorial, your vine is now finished. There is just the matter of fine tuning your coloring, and possibly some shadowing. I’m going to give some applied examples in the next part.

Part 4 – Vine Usage examples

Since this is a really long tutorial I’m only going to give a few brief examples. The first one uses the vine directly from the tutorial, but with some pretty blue flowers, and cleaned up gradients. The flowers I used here are from the Daisy Tutorial.

I don’t think I ever mentioned it, but my wife loves blue flowers. So here’s a completely blue vine;

If you set the transparency to around 60%, This would make an excellent background over a lighter color. You could blend it with a similar blue too. Take this next image for example.

This is simply the same image as above with a gradient blend. Great for a backdrop or card. Change the squares gradient while keeping the blend will also bring out some nice color combinations like the following orange – pink combination.

Source: http://designermill.com/2008/06/13/illustrator-floral-vine-tutorial/#more-1364

Adobe Illustrator Ladybug Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you how to draw your very own ladybug using Adobe Illustrator 9.0, CS, CS2, or CS3. This tutorial is rather simple in terms of drawing, but contains a good number of concepts and ideas you will find useful in future, more complex, drawings. The entire tutorial should not take more then one to two hours for most people to complete. The entire drawing took me only 10 minutes to create with the screen shots for the tutorial. Of course the entire tutorial took a few hours to write.

To the left is the finished product of this tutorial. Although drawing a ladybug is easy, it requires quite a few steps, so I’m going to split this tutorial up so that our more bandwidth deprived friends can enjoy reading it. This should also make the tutorial a little more legible also. I would like to hear your thoughts on improving this, and my other tutorials, as you read along. Let’s get started.

Part 1 – The Main Body

First we want to open illustrator, and start a blank drawing. Once again, any size is fine. I’m using an 800×800 pixel layout for this drawing if your dead set on following along exactly as we progress. Set your Fill to white and your Stroke to Black. This will make it easier to work with our shapes.

Now let’s start by selecting the Ellipse Tool from the tool pallet, and draw an ellipse on the screen. This ellipse will be the main body of our ladybug. For the head we need to draw a second ellipse slightly smaller and below the first. Notice that my second ellipse is near half the size of the larger one. You should see what I have here. Don’t worry if your ladybug body looks more like a Junebug. We will fix this later.

If your ellipses do not line up correctly you can use the Align to Center tool in the Align Window Pallet. If you don’t see it on your screen, you can access it using the Window pull down menu. Just drag a window over both ellipses and select the second button on the Align Window Pallet. You will see your ellipses align to each other on your screen. Now that your ellipses are all lined up it is time to move on.

You may be asking why I drew the head second instead of first. I had originally, then I thought, it would be really good to mention the Send to Back command since life is not always easy. You never know when you will need to use it, and as long as you draw in illustrator, you will use it a lot. So select your smaller ellipse, right click on the screen, and select Arrange->Send to Back. You should now see the smaller ellipse behind the larger one.

Now we need to do something about that Junebug look we have going on. Select the larger ellipse again. We are going to make a quick and simple change to the shape of our larger ellipse by removing the lowest anchor point. Select the Delete Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet. You should see four anchor points now on the quadrants of the larger ellipse. Select the lowest quadrant to remove the anchor. Don’t change any other features. Just removing this one point is enough to get the effect we want. When your finished you should see Something like the figure below.

Now that we have a good idea as to how our ladybug body is shaping up, it’s time to make some minor adjustments to the height and width to get our proportions correct before going further. Select your Selection Tool from the Tool Pallet. Select both ellipses by drawing a window over them. Using the grips, transform your junebug looking ladybug into a ladybug looking ladybug. Mine is a little long for a ladybug, so I’m going to make her a tad shorter, but otherwise I am happy with the shape. If you distort your ladybug a little too much use the Edit -> Undo command from the File Menu to restore your image.

Finally for this portion of the tutorial we need to apply a little color to our main body. I’m going to make my larger ellipse the traditional ladybug red, and the smaller ellipse, or head, black. Select the shape you want to colorize, then select the color you want by double clicking on the Fill square in the Tool Pallet.

Here’s the finished product for the first part of the tutorial. Next time we will start applying various body features to our little bugs.

Thanks for reading. The second portion of this tutorial will be coming shortly.

We have already laid out the ladybug’s body in the first part of this tutorial. We will be using that as our foundation for our second part. We still have a lot of work to do so, take your time as you walk through this part. I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can, hopefully, without losing you. If you missed the first tutorial, you can click the link above to read it.

Part 2 – Finishing Out Our Ladybug

Open up the ladybug body we completed in the first tutorial. It should look something like the picture you see here. To finish our ladybug out we need to give it some eyes, antenna, and legs. It might not sound like much, but this is going to be the larger portion of this tutorial. So lets get to work.

The Eyes …

The first thing I want to add is the eyes, so set your fill color to white and stroke to black. Select the Ellipse Tool from the Tool Pallet, and draw a small ellipse like the one you see here. Now use your Selection Tool from the Tool Pallet to drag the ellipse over the head to make the white part of the eye. Resize it using the grips if you need to make it smaller, or change it’s shape.

Once you have the eye the right size and shape you want, select it and make a copy by using CTRL + C. Now paste the new copy of the eye over the other using CTRL + F. While holding down the Shift key, drag the new eye to the other side of the head. Holding the Shift key will allow you to drag the eye without changing it’s relative vertical position to the other eye. This will keep them perfectly even vertically. For this tutorial we won’t worry about exact mirroring horizontally.

Now it’s time we make the pupils. Set your fill to black, and select the Ellipse Tool again from the Tool Pallet. Draw a small black circle on the screen by holding down the Shift key while drawing will make the circle perfectly round. Drag the new circle over the eyes we just placed. Make a copy of the pupil just like you did with the eye. Paste the new pupil over the old one with CTRL + F, and use the Shift key once again while dragging the pupil to the opposite eye. When your finished your picture should now look more like this one.

On to The Shell

As you can tell from the picture above I got a little ahead of myself while I was taking screen shots. So lets get caught up. Select your Line Tool from the Tool Pallet. We want to draw a single line from the bottom center of the red shell, to the top center. Select the top most quadrant of the shell and drag down until you reach the bottom most quadrant. Once again to can use the Shift key to draw a perfectly straight line spitting the shell into two equal parts. Once you finish well move onto the spots.

The spots are relatively easy. All we need to do is make some copies of our pupil like before and paste them, however we like, on the shell. Pick your Selection Tool, and select one of the pupils we drew before. Once you have selected your pupil, copy it by using CTRL+ C. Since we don’t need to place our spots in any particular place, just use CTRL + P to paste the spots on the screen. Position the spots on one side of the shell in the desired locations. Why on one side you ask. Well we are going to cheat my mirroring our spots by using the Reflect command.

Once you have your spots where you want them, hold down the shift key while using the Selection Tool to select all of the dots. Now right click on the screen and select Transform -> Reflect. You should now see a highlighted mirror image of the spots you first selected. Now hold down the Shift key again, and drag your spots onto the opposite side of the shell using the Selection Tool.

The Antenna …

Now that our ladybug is starting to look more like a bug then a red blob, it’s time to add our antenna. Select the Arc Tool. From the Tool Pallet and drag an arc somewhere on the open space of the screen. Anywhere is fine, since we are going to use it not only for our antenna, but also our legs later. Select the Selection Tool on the Tool Pallet, and select your new arc. Make a copy of your arc using CTRL+ C and paste a new copy on the screen using CTRL+ P. Using the grips rotate and scale your arc until it looks something like an antenna, and drag it over the head. Now use CTRL + C again to make a copy of your new antenna, then CTRL + F to paste a new one over it. Right click on the screen and select Transform -> Reflect to make a mirror image of it. Finally drag the new reflected Antenna to the opposite side of the head.

Once you have finished your antenna, it’s time to add the little balls at the end. This is of course a matter of preference. If you don’t like balls at the end of your antenna, you can skip this step. To add them, select one of your pupils or spots using the Selection Tool, and make a copy using CTRL + C Paste two new black circles on the the screen using CTRL + V. Now drag the two new copies over the ends of the antenna. That’s all nothing more to see here.

Finally, The Legs …

Here is where leaving our original arc on the screens going to pay off. Select the original arc you drew on the screen, and make two more copies of it. You should remember how by now. If it looks like my original above, you won’t even have to make any changes to them. Drag the three arcs to one side of the body spacing them equal distance apart vertically. You may want the front legs to stick out further then the rear ones. Don’t worry if they cover your image. You just don’t want your legs to stick out the other side.

Now for the other side. Using the Selection Tool drag over all three of the newly positioned legs so that all three are selected. Now you want to use the Transform -> Reflect command to mirror those legs like we did the spots. Drag the mirrored legs to the opposite side of the body while holding the Shift key.

Now that our legs are in position, we need to hide the excess under the body. Select all six legs using the Selection Tool, and right click on the screen. Use the command Arrange -> Send to Back to send the legs to the bottom of the drawing order. Thus hiding them under the body so that we only see what is sticking out. It’s just that simple.

Depending on your drawing size you may want to change the stroke of your legs. Use the Stroke window to play around with different leg widths, and caps, till you find what style your looking for if your not happy with the basic legs. I’m just going to go with the default cap here, and increase the “Weight” to 3pt instead of the default 1pt.

A Little Style …

That’s it for the drawing portion of this tutorial. However, you could go one step further to really make your ladybug stand out. Use your Selection Tool and select the ladybugs shell, then go to the Gradient window. Under “Type” select “Radial”. Your shell will now become a radial gradient. I filled my shell with a mid to deep red as shown here. Use the Gradient Tool from the Tool Pallet to adjust the intensity, and amount of gradient you want. I won’t go into using the Gradient Tool here, because simply, I could write a whole tutorial on just using it. Play around with it, and you will understand it’s usage very quickly though.

Source: http://designermill.com/2008/07/10/adobe-illustrator-ladybug-tutorial-part-2/