Tutorial Wrap

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  Create a Realistic Candy Bar in Illustrator

  Photo-realism in Illustrator can be a difficult goal to achieve. This tutorial from Web Designer Depot will guide you through the process of creating a photo-realistic candy bar in Illustrator.

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  Creating an Amazing Palm Pre Icon in Fireworks

  If you follow technology, you my have heard of the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre is an awesome new gadget that hopes to compete with the iPhone. This tutorial from Abduzeedo demonstrates how to mockup the Palm Pre in Adobe Fireworks.

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  Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator

  Character creation can be one of the most satisfying uses of Adobe Illustrator. This tutorial from Spoon Graphics guides us through the process of creating a cute, furry monster in Illustrator.

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  Turn Any Font into a Sketch Font

  There are a lot of sketchy fonts out there. Some of those fonts are free, others are not. Save yourself the trouble of tracking down your favorite sketch font and just create one out of your favorite font for free. This tutorial from Vectips demonstrates how to turn any font into a sketch font.

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  Perfect Silhouette with Live Trace

  Drawing a silhouette with Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool can be a long and painful process. This tutorial from Vector Diary shows how to create vector silhouettes with ease using Illustrator’s Live Trace tool.

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  A Comprehensive Guide to Illustrator’s Live Trace Tool and More

  Speaking of Illustrator’s Live Trace tool. Check out this article by Kevin Kirsche on my website that explains the functions of Illustrator’s Live Trace tool in detail. This tutorial also compares the features of Illustrator’s Live Trace to some of the other tracing tools available on the Internet.

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(FREE!) Download Picks

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  Stylized Clouds 1

  Seamless patterns are excellent tools to have in your arsenal. They are great to have to add a bit of interest to an otherwise boring background. This beautifully unique set of stylized vector clouds from Pattern Head will make a wonderful addition to your graphic design arsenal.

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  Floral Curves

  Everyone loves floral curves right? This set of vector floral curves from Vector Diary is fantastic! Use this set of floral curves to spice up your backgrounds, add interest to part of your design, or to create a cool background.

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  15 Paint Brushstroke Illustrator Brushes

  Ever wondered how to create photo realistic brush strokes in Adobe Illustrator? It’s actually not that difficult. This set of 15 paintbrush strokes for Adobe Illustrator is fantastic and a lot of fun to play with. Download it and give it a try.

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  Free Cuties

  Mascots and cartoon characters can make excellent additions to your web designs. This uber cute freebie from Pehaa includes three characters that can be used in your children’s illustrations or designs. Go cute and download this fantastic set of children’s characters.

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Vector Inspiration

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  100 Inspiring Character Designs

  Need some inspiration for your latest character design project? Check out this fantastic round up of character designs from Design Blurb. With over 100 inspiring designs you should have no problem coming up with a unique idea of your own!

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  Vector Backgrounds in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices

  You may have noticed that a lot of websites are now using intricate vector backgrounds to make their designs a bit more interesting. This article from Web Air shows examples and describes some best practices for using vector backgrounds in your web designs.

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  15 Cute Vector Scenes

  There is no shortage of cute vector art on the Internet. This round up from Graphic Mania shows 15 examples of some of the cutest vector scenes out there. Take a look at this excellent round up if you’re in the market for some inspiration for your next cute project.

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  Vector Inspiration

  Illustrator, artist, and frequent Vectortuts+ contributor Ryan Putnam from Vectips always does a great job of identifying stunning vector artwork on his blog. Check out his round up from earlier this month for some fantastic vector inspiration.

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  Creative Process of Maxime’s Quoilin Final Year Project

  While not entirely vector, this article from Abduzeedo details the process behind the creation of a fictional brand of bottled (or canned) water by graphic designer Maxime Quoilin.

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This Penguin was used for a plumbing website to bring a soft,cold and cuddly image for the brand.

Final Image Preview

Below is the final image we will be working towards. Want access to the full Vector Source files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Vector Plus for just 9$ a month.

Introduction

First, there are a lot of different bulbs out there. A client recently requested a traditional one and instead of using reference images, I took a real light bulb and took some time watching how the glass parts bend the light and how highlights and shadows are formed. So, get a reference image or better yet, grab a real bulb and let’s start drawing. First, you have to get a grip of the elements that make the bulb, because we’re going to recreate all of them.

Step 1

Let’s begin by drawing the glass body first. Create a new document of your choice. I renamed my Layer 1 to “Glass Body.” I suggest you name it the same, so it will be easy to follow the rest of the steps and this will help you with the final alignment of all the layers later.

Drag a vertical guide onto the artboard. Create a perfect circle (while holding Shift), and center it to the guide. Select both the right and bottom anchor point and delete them, thus leaving only the top-left part of the circle present.

Step 2

Grab your Pen Tool and using Bezier curves, draw the rest of the left side of the glass body. Duplicate the completed shape and merge them together. We have made the glass body. Let’s move on to the screw thread contact.

Step 3

A light bulb is not perfect. This is good for us, because the left and right side of the thread contact don’t have to match at all. Ready the Pen Tool and start drawing. When we have completed this part we can move on and do a quick drawing of the electrical foot contact at the very bottom.

Those two shapes are pretty easy and somewhat creative shapes, so you shouldn’t have any problems. See how my shapes are overlapping, that doesn’t matter at this point.

Step 4

Again with the Pen Tool and Bezier curves, draw a shape that represents the actual screw part. When finished, copy and paste it two more times as shown below.

This is the basic outline of outer bulb shapes, but we are missing something, right. Yep, the glass mount, the support wires and the tungsten filament. I found those to be the real challenge of the bulb, so let’s leave them for last.

Step 5

Let’s move some elements to new layers. Create a new layer and call it “Metallic Body.” Move it above our “Glass Body” layer. Select the thread contact, the three screw elements and the foot contact and move them to the “Metallic Body” layer.

Let’s start painting the elements from bottom to top. Fill the electrical foot contact shape with a radial gradient. Set the colors, locations and gradient sliders as shown in the image below. Apply Inner glow as well and remove the stroke.

Step 6

Let’s move on to the thread contact. Repeat the above actions, by applying a Radial Gradient and Inner Glow with the settings shown. Also, remove the stroke.

Step 7

Moving on to the actual screw elements. Apply the settings shown below on all three of them. Remove the stroke. We are basically applying the same radial gradient we did with the thread contact, but we are changing the sliders’ positions slightly.

Step 8

Moving to the glass body. You can lock the “Metallic Body” layer and continue working on the glass one. Remove the stroke and give it a fill color of K=3. We want very light gray that will separate the bulb from the white background. With the shape still selected, give it an Inner Glow and use the settings and color shown below.

Step 9

So far, so good. Now comes the hard part - the glass mount. Your task here will be easy or hard, depending on the light bulb you’ve chosen. I didn’t really have a choice, since the client wanted a traditional bulb. Create a new layer and call it “Glass Mount.”

I’m going to hide the rest of the layers to better focus on the mount. I created the shape and filled it with K=10 (Step 9.1). On top, I made an additional shape and gave it a radial gradient going from K=10 at 0%, K=20 at 64%, K=25 at 80% and K=10 at 100% (Step 9.2.) I used the Pen Tool and Bezier curves to draw the support wires with 1 pt stroke color of K=90 (Step 9.3).

Step 10

Now, I moved to create four more shapes for the big support wires.

I drew the two wires and noticed that in an actual bulb they are folded at the end. The left one is folded back and the right is folded in front. I drew the folded shapes and sent one at the back and the other in front. Then I filled the wires with K=90, and the folded shapes with K=95. No stroke (Step 10.1).

Moving on to the tungsten filament. What I did was pretty simple. I Pen Tooled a line between the big wires and applied Effect > Distort and Transform > Zig Zag. I entered: 1% for the Relative size, Ridges per Segment at 8, Points at Smooth and finally K=90 stroke color. The effect gave nice curved line, just like the real thing.

Additionally, I created the bottom element of the glass mount, along with two ellipses for the central part. I selected both ellipses and in the Pathfinder palette I chose Minus Front to get rid of the front one, this creating a hole in the big ellipse. After that, you guessed it, radial gradient from K=70, K=90, K=80, at respectively 0, 63 and 100% (Step 10.2).

Step 11

I noticed that the big support wires go inside the glass mount, and the glass acts like a magnifying glass and the wires in there look magnified.

Let’s draw that. I made four shapes. Notice that they go all the way down and at places it looks like they are separated, that’s why I made four and not two (Step 11.1).

The glass mount is complete, but look at it - it’s flat. We have to make some highlights and play with the opacity and blending modes to create the illusion of 3D. Let’s do that!

For the top glass shape I made two highlights. The left one I filled with a white to black gradient, and no stroke. I did the same with the right one, this time with black to white gradient fill. I set both shapes to Screen blending mode. Next I applied a Gaussian Blur of 2 pixels to both shapes and the glass started to appear (Step 11.2).

Step 12

Let’s go on and create more highlights. Simply draw and repeat the same steps until you’re satisfied. Experiment with both shapes and with smaller and larger blur radius, but don’t forget always to use a white to black gradient set to Screen. This is what gives the actual glass look.

We have to add one final detail to the glass mount - a big reflection going all the way from top to bottom. I made a shape following the curves of the mount, gave it a white to black radial gradient, set it to Screen and gave it big 7-pixel blur. Additionally, I adjusted the gradient sliders to punch it up a bit (Step 12.1).

This is the finished glass mount. Be careful with the object layering. My glass mount is on one Illustrator layer, but the object layering inside the layer is critical. Keep the basic shapes in the back and bring forward the highlights and glows. This will add more to the glass effect (Step 12.2).

Step 13

Group all the stuff in the “Glass Mount” layer and switch on the other layers. Move the Glass Mount to the center of the bulb using our vertical guide we created in the beginning. Rearrange the layers order as follows (from top to bottom): “Metallic Body,” “Glass Mount,” and then Glass Body.”

Step 14

The last step in the tutorial is to add highlights to the bulb itself. I put them on a new layer named “Reflections,” then moved it on top of all the others.

Next, I created a series of shapes along the right part of the bulb, the bottom and the top left part, where I placed some ellipses. I scaled some of them down and rotated them accordingly. I outlined them in blue for better illustration. At the end I colored all the reflections in white and added Gaussian Blur of 8 pixels to each one.

Step 15

This step is optional. For those of you interested in making the bulb turned on, create a new layer over the “Glass Mount” and below the “Metallic Body” layers.

Create a circle, smaller than the glass body. I gave it a yellow-to-white radial gradient at -180 degrees and set it to Multiply Blending Mode.

Conclusion

The final print came out great. At the end my client was really happy and so was I. I hope you enjoyed creating this realistic vector light bulb!

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New Vector Plus Illustrations

This new Vector Plus Pack is created by Sean Hodge. I enjoyed making this set of seamless vector patterns. There is a healthy mix of plants, flowers, and pop elements, which repeat organically. There is a nice tutorial from Ian on how to make these types of patterns and you can use just about any design element to construct them once you’ve practiced a bit.

There are eight seamless vector patterns in this pack. The license allows these to be used in your commercial client projects as well, see the download file for details. Below are the set of unique botanical pop patterns, which can be colored any way you choose, as it’s all vector (EPS format)! Note that the images below are scaled and cropped; they are seamless in the Plus download.

Vector Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called Plus that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! If you’re a Plus member you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

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Giulia’s work has the ability to grab your attention and her choice of software to create the vector illustration is Flash. She eloquently uses Flash’s vector capabilities to create amazing still images. This stands as proof that the software is indeed more than an animation tool. So, let’s move on to this interview with Giulia Balladore.

1. Hi Giulia, tell us a little about yourself, where are you located and how does the culture of your country influence your art?

Hi everybody! My name is Giulia Balladore, I’m an Italy based illustrator and I’ve been drawing since I can remember. Drawing has always been part of my life, and I feel lucky for it. My father was a painter in his spare time when he was young and this fact hugely influenced me. I can easily say that it was his fault that I’ve always liked scribbling on everything I had at hand.

Since I was a child, I’ve always been influenced by what my eyes wanted to see. My taste for beauty is simple, and simple is my decodification of it. I cannot say in which way the culture that I daily live influences my art; surely it has, we are always what we eat.

LUSSURIA

2. What was your first experience in digital art field? Did you have any formal education in this field or are you self taught?

I am completely self taught. Everything began some years ago, in 2002, by chance, as the most things in my life, when I bought my first PC.

FUCSIA

3. Where do you work on your designs and projects? What tools and applications do you use most?

The main tools I use for my works are my hands and my eyes! The process of every vector illustration is first manual, then digital. Every kind of paper I have at hand and my PC do the rest.

CREMA, VENTISETTE

4. You use Adobe Flash for creating your vector arts. Flash, no doubt is a great vectoring tool but it is better known for creating animations than for creating still works. Why do you prefer it over other applications like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw?

You’re right, Flash has a lot of limits than other software doesn’t not.

Why am I a self-injurer? Because I’m in love with Flash. When I bought my first PC to approach digital illustration, a friend of mine who is a programmer gave me the opportunity to bungle with it. I began to outline simple forms, only secondly I linked together hand-drawn and digital illustration. In the years I’ve acquired a personal technique that makes me realize something satisfying, and someway, completely new and fresh for me.

SMOKING MUG

5. What design projects have given you the most satisfaction? Share with us something about those projects.

I’m happy when my work is published on books and magazines with other people’s work. I love sharing experiences all over the world.

THOM YORKE

6. Your vector images are very detailed, clean and they look ultra realistic - almost like a photograph. Give us an insight into your creative process from start to finish. And what resources you use, if any.

You’re right, the hyper-realistic taste of my vector illustrations comes from the time spent in my hairdresser’s waiting room, taking a glance at those glittering fashion magazines full of sophisticated pictures. When I take the pencil in my hand and start drawing I feel free to put on paper what strikes more my attention. I scan the drawing and start playing with flash, first outlining, then coloring, using a big amount of layers…the more layers I use, the better the result will be.

BIANCO E NERO

7. Women also seem to be a main focus for most of your works. Why is that? Also, most of your vector illustrations are portraits, why?

My work is mainly focused on female portraits for the simple reason that for me the purest and simplest beauty stands in the look of a woman, with all of her imperfections and boundaries.

8. What is it about vector illustrations that you enjoy the most? What is your favorite vectoring or Flash tool, tip or technique?

It will sound banal, but the thing that I adore about vector illustration is its unique possibility to scale in an unlimited way without loosing the quality. This lets me find different points of view of the piece I’m working on, and it can be considered the peculiarity that I prefer most.

CATPOWER

9. How would you define your artistic style? Apart from your own style do you also explore and experiment with other illustration styles or digital arts?

My style is personal and common at the same time. I like playing with my HB pencil in my spare time. I like as much manual and analogue illustration as digital illustration.

10. Where do you look for inspiration? Who are your favorite artist or designers, and if you listen to music, what kind of music do you like?

I love music, I always listen to music when I draw, so I can say that I do two things contemporaneously. Above all, I love the magnetic sound of the National.

Obviously I love a lot of illustrators, painters and artists, too. In open order I can mention Chagall, John Solimine, Paul Smith, Caravaggio, Chan Marshall, Massimo Vignelli, Emmanuelle Alt, Okkervil River, and above all my father.

11. Thanks Giulia, for the interview. What are the things a beginner vector artist or graphic designer should keep in mind, any advice?

I’m not in the position of giving advice…I’ve always done what I’ve liked, maybe this is the main thing to keep in mind for anyone who is still reading these lines.

Thank you everybody, my pleasure…ciao!

BIANCO

Giulia on Web:

• Portfolio
• Flickr

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A sugary-sweet elephant character in vector format. Aww, he loves you!

Final Image Preview

Below is the final image we will be working towards. Want access to the full Vector Source files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Vector Plus for just 9$ a month.

Step 1

Create a circle with the Ellipse Tool (L). Fill it with black and leave the Stroke empty. Go to the Toolbar and select the Knife Tool, then use it to cut the circle into random pieces.

Step 2

Group the pieces (Command + G) and go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Roughen and apply the settings below, then click OK.

Step 3

Use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to select shapes, then move them randomly around.

Step 4

Select the shape with the Selection Tool (V) and apply a linear gradient fill. Because of the roughen effect, it looks like we applied several different gradients.

Step 5

Duplicate the shape and add another gradient. I chose a red to white gradient. Overlap them. Then select both and go to Object > Envelop Distort > Make with Warp, choose the Twist option, and use the settings shown below.

Step 6

Create another circle and repeat Step 1 and Step 2. Leave the Fill empty and apply a Stroke of 1pt black. Apply the Roughen Effect again. It will give it a neat scribble look. If you want to have it look thinner, just apply a smaller Stroke.

Step 7

Set the scribble shape for the back and then place the others shapes on top. Duplicate them as necessary. Apply a Drop Shadow if you want.

Step 8

Let create some weird looking headphones. Create a circle with a 7pt Stroke, gray and set to inside. Also, fill it with a light gray to white radial gradient.

Step 9

Then duplicate the circle, remove the Stroke and add an Outer Glow (Effect > Stylize > Outer Glow).

Step 10

Create another slightly smaller circle and fill it with a dark gray radial gradient, then set the Stroke to 1pt black.

Step 11

Create another circle and fill it with the Sticks Pattern. Either open the Pattern Library under the Swatch palette or go to Windows > Swatch Libraries > Patterns.

Step 12

Create yet another smaller circle and fill it with a gray to black radial gradient.

Step 13

Create a funky wing like object with the Pen Tool (P) and fill it with white.

Step 14

Create one last tiny circle filled with a radial gradient and an Outer Glow.

Step 15

Now take all the circles together and place then on top of each other. Add some patterns for more texture.

Step 16

Create a long, thin rectangle (M) and fill it with a dark linear gradient and apply a dramatic Drop Shadow. Put it aside.

Step 17

Create a line using the Pen Tool (P) with a 9pt Stoke. Then go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag and apply the settings below.

Step 18

Create a shape for the head part of the headphones and fill it with a linear gradient and a Drop Shadow.

Step 19

Duplicate the shape and fill it with a funky patterns.

Step 20

Create another shape like the one below with a gradient and a Drop Shadow.

Step 21

Stack the shapes together.

Step 22

Now take the headphone shapes and group them (Command + G). Place them on top of the background shapes. Then take the rectangle from Step 16 and use it as a cord. Then take the Zig Zag shape and place it on the bottom. You might want to create some other shapes to simulate the headphone cord parts.

Step 23

Make a copy of the Zig Zag shape and apply the Arc Warp option. (Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Warp) and apply a Drop Shadow.

Step 24

Make a duplicate of the just created shape and mirror it (Command + O). Place them behind the headphones.

Conclusion

This is the final outcome. I added some simple lines with
the Pen Tool (P) and created some bands, which where just simple rectangles with warped applied.

You can now take this a bit further and create a flyer or other design piece. I hope you had fun and learned something new!

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