Introduction

This is an extension to my original Floral Tutorial. It should offer a better understanding of how to do florials that are a little more detailed then simple vectors. Since there is a lot of material in this tutorial I’m going to move through it as quickly, and painlessly, as possible while attempting to keep it at a beginner level. However, intermediate level users may still find it of interest too. Depending of your experience, and how much you like to play around, it can take you from 15 min to an hour to finish with Adobe Illustrator 9 and CS. Lets get started.

Part 1 – Drawing the Vine

Before we even start drawing our vine you need to take a couple of things into consideration. In photography you will learn that photos require structure to make them interesting. It’s all a matter of directing the the eye towards the subject. Drawing a single line and giving it a simple flat stroke will not work in most floral drawings. The stem of our vine gives our entire drawing not only a foundation, but it directs our attention toward a givin direction. This direction is usually towards the end, but it can also be towards the center. I like to scratch out a design on paper before ever starting my drawing, but that is not required of course for this tutorial. The 3/4 rule applies here also. So keep all this in mind as you create your vines.

Now that we have considered our vines structure and path, lets open Adobe Illustrator and create a new drawing. Any size drawing is fine. First start by going to your tool pallet, and selecting the Pencil Tool. Draw a freehand line in the desired shape on the screen. I want to direct attention to the upper left of the screen so I’m going to draw my line from the lower right to the upper left. Notice that that I added more detail towards the tip. Don’t worry if your lines ruff. We will fix that in a moment. I drew mine with the mouse instead of my trusty tablet just for illustrative purposes. Here’s what it looks like:

Now that we have our line, we need to smooth it out a little, and make our vine. Select your line and go to Object -> Path -> Simplify in the File Menu. You’ll see a dialog like the one here. Depending on how well, and in what shape you created your line, you may have to play with the settings until you have a nice smooth line in the desired shape. Once your happy with the shape of your line select OK.

Make a copy of your line with Ctrl + C keys then paste a new line directly on top of the existing one with with the Ctrl + F keys.

Now grab the new line with the Selection tool and move it slightly off the original. Arrange the paths until one end of your path comes to a point, and join them together using the Direct Select Tool. If you can’t remember how to do this then go back and read my original Floral Tutorial. Remember not to cross the lines or your fill will have a flat spot. When done give it a green fill and move on to part two.

Part 2 – Drawing the leaves

Most people think that drawing leaves in Illustrator is really easy until you actually try it. One benefit of vector drawing applications though is that we can re-use our leaves as a pattern once their created. So, lets make the leaf that will be copied across our vine.

Leaves are rather complex shapes, and there are several methods to drawing them in illustrator. Since this tutorial is for beginners, we are going to start by drawing a rectangle. Go to you Tool Pallet and select the Rectangle Tool. Draw a rectangle anywhere on the screen. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfectly square or not, just make it large enough to work with. Now select your Add Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet. We need to add points to all four sides like the picture you see here. The point here is not to be precise. If we wanted to be precise we could have just rotated our rectangle.

Now that we have our 4 new anchor points select the Delete Anchor Point Tool, and remove the rectangles original corners. You should now have something of a diamond like shape.

Now we need to make it look a little more like our leaf look more like a leaf. Select the Convert Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet and round the two sides and top of our square like shown. make sure to leave the point at the bottom of your leaf. Once your happy with the shape of your leaf move on.

Now it’s time to add our leaves to our vine. Most vines alternate leaves along the stem, so that’s what we’re going to do here. Resize your leaf until it reaches a size that is appropriate for your vine size, then place the leaf somewhere along your vine. Placement and frewuency are a matter of taste and, don’t worry about changing the leaves shapes as you go. Get the placement right first. Make copies of your original leaf using Crtl + C and paste copies of the screen with Ctrl + V. You should get something Like I have here.

If you draw your vine the same way I have, you will need to push the back leaves under the vine like I’ve done above. Select the leaves you want to put behind your vine then Shift + Ctrl + [ This will place the selected items at the bottom of the drawing stack. I’ve colored the leaves in back slightly darker for you to see here.

Part 3 – Leaf it or Not, Styling your leaves

Time for some vine education. When altering your leaves you need to keep a couple of things in mind. The first thing I should mention is that the leaves on most vines are pretty close to the same size until nearing the tip of the vine. Usually the last two or three leaves are incrementally smaller. Another vital thing when your altering your leaves shape is that vines, and all plants for that matter, will grow with the largest part of the leaves surface facing the available light source. It’s not necessary to follow this rule when drawing vines for a website, but if your planning to apply some sort of lighting effect it may make or break your drawing. Finally, if your vine looks similar to mine, you should make the leaves in the back slightly smaller to give some dept to your drawing.

Now that we have a flat vine, and a little vine education, lets add a little styling. Use the Warp Tool from the Tool Pallet as you go along to give your leaves a little character. You can ajust the size and strength of the Warp Tool by double clicking its icon in the Tool Pallet. Just like people, no two leaves are the same. Don’t be afraid to make them interesting. Note that it’s better to add more detail towards the focal point of your vine rather then along it’s entire length. If you roughen up a leaf too much you can always use the Path -> Simplify tool, or make yourself another copy and start over. In the end styling is a matter of taste. The immortal words of my art teacher “Go Wild!” apply here.

Once your leaves have the shape your looking for, select one of your foreground leaves and apply a green radial gradient using the Gradient Window. Now select the rest of the foreground leaves, and using the Eyedropper Tool from the Tool pallet, select the leaf you styled to apply the style to the other leaves. Now that we have the colors for our foreground leaves we need to look at the background ones. We can either make them darker or lighter to differentiate them from the foreground ones. I’m using white as my background, so I’m going to go with a slightly darker gradient. You can also apply a stroke color if you like. Apply the color across the background leaves like you did the foreground ones. You can very the gradient as you move along the vine, but I prefer to do this later in Photoshop via a color mask. You should now have something like mine here:

For most uses, and for the scope of this tutorial, your vine is now finished. There is just the matter of fine tuning your coloring, and possibly some shadowing. I’m going to give some applied examples in the next part.

Part 4 – Vine Usage examples

Since this is a really long tutorial I’m only going to give a few brief examples. The first one uses the vine directly from the tutorial, but with some pretty blue flowers, and cleaned up gradients. The flowers I used here are from the Daisy Tutorial.

I don’t think I ever mentioned it, but my wife loves blue flowers. So here’s a completely blue vine;

If you set the transparency to around 60%, This would make an excellent background over a lighter color. You could blend it with a similar blue too. Take this next image for example.

This is simply the same image as above with a gradient blend. Great for a backdrop or card. Change the squares gradient while keeping the blend will also bring out some nice color combinations like the following orange – pink combination.

That’s it for another tutorial. If you have problems getting it right don’t worry. Vines, and vegetation, are very articulate structurally so it takes time and practice to get them right. The vine you see here took me around 10 minutes to make along with the making of the screenshots for this tutorial. So the more you practice, the better and faster your florals will come out. Thanks for reading …

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