Veerle's blog

It is weekend so the ideal time to have some extra fun in Illustrator and learn something along the way. I’ve talked about writing a tutorial for Vectortuts+ a few days ago. The article has now been published as part of the Graphic Design week that was going on.

The Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 packages have this interesting gradient style effect. It looks like a grid of swatches going from one color to another in subtle gradient effect. If you have ever wondered how you create this effect, then I invite you to take the jump and read on.

Pattern brushes in Illustration… Honestly? It’s something I hardly (read ‘never’) use. That’s just because I haven’t looked into this feature and now that I have I truly believe in its powers. Ever since I started writing Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials, I come to the conclusion that I know and use so little of certain features that can really save me a lot of time. When I’m writing these tutorials, I always take time to explore and experiment a lot to get to know and understand these features better and to see how far I can go. Sometimes, depending on which feature of course, I’m only scratching the surface. It’s good to question the different ways or techniques to accomplish the same result. Without further ado, here is my version of how you can use seamless Illustrator pattern brushes with outer corner tiles...

Today’s post is a brief one because the past week and the coming weeks are just so busy for me I can’t find the time to write a more extended article. Still, I hope some of you will find what I share is valuable.

Not sure if my title describes exactly what I’ll try to explain in this tutorial, but it in the center of the shape I see a flower and the outside reminds me of a diamond. I’m sure there are a few different ways to create such a shape. It’s all pretty simple really. The hard part is choosing the right colors, right transparency value and transparency mode because you need to experiment a lot to achieve the result you want.