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.