Veerle's blog

Sometimes I think “what could I create next?”. Why not start with just 4 lines and 5 color swatches and see from there? Use the tools at hand and see where it ends up. Surprising results happen when you do. Here is where I ended up…

A reader showed me this image with the question if I knew how to create this masking grid effect on the photo of this album. My first reaction was “Oh Soulstice Mixed Illusions I totally love this album” :) This grid masking seems like an interesting technique to take a closer look at. I’m sure there are many ways to excecute this technique and you could do this both in Illustrator or Photoshop…

Sometimes when I create a pattern background in Illustrator I don’t end up with a Pattern Swatch. Instead, I create a Symbol of the repeating element and I create a whole background repeating this Symbol: duplicating 1, then 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on. It’s just not always that simple to create perfectly seamless patterns, especially with geometric forms. Today I’ll show you how to create a geometric pattern shape and fill a background with it using the method I just described.

Today I want to show you how you can create a spiral ornament in Illustrator and reuse this ornament throughout your artwork multiple times resized, rotated, mirrored, whatever… by turning it into a Symbol. I’ve talked about Symbols before and I showed you how to use the Symbol Sprayer Tool. This time I’ll focus a bit more on the creation of the ornament itself. Like always I’ll talk you through the entire process step by step. By explaining every little detail of each step, this tutorial should be a good exercise for the beginners among you. You’ll learn to use a lot of several tools along the way and you only use the Pen Tool a tiny little bit. Hope you enjoy and learn :)

Whenever I get a question from a user asking me “how did you draw this?”, I often have to answer that I’ve used the Pen tool. The Pen tool is probably the hardest tool to learn in Illustrator. It just takes time to master it fluently, but once you do, you have this freedom to create. Sometimes we can get a long way using only shape tools like the ellipse, polygon, rectangle or rounded rectangle. With a bit of creative thinking and some simple aligning in combination with Pathfinder’s powerful tools you might just achieve the perfect drawing in no time. Here is another Illustrator tutorial where I show you to draw a simple icon without the use of the Pen tool…