You might find that The Christmas Baubles from our High Quality Christmas Icons and Christmas Vectors doesn’t come with the reflections as shown in our featured image, shown below.
This is to provide greater freedom for all users. Adding reflections and shadows are easy, but removing them is simply a waste of time.
Here, we’ve provided a short tute on adding reflections the easy way. In later tutorials, we’ll include masks and overlays, etc for advanced users. Continue Reading…
In this tutorial, we will first go into the Gradient Mesh, Gradient tool, and Eyedropper.
For this purpose, we’ve chosen an apple to illustrate the tool’s functions.
Let’s begin with a plain green apple. Download working file here.
So, now we have the apple.
We will need to set up some base colors. Select a number of green shades. The more you pick, the more detailed your apple will look. I’ve selected the colors below in my example.
Select the Pen Tool(P) and start tracing the outline of the apple. Then select the Mesh Tool (U) and add a mesh line by clicking on the shape.
Just keep adding more mesh lines. First add them horizontally, then move on to creating vertical mesh lines. Your image will look something like this.
Select Mesh Point with the Direct Selection Tool (A), then click on the lightest shade of green. This will create the apple’s highlight color.
Keep repeating the steps and filling the apple with different shades of green. You’ll have to keep experimenting – there are no 2 ways about it; practice makes perfect. Ultimately, your apple should look something like this.
For this part of the tutorial, please view one of our previous posts in which we’ve covered the Gradient Tool. Click here to view post.
This one is pretty straightforward. Use the eyedropper tool to select a color from an existing object to apply it another.
In this example below, you can see that the bunny contains several shades of pink, while the bunny shape on the right is in black. The objective is to turn the black bunny into a light shade of pink as per the bunny’s body.
Select the black bunny, then use the eyedropper and click it on the pink part of the body on the left bunny. The black shape will become pink.
Check out Muffy’s debut and come back often to see Muffy in action in his very own comic strip series – Muffy’s Mischiefs! Enjoy!
Muffy is Daily Overview’s very own comic character. As the title suggests, Muffy is all about fun pranks, cheeky antics, and mischief. Watch this little alien as he pops up everywhere, injecting humor into the lives of everyone around him. If you’re looking for good laughs, keep yourself entertained with Muffy’s comic strips 
In today’s tutorial, we’ll be covering the warp, free transform, symbol and graph tools. You can download the vector bunny we’ve used as our sample file here.
This tool is similar to Photoshop’s Liquify tool, letting you bend paths around to create amazing distortions and styles. This guide will get you started experimenting with the warp tool.
This is used to distort the shape of a selected path or series of paths. This is different from the “Rotate Tool” which only turns or rotates a selection. First, select a path, object, or grouping of objects by dragging your cursor over them while the “Selection Tool (V)” (the solid arrow) is active. Once you create your selection, a “Bounding Box” will appear around the selected objects. Once the bounding box appears, select the Free Transform tool.
This is a very useful tool that can potentially save you a lot of time. Illustrator comes with hundreds of symbols, and there are thousands more available on the Internet. First, you need to understand that a symbol is an art object that can be used over and over. Each time a symbol is used within an Illustration, it is referred to as an instance of that symbol.
An instance of a symbol can be added one-by-one, or can be sprayed onto an illustration via the Symbol Sprayer tool. Secondly they allow you to edit the symbol in one place and for all occurrences of that symbol to be updated. First open your Symbols panel (under Windows).
It may seem like a real challenge to pull the fireworks out of the image below. Certainly, using the magic wand, magic eraser and pen tool is not going to produce very good results. Here, I’m going to show you a very simple technique for isolating the fireworks in this image using the channels palette. This technique doesn’t always work this smoothly for every image, but it can be used in combination with other methods for making more complex selections, which will be covered in future posts.
So, what do you do next? Open up the channels palette. Take a good look at the image and determine which color channel best represents the area we want to capture. As you can see, it’s obvious that the red channel contains the most information for capturing the fireworks. (since the fireworks are mostly in red). Image 1.
Image 1
Now, in Image 2, you will see that I’ve selected the Red channel. Do that.
Image 2
Next, drag the red channel down to the new channel button as shown in Image 3.
Image 3
You will now see a new channel named ‘Red Copy’ as shown in Image 4 below
Image 4
Now, go under ‘Select‘ and choose ‘Load Selection‘. Image 5
Image 5
A ‘Load Selection’ box will appear, select ‘Red Copy’ under channel, and tick the invert box as shown in image 6
Image 6
What you will see next is as per Image 7 below once you’ve clicked ‘ok’.
Now, click back on the RGB channel to load the full colors of the image. Image 8
Next, go under ‘Select‘ and choose ‘Inverse‘ as shown in image 9.
Image 9
Now, open up the new background on which you want your selected fireworks placed. Here, I’ve chosen a dark blue sky background.
Finally, all you got to do is to drag the fireworks from the original image onto the new background. Voila! You’re done!
