Points & Paths

Create a Lucky Clover in Illustrator

2010-03-07T23:02:31Z

To help celebrate St. Patrick’s day and the luck of the Irish is a tutorial on how to create a clover, four-leafed or otherwise. Creating the clover involves using 3 circles and a bit of Pathfinder magic.

1. Draw the first circle
Create a new document using pixels or points as the unit of measurement. Set the fill box in the toolbar to None and leave the stroke black.

Next, select the Ellipse tool and click in an empty area of your document where you want to create the first circle. Enter the values shown below and click OK.

2. Create the remaining circles
Using the same technique from Step 1, create two more circles. One using the values on the left and the other using the values on the right.

The reason for the varying sizes of circles is to ward off symmetry and perfection. I like to have a little human touch in my work so changing things up with sizes and shapes helps. Here’s what you should have so far.

3. Positioning
To make life easier for this step, enable Smart Guides (View > Smart Guides). Next, use the Selection tool and hover the right side of one of the smallest circle until you see the “anchor” label appear.

Now your cursor is over an anchor point so click on it and drag it into the larger circle and line up the selected anchor point with the right anchor point on the larger circle. See the image below for guidance.

For the other circle, click on the left side anchor point and line it up with the larger circle’s left anchor point. The end result is shown below.

4. Make it pointy
Click and hold your cursor over the Pen tool in the toolbar until the flyout menu appear and select the Convert Anchor Point tool.

Click on the bottom anchor point of the large circle to change it from a smooth point to a corner point.

To make this point pointier, use the Direct Selection tool to select just this bottom point and then click and drag down while holding down the Shift key to keep things aligned.

5. Dividing then merge
Select all of the shapes and click the Divide command on the Pathfinder panel.

Ungroup the results (Object > Ungroup) and click an empty area of your document to deselect the shapes. Use the Selection tool to select the top shape amongst the now divided shapes and hit the Delete key on your keyboard. You should have something similar to what’s shown here.

Now select what remains and click the Unite command on the Pathfinder panel to merge all of the individual shapes into one. At this point, if it were Valentine’s Day, you could stop and you’ve got yourself a heart to work into a design. Alas, this isn’t the end result we’re looking for.

6. Color and arrange
Select the heart/clover shape and swap the stroke and fill boxes in the toolbar by holding down the Shift key and then hitting the X key. Choose a shade of green for the clover. I used the pre-made Foliage color palette (Window > Swatch Libraries > Nature > Foliage) to select from. After coloring, make 2 copies of the clover. If you want a 4-leaf closer, just make an extra copy.

Use the bounding box on a selected shape to rotate it so you end up with something similar to what’s shown here.

7. Add a stem
A clover’s not a clover until it has a stem. Set the fill box in the toolbar to none and use the color from your clovers as your stroke color. On the Stroke panel, set the weight value to 10.

Use the Pen tool to draw a simple curved path that starts in the center of the clovers and ends a little ways down from them. Here’s what I’ve got.

Raise a pint of good cheer as you’ve just made a lucky clover. But, why stop there? With the various tools and features in Illustrator, you can customize your clover beyond the basics as seen in the feature image for this tutorial.

Use different size circles in Steps 1 and 2 to vary the look of your clovers.
For more randomness, resize the clovers in one grouping and also vary the colors of the leaves on each clover as well.

Reports: Illustrator CS5 Available April 21 or 22

2010-03-06T21:55:41Z

According to various sources, none of them Adobe, Adobe Illustrator CS5 will ship in late April as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. According to a report on the CS5 web site, an advert for a digital printing conference in April reads “Adobe will unveil a brand new application as part of its signature suite of services. Be among the first to see why this is sure to surprise even the most ‘in the know’ Adobe fans”.

Traditionally, Adobe follows an 18-month release cycle for its products which puts April in their sites for a major release. This cycle has remained pretty consistent since I began using Illustrator about 10 years ago. So CS5 in April and CS6 in October 2011

As for new features, details remain very slim. There will be the usual interface tweaks to make all of the applications look and feel the same for consistency and familiarity. At a software demo last October, Adobe demonstrated better integration between Dreamweaver and Illustrator through a process called FXG which stands for Flash XML Graphics. Apparently, vector objects remain as vector objects within Dreamweaver rather than becoming rasterized. This could certainly make editing the original graphics a lot easier. More info on the demo can be found at the CS5 site.

Beyond those details, I can only speculate about new features. There were mutterings in the past about bringing the graphing and charting tools into the 21st century but, clearly, that’s not something that would get designers – or shareholders – excited. I’d certainly like to see a performance update to the 3D effects as they’re achingly slow to use. Also maybe a thoughtful way to combine all of the various color features? I’m looking at you Live Color, Color panel, Color Guide, and Swatches panel!

Well, that’s all of the gossip and rumor mongering I’m qualified to offer at this point. Perhaps someone out there can provide more insight in the comments or let everyone know what killer feature they’d like to see in CS5.

Easy Cartoon Clouds

2010-03-03T15:42:19Z

This tutorial will show you how to create custom cartoon-like clouds that feature soft shadows. This is a complete update to another tutorial on cartoon clouds that I had written for my previous site. This version is simpler and has a better end result so let’s get started.

1. Create a background
Since the clouds I’m creating are mostly white, I need to create a background that will contrast with them. To do this, I’ll choose a sky blue color from the Swatches panel and then create a rectangle that matches the dimensions of my document.

Since I won’t be interacting with this layer any further, I’ll lock it in the Layers panel.

2. Make the basics
In this step, I’ve created a new layer and on it I’ll create just two shapes with the Ellipse tool. The first shape is a perfectly round circle while the other is a little flatter. These two shapes will serve as the building blocks later for the clouds. Note that I’ve disabled the stroke on the shapes so that I’m only using a white fill.

To stay organized, I’ve labelled this new layer “Clouds” and the original layer “Sky”

3. Create shading shapes
To create the illusion of shading on the circles, follow along. Select both shapes and make a copy of them. Next, use the Edit > Paste in Front command to paste a copy directly over the originals. If you use the regular Paste command, your shapes will be out of alignment.

Keep the copies selected and move them up from the originals by tapping the Up arrow on your keyboard a few times. I hit this key about 10 times to get the result below.

At this point, click an empty area of your document to deselect the copies. Use the Selection tool to select the original perfect circle and its copy. Click once on the Minus Front command in the Pathfinder panel. Repeat this process for the flatter circles so that you end up with the result below.

Select both of these shading shapes and apply a blue fill to them. You can use the same blue as your background if you prefer. To soften the shapes, apply a Gaussian Blur effect (Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur) to them using the values shown.

4. The circles return
If you didn’t do any other fancy keyboard shortcut copying, cutting or pasting, you should still have a copy of the circles from Step 2 in the system’s memory. Use the Edit > Paste in Back command to make them appear.

Group the shading shape together with the circle below it (Object > Group) for each pair of circles. This makes moving a circle – along with its shading – much easier.

5. Bring in the clouds!
At this point, the hard part is over and the clouds will finally take shape. Use these two shapes as starter shapes to create your clouds. Make copies of the shapes, distort them a little with the bounding box handles if you prefer and stack them over one another. If the shading looks a little funny on some cloud parts, reposition using the Arrange commands (via the Object menu or by right-clicking a shape) or the Edit and Paste in Front/Back commands.

Here’s what I ended up with after a bit of copying and distorting. Notice that I’ve not only resized some of the original shapes but also rotated them around to get shading on different sides.

Points & Paths Launches

2010-03-01T09:27:53Z

The idea for Points & Paths came about 4 years ago which, in Internet time, is decades ago. My intention was to simply redesign my existing Illustrator tutorial site, ErgoDraw.com, but I let my ambitions get the better of me plus, having just been laid off from my job, I had plenty of time on my hands. I dove headlong into the design and development process.

Weeks passed with dozens of wireframes, designs and other web files to show for my work. At the same time, my confidence in finding a new job in Houston, where I lived at the time, was waning. It wasn’t long after that I packed up and moved halfway across the country to Seattle. I soon found a full-time employment once more. Suffice it to say, Points & Paths fell by the wayside as did updates to ErgoDraw.

When I did have time to work on the site again, I was always unsatisfied with what I had previously designed. Any designer that’s worked on stuff for themselves knows what that’s like. So I’d come up with something new and then get too busy with work to execute the idea. This has occurred off and on over the last 4 years. Somehow late last year, I found the time to finally get this thing off the ground and that’s what you see before you today.

I plan to update the site regularly with tutorials that range from the very basic to advanced. In addition, I’ll pass along news and resources relating to the world of Illustrator and all things vector. I hope you like what you see and if there’s something amiss or something you want to see, get in touch.

Desktop Wallpaper for March 2010

2010-03-01T09:27:40Z

Conveniently coinciding with the launch of Points & Paths is the beginning of a new month. To mark these events is some desktop wallpaper you can download and use on your computer. This is the first desktop wallpaper from Points & Paths in what will be an ongoing series. Come back at the beginning of each month to see what the new wallpaper is.

Preview the wallpaper and then choose your desktop dimensions.

1024 × 768
1280 × 800
1280 × 960
1280 × 1024
1440 × 900
1600 × 1200
1680 × 1050
1920 × 1200