Creating Flowers using Illustrator CS3 - CS5

Transcription

1 Creating Flowers using Illustrator CS3 - CS5 In this lesson you'll learn how to use the scale and copy to create flower shapes. Creating Gradients for fill color and use the Roughen filter, Twist, Zig Zag, Pucker and bloat filter to create other types of flower, stem and leaf (plant) shapes. To start this lesson go to File > New (use following example below to setup your document settings) Next select the Ellipse Tool and create a circle use shift + lift click and drag to create a nice round circle, make the circle 3-4 inches across. Note: No Fill only stroke should be used to create the circle. Now select the Circle Layer in the Layers Panel and drag it to the New Layer icon to make a copy of the circle layer. Now select just one of the circles - go to Filter > Distort > Roughen (select setting below) Select the second circle and repeat the Roughen filter process with the above settings.

2 Now select both circles, then select the Scale Tool by double left clicking on the Scale Tool. This will open the Scale dialog > choose Uniform > 85% > Copy. This will create exact copies but 85% smaller than the original to shapes. Continue selecting the last two circle shapes created from the Scaling and Copying until you have something like the example below. Note: If you want to create a space with the last two circle shapes I set the scale to 65%. Now we need to switch it from stroke to Fill. To do this select the whole flower, then go to the the Tool Panel and select the Fill Color swatch and use the same color of the Stroke for the Fill color. Then change the Stroke color to none. Not very interesting, after all that work and you can' t see anything inside of the flower. To change that we need to add a Gradient to the flower. Make sure the complete flower is still selected and open the Gradient Panel if you can't find it go to Window > Gradient. Use the settings below.

3 If you haven't used the Gradient Panel before you going to have to click on the color stops in the Gradient Panel to change the color of the gradient with each stop going back and forth from the Gradient Panel to the Color Panel. Let's work on a new flower shape. Go to the Layers Panel and select the First flower layer and left click and drag it to the New Layer Icon to create a copy of the first flower. Call the new layer "spike flower." Select the Spike flower then go to Filter > Distort > Pucker & Bloat. Play with the slider bar and see what you can create. If you're in the experimental mode you can select the spike flower and then the Scale Tool and add more layers to the flower if you wish.

4 To create more flowers copy the First Flower layer and use the copy layer and rename it and move the flower so it's not on top of the other flower. Then select the copied flower go to Filter > Distort and try the different Filters to create different types of flowers. Make at least 12 flowers in this project and then next we'll start working on leaves and stems. Stems and leaves To create a basic stem select the Rectangle Tool and a fill color of green, no stroke Draw a long skinny rectangle to start the stem, later you can go back with the Direct Selection reshape the stem as needed. Tool and Now let's create some leaves using the Pen Tool. If you would like some texture on the leaves use the Roughen Filter to create it.

5 When finishing the coloring some times like in a leaf you may have to change the Angle such as I did below to 45 setting to get the correct effect. Without the Angle change the yellow would be on the tip of the plant and wouldn't look right. So now all that's left is to be creative. Make a natural looking landscape of at least 12 flowers for this project. Have fun with this one and don't forget to go home.