Incorporating textures into your vector artwork is a great way to add visual interest.  Manually drawing a detailed vector texture in Illustrator can be labor intensive and time consuming.  But creating custom dynamic textures using the Live Trace tool makes Illustrator textures quick and easy.In Part One of Easy Vector Textures, we’ll walk through the simple steps of creating a texture.  Part Two, will be an exercise in using some of textures in a design.Let’s start by selecting a photo that shows the type of texture you want to create.  I am going to use the weave texture shown below.Once you have selected a texture, place the photo into your Illustrator document (File > Place). With the photo selected, create an expanded trace of the image by selecting Live Trace in the Object menu (Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand), which can be seen on the left.  The trace will be a simplified black and white vector version of the texture image. In order to use the texture to modify a larger design, we want to separate out the black and get rid of the white – to leave negative space through which the objects behind the texture will show through. Select all of the white portions of the traced texture by, first clicking on a portion of the white using your Direct Selection Tool, and then choose Select Same > Fill Color for the Select menu. (For for information on using the Select Same option, see QUICK TIP – Easy Way to Select Multiple Objects.)With all of the white portions of the texture selected, hit Delete on your keyboard.Now you are left with only the black portions of the texture.To see how the texture can be used to modify a flat object, draw a rectangle and fill it with the color of your choice, as seem below.Now select your texture object, fill it with a slightly different shade of the chosen color, and place it on top of the rectangle. Now we have an object with a detailed texture – that only took us a matter of seconds!Here are a few more simple samples of quick and easy textures creating using the Live Trace Tool:

Many of the basic Illustrator tools have a palette of options allowing you to tweak a number of variables within the tool.  Using these settings gives you much greater control of the way objects and effects appear.

To pull up the tool options for a given tool simply select the tool and hit Return (Mac) or Enter (PC).

Example ~ the options for the Warp tool is shown below:
 

Transparency is a quick and easy way to give visual interest and depth to your artwork.  Let’s create a very simple 3 minute peacock to illustrate this.

Create an ellipse and  fill it with a multicolored gradient.  Use the Convert Anchor Point Tool  to remove the curve from the anchor point on either end of the ellipse, as seen below.  This will create the feather shape for our peacocks tail feathers.

Now use your Rotate Tool  to fan out the feathers in a half circle like below.  For more info on how to do this see the tutorial, Quick and Easy Flowers in Illustrator.

Apply a thin stroke to the feathers to distinguish them from each other.

You will see that the fan of feather still looks a bit one dimensional.  Let’s use our transparency palette to change that!  Select all of your feathers and set them to 50% transparency.
You will see that instantly our feathers seem to have much more layering and depth.  Now play a bit with your transparency blend modes and check out all the cool ways the transparency palette can change the look of your feathers.  You can see a few examples below.





Now with the use of some very simple shapes, we can create the body of our peacock.

Now choose your favorite blend mode for your fan of feathers, color up your body to match and put them together for your 3 minute peacock.