LETTERING + GRAPHIC
DESIGN LEARNING
One of Spring’s first cues here in the south are moths flying around porch lights in the evenings. This sent me down a rabbit hole of ideas and searching through pages of moth photography 😂There are just.soooo.many! And many beautiful ones I had never seen before. Instead of just illustrating a moth, this week, we’re adding a little doodle magic and lots of fun, gritty texture. ✨
It’s almost Valentine’s Day! If you’re creating your own valentines this year or have ever needed a heart shape in the past, then you know it’s not a default shape that comes with Illustrator. It can also be a little tricky to figure out using the default shapes as ‘shape builders.’ In this week’s tutorial, I share my favorite 3 (quick) ways to create a heart shape in Illustrator. Read on to see them all!
Happy New Year! To celebrate, I thought we could create some wintery geometric snowflakes in Adobe Illustrator this week! We’re definitely starting to feel the chill of winter here in Georgia. The main reason for my move from upstate NY to Georgia in my early twenties was specifically to avoid the harsh winters. I’ll take being too warm over being too cold any day. Regardless, snowflakes *do* make being that cold worth it. If you saw this tutorial awhile back, we’re applying similar techniques, but creating something completely different with them 🙂 Read on to see it all!
On Tuesday, we walked step by step, creating our own hipster-style clothing tag vector shapes and designs from scratch in Illustrator. Knowing which shape you’d like your tag to be when you begin informs all of the design decisions you make afterwards. The cool thing about tags is that there are soooo many options when it comes to shapes! I’ve found having a few ideas in mind of which shape I’d like helps me to sketch out a bunch of ideas quickly, which makes my final shape decision a confident one.
This week’s tutorial comes courtesy of Kori, who requested an overview of the Illustrator Pathfinder Palette and I thought it was a great idea! The pathfinder palette is a ridiculous time saver when it comes to creating custom lettering, flourish designs, and vector-based Illustrations just to name a few. In this week’s video, we go over my favorite and most used pathfinder options. We’ll also go through a brief overview of the other options for you to get started. As a bonus, I’ve created a couple of Illustrator pathfinder palette cheat sheets (pdfs), so you have them handy whenever you may need them in the future. Download link to the cheat sheets and full overview video all below!
Last week, I was asked by a designer how to repeat a shape along a circular path. It had to be an exact number of shapes and the shapes needed to be evenly spaced. I received an email from Kimberly a few days later asking how to replicate a badge she came across that also used repeated shapes along a circular path (this one was made out of skinny rectangles). Serendipity? Coincidence? Either way, we’re solving this question in today’s quick tip tutorial!
In this week’s tutorial, we’ll create our own hipster-style vector badge in illustrator, perfect for branding all that you do as a sticker or website badge! We’ll create the badge from scratch in illustrator using basic shapes and our pathfinder tool. Let’s get started!
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