In this tutorial you will learn how to create a photo-realistic iPhone illustration and every single icon you can find on the iPhone touch screen. That’s 18 icons! With so many fantastic tips and tricks we’ve broken the tutorial into two parts, in part two you will learn how to make the remainder of the icons and finish your illustration. Let’s get started!

Part 1

Part 2

Beautiful Vector Illustration

Hey guys! For this tutorial/making of I created a fun illustration for my sister Stella’s blog. In her blog she writes about funny daily situations and I thought that it would be nice to develop an illustration that expressed that somehow. I hope that this step by step help the new designers and illustrators. So, prepare yourself, and continue reading because even though it is a quite long post I hope it might be useful for your illustration projects. Also, feel free to share your thoughts with comments.

Read more

How to Create a Medieval Paper Scroll

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a medieval paper scroll with the 3D Extrude & Revolve tool. Using texture, you will also learn how to make an object look old and how to map artwork to a 3D Vector object.

Read more

How to Create a Lustrous Electric Guitar

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a realistic looking electric guitar. We will start with basic shapes and build our way up using a couple of simple yet effective techniques. You will learn how to use 3D Effect, Scale and Blend Options, to make a guitar worthy of even the most rockin’ of vector fans!

Read more

Create summery poster artwork

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has recently arrived, and with it comes a new version of Illustrator, featuring some exciting tools. To give you a flavour of them, we asked Ben the Illustrator to put Illustrator CS5 to the test. He uses it to create a summery poster, as given free with the June issue of Digital Arts.

Read more

Create a Milk Bottle with a Funny Cow Label

In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to create a 3D milk bottle. We’ll also cover how to create and apply a cute cow label to it. Let’s have some fun with this one!

Read more

Make Watercolor and Marker Style Portraits

With this tutorial, we are going to work through ways of creating digital portrait illustrations that have a unique and somewhat tactile feel of marker and watercolor. This tutorial will focus on using a drawing tablet and Adobe Illustrator. There will be a focus on technique and technical settings, but the overall product will rely on your own personal style and taste.

Read more

Elegant gradient ribbon in Illustrator

One of the Duoh! dot com illustrations called Grafiek Grafik Grafico has this special shape which I thought would be ideal for a tutorial.

Read more

Create a 3D Vector Labyrinth

Let’s start off by creating a new document that’s 1024×768.  Name this first layer “Maze.”  Then, take the Rectangle tool and draw a 50×50 square.  Give this square a 10px black outline and no fill.  Then align it to the center of the canvas.  Repeat this process, only this time make the square 700×700.

Read more

illustrator Pucker and Bloat Effect

There are lots of hidden secrets in Illustrator. Even I have the feeling I only use only a part of the application. That’s probably because I’m sometimes stuck in my old habit of doing things. If you’ve been working with the application since version 3 like I do, then you know what I’m talking about. It’s good to explore new and better ways. Ways to do things faster and in a more flexible way. Today I’ll show you how to use the Pucker & Bloat Effect. It’s another cool Distort & Transform Effect.

Read more

Stamp your style on a surface by covering it with your own connecting motifs, writes Sam Brade

How do you fill a space with interlocking motifs, each one occupying its own little piece of the jigsaw puzzle?

In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate how to rough out and plan your artwork before transferring it into Illustrator (CS3 or later) using the most important feature for creating vector graphics, the Pen tool.

Using the information provided in this tutorial, you will be able to have a shot at designing and filling a plane with your own interlocking motifs. Be warned: this activity is extremely absorbing and a total labour of love, which can become surprisingly addictive.

Click here to download the tutorial for free

source: http://www.computerarts.co.uk

I have written some Illustrator tutorials in which I’ve used the Blend Tool to create swirls and other shapes, but I have never used it to create a text effect. Then we received this email suggestion from one of our readers quite a few months ago asking us how to create that effect. I really like the text effect and decided to give it a try.

So in this tutorial I will show you how to create a text effect using the Blend Tool in Illustrator and then we will use Photoshop for some final retouches to make the effect more subtle. The technique is very simple and it won’t take more than 30 minutes to achieve the same effect.

Read more

Learn to create a stylized Rubik’s Cube in Illustrator. I’ll take you through how to make every detail of the final illustration, which will teach you some new techniques and introduce you to some new Illustrator tools. Let’s get started with creating this iconic, retro puzzle cube.

Read more

In this tutorial we will travel back in time to recreate the painting style of one of the most outstanding symbolism artists – Gustav Klimt. His works are full of warm golden colors, simple ornaments, irregular patterns, natural symbols, and asymmetric shapes. We will work to produce this style with the help of Adobe Illustrator tools.

Introduction

I recently got a beautiful gift – a reproduction of a Gustav Klimt painting. This outstanding work made me understand that we, designers, are used to looking for inspiration in everything around us, rather than behind us.

Back in centuries past there were hundreds of brilliant artists whose paintings became immortal. There were numerous interesting periods in art history that offer plenty of sources of inspiration. So today we start a series of tutorials devoted to various historical periods of art, where we’ll recreate the most challenging styles through modern graphics. We begin the series with artwork inspired by Gustav Klimt paintings.

Gustav Klimt, an austrian artist of the nineteenth century, was a founder of European modern art. His works are full of hidden symbols and ornaments, warm golden colors, asymmetric patterns and natural shapes. The major object of his paintings are female bodies, and his portraits remain favorite artworks for plenty of people until now. You can search his brilliant art (through Google, for example) and visit the Gustav Klimt Wikipedia page to get familiar with artist works.

We will recreate Klimt’s unique style and technique with the help of Adobe illustrator tools, applying brushes, symbols, textures and patterns, blending modes, and few more tricks.

Read more

His Majesty the Bubble! In this tutorial we will learn how to create realistic colorful bubbles. We’ll cover numerous techniques and build this illustrations step by step. Set aside a couple hours for this one!

Read more

In this tutorial we’ll learn to create three types of optical illusions. Learn how easy it is to fool our brains. You’ll not believe there is no curved lines on the chessboard.

Read more

The retro aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s is currently back in vogue and it’s set to be a great trend for 2010. It’s not hard to see why retro design is so enduringly popular: the bold, blocky colours, simple imagery and vivid typography make this a striking era of design.

Read more

Type art is popular at the moment for all sorts of reasons – and it’s a highly versatile skill to have. You can use illustrated lettering in projects ranging from posters to brochures – making it a great technique to add to your creative toolset.

Read more

Last week I decided to spend some time playing with Illustrator and trying to come up with a cool black and white artwork. My inspiration came from some skateboard deck designs which have this sort of 3D effect without using gradients or anything, and not exactly a woodcut effect either. After a few hours I was able to come up with a really nice design, but the most important thing, the whole process was an excellent way to improve my Illustrator techniques.

Read more

Final Image Preview

This image is inspired from the cover of LAYOUT, dasar & penerapannya, a graphic design book by Surianto Rustan published by Gramedia in Indonesia. Before starting this tutorial, see the result below. Click here to see the image at a higher resolution. The Illustrator and Photoshop files can be found at the bottom of this post. You can also see more of work at my website DesainDigital.com

Read more

This tutorial is about how to draw a colorful, jolly, full-face, carnival mask in Illustrator. I explained how every part was made like: the jolly hat, the border seam brush, the bells, the small mask on the face, the glitter symbols and the other decorations on the face. Hope you enjoy it.

Read more

I created this text illustration of the ‘Bard’ as an ironic play on the idea of making pictures out of words. Something Shakespeare is one of the best at.

Files that might help:
Shakespeare reference picture – istockphoto
Ink Blot Vectors – I have provided these for download in an earlier post.
Il Shake Fest Font – DaFont
Shakespeare Quotes – Available from many sources on the internet.

Read more

One of the hardest parts of Photoshop art – or indeed much other art – is creating subtle, detailed shading. However, layer masks make the process much easier, allowing you to select and modify certain areas without affecting the rest of your canvas.

In this tutorial, Yuta Onoda shows how you can transform a pencil sketch into a gorgeous, textured digital artwork using layer masks and blending modes. You’ll also learn how to add realism to your artwork by faking print offsets and paint spatters.

Read more

In this Illustrator tutorial I’ll explain step by step how I created the “Delicious Coffee” illustration which was published in “1000 Restaurant, bar & café graphics” by Rockport Publishing.

Read more