| Decorating Easter Eggs in Illustrator CS | |
(If you arrived at this page from a search, you can start the tutorial on page one.)
Making Decorated Eggs
Those are pretty plain. Let's dress them up a bit. Make a new egg, any color, with no stroke. Click away from the egg on an empty part of the art board to deselect the egg. Go to Preferences (cmd/ctrl+K) and choose Guides and Grid. Set the grid options to Gridline every 72 pt with 2 subdivisions.
Turn on the grid (View > Grid) to use as a guide to divide your egg. Choose the line tool in the tool box. I made my lines black so I could see them against the egg and the grid; what color the lines are is not really important since they disappear when we use the pathfinder to divide the egg into sections. What is important is that they extend past the sides of the egg so the division is clean. Click and drag to draw lines across the egg to divide it. These sections will let us make a striped egg.
Use the selection tool (V) to drag around all of the lines and the egg to select all of the pieces. In the pathfinder palette (Window > Pathfinder) choose Divide.
The egg is now separate pieces, but they're grouped. That means they act as one piece, so if you try to change the color of one piece, you'll change the color of all sections. You can handle this one of two ways:
- With the group selected, ungroup them (Object > Ungroup). If you choose this method, remember to regroup when you're finished coloring the egg (Object > Group).
- Click on the pieces one at a time with the Direct Selection tool (A) to select each piece separately and change the color.
Using the Direct Selection tool method lets you select individual objects in a group without ungrouping. The advantage to this is that you don't have to remember to regroup them when you're finished changing the colors. Click each section one at a time with the Direct Selection tool (A) and change the color using the swatches or color palette. When finished, simply select the whole egg using the Selection tool (V) and rotate as before.
Try other divisions. These two eggs were divided with lines as shown, and then divided using the pathfinder palette:
The colors were changed on the sections and lines were drawn where I wanted the decorations to be. I then applied brushes from the Borders_Floral and Decorative_Celebration brush sets that come with Illustrator. Load them from the brush palette options menu by choosing Open Brush Library and picking them from the list.
The brushes may not always be the right size. If you need to make them smaller or larger, use the Stroke palette (Window > Stroke) to change the width of the stroke. After applying the brushes select all of the brush strokes and egg pieces and group them, then you may rotate if you wish. What if the brush stroke hangs over the edge of the egg? Using a clipping mask can fix that!
Continued on page 3…
©2005 Sara Froehlich
