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HomePosts Tagged "illustrator" (Page 7)

illustrator Tag

Hand Drawn, Illustration, Illustrator, Patterns, Tutorials

Seamless patterns in Illustrator have been on my tutorial list for a while, so I’m very excited for this week! There’s something about the anticipation right before you test your pattern that I love. The total surprise when you see this pretty little square you made repeated a dozen times – suddenly the little square looks the same, but entirely new. And then go ahead and imagine it on your favorite throw pillow, mug, notebook, mousepad, comforter, wallpaper..it’s a great moment for a designer, even if they’re just daydreams 😉 My goal is to bring you one step closer to those daydreams this week with a method you can use to create seamless, repeatable patterns no matter which version of Illustrator you have. We’ll take a square with elements from the 100+ Vector Leaves and Flourishes pack and go step by step to achieve a fully usable pattern at the end – color palette included. Let’s go!

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Illustration, Illustrator, Tutorials

After the Lovebird and Watercolor Popsicles tutorials, I had a few requests to create more illustration-based tuts (if this is something you’d like to see more of, please let me know!). Last week, Tamara made a request for a donut tutorial which I thought would be fun, plus it incorporates quite a few useful techniques I find myself using all the time. So! Even if you don’t have an appetite for some digital donuts, I promise you’ll walk away with something you’ll use many times in the future. In this tutorial, we’ll create 2 different versions of typical donuts in Illustrator utilizing the blob brush, scatter brush, paint streak textures and clipping masks. Let’s get started!

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Branding, Business, Personal, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial comes courtesy of Jodie who asked a great DIY question I think will help a lot of people. Personal business card printing can get pricey pretty quickly if you’re looking for anything better than a paper thin glossy card (ick). I’ve DIY’d every personal business card I’ve ever made. Yup. And you know what? Even fancy shmancy design studios loved em. So say you’ve designed up a killer card design in Illustrator and don’t want to be wasteful with your paper. Say you also have a back of the card designed that you need to match up to the front when you print on your home printer. What’s the best way to make the most of your paper and have things work out perfectly front to back? In this week’s tutorial, I share how to bulk print DIY business cards using Illustrator to print 8 cards, front and back using one sheet of 8.5″x11″ paper. You can also use the same method in InDesign if you’d prefer using that instead. Let’s go!

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Freebies, Resources, Textures, vector

Have you ever run into a situation where you know adding a little – just a little bit – of subtle texture could take something you’ve done to the next level? This happens to me allll the time, which is why this week I want to give away a couple of vector mini grit textures. Each texture’s grittiness is on the smaller/finer side to work perfectly with more detailed artwork. And because they’re vector, no matter what you use em on, they’ll never lose resolution and can infinitely scale for any size you need them. Check out a few ways you can use them below!

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Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial is brought to you by Whitney + Monica who both emailed asking how to vectorize hand drawn doodles so they would have reuseable, and infinitely rescalable vectors. You’ve probably seen vector artwork around a lot lately – I just released a pack of vectors a few weeks ago and gave 5 of them away for free. In this tutorial, using that vector pack as an example, I share how I took those hand drawn elements from a doodle on a sheet of copy paper to a crisp vector that can be used over and over again on any application. Do you remember the how to vectorize hand lettering tutorial? If you’ve practiced that at all, you’ll be in great shape with converting doodles 🙂 In this video, we’ll go over 3 different methods of cleaning up your doodles, so whether you’re a beginner or advanced Illustrator user, there’s an option that will work for you. Let’s get started!

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Branding, Color, Illustrator, Products, Tutorials

If you took my Watercolor Branding Skillshare class, you learned how to digitize watercolor textures – from scanning them in, to color adjustments, to removing the background correctly so they could be placed on anything. When a watercolor texture is scanned in, you’re limited by the greatest size and resolution your scanner is able to scan at. For large applications (think billboards, signage, posters), if a professional scanner wasn’t used, resolution is likely too small for the texture to reproduce as crisply as you might wish. Enter vectorized textures. Since vectors (which are point based instead of pixel based) can be rescaled infinitely without losing quality, they make a great alternative to finding a high res scanner and going through the process of color editing + removing the background again. Watercolor textures are super detailed, so finding a happy medium with file size and a similar outcome to the raster (pixel) based image is key when vectorizing. In this tutorial, I share my exact method on how to vectorize watercolor textures using two different textures. We’ll go over what to look for when you vectorize your own.

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Freebies, Illustrator, Patterns

I was going to say a few months ago, but I just checked, and last year (holy moly), I shared some geometric photoshop patterns. They’ve been downloaded almost 20,000(!!!) times, so I thought it might be time for some Illustrator ones! This week’s freebie is a set of 4 geometric Illustrator pattern swatches to use on whatever you please 🙂 I’m also sharing some quick tips + tricks on using them you may not have heard before – read on to see!

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Business, Tutorials

A few weeks ago, Kori emailed me asking how to create an editable pdf file. If you’ve ever browsed the template files on Etsy, chances are you’ve come across files for sale that come as editable pdfs. This is cool because you can offer a design file to someone who doesn’t have the programs and they can still work with and edit them to some degree. This is also useful to know if you ever need to send a client any kind of form you’d like them to fill out and send back – same rules apply – which eliminates unnecessary printing steps for the client. In this tutorial, I’ll share how easy it really is to create your own editable pdf. We’ll take a design created in Illustrator and transform it into that editable pdf using Adobe Acrobat. If you don’t have Acrobat (it’s the professional version of Adobe Reader) you can try it out for free for 30 days here. Let’s get started!

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Color, Illustrator, Tutorials, Typography

Happy Tuesday! This week’s tutorial comes courtesy of Kamron’s request on how to replicate a line gradient typography effect, like this one. While you could create this effect in a similar way as this retro type effect tutorial in Photoshop, the blend tool in Illustrator performs the effect quicker (in my opinion), AND you end up with vectors that can scale infinitely without losing resolution. Win, win 🙂 This is one of the quicker type effects we’ve created, making it the perfect solution when you need a nice type effect in a pinch!

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Hand Drawn, Photography, Tutorials, Typography

Have a photograph you love and wonder how to make it into an art print you could gift or sell? In this week’s tutorial (brought to you courtesy of Yasmin’s suggestion!), we’ll create an art print based on a photograph by taking a photo of an object and recreating portions of it in Illustrator. We’ll add some watercolor texture and even a nice quote using a beautiful brush script font. This is a quick way to practice your Illustrator skills and create something personal you could gift or sell at the same time! Start by picking out a photo of an object or use the same one as I am (link below) and let’s go!

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Branding, Freebies, Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Tutorials

We may not be fashion designers, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for graphic designers with apparel design. At some point in time, the majority of graphic designers have to mock up some kind of apparel to get quoted and executed by a manufacturer. It’s no surprise why – as branding experts, we need to be able to carry a brand through a variety of applications, and especially at events, apparel is key.

I’m currently working on some clothing designs for a company that will be at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics. They’re in the process of finding a manufacturer for their clothing and had asked for mockups to present to potential manufacturers to get accurate quotes. They sent a few pictures of styles of clothing they were interested in, all at different sizes and resolutions. To keep the focus on the design of the clothing and keep everything similar, I redrew the clothing in Illustrator, then implemented the vector graphics on top.  Having redrawn it in illustrator, all the clothing was kept consistent look-wise and the manufacturers were quickly able to see which panels would be printed with design or kept the base color. In this week’s tutorial, I’ll share my exact process for executing a vector t-shirt mockup and also give away 2 free vector t-shirt mockup files!

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