This tutorial will show you the basics on how to create florals in Adobe Illustrator CS3. Illustrator is the perfect tool for these types of graphics, and your about to see why. Lets get to work.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator and create a new drawing. First of we’re going to need to set our fill to transparent, and our stroke to some color. I’ll be using green for this tutorial.

2. Next were going to select the spiral tool from our tool pallet, and draw a spiral on the screen. If you can’t see it, hold down the left mouse button over the line tool, and select it from the flyout menu.

3. Now that we have a spiral on the screen, we need to make a copy of it, and paste a second spiral. Select the first spiral then select edit->copy from the edit menu. Then select edit->paste in front from the edit menu. This will give you an exact duplicate of the original spiral at the same location.

4. Now we need to transform our duplicate spiral so that we can make a fill later. Rotate and scale your spiral until the center of the spiral touches, and the end points of the spiral are slightly apart. Make sure you don’t have any parts of the spirals touching, or our fill won’t come out right.

5. Now that we have our two spirals, we need to join them together so that we can fill our floral. Select the Direct Selection Tool from the tool pallet, and draw a window over only the two end points of our spiral. Remember to only select the two end points or you won’t be able to join the ends.

Then go to the Object menu and select Object->Path->Join This will join our two end points together. Repeat this step at the center of the spiral also.

Once you have joined your paths set your fill to the same color as your stroke. Once your done you should see something like this:

That’s it your done. From here on out you can add more spirals, and vines, to make nice floral patterns like the ones below.

To make a light weight floral change the fill to white and lighten the stoke. Then add a colored drop shadow. Like this:

Illustrator can save you large amounts of time when making florals, and with a little imagination you can come up with some great designs. That’s it for today. Thanks for reading …