Stop. Request Time.

Natalie — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:22:14 +0000

Now that I have more time I’d like to be able to focus on contributing more to the knowledge base available for Adobe Illustrator on the world wide interweb tubes. If you have a tutorial request, or a simple question, let me know so I can start planning a series of posts on de-mystifying this fabulous piece of software.

You’ll notice to your left, a piece I created all in Illustrator for the TED696 competition. Basically, you get to dress up a brown paper bag (I’m all about brown craft paper at the moment actually) for Toohey’s Extra Dry. Dmote, Shepard Fairey and Luca have designed three bags to kick it off, and the first week’s entrants are now in the gallery. When my entry is up I’ll post about it again and implore you to vote for me every day! Mama wants a MacBook Pro!

In my design, I have included paisley motifs taken from my sketchbook and paintings and vectored them. I was always going to work on vectored paisleys but put it off because of the time involved and the complexity of some of the designs. Now I’ve started, it’s almost like an investment in the future because I’m going to build up a bank of paisley motifs that I can include in future designs (including patterns for Naked and Angry!) Some of the Illustrator techniques I used in this piece include custom designed patterns and borders as well as extensive use of the pathfinder pallette (dividing, merging and cropping).

Weaving Flourishes – An Illustrator Tutorial

Natalie — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:20:41 +0000

I’ve had my first request for a tutorial! It never occurred to me that people weren’t aware of how to get elements “weaving” in and out of other elements (like text) in Illustrator. So click through and check out my first tutorial on “Weaving Flourishes”.
1. Pop in some text. I’ve used Fontin Smallcaps in this instance, a wonderful free font by Jos Buivenga.

2. Outline your text.

3. Bring in some flourishes – here’s some I prepared earlier! Ensure all of the strokes and brushes on your flourishes are expanded.
4. Place the flourishes over your outlined text. Try to position them so that they will weave in and out of the letters – take your time with this.

5. Select the flourishes placed over your text and the text and hit Shift+Ctrl+F9 to bring up your Pathfinder palette.

6. Hit the Divide button .

7. Using the Direct Selection tool (keyboard shortcut: A) choose the parts of your text that you want to bring in front of the curls in the flourishes. Once you have selected an object, hit I for the Eyedropper tool and select the colour of the text that you want to sit over the flourish.

8. Continue doing this – use your own judgement in terms of what elements should be behind or in front of others.

9. Using the Direct Selection tool still, select the objects that make up each letter (holding down shift to make multiple selections). To group these objects back into the “letter”, go to your Pathfinder palette again and hit the Merge button .
10. Continue merging all adjacent blocks of the same shape and colour together.

11. Hit Ctrl+0 and marvel at what you’ve done!

definatalie.com » Tutorials

Stop. Request Time.

Weaving Flourishes – An Illustrator Tutorial