Veerle's blog

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.

In my previous Illustrator tutorial I showed you how you can create a diamond flower using different transparency modes. With this tutorial we’ll stay within the same area of spirographs. Today’s article is completely inspired by Mr. Spirograph himself Andy Gilmore. His work is stunning and very inspirational. He does magic starting from simple shapes and ends up with a remarkable complex composition. I e-mailed Andy to ask permission if I could write a tutorial on one of his creations. Andy replied that it is always interesting to see the many ways that an image can be built. Let’s get started.

In my previous article I talked about how you can apply a line pattern effect on text in Illustrator where I showed 3 different techniques. The last technique bugged me because it wasn’t a really ideal one. It involved a lot of tweaking. In the comments Jesse and Amanda suggested an interesting approach definitely interesting enough to investigate and try out…

One of the things I’ve seen around quite a bit lately is a transparent rainbow gradient effect on a dark background. It seems to me that flashy transparent gradients are in these days. They make me think about magic. Today I’ll show you how you can create a magical rainbow color flame. OK, maybe I’m using too many words in a row here, but it’s the best I can do to describe this.