LETTERING + GRAPHIC
DESIGN LEARNING
One of the questions I’m asked most often about iPad lettering is how to use vectors with Procreate. The very short answer is: you can’t. But! There *are* some workarounds you can use if you’d like to either integrate your vectors within Procreate or vectorize your Procreate artwork later on. Everything you need to know about why that is and how to adjust is below!
Happy Tuesday! I’ve had a few requests to create flat-style illustrations, so this week we’re creating a flat iMac icon in Adobe Illustrator! If you’ve ever been unsure of how to get started with vector icons, or you’d like to practice your shape-based illustration skills, this tutorial is perfect for beginners. We’ll be utilizing the rounded rectangle, rectangle and ellipse shapes the most and keep things super simple throughout. Read on for the full tutorial and all of the color builds mentioned in the video!
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!
Hope you had a wonderful holiday! Since we’re just about to welcome the new year, this week I thought it would be fun to make a custom resolutions list in Adobe Illustrator! We’ll create it in a printable style, so you can reuse it every year, too. Grab your free holiday vector pack and create your own below!
Since Procreate’s latest update is less than a month old, it’s time for a new iPad lettering tutorial! If you checked out my iPad Lettering class from a couple versions earlier, you saw how fun it is to work with Procreate textures. One texture works wonderfully, but things can get a little trickier when you want to get other textures involved. In this week’s tutorial, I’m sharing one quick trick that makes introducing other textures super simple. In this tutorial, we’ll use a foil and watercolor texture, plus add a little holiday flair for good measure 🙂 Read on to see how!
Happy December! Now that the holiday season is in full swing, I wanted to offer up a fun hand lettering technique for your (any time of the year) stationery, too! This ombre embossing effect is SO eye catching *and* I have a technique that avoids mixing your embossing powders together. Using this technique, you’re able to maximize the life of your powder purchases and create beautiful outcomes, too. Plus, look at the colors on black! I love the vibrancy and contrast embossing straight onto black produces. Swoon. Read on to see it all!
I really hope you’ve been enjoying these holiday Adobe Illustrator tutorials! They’ve been extra fun for me to share, and today’s video is no different. In this tutorial, we’ll create seamless pattern wreaths, once again utilizing the free holiday vector pack. These are really impressive looking and so, so easy to create! In the video, I walk you through the one thing to keep in mind when you make yours and then show how easy they are to use! Read on to see the full video!
Get ready to add some extra beauty to your gifts this year with some custom designed holiday gift tags in Adobe Illustrator! Creating stationery items in Illustrator is honestly one of my favorite parts of graphic design. This week, keeping with the holiday theme, we’ll utilize the free holiday vector pack once again. Grab that vector pack, Adobe Illustrator and about 10 minutes and you’ll have your new gift tags ready for print. Read on to see how!
Piggybacking off of last week’s tutorial, this week we’re creating a holiday postcard in Adobe Illustrator! We’ll be using the free vectors from the holiday vector pack, so be sure to grab those if you haven’t already. Today is extra exciting, because I just released my newest font Espresso Roast, which we’ll be using, as well. It’s a font trio, so you get an all caps version, a script version and a symbols font. It’s full of fun personality and was designed so all styles pair perfectly together 🙂 Read on to see how to create a complex wreath design quickly using a few easy tips!
Welcome to the first holiday tutorial of the season! To kick things off, I thought it would be fun to create custom holiday gift wrap in Adobe Illustrator. Since gift wrap is essentially a repeating pattern, we’ll be walking through all of the steps of a seamless pattern using the pattern tool. Be sure to pick up last week’s free holiday vectors to follow along exactly! This pattern tutorial is a little different; not only will we create a seamless swatch, I’ll also share how to apply any background color to your pattern quickly (without re-entering the pattern tool)! Once our pattern is complete, we’ll export it and use an online service to upload and customize our gift wrap. By the end of the video, you’ll have everything you need to create your pattern and also get your custom holiday gift wrap printed for real! Everything you need included below!
Last week, we created a realistic foil stamp effect using only illustrator and a seamless foil texture. This week, we’re borrowing some of the same tips, but simplifying. If you don’t have a texture on hand, but still want to add an element of cool, a letterpress effect is a great option. The letterpress effect simulates the impression a polymer plate makes on paper when it’s pressed into it. Letterpress has become increasingly popular over the last 5 years, but fun fact: letterpressing was never meant to be a final print effect. Letterpressing first began as a ‘test’ print before metal plates were developed which create stronger, deeper (and more expensive) impressions. In this week’s tutorial, adjust the settings for however strong of an impression you’d like as we create a letterpress effect entirely in Illustrator.
This past January, we created a foil stamp effect in Photoshop, and I’ve recently had a few requests on how to accomplish the same look in Illustrator. With the holidays fast approaching, now you’ll have plenty of time to use it in Illustrator, too! Not only can this look be applied to typography like in the example, but you can also export it as a graphic style. Exporting graphic styles allows the foil stamp effect in Illustrator to be applied to any vector element, as well. Pretty powerful stuff. At the end of the video, I share how to export those graphic styles to use them in new documents or share them with others. Read on to see it all!
We use cookies to customize and create content that’s most important to you. We’ll never share the info we collect.
