Illustrator Tutorials

How to Use Adobe Illustrator to Change the Colors and Alter an EPS Illustration

May 11, 2011 3 Comments

Part 1: Change Colors and Gradients

Part 2: Alter your Illustration

Filed Under: Adobe Illustrator, Advanced Tutorials, Custom Illustration, Easy, Easy Tutorials, EPS Illustration, Illustrations, Illustrator Tutorials, Intermediate Tutorials, Tutorials, Vector

Adobe Illustrator Tip: Easy way to find a Complementary Color

March 22, 2011 3 Comments

When I am designing, sometimes I have a hard time thinking outside of the box when it comes to color… It is easy to pick a color, but it gets harder to build on to that with complementing colors. I wanted to post this tip, because it is a super easy way to come up with a color scheme with little effort. Step 1: Select the object that you want to change colors. Step 2: Select Your Eyedropper Tool Step 3: Withe the eyedropper tool, click on the color that you want to complement. Step 4: Click on the Menu Bar, on your "color" palette, and click on "invert". Now you will see the color that it picked. Step 5: Now if you don't like that color, or if you want to try another one, go back to your original color and do the same thing, except, select "complement" instead. I liked this color for my background :)

Filed Under: Adobe Illustrator, Advanced Tutorials, Background, Blog Design Ideas, Blog Tips, Color, Creative, Design Tips, Easy, Easy Tutorials, EPS Illustration, Illustrations, Illustrator Tutorials, Tutorials

The Easy Way to Make a Seamless Pattern in Adobe Illustrator and Install it in Blogger.

December 2, 2010 2 Comments

I used to make all of my blog backgrounds about 1600px X 1000px, which is all good…. but I hated it when I would look at my designs on my dad’s 30in monitor and I would see all that nasty white space on the sides of my beautiful designs.

Hopefully with this simple tutorial, I can get you hooked on seamless patterns as backgrounds. Not only are they simple to make, and oh so lovely, the go on forever and ever, no nasty white space. Oh, and don’t let me forget, they are smaller in file size, therefore, they will show up quicker when you are loading your page.

So on to the tutorial! This is going to be the first of 2 tutorials, and this one is the UBER EASY way to do it. We are going to take a dingbat font (this is “Davys” that I found at fontsquirrel.com) and make that into our seamless pattern.

First, go to Type and Glyphs.

Then find your font, and find a dingbat that you like, for the way that we are going to make this seamless pattern, a semi square font usually works the best, but just experiment with it :) This is the one I chose:

Now go ahead and change your font to Outlines, by doing a Right-Click and Create Outlines.

Now I need to make a box with my Rectangle Tool. When you drag your mouse to make the box, if you hold the Shift key, it will stay exactly square. My box has no Stroke or Fill Color.

Then you need go Window and Align, to get your Align box.

Now select both your box, and your Dingbat and click on the Horizontal Align Center. That will Align your box and your dingbat exactly center.

Then you need to click on the Vertical Align Center. That will make it all centered now. Now if you need to resize your box any (it should be slightly larger than your dingbat, as shown below), then use the corner to size while you hold down the SHIFT and ALT. That will keep your box centered on the dingbat.

Now, select both the box and the Dingbat, and Drag it onto your Swatches Palette. Then it will show up like this:

Now, make a box, and use the new swatch you make to preview your seamless pattern.

Now of course I CAN’T just leave this black and white, so I am going to go back to the box and the dingbat that I made, and change the box pink, and the dingbat a darker pink, then just drag it on to the Swatches Palette, just like I did before, and Voila! Now it is cuter :)

Now if you want to use this as a blog background…. You need to save it like this:

First you are going to go back to the box and the dingbat that you dragged on to your layer palette, and you are going to find out what size your box is, by clicking on it, and using your Info palette. (if you don’t know where your info palette is, go to Window, and Info).

Mine is 156px X 156px, so I am going to make a new document that is just that, 156 X 156. Then I am going to copy and paste it onto the new document and put it exactly centered, like so:

Then, just to make sure that I don’t have any sliver of white around my box, I am going to take just the pink box that is behind the dingbat, and I am going to size it up, by holding the corner and holding shift and alt. Then it will look like this on your document:

Now I am going to do a File, Save for Web, and save it as a PNG.

Now just upload it to Photobucket and go to your “Edit Html” page in blogger. Paste this code where I have shown below:

background:url(your “direct link” code here) ;

Now you have a nice seamless pattern background, and NO nasty white space, even on a 30 inch monitor :)

Filed Under: Advanced Tutorials, Background, Creative, Custom Blog Design, Custom Blog Design Tutorial, Easy, Easy Tutorials, Illustrator Tutorials, Intermediate Tutorials, Minima, Seamless Patterns, Tutorials

Making a Post Signature in Adobe Illustrator

November 30, 2010 3 Comments

I wanted to start this week off with a simple tutorial, so we are making a Custom Signature. The fun thing about this tutorial, is that I am going to show you how to alter your font and so that your Signature can be even more personalized than just a cute font alone. I am using Illustrator CS5, but you can use any version that you have (nothing in this tutorial requires CS5).

First I am going to make a new document. I am sizing mine at 100px high by 175px wide.

Now, I have used the Type tool to type my name.

Next you need to find a cute font. I have used “Pea Anna-Banana” from KevinandAmanda.com LOVE her site!

So I love this font, but not thrilled about the way it lays out when just typed straight across. So what I am going to do, is right click and select “Create Outlines“. **What “Create Outlines” does, is to change type to a Vector Object.

Now, right click again, and select “Ungroup”

Now you can see that you can select, size, rotate, each individual letters.

So as I started moving letters around, I decided that I would like to make my “L” taller, rather than just sizing it with my “Selection Tool” (the black arrow), I am going to use my “Direct Selection Tool” (the white arrow). The “Direct Selection Tool” gives you a lot more control over objects. So I am going to only select the top 2 anchor points of the “L” and drag it up. I also used that same tool to adjust the “Y”, I made the bottom part of the “Y” a little longer.

Now that I have it laid out the way I like it. I am going to fix the “C”, because I made it larger, it is to thick now. So I am going to select the “C” and put a white stroke on it.

Your stroke will automatically go to 1pt, and that isn’t exactly where I want it, so I am going to adjust it on my stroke panel.

0.75pt was still a little thick, so I manually typed in 0.6pt was just right.

I like to add little embellishments to my signatures, so I am going to go to my top menu bar and select “Type” and “Glyphs“.

I found a cute butterfly that I liked, from the font “Pea Stacy’s New Doodles”, also from KevinandAmanda.com. She has quite a few cute doodle fonts that are fun.

I wanted the butterfly to go the other way, so I right clicked, and selected “Transform“, and “Reflect“.

Select “Vertical“.

All that is left is to add color, but I want to add more than one color to the butterfly, so what I am going to do is do a right click, “Create Outlines“, and then right click “Ungroup“, and then right click and “Release Compound Path“.

Now you can select each part of the butterfly, and change the colors :)

And there you have it!

The last thing you need to do, is do a File, Save for Web, and save it as a PNG.

Now if you need to know how to Install your Signature, CLICK HERE.

Filed Under: Adobe Illustrator, Advanced Tutorials, Custom Blog Design, Custom Blog Design Tutorial, DIY, Illustrator Tutorials, Tutorials, Typography

Tutorial: How to make a custom designed background that can change colors easily.

September 30, 2010 1 Comment

I don’t know if any of you run into this with your clients, but occasionally I will get a client that wants the flexibility to change the color of their background, but they don’t want the background to be a plain color. I thought that I would share my little trick to make this work. I hope you can use it in your designs :)

Step #1: Make or use a background or a seamless pattern for your background. The key is that you need to take your background and make it white, with a transparent background. I made this simple dot pattern in Adobe Illustrator (it works the same in Photoshop if you choose to use that).

Step #2: Then I made the dots white with no background (it is very important that there is no background). After I made the dots white, I changed the opacity of the dots to 40%, you don’t need to necessarily use 40%, just whatever you like, depending on how much contrast you want.

Step #3: Save the background or pattern for web as a PNG with transparency selected, as shown below.

Step #4: Upload you background image to Photobucket, or whatever hosting site you use and go into your Edit HTML page. Add your background image, but do not delete the line that says: background:$bgcolor;