Hello, it's Kat, and in today's tutorial, I'll be taking you through
my process of drawing this blossoming cherry tree branch in Adobe illustrator.
I'm starting my sketch here in Adobe fresco so that you can see the
whole process from sketch to vector.
After doing a rough sketch of the branch and some blossoms, I'm moving
on to making my color palette, which I also like to do in fresco.
I'm just using the watercolor brushes here to get some pinks
and some greens that I like.
And then I will move this into Adobe illustrator and start
creating the vector shapes.
I've set up my art board at 10 80 by 10 80 pixels.
And now I'm just pasting in the tree branch sketch and the
blossom sketch from fresco.
I'm also making these layers template layers.
You can do this by double clicking in the layers panel
and clicking the template box.
This will just lock the layer for you and turn down the opacity so
that it's easier to trace over as you're creating your vector shapes.
The last thing I'm pasting into illustrator here from fresco
is the colors that I painted.
This is what I'll be using to build my color palette swatches in illustrator.
To start creating my color palette in Illustrator, I draw a few
circles off of the art board.
Then I grab my eyedropper tool and holding shift over the image
that I've pasted in of my colors.
I'm just going to click and grab the colors from lightest to darkest.
I like to give myself about five or six color options in each group just
to get a good variety of values.
After I've chosen the colors I like for a specific group, I select the circles,
open my swatches palette and go here to new color group to add them there.
I repeat this process for the pinks and dark purples, and I like to leave
the circles visible on my art board, just so that I can remember what
the color palette is as I'm working.
This is what my file looks like when I'm all set up to start drawing
and I'm going to focus first on the branch using the pen tool.
I've selected one of my darker colors and set it as an outline color with no fill.
And now I'm just using the pen tool to trace along the main branches.
These lines don't need to be connected.
And just a quick tip when you get to the end of a line and you'd like to
escape from that line, you can just hit the escape key and start drawing
your new line for another branch.
To create the thickness of the branches, I'm going to use the width tool, which
you can select by using shift w and this will allow you to click and drag on a
line and adjust exactly how thick you want the line to be at that particular point.
As I'm adjusting this, I want to make sure that the branches start
out figure at the base and then taper to a point at the ends.
To make it easier to use the width tool without selecting the wrong line,
I've double clicked on the branch that I want to work on, and that puts me
in isolation mode so that the width tool will only work on that branch.
To get back out of that you can either click that arrow at the top left in your
gray bar, or you can hit the escape key until you're back to your main view.
One more thing I'm doing with my branch shape here is just using these corner
widgets to round out certain corners.
I'm going to leave some sharp and some rounded so that it
looks a little bit more natural.
Now that I've got the basic shape down for my branches, I'm going
to move on to drawing the flowers.
For this we're going to use the curvature tool.
Again, I'll select a color from my palette this time, one of my lighter pinks.
And I'm going to set that as my outline color with no fill color.
That seems to be the easiest setup to trace so that you can see your artwork
underneath as you're creating shapes.
The curvature tool is a lot like the pen tool, but it's very handy and intuitive.
It will try to calculate curves for you as you're drawing.
If you single click and move on to another click, it will
calculate the curve and show you a preview between those two points.
If you double click, it will give you a sharp corner point and you can easily
move back and forth between those.
You can also add points to the lines by just clicking and dragging anywhere
on the line that you've already drawn.
And here I'm going to start drawing the inner shape so that we can create a blend
from the dark pink to the light pink.
I'll do that by copying the shape with control or command C and pasting it
in place with control or command F.
And I will shrink it down by holding down shift and alt so that it
shrinks perfectly to the center.
And I'll set this inner shape to one of the darker pinks so
that the dark color will blend outward toward the lighter petals.
Selecting both my outer and inner flower shapes, I will go to the
object menu and select blend make.
Once I have my blend made, I can experiment with the colors just to get
the exact effect that I'm going for.
And now I'm going to copy the inner shape from my blend.
And we're going to make a second blend on top of this that has the darker pinks that
you see in the center of a cherry blossom.
I've decided to simplify the path a bit here by selecting it and going
to the object menu path simplify, and that just removes a few points.
For the very center shape here, I'm just manipulating the path a little bit so
that the ends of the petals are pointed.
And you'll see me do this a bit more after the blend is made.
I'm following the same process I did with the first blend, I'm just going
to duplicate this shape, paste it in place and scale it down to the center.
Here I'm creating the second inner blend, and now I'll just experiment with colors
and size until it looks about right.
Once I have the main two blends created that make up this flower, I'm
going to go back in and just edit the bottom one that we've already made.
I'm hiding the middle blend and just tweaking the path
here by moving a few points.
And you can see that that changes how the colors blend into each other.
This is a fun process, and it's mostly just using your eye and figuring
out what you think looks best for the outcome you're trying to get.
I do recommend having some reference images handy while you're doing the
step in your own artwork, it can help you make decisions like this on final
color tweaks and how your flowers are looking compared to real cherry blossoms.
I'm happy with how that looks.
And now we'll move on to creating the rest of our flower petals using the curvature
tool, which I'll speed up for you a bit.
For the center of the second flower I'm using the same technique I did for
the first creating blends for these outer petals, however, I'm just going
to use a simple gradient from one of our darker pinks to our lighter pinks
to give it the appropriate shadow.
For this smaller bud, because it's made of simpler shapes, I'm
going to use my eyedropper tool and just sample that gradient that
I used on the other petals here.
And through this whole process I'm using mainly the curvature
tool and the gradient tool.
I will add some blends to these smaller petals and we're almost
finished up and ready to start placing our flowers on our tree branch.
Now that I've got my petals and blossoms created, I'm going to just drop a
background color behind the branch so that we can see the contrast as we work.
And I'm just taking that color from my blue-green palette that
I created at the beginning.
And the last step before I start placing my flowers is to make the tree
branch look a little bit more organic.
For that I'm going to use the warp tool, which you can get by using
shift R on your keyboard, or it's here under the width tool menu.
You can think of the warp tool as sort of a smudge tool for vector.
If you click and drag on your paths, you'll see that it
distorts it just slightly.
If you double click on the tool, you'll get an option box that allows
you to adjust the size of your brush and the strength of the smudging.
Now, the branch looks a bit more natural and wavy and we're ready
to start placing our flowers.
At this point, I've gone ahead and deleted my extra art boards and
sketch layers to clean up the file.
And now we'll just drag a copy of each of these flowers over onto the
branch and start positioning them.
I'm just arranging these to look organic and natural.
I'm dragging and dropping in some cases, just rotating and scaling a bit.
And I'm making copies of some of the larger flowers to paste in
different places on the tree branch.
Just doing this so that it doesn't look too busy in any particular spot,
but that there's good coverage of blossoms and buds all over the branch.
In some cases I'm just going in and editing the path of the stems,
where they meet the branch to make sure that there's no gaps.
Now, I'm just arranging some of the single falling petals at the bottom here.
And now that I'm happy with my composition, I'll move on to just
adding a few effects in the background and some texture to the tree branch.
Here, I'm adding a circular gradient to the background to give it a glow in the
middle and a darker blue green around the edges for a subtle vignette look.
And I'd also like to add a subtle shadow.
That's the shape of the branch and the flowers.
So here I'm just selecting all of the blossoms and flowers and just
ungrouping that and uniting it with the Pathfinder to get a solid shape
that mimics the entire branch.
I'll set that shape to one of my darker blue greens.
And then I'm just going to add a blur effect so that it looks
more like a shadow and not just a solid shape behind my branch.
And you can see that gives it just a hint of depth.
One of the last main steps I'll do here is to add some texture
and color to the branch itself.
To do that, I'm going to use the paint inside feature, which you can select
down here at the bottom of your toolbar.
This basically makes the branch shape a clipping mask that you can paint
inside to do the actual painting.
I'm going to use the blob brush tool.
And you can see my settings here.
This is something you can adjust for yourself and experiment depending on
how you want your texture to look.
I just selected a color that's slightly lighter than my tree branch base and
started painting in where I think there might be some highlights or variations
that I want to see inside that branch shape and painting in several layers
with the blob brush tool here, just selecting some lighter colors as I
go to build up that highlight effect.
And then what I'll do is select several of my sketchy layers with the blob brush.
And I'm just going to use the tweak effect to roughen that up a little
bit so that it doesn't look quite so much like straight brush lines.
I also end up adding a subtle blur to some of the brushstrokes
inside the tree branch.
And then I'm going back with a bit of a thicker brush and I've
adjusted the opacity down and set it to screen mode just to paint back
over and give us just a bit more variation inside that wood texture.
I will be doing a full tutorial on how to create textures like this and how to use
the blob brush and the paint inside mode.
If you'd like to see that it should be coming up soon.
So feel free to subscribe.
And these last few minutes, I'm just going back and adjusting the
shadows, tweaking the texture a little bit, painting in some new lines.
This is really just a process of trial and error, where I'm zooming out, taking
a look at it and seeing where I think I could tweak things just a little bit
to get the final look that I'm going.
And here we have our final cherry blossom branch illustration.
I hope you enjoyed the process.
This was a bit of a different format for me.
Let me know in the comments, if you like the speed art with narration, or
if you prefer the real time tutorials, I'd be happy to do more both.
And if you have any questions, of course, feel free to leave them.
I'm always happy to help.
Thanks again for watching.
Hope you have a great day!