Illustrator Tutorials « The Singing Tree

Illustrator Tutorials

Colour my world happy

Monday, February 25th, 2013

Hello Happy Peeples!

Have had a busy weekend and am starting to think ‘garden’ again. Bought a big dark grey/black planter and a tin of cream Rustoleum…. made a stencil on the Pro… you can guess where this is going! Am just waiting for the paint to dry to peel off the stencil (just sticky vinyl) and the surrounding masking tape. IF it has turned out ok I will take a pic and show you. If it looks awful and has bled under the stencil I won’t! But I will turn the pot around (it’s square) and try again on a different side…

In the meantime, have been playing in Illustrator. The letterform above has been filled and stroked and coloured in to create a carnival effect and it’s very easy to do.

ILLUSTRATOR

1. Type a letter in the font of your choice

2. Using the Selection Tool, select it and then go to Type>Create Outlines

3. With it still selected, go to Object>Ungroup and repeat this action until the Ungroup option is greyed out, ie, all the grouped elements are free.

4. Then simply select individual elements and fill with colours and gradients to your heart’s content.

5. In the above case, the H, the outer stroke is one continous line with two ‘inner islands’ contained within. I selected and cut these three elements, created a new layer and pasted them (using CTRL F to paste in the exact position they were cut from). I then grouped the two inner bits.

Finally, I selected all three and used the Pathfinder>Subtract action to cut the inner bits from the outer shape. It looks exactly the same but created one continous shape that could then be filled with a pattern, solid colour, gradient etc.

I also selected the outline and went to Object>Path>Offset Path and entered -1 as the value to offset by. This gave me a second ‘outline’ just inside the outer to which I applied a different colour and stroke weight to. I repeated this again and gave it a third inner ‘outline’ and gave it a dotty stroke.

That’s all there is to it. Easy and quick, though it’s up to you how many colour variations and tiny bits there are to colour in but you can always speed things up by selecting bits (several bits if you hold down the Shift key while selecting) and then using the Colour Dropper tool to pick the fill and stroke colours from bits you’ve already done and apply them to your selected elements.

Hope you give it a try and enjoy.

Hel

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All you need is Love – make any font look ‘hand rendered’ in Illustrator

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

Isn’t the Scribble effect used above in Illustrator versatile and effective? I posted a couple of things about it last year: See the magic of Illustrator scribble and here: Security seal tutorial.

Today I’ll tell you how to turn a font into a hand-rendered effect font and how to fill selected elements within the font with colour or gradients. AND it is so easy to do.

1. Open a new document in Illustrator. The size is up to you.

2. Type in some text using any font you like. I can’t remember which font I used here – I think it may have been Circus or Cast Iron.

3. With your text selected, go to the Swatch palette and remove the fill and stroke.

4. With the text (now invisible!) still selected, go to: Window>Appearance and click the little group of horizontal lines on the right to display a drop-down menu. Select Add New Fill.

5. You’ll see a small block of colour – leave the default colour black, keep it selected and go to Effect>Stylize>Scribble and apply the following settings:

Angle: 45°
Path Overlap: 0 px
Variation: 2 px
Stroke Width: 1 px
Curviness: 0%
Variation: 50%
Spacing: 2 px
Spacing Variation: 1.5 px

Okay the settings. (You can vary them to see the difference they make. I originally came across them in a from Vectips and for convenience I am using the same ones here. Please feel free to play around to see what they do and pick the effect best suited to what you want to create).

6. Back to the Appearance Panel. Now Add New Stroke and give the text a 2 px stroke.

7. With the Stroke still selected go to Effect>Distort & Transform>Roughen and apply the settings below:

Size: 0.5%
Size, select the Relative check button
Set the Detail level to 30 Points: click on the Smooth checkbox

Click OK and the scribble effect is all done.

8. Now, using the Black arrow selection tool (V) go to Type>Create Outlines

9. With the text still selected (now displaying as outlined with many nodes) go to Object>Ungroup and keep repeating this until the option to Ungroup is greyed out.

10. Using the Selection Tool (V), select elements within your text and fill with any colour or gradient you like from your Swatches or Gradient palettes! It’s as easy as that and you can now create some punchy, great-looking text effects for all sorts of applications.

In addition, if you want to apply the Scribble effect to other fonts without having to keep going through this process, simply save your ‘scribble’ by opening a New Graphic Style in the Graphic Styles panel and giving it a name. This adds it to the Graphics Styles library. To use it again, create your new text and, with it selected, click on your named scribble effect from the Graphic Styles library.

Ta Dah!!!!!!!!

Thought I’d be generous and give you the above graphic (b & w) as a PS brush as a freebie for the new year. Simply register to subscribe:
Love Love Love Photoshop ABR Love Love Love PS brush

Tags: Hand-rendered fonts using Illustrator Scribble
Posted in Digi stuff, Illustrator Tutorials, Toots | No Comments »

A winter’s verse

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

Came across this lovely verse on the net and thought it would be nice to type out for card toppers or inserts:

Snowflakes

Snowflakes spill from heaven’s hand
Lovely and chaste like smooth white sand.
A veil of wonder laced in light
Falling gently on a winter’s night.
Graceful beauty raining down
Giving magic to the lifeless ground.
Each snowflake like a falling star
Smiling beauty that’s spun afar.
Till earth is dressed in a robe of white
Unspoken poem the hush of night.

by Linda A. Copp

Hope you like the art work. Created the graphic using Illustrator to produce the blended lines and Photoshop for the flowers (petals created in layers with varying degrees of opacity to give depth here and there).

Used a Bokeh effect background I made last year some time on one layer in PS.

The ‘Winter’s Wishes’ was a graphic I’d made earlier and used yesterday as the introduction to the post. It was placed into another new layer and the Blend Mode of that layer was set to 65% opacity. The Eraser was used to rub away bits of the graphic so as not to obscure the flower graphic beneath.

The ‘Winter’s Wishes with the snowflake’ was made in Illustrator from a snowflake I made a long time ago welded onto the two words (converted to ‘Outlines’ ) to make one, single editable graphic.

I also filled it in with black and pasted it into a new document in Photoshop and made an ABR from it there so I could use it as a brush in future. That’s how it was done. Nothing complex or difficult.

Anyway, must get on. Chilly here – what a cold and wet year it has been. Not long to Christmas so no time to be sitting around getting cold, things to do, make, clean, buy, wrap… so much to do and yet getting them done feels like knitting spaghetti or nailing jelly to the walls!

Have a good one!

Hel

Tags: Christmas verse
Posted in Christmas, General chitty chat, Graphics, Illustrator Tutorials | No Comments »

Make seamless patterns in Illustrator

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Okay – this title banner is not a seamless pattern! This is just something I put together for a little colour and prettiness on the blog. I like to play with graphics and never a day goes by that I’m not drawing, sketching or doodling – electronically or with good ol’ fashioned pencils and paper. This was a little design done in Illustrator just for colour – I can’t post without creating some graphic or other.

Now, if you really want to know how to make seamless patterns in Illustrator, register and download the pdf tutorial for free. I know that blog.spoongraphics.co.uk has a tutorial on making them too with lots of screen grabs and funky design instructions to go with it. Mine is slightly different and has no screen grabs. For me, mine works as a quick reference sheet and having it on my blog keeps my notes organised and easily searchable. So, if you know the principles and want a quick guide you’ll find mine useful but if you want the visuals as well check out the spoony one.

btw – the background on the pdf tutorial IS a seamless pattern. I made it this morning while writing the tutorial to check the instructions against!

Off to think about what to have for tea. Hope you’re having a good weekend.

Tags: illustrator, seamless patterns in illustrator
Posted in Free, Illustrator Tutorials, Toots | No Comments »

See the magic of Illustrator Scribble

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Can you tell I was blown away by the power of that simple Scribble effect in Illustrator that I found while following that tutorial I posted the other day?

This is how to do it. A solid black circle into a Guilloche swirl with one filter and three settings. It’s like magic.

If you want the PDF (Illustrator Scribble Effect PDF) here you go:

Illustrator Scribble Effect PDF

Free but you’ll need to subscribe.

Tags: graphics, illustrator, tutorial
Posted in Illustrator Tutorials, Toots | No Comments »

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