Graffititools:Designing tips n tools, tutorials, tricks

Not sure if my title describes exactly what I’ll try to explain in this tutorial, but it in the center of the shape I see a flower and the outside reminds me of a diamond. I’m sure there are a few different ways to create such a shape. It’s all pretty simple really. The hard part is choosing the right colors, right transparency value and transparency mode because you need to experiment a lot to achieve the result you want.

Draw a circle

Start by drawing a circle. Select the Ellipse Tool (L) and hold down the Shift key while dragging.

Fill the circle with a color to your liking. My suggestion here is either to use a dark color and tone it back by adjusting the transparency, or you can choose a light color. Change the Transparency mode to Color Burn in the transparency palette (Window > Transparency).

Make sure rulers are visible. If they’re not visible, hit cmd/ctrl + R. Drag a horizontal and vertical guide as shown in the image above. To make the guide snap to the points of the circle, turn on Snap to Point: View > Snap to Point. It’s also suggested to turn on Smart Guides: View > Smart Guides. To switch them on and off use cmd/ctrl + U.

Select the Selection Tool (V) and select the circle in the middle of the bottom right path segment. Now drag the circle 45° downwards until your pointer curser reaches the intersection point of the guides as shown in the image above. Use the Shift key while dragging the circle.

Rotate and duplicate circle

Select the Rotate Tool (R), hold down the Option/Alt key and click exactly on the guides’ intersection point. Enter a value of 90 as degrees and click the copy button.

With the 2nd circle selected, hit cmd/ctrl + D twice to repeat the exact transformation. You should end up with a shape of 4 circles as shown in the image below.

Go to the Layers palette, select the layer with the circles and drag it onto the Create New Layer icon to duplicate this layer.

Duplicate and rotate circles

Lock your original layer, by clicking the empty square next to the eye icon in the Layers palette (see image below).

Select all circles of the duplicated layer and select the Rotate Tool (R), hold down the Option/Alt key and click exactly on the guides’ intersection point again. Now enter a value of 45 as degrees and click the OK button.

Adjust colors and transparency mode

With the circles still selected, choose another color fill for the circles and choose Overlay as Transparency mode.

Duplicate layers

Unlock the original layer. Select both layers and drag them onto the Create New Layer icon to duplicate them. Lock the 2 original layers.

Rotate duplicated layers

Makes sure all circles of both new created layers are selected. Select the Rotate Tool (R) hold down the Option/Alt key and click exactly on the guides’ intersection point again. Enter a value of 22.5 (or for some of you 22,5) as degrees and click the OK button.

I always check the Preview option to view the result upfront.

Final result

The final result should look similar to the image on the left. Though it all depends on the colors, transparency modes and transparency values you’ve chosen along the way. Chances are the result of the color combination is not to your satisfaction.

You can adjust the colors, transparency value and mode where needed adjusting circle by circle.

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can quickly make a stylized Christmas tree in Illustrator, you can decorate it as the way you like & maybe you can use it as a Christmas card to send it to your friends & beloved!

So lets begin:

Step 1:
Open a new document, the size of my document is 1200 by 1200 pixels, CMYK mode. With the Rectangle Tool(M) make a square of about 1100 by 1100pixels or any size that you prefer. Fill it with a gradient of your choice, here I have filled it with green colored linear gradient, for the first slider I used, C-100 M-24 Y-100 K-9. For second slider, C-55.67 M-0 Y-74.22 K-0. Third slider is same as first.The stroke color is white.


Step 2
Now, select the Star Tool & while you’re still dragging it keep the mouse button still pressed, hold down the Down Arrow in your keyboard to get a triangular shape. Fill it with white color or any color of your choice, keep the stroke color to none.

With the Selection Tool (V), drag the bottom of your triangle to make it longer, you can also increase its width the same way. Look at the image below to get the idea.

Step 3
Next, select the triangle shape that we made in above step & go to Effect>Stylize>Scribble. With the Scribble dialogue box open change the settings/parameters as shown in the image below. Or you may play a bit to have things as you like.

You should have something that looks like this:

Step 4
Now, if you’re happy with the scribble effect that we did in the step above, go to Object>Expand Appearance.

Step 5
Now the next few steps are pretty easy. Duplicate the above scribbled shape, (we will call it tree) 3 times, for duplicating, just select the scribbled tree & go to Edit>Copy and then Edit>Paste in Front, repeat it 2 more time. In all we should have 4 scribbled tree. Look at my Layer Palette to get the idea.

Step 6
Select the tree 1 or for that matter any one of the scribbled tree that we copied & pasted in Step 5. You can also select a tree via Layer Palette, for that you just have to click on the lil black circle on the right side. Once you have selected a tree, select Brush Tool (B) and from the Brush Palette, click on the brush names “Pencil Thin” which is one of the default brush in Illustrator. I also changed the color of the stoke to yellow viz. C-0 M-0 Y-25 K-0 to match my background which is green.

Step 7
Now select the tree 2 as mentioned in step 6 & drag it a bit down with Selection Tool (V). Apply the same brush & color as we did in step 6. Then, go to Effect>Gaussian Blur and give it a radius of 6.6 or any that suits the image you’re making.
Now your image should look like this:

Step 8

Now again select tree 3 in the same manner as in step 6 and then select the Brush Tool (B) and stroke it with a star brush, to find the star brush, open your Brush Palette and click on the lil triangle type shape on the right side and then Open Brush Library>Decorative>Decorative_Scatter there you will find a brush named, “Tiny Stars”.

Now your image should look like this:

Step 9
Finally, make a very tiny little circle with the Ellipse Tool (L) having a fill of white & no stroke & drag it inside your Brush Palette to convert it into a brush. In the next dialogue box click on “New Scatter Brush” radio button. After that in a following dialogue box set the parameters as shown in the image below:

And then select the tree 4 which we have duplicated in step 5 and stroke it with the brush that we made as shown above.
Now my tree looks like this:

Step 10
Now we just need to decorate the background and other stuffs of illustration that we made above, which I am pretty sure you can make it far more beautiful then I have.It is more important to learn the technique and I hope you learned something from the above tutorial.

Anyways,here is my final illustration, my image was too big so I had to downsize it considerably for the easy pageloads and thats why you cannot see the details completely here. I decorated it with a snowflake brush, for the border I stroked it with the brush we made in step 9.