Back to Illustrator tonight and for this exercise I'm going to recreate the cover for Queen's 1978 album Jazz. In actual fact, this particular cover is not much of a favourite of mine. However, it's ideal for taking advantage of Illustrator's extreme ease of use when it comes to creating geometric patterns.

It also gives me the opportunity to put Illustrator's excellent blend function through its paces, as well as creating an Opacity Mask, some 3D revolve, a little Free Distort and the Polar Grid tool

Don't worry, it's a lot easier than it sounds.


So let's begin:

1. I'm going to start by drawing the concentric circles that form the major part of the design. There are actually countless ways of doing so but in this case Illustrator's Polar Grid tool is perfect for the job. Select the tool and click on the artboard to bring up the Polar Grid tool dialogue box. These are the settings that I've used. The skew value is particularly important as this governs the increasing gap between the concentric circles.



This is the sort of result that you're after:



2. Before you do anything else select all and bring up the Align palette (Window> Align). In the palette menu make sure that Align To Artboard is checked and then align your Polar Grid to the artboard both vertically and horizontally. When I'm creating artwork I always find this a useful thing to do. It will place the object exactly in the centre of the artboard.

Now go to the Layers palette and expand the contents of the layer by hitting the small triangle. In the concentric circle group hold down the shift key and select the first six concentric circles. Now hit delete to get rid of the nasty blighters.



3. Now for the inner circles. Create a new layer and then draw a constrained circle that is just a little smaller than the inner concentric circle and set its stroke width to around 6pt. Copy the circle, Paste In Front (Command-F) and then reduce the circle in size (hold down shift and alt to do so). Now select both circles and hit Command-Alt-B (this will blend the two circles. Double-click on the Blend tool and from the pop-up menu choose Specified Steps. Make the value 7. You now have a second set of concentric circles.





4. This set of concentric circles now needs a little perspective added to it. Go to Effect> 3D> Revolve and tweak the circles a little. Below are the settings that I have used.



Here's how both sets of concentric circles should look:



5. Now select all and apply a white stroke to everything and a fill on none. Create a second new layer (you now have three in all) and move this one beneath the other two. Now draw a square and fill it with black. Use the Align palette to align the square to the centre of the artboard.



6. Now we're getting places. But first we have to do something about the concentric circles on layer 1. At the moment they are just a little too bright. They need to fade as the circles get smaller. As always there are many ways to do this, but on this occasion we are going to use an opacity mask.

Copy the black square that you created earlier. Now select the concentric circles on Layer one. Go to the Transparency palette and select Show Options from the palette menu. From that same menu select Make Opacity Mask. In the Transparency palette you will now see two squares. Click on the one to the right and hit Command-F to paste the black square into the Opacity channel.



7. You will be forgiven if you are now feeling a little confused. The concentric circles seem to have disappeared. Not so. Go to the Gradient palette and after selecting Show Options from the palette menu, double-click the gradient to fill the black square you pasted in with a gradient. Make this a radial gradient and tweak the settings as I have done below. The concentric circles are now back and they are gently fading to the centre. Now exit the opacity channel by clicking on the left hand square in the Transparency palette.



8. Now for some text. Create a fourth layer and make sure it is sitting on top of the other three. Choose the type tool and create the 'Queen' lettering at the top . I've chosen Myriad Italic for this and tweaked the vertical scaling and tracking as below.



9. Colour the text white and position it towards the top left of the illustration. Now alt-drag a copy of the text to the far right of the illustration. Select both bits of 'Queen' text and as before hit Command-Alt-B to create a blend. Double-click on the Blend tool and change the settings to Specified Steps with a value of 3.



Here's what you should have now:



10. Now for the Jazz logo. Select the Type tool and single-click somewhere away from the illustration. Type in the word and set it to Myriad Bold, colour the type red. Now to add some perspective to the type.

Back in the Selection tool, select the type object and got to Effects> Distort & Transform> Free Distort... Drag the anchor points to get something like this.



And that's just about that. Easy, huh?

Of course, aficionados of Queen will be quick to point out that there are some bicycles missing from the foot of the cover. Haven't got time for bikes now, some other time maybe...

Illustrator CS2 included the welcome addition of a 3D effects module, older timers like me will remember this from the days of Adobe Dimensions. It's a relatively simple 3D app but still fun to use. Here we're going to use Extrude And Bevel to create a simple 3D dice.


1. To begin go to the View menu and turn on Grid and Snap To Grid. Now draw yourself a simple square, adding a fill and removing the stroke. Then draw a simple circle and colour it. Next, alt-drag the circle to make a copy, select the two circles and alt-drag downwards to create two more circles. Finally, hit Command-D to repeat the transformation. You now have a dice with six spots.



2. Now select the dice face and alt-drag to the right. Next select the two dice faces and alt-drag downwards to create two more dice. Finally, hit Command-D again to repeat the last transformation. You now have six dice sides.



3. Now it's time to start removing the spots that you don't want. Moving a few here and there, deleting others. In the end you'll finish up with something which looks like the screenshot below.



4. Now it's time to save each dice side as a Symbol. Select the symbols palette and drag each side into it, one by one.



5. Now delete five of the dice sides and remove all the spots from the final one. Make a note of width of the square. In this case mine is 120px. Select the square and choose Effect>3D>Extrude And Bevel. Turn on the preview and set the Bevel depth to whatever the width of your square is (In my case 120px). Next, hit the Map Art.. button.



6. Now it's time to apply the dice symbols that you saved to each side of the 3D dice. Trawl through each surface and choose the appropriate dice face. Remember to check the Shade Artwork (slower) button and hit OK.



7. The dice is almost done. All that remains is to add a little perspective (everything in the real world has perspective) and light the dice to your satisfaction. Here I've used three lights to do this.

Now start rolling the dice!

Hi there.

Today’s exercise will show you how to create a star-field effect in under five minutes. There are, of course, many ways of doing this, the Symbol Sprayer tools being an obvious choice. In this instance, however, I'm going to use a Scatter Brush, which is sometimes very useful for things such as crowds scenes and – naturally – Star Fields.

Hi there. The following exercise is a bit of an old chestnut. So I apologise about that. Almost everybody who has ever used a 3D package has begun by drawing the obligatory bottle or glass. I think that maybe I'll be able to show you why.

Digressing slightly: if anyone from the USA is tuning into this, I'd like to personally thank the whole of America for beta-testing the iPhone. It's very thoughtful of you all. Hopefully, when it arrives in the UK in November time, the iPhone will actually work! :)

1. Lets begin: what I kind of like about this exercise is that if you're the sort of person who gets scared by using the Pen tool I can hopefully prove that you don't need to be an expert in Bezier curves to create perfectly acceptable artwork.

Start by drawing two rectangles: one for the neck of the bottle and one for the barrel of the bottle. Align these both to the centre of the artboard. This last step is not essential but it's good practise in my opinion.



2. Select the larger rectangle and copy it – you will need this copy soon. Now go to Effect> Stylize> Rounded corners and turn on preview. Use the up and down arrows to round off the barrel of the bottle as below.



3. Now to use the copy of the rectangle you created earlier: Hit Apple-F to paste the rectangle in front of the rounded edged rectangle. You're going to use this rectangle to create the rounded bottom of the bottle. Once again go to Effect> Stylize> Rounded Corners and use the up and down arrows to round the box so that it looks something like this:



4. Now reduce the rectangle in height like this:



5. Now we're going to merge the two rectangles. The first step in this is to select the two rectangles and go to Object> Expand Appearance. This removes the rounded edges effect and turns the rectangles into editable objects. Now bring out the Pathfinder palette and alt-click the Add To Shape Area icon. Alt-clicking saves you the trouble of expanding the object later on.



6. You can see that the merge has left us with one or two extraneous anchor points. Select the Pen tool and use it to remove these points. All you have to do is hover the Pen tool over an anchor point until you see a '-' sign. You can now click to remove the point.



7. Now to address the neck of the bottle: draw a rounded-edged rectangle for the lip of the bottle and align it to the centre of the artboard as below:



8. Now select the neck rectangle and the lip rectangle and once again use the Pathfinder palette to merge them.



9. Now select the neck and the barrel and merge them in the same way.



10. We're now going to 3D rotate the object. before we can do this we need to cut it in half. Lots of ways of doing this but the way I favour is to first draw a line down the centre of the bottle and align it to the middle of the artboard as below:



11. Now select all and hit the Divide button in the Pathfinder palette.



12. Now we need to remove the line in the centre. Select the Direct Selection tool, click on the vertical line and hit delete. Also remove the top of the bottle – we need to put some wine in this bottle. Then thicken up the stroke a little and in the Stoke Palette select rounded corners and rounded edges.

Now make sure that there is no fill on the object and go to Object> Path> Outline Stroke. This will create a filled object based on the width of the stroke. Very useful, I find.



13. Now go to Effect> 3D> Revolve. Did I say we were creating a bottle? Looks like a glass to me. Weird, huh?



14. Correct this strange anomaly by choosing Right Edge and change the settings in the dialogue box to meet your requirements.



15. Here I've Selected More Options and added a new light. I've also added some perspective. Hit OK and you have a bottle. Tomorrow we'll set about mapping a label on to the bottle.

See ya soon.

This is just me, and some people might accuse me of going the long way around the block. But...

One of the annoying things about Illustrator is the relatively minimal control that you have over rounded corner rectangles. It seems to me that you have two options if you wish to adjust the corner radius:

1/ Use the left and right arrows to alter the corner radius as you're drawing. All very well but the problem is that the box you are drawing very quickly gets to look like a circle and you tend to lose any fine control.

2/ Single click on the artboard and then key in the corner radius that you require. This is a little hit and miss but it works if you’re prepared to keep deleting the object until you get the size that you require.

Me, I prefer to draw myself a plain old rectangle and then move over to Effects>Stylize>Rounded corners. You can then turn on preview and use the up and down arrows to intuitively change the corner radius of an object. As I said: longwinded, sure. But to me it's the best of a bad lot.

Hi there.

Back to my favourite prog today. I'm going to be doing this while I watch Federer-Nadal in the Wimbledon final. If I appear a little distracted then, please forgive me (as I write Federer is two sets to one up but has fallen to pieces a little in the fourth set).

Illustrator. What a fantastic program. I was brought up using Freehand and for many years I thought it was the bee's knees. Then, round about version 9.0, Illustrator took over. For this exercise I'm going to be showing you how to create metallic looking text. I hope you enjoy it. Once again, any comments are greatly appreciated.

1. Create some type. In this case I simply click on the page and begin typing. I'm using the font Impact, which everyone should have. When you're ready switch to the selection tool and manually resize the type to your satisfaction. As ever, I've aligned my type to the centre of the artboard horizontally and vertically. I always do this, I just think it's good practice.



2. First of all, convert your text into outlines. Do this by selecting Type> Create Outlines. Now ungroup the converted type and apply a gradient to one of the letter forms. This is how I've done it:



3. Select the gradient tool and change the angle of the gradient so that it runs vertically. Here you can tweak the gradient to get it looking good.



4. Now the fun bit: if you're using a version of Illustrator earlier than CS3 you must create 10 swatches; from 100% black to 0% black. If you have CS3 you can use the default Grayscale Colour Group.

Apply a 10pt stoke and colour it 100% black. Next go to the palette menu of the Appearance palette and select Add New Stoke. Make this 9pt and 90% black. Make another 8 new stokes in this way, each time reducing the size by 1pt and the colour by 10%. As you work you will see a metallic looking stroke begin to take shape.



5. Eventually your stroke will look like this:



6. Now you have to apply the metallic stroke to every character. Of course, we wouldn't want to have to reinvent the wheel to do this, so go over to the Graphic style palette and with the first character selected, hit the New button. Select each letter individually and apply the stroke style that you have just created. Now manually adjust the kerning between the letters and group them.



7. The type may now be looking metallic enough for your taste. This next bit, therefore, is optional. Create an ellipse and align it centrally to the artboard. Fill the ellipse with a neutral looknig grey and head over to Effects> Artistic> Film Grain…. Apply the default settings and then select Effects> Brush Strokes> Angled Stokes… Again apply the default settings. I always find this a fairly straightforward way of creating a brushed metal effect.



8. Send the ellipse to the back and copy it for later use. Now apply a drop shadow to the type (Effects> Stylize> Drop Shadow…) These are the settings I've used:



9. Now paste the copied ellipse in front (Apple-F) and in the Transparency palette set its blending mode to Multiply. Adjust the opacity to suit. You should now have a brused metal effect on top of the type.



10. This bit is also optional. Here I've selected the Flare tool and applied a flare with the following settings:




Some might say that the Flare tool is simply too tacky to ever use and most of the time I'd agree. But what the hell…

I'm new to this blogging business and as yet nobody has even looked at this wonderful blog. Today I submitted this page to a number of blogging search engines, so hopefully there'll be some traffic soon. I live in hope...

Anyhow, here's a fun little thing you can do in Illustrator. When you're using any of the primitive drawing tools (i.e. rectangle, ellipse, polygon, line tool, etc.) simply hold down the tilde key (~) and you enter 'Spazz mode'. This enables you to very quickly create hundreds of paths and cause your computer to crash. It's very good for creating spirograph-type patters. Give it a try.

You may have noticed that Illustrator happens to be my favourite program. Sure, Photoshop has the power and the ability to produce quick-fix effects using Filters, etc. But Illustrator, to my mind, is the purists' program. Surprisingly, in my opinion, it's not a pre-requisite that you should be able to draw before using Illustrator. Nor, for that matter, should you be an expert in Bezier curves. Of course, these things help but even if you're a beginner you can get a lot out of Illustrator.

Above all, I believe Illustrator to be a problem solving program. It's all about thinking out of the box to achieve a particular end result. Take the following, for example.

A few years ago a student of mine asked me how to create a three-dimensional diamond shape in Illustrator. Naturally, to achieve this there's always the drawing option. But I immediately got to thinking about Illustrator's Rotate feature. This is a ported over version of the old favourite Adobe Dimensions. Problem with this, however, is not matter what shape or profile you begin with you're always basically lathing an object. Try as I might I could not produce the effect I wanted. Then I thought: what not create a custom bevel and extrude the shape?

Here's how I did it:

1. Use the polygon tool to create a six-sided shape. You may not know that while drawing with the polygon tool you can us the up and down arrow keys to intuitively add or remove polygon sides. In this example I've given the shape a green fill – this can always be changed later on. Remember to remove the stroke or you will end up with a black object when you bevel.




2. Select Effect> 3D> Extrude And Bevel and turn on the preview. Choose one of the default bevels and try increasing the bevel and extrude depth. Get a feel for what happens when you do this. It's good fun but you'll find in the end that whatever you try you will not be able to create a diamond shape.



3. Your only option is a custom bevel. Select File> Open... and navigate over to your applications folder. Find the Illustrator CS2 or CS3 folder and inside you will find a folder called Plug-ins. Inside there is a file named Bevels.ai. Open it and you will see a list of all of Illustrator's default bevels. (If you're on a PC you must go to the Programs folder and find the Illustrator Plug-ins folder nested inside the main Adobe folder.)



4. Use the Pen tool to create a bevel shape that resembles the one depicted below. Make sure that both ends of the bevel line up. You can do this by selecting the points with the direct selection tool and making sure that the 'Y' value in the control panel at the top of the screen is identical. Now select the Symbols palette and hit the new button. All bevels must be saved as symbols for this to work. Now save and quit Illustrator.



5. Restart Illustrator and re-open the file you created earlier containing the extruded polygon. Locate the Appearance palette and double click on the 3D Extrude & Bevel layer to edit it. Turn on the Preview and in the Bevels list you will find the bevel that you just created. Now you're cooking!

Play with the setting until you get something similar to what I've created below.





6. You will notice that I've taken the blends steps right down to only five steps. In this type of object you're not really looking for a smooth finish. To complete the job add another light and adjust its position and intensity to your satisfaction.

It's easy, I admit, but an ideal example of how lateral thinking can really achieve good results in Adobe Illustrator. It a real diamond of a program ...Sorry about that.

Hello out there.

Once again I’m going to have to offer my most sincere apologies for the somewhat sporadic nature of these little tutorials of ine. It’s probably not much of an excuse but I really have been very, very busy lately.

What with family business and far too much work, I’ve been finding it very hard to spare the time to maintain this blog. But I promise, I really do promise, that I’m going to try and men my ways. Watch this space!

Apart from that I’d like to thank all the people who continue to tune in. We’ve now reached the 10,000 hit mark. Which I think is amazing given the short amount of time that I’ve been running this blog.

For today’s exercise I’m going to be doing another album cover. So many people seemed to enjoy my recreation of Queen’s Jazz album cover that I’m going to attempt the granddaddy of them all: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. This is a simple enough looking design – a triangle with a rainbow running through it. However, if you’re going to be able to do it correctly there is no option but to do a little trickery with opacity masks and blends.

So here we go... Have fun – and as always your comments are very welcome.

1. We’re going to have to be pretty organised with this. For this reason we’re going to create two layers – one for the Black background and one for the prism. So begin by creating an A4 document and selecting the Rectangle Tool. Single-click on the artboard and create a square that is 375pt x 375pt. Use the Align Palette to align the object to the centre of the artboard (as you know I always do). Double click Layer 1 and call it ‘Background’. Now lock this layer.



2. Create a new layer and call it Working Layer. Select the Polygon tool and single-click on the artboard. Create a three sided polygon (i.e. a prism) with a radius of 68.5. Position this prism at 301 pt on the X axis and 416 pt on the Y axis (you can use the control panel or the Transform palette to do this). Fill the Prism with white and remove the stroke.


3. What we have to do next is actually quite complex, but also rather simple. We need to have the prism fading from white to turquoise to transparent. We achieve this by first of all copying the prism (this is most important that you do this, I can’t emphasise this enough) then heading over to the Transparency palette and from the palette menu selecting Show Options and then Make Opacity Mask. Now select the second of the two squares that appear in the Transparency palette (the black one) and hit Apple-F (Paste in Front). You are now working on the opacity mask rather than the object itself.

4. Now select Effect> Stylize> Feather... Turn on Preview and use the up and down arrows to feather the prism something like this:


5. In the Transparency palette turn off Clip and invert the mask. Now go to the Appearance palette and double-click on ‘Feather’. Now adjust the feathering so that it looks like this:


6. In the Transparency palette select the first of the two squares to exit from opacity mask mode. We’re starting to get there now. In the Layers palette expand the Working Layer and make a copy of the the prism by dragging the sub-layer on to the New button. In the Tools palette make sure that the Fill is in the foreground and then choose or create a turquoise colour from the Swatches palette. You now have two prisms, one white and one turquoise. The turquoise prism is sitting bang on top of the white prism.




7. We now have to create the illusion that the white of the underlying prism is fading into the turquoise prism. To do this go to Effect> Stylize> Feather and feather the turquoise prism so that it looks like this:



8. Now go back to the transparency palette and select the second of the two square to re-enter opacity mask mode. Go to the Appearance palette and once again double-click on Feather and and then adjust the feathering of the opacity mask so that it looks like this:



9. We have now achieved the effect of white fading into turquoise and then into transparent; and we couldn’t have done it without opacity masks. Exit the Opacity mask by clicking on the first of the two squares in the Transparency palette, That’s the hard part over. Phew!

10. Now lock the Working Layer and create a new layer called Rainbow. Hit Apple-F to paste in front the prism that you created ages ago (remember I said that it was important that you copied the prism?). Use the Line tool to draw two lines of approximately this size and location. Make sure that both lines generously overlap bothe prism and the edge of the black background.



11.Now draw yourself a rectangle that overlaps the two lines, as below:



12. Select the blend tool and – one at a time – click on the two lines. You’ll get a blend that forms and looks something like this:



13. Double click on the Blend tool and set the spacing to 5 specified steps. Your rainbow will now look like this:



14. Select the rainbow blend and go to Object> Blend> Expand. Now Bring out the Pathfinder Palette and select the white prism, the blend and the small rectangle and hit Divide.

15. If you’ve done this correctly the end result will look like this:



16. Ungroup the divided objects, delete the bits you don’t want and then fill the rainbow segments with the colours of your choice. Like this:



17. Now hit Apple-F once again to paste the prism in front. Use the Pen tool to add and remove points until you get an object that looks like this:




18. Copy this object and hit Apple-F again to you-know-what. Now use the Direct Selection tool to move the two points on the right of the object over to the left of the black square on the Background layer. As follows:



19. Now Select the white object in the middle of the prism and use the transparency palette to knock back the opacity.



All done... How difficult was that? Any questions – and I realise that there may be quite a few – please drop me a line. Hope you had fun doing this.

Until next time...

A quick tutorial for a change, featuring my favourite program the sublime Adobe Illustrator.

1. Create a simple elipse and then use the pen tool to sharpen one of the curves (hold down the alt key to temporarily bring up the convert anchor point tool).



2. Add a fill and stroke of your choice and then select the Rotate Tool (r) and alt-click at the base of the ellipse to redefine the rotation origin. Type in a rotation value of 36º and hit 'copy'. Now hit Command-D (Control for PCs) eight times to repeat the transformation and create the flower shape.



3. Use the Pathfinder pallette to join the flower petals together and then add a drop shadow that emanates from the centre of the flower decoration.



4. Select Object>Transform Each and reduce the size of the object to 90% and change the rotation value to 18º. Hit 'copy' and then Command-D until you have made an appropriate number of copies. Hey presto! Easy flowers.

I'm really knackered as I write this. So I’m afraid that this exercise will be short and sweet. I'm doing this at 11.30 a.m. because I live in hope that one day somebody might actually post a comment to let me know that I'm not alone in this world.

For the record this exercise takes advantage of Illustrator's Symbol tools to very quickly create a bunch of flowers.

1. Begin with a simple square. I've made sure that this one is aligned to the centre of the page. Don't ask why – it's the anorak in me coming to the surface again. Now go to Object> Path> Add Anchor Points. It's important that you do this or your flower will end up looking pretty crappy.



2. Now the fun bit. Add a fill and a stroke to the square and then Go to Effect> Distort And Transform> Pucker And Bloat. Turn on the preview, place your cursor in the field and use the up and down arrows to magically create a flower. Far better than drawing it. Anyone out there agree? No?



3. Select Object> Expand Appearance. Now drag the flower into the Symbol palette. Make the symbol a graphic in the options dialogue box that appears. Now delete the original flower. You don't need it any more.



4. More fun: tear off the Symbol tools for ease of use. Select the Symbol Sprayer tool and begin painting your flowers. Far cheaper than buying a bunch...



5. Now it's time to be a little creative. Give your flowers a more random appearance with liberal use of the Symbol tools. Here I've used the Shifter, the Scruncher, the Sizer and the Spinner tools.

Remember that you can double-click on any of the tools to adjust their settings. Also remember that you can reverse the tools' function by holding down the alt key.



6. Next apply the Screener and Stainer tools. For the latter tool you must first select a fill from the Swatches palette. Here I've used four or five different colours to further randomize the flowers' appearance.



7. Next create a new layer and move it beneath the existing layer. Draw a box that fills the entire artboard and add a gradient by clicking on the middle squre icon at the base of the Tools palette.



8. Move over to the Gradient palette and adjust the colours by clicking on a gradient handle and alt-clicking on the colour of your choice in the Swatches palette. Now use the Gradient tool to change the angle of the gradient as show below.



9. Complete the task by selecting the flowers and adding the obligatory drop shadow. I always think that drop shadows are the best way of hiding poor design.

Hello there, for today's long overdue exercise I'm going to be creating a dartboard. Why? Why not?



2. Here's watcha get:



3. Now tear off the Group Selection tool and the Scale tool. Move them close to the potential dart board for easy access. Use the Group Selection tool to select the second concentric circle. Then double-click on the Scale tool and take the uniform value down to 90%.



4. Now use the Group Selection tool to select the fourth concentric circle and double-click on the Scale tool to scale it down to 84%.



5. Repeat this process again. Choose the sixth concentric circle and scale it down to 29%.



6. Finally, scale the seventh concentric circle down again by 29%.



7. Now you need to rotate the entire dart board. Click away to deselect then select the dart board with the Selection tool. Select the Rotate tool and double-click it. Set the rotate value to 45º.



8. Now we need to colour the dart board. To do this I'm going to turn the dart board into a Live Paint object. Go to the Object> Live Paint> Make. Now select the Live Paint Bucket tool and then choose a black coloured swatch. Begin dragging as below:



9. Continue dragging to paint...



10. Don't worry if you make mistakes (like I have)...



11. Get yourself a red swatch and carefully colour in the doubles and trebles...



12. Now use a white swatch, like this:



13. Finally, get yourself a green swatch to complete your dose of Live Painting. I like this feature, it saves so much time.



14. Now zoom into the bullseye. Draw yourself a circle and colour it red. Align this circle to the centre of the artboard.



15. Now for some numbers. Fit the page to the window (Apple-0) and then use the Type tool to create the number 20. I've use Myriad Pro 29 pt, but you can obviously use whatever takes your fancy. Make sure the type is centrally aligned, then move it into position and align to the centre horizontally.



16. Select the Rotate tool and hold down the alt key and click in the centre of the dart board. Key in 18º for the value and hit Copy. Finally hit Apple-D 18 times to repeat this transformation.



17. You end up with a very high scoring dart board.



18. If you're not happy with this you'll have to do a little donkey work. Use the Type tool to manually change the numbers.



19. Still more drudgery. You're going to have to use the Rotate tool to manually straighten all the numbers. Just select each number one by one and double-click on the Rotate tool; use the up and down arrows to straighten the numbers, What a drag...

...Well done! You're there! You did well!

Another Illustrator tutorial for you. This one makes use of Illustrator's envelopes as well as blending modes. I've chosen a Japanese flag for this exercise. This is simply because I'm getting so many Japanese visitors to this blog. It'll work with any flag obviously.

1. Begin by drawing a Japanese flag: a red circle inside a rectangle. If you're an anorak like I am you can use the align palette to make sure that both objects are precisely aligned. Now group them.



2. Next use the Line tool and draw yourself a straight line above the flag that is slightly wider than the flag. Go to Effects> Distort & Transform> Zigzag and apply a smooth wave to the line. The more ridges you apply the windier the day is going to be for you.



3. Now go to Effects> Distort & Transform> Twist and choose an angle that makes your zig-zagged line look a little more random. Now alt-drag a copy of the line underneath the flag. Because the top and bottom of a flag are never the same go to the Appearance palette and double-click on Twist and adjust the angle slightly.



4. Now this is important: we need to join the two lines together to form an outline around the flag. In order to do so you must select Object>Expand Appearance and then Object>Ungroup. You can now use the pen tool to do this. Aim for one edge of a line and you will see a '/' icon. Click on this and then click on the other line to join the two segments together. Now repeat this process and you will have a fully closed path.



5. Now it gets easier. Select all objects and choose Object> Envelope Distort> Make With Top Object. The flag is now beginning to take shape.



6. Now copy the object and choose Edit> Paste In Front. This will make a copy of the flag and place it sitting on top of the original. Choose Object>Envelope Distort> Release and you will end up with a nice neutral gray version of the flag, Delete the underlying Japanese flag group that lies beneath the released envelope object. Now select the Gradient Mesh tool and make a series of cuts at the tops of the flag. When you have finished you will have something that resembles the screenshot below.



7. A little patience is now required. With the Direct Selection tool choose every other anchor point at the top and bottom of the flag. If you do this correctly you can then apply a black swatch to your selection and you should end up with something that looks like this:



8. Now go to the Transparency palette and set the blending mode to Multiply. Fiddle around with the opacity until you have what you want.



9. Now the fun bit: select all objects and group. Choose Effects> Warp> Twist and play with the settings until you get the flag shape that you require. Make it as windy as you like!



10. By the way: I know from my web stats that a lot of people are visiting this blog. I'd really appreciate it if you could post the odd comment or two, if only to know that there are other people in this world who enjoy using the Adobe Creative Suite. Thanks in advance.