Veerle's blog

One of the ways to create nice color combinations is to extract colors from a photo. It’s one of the methods I described in my article Choosing color combinations from a while ago. Adobe® added this feature in the new version of Kuler, an online Flash application from Adobe Labs®. Kuler let’s you create your own color combinations from an interactive color wheel. In this article I will share some of my experience on how I compose color themes in Kuler together with some tips on how to compose your own color combinations.

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…

Are you in the mood for some Action? I’m talking Photoshop Actions :) They are the perfect solution to handle tasks with one click. An Action is a recording of several Photoshop operations and commands. Once the Action is created, one click is all it takes and the task will be excecuted. It’s very powerful, can save you heaps of time and it’s actually not that hard to create. Oh and before someone asks, this tutorial is written for version CS3. Certain things might be different in previous Photoshop versions.

Ever wondered how to create those popular, but elegant tapered lines? Or just simple lines that go from very thin to tick and back to thin? If you create an Art Brush for this, you’ve really done half the job already. So the good news is, it’s easy and it’s fast.

One of the frequest questions I get from readers is how you create seamless patterns in Illustrator. Today I’ll explain how I create such patterns and how you can scale and rotate them using different settings in the Scale tool options.