Archive for the ‘tutorials’ Category

I am fairly new to Illustrator (or AI, as most people call it)…so I personally understand how overwhelming it can be if you are self-taught like I am! I recently ran across a very inspiring set of tutorials on a blog named ‘Illustration Info’ and it really opened my eyes to some tricks I hadn’t thought of. There’s a set of tutorials in there for early beginners, too…so if you feel lost with Illustrator or you’re thinking of trying it out someday, be sure to take some time to look at these tutorials! They really help.

There are a few tutorials for Photoshop, too. :) Enjoy!

‘Illustration Info’ Tutorials & Tips

A not-so-pro tip of my own…if you love to draw and are aspiring to do any form of digital art, be sure to get a good tablet! They save time and wrists. :) I suggest Wacom. It’s the only brand I’ve used since 2003.

I was asked by Martha of MyGraficO’s Challenge Blog to design a card with my Halloween Ghoulies digital stamp set. After days of wondering what I’d make, I came up with a fun idea this morning…why not turn their little circular faces into the center of some cute flowers instead? I just happened to have some scrap papers and a fun flower pot sitting around (yes, I am a clutter bug) and so I got a-craftin’!

The best thing about this project is you can easily make it from simple things you can get from almost any store. You probably have most of these things laying around your house!

Materials:

• 1 sheet orange construction paper
• 1 sheet black construction paper
• Hole puncher (the regular office kind)
• Scissors
• Ribbon (I used some very thin black ribbon)
• A lid (or other circular object larger than the faces)
• Flower pot
• Masking tape
• 5 wooden skewers
• Colored pencils (I used Crayola)
• Florist’s styrofoam OR plastic grocery bags
• Printer paper

I opened one of my art programs and dragged and dropped each stamp I wanted to use (I used 5) onto a 8.5×11” 300dpi document. I made sure each face was about the same size. Then I printed it out on regular ‘ol printer paper. I colored each face with colored pencils (use your own artistic flare here!)…and I cut them out, leaving a white edge.

Then I traced a jar lid (larger than the faces) onto one of the colored papers. I drew a scalloped edge along the line, cut it out, then traced it 4 times to make 2 orange and 3 black flowers. I rolled up 3 small strips of masking tape, stacked them on top of each other in the center of each flower, and gently pressed the faces onto the flowers. You can use whatever method you want to make the faces pop out on the flower. This was my method with our limited resources.

I positioned each skewer (blunt end at the top) on the back of the flowers and gently taped them on with another strip of masking tape. Now for the flower pot!

I had to get creative with this part as I didn’t want to use a lot of rice as a filler, and we didn’t have any Styrofoam for sticking the flowers in the pot. So, I grabbed a couple plastic grocery bags that we had our pantry and put them in the pot. I pierced each skewer (with the flowers on top) into the bags and pushed them in to help them stay. I added each flower one-by-one and tucked more bags in between the stems to hold them in place. This can take some tweaking and arranging, but it works!

Next, I cut a long orange strip of paper to wrap around the lip of the pot. I made it about the width of the pot’s upper edge (tape the ends together if the paper wasn’t long enough). Again, I drew and cut scallops along the edge. I then used the hole punch to punch a hole in each scallop.

I rolled strips of masking tape and stuck them all along the back of the orange strip. Again, there are other ways you could do this…you could use fabric instead, or a hot glue gun. This was what worked for me. I positioned the strip around the lip of the pot, and then tied the black ribbon around it.

Now you can take the remainder of the orange and black paper and rip it up and crinkle it to sprinkle into the top of the pot (to cover the plastic bags), or you can use any kind of embellishment you can think of. Bunches of curled ribbon, tulle…get creative!

VOILA! Total crafting time? An hour or two. Most of the time was spent coloring. :) The best part of it is this project would be easy to mix-and-match with all sorts of materials. Have fun!

PS – If you feel like trying out this craft, I’d love to see what you come up with! Feel free to contact me with pictures of your creation (use Photobucket or any other image host and link me to it, or email me an attachment). I’ll share it here for all to see!