>> After this, use the brush tool to draw an outline slightly
around the shape you want to texture with one of the stipple
brushes. Take this path and send it to the back. You can do this
by right-clicking on the brush line, hovering over arrange then
clicking send to back. [Image D]
>> Now use the direct selection tool to select both the original
shape you traced around and the brush layer that you just sent to
the background. With both of these selected, press CTRL + 7 to
clip these. This will cut out all the brush that exceeds the original
shape, therefore only putting the texture inside.
>> As we added texture to the dark part of the leaf, we chose the
lighter color of the plant to use as the brush color. This created a
nice contrast and kept to the original color scheme.
4
MIRROR, MIRROR
Hopefully, the plants and their pots should now be
finished with a nice bit of texture added to them, but what
about the rest of the image?
>> First, holding the shift key, we draw a straight horizontal
line under the shelf and use a stipple brush effect to create a
textured shadow. We decrease this to 0 .5pt and use the same
color as the shelf. For the mirror, we create a rough outline of the
circle and apply a brush to that stroke too. However, this time we
increase the point size to 5pt, which gives us a dispersed splatter
effect to sit around the mirror. We sent that behind the mirror as
we didn’t want the pattern inside.
>> Finally, using the pen tool, we add a curved line towards the
top left of the mirror to replicate a glass effect. We then changed
the stroke to a brush stipple effect to fit the rest of the artwork.
>> So there you have it, a quick and easy method of creating
more texture with the handy help of the brush tool [Image E]. This
technique can be applied to a variety of media and can be used
as the finishing touches to artwork as we have shown here.
C
D E
©^
AD
OB
E
Now that you have completed this first part of this tutorial,
you can experiment with ways of taking the concept
further. One possibility could be to take one of the plants
from the artwork we have made and apply a grid repeat
effect so that you end up with a patterned wallpaper look.
First, we need to copy one whole plant by highlighting
the necessary shapes—as an aside here, if you ever
highlight too much of the board or too many individual
shapes, simply hold the shift button and click on the parts
that you don’t want to highlight, and this will deselect them.
Once you have the desired items selected, make sure all
the shapes that make up that item are grouped together, by
pressing CTRL + G. Then, head over to the top object menu.
Inside this drop-down, find the repeat menu then inside
that, click the grid option.
As you can see, this has created a partial grid pattern of
the design. Adjust this until you get your desired pattern.
There are plenty of adjustments that you can make to
change this grid. Firstly, you can resize the box—we
extended it to fit our artboard. Then using the two sliders
along the top and left-hand side, you can alter the vertical
and horizontal gap sizes between the pattern. Another
tweak we made is to resize the original object, this affects
the whole pattern but, thankfully, you can see an outlined
preview of what this looks like when changing it.
After playing around with the grid, we ended up with
an even pattern that filled our artboard. You can use this
on a range of different designs to create a pattern. This
is a more accurate method that beats simply copying and
pasting the original object over and over again.
REPEATED PATTERN
JAN 2022 MAXIMUMPC 55
