Create Movement In Your Illustrations

There are an abundance of Illustrator tutorials out there for many different uses. Most of which are the same tutorials with different techniques, not that there is anything wrong with that, some techniques work better than others. This tutorial will teach you how to use Illustrator 5 tools to create stylistic lines that can be used to simulate movement. When I created this piece I was stuck on how to tackle the look and feel of movement for my waterfalls. After sifting through many tutorials, I couldn’t quite find what I was imagining. After some messing around with the new width tool in illustrator I found the perfect look for me, so I hope you all like it!

PREPARATION:

Any image that you want to create movement in. I used this technique in a few of my projects, each with varying looks. So depending on the object that needs movement, it can really stylize your image. You also need Adobe Illustrator CS 5, specifically the width tool.

STEP 1:

I like to sketch out my scenes beforehand. This is a very rough starting sketch (my sketches always tend to evolve down the line, even after vectoring has started). So if you already have a starting point, then great. Otherwise its OK to just follow the tutorial in an arbitrary shape to see how it comes out. For the sake of this tutorial, I am going to skip over everything in my scene except for the waterfalls.

STEP 2:

Next, I like to pick out a group of swatches that compliment each other. This will come in handy later when we are coloring each line. A great resource for getting great color swatches is Kuler, a great free resource from Adobe. The swatches I used are; #C6E9FB, #A5DEF4, #37789D, #C0E7FA, #2791C6, #4C88A9, and #68BBE9.

STEP 3:

Now its time for the tedious part, blocking in all the lines. Don’t worry, it might not look like much, but later it will all come together. Try filling in as much of the area as you can. The closer together the more details there will be and better the end result will look. Don’t worry about the color of the lines now, we will fill those out later, just focus on getting the lines perfect.

NOTE: Before I started blocking in the lines, all I did was outline my wave shape and make it a solid blue color.

Now just finish blocking in the lines. Remember, don’t get discouraged on how it look now, it will look better soon! I used to get discouraged about how my work was looking, but you have to remember its not done yet! After tweaking my work I always felt better after the end result.

STEP 4:

Now we can begin coloring the lines. Bring your swatches nice and close, then start selecting many lines and pick one of your colors. Remember to try to make the colors random so there are not a group of the same colors next to each other, make each line a different color from your preselected group. You can select the lines one by one and see what looks best, or you can shift + click a bunch of random lines and then select a swatch. Notice how by just changing the color of the lines, it is already starting to look much better, but we’re not done yet!

STEP 5:

To really bring out the depth and diversity to the lines we are going to do two things. First, select all the lines and in the stroke menu click but cap and miter join (this should be set by default). This will give the lines a sharper point to them.

The next thing that will change up the look of the lines is changing some of their sizes. My lines range anywhere from 1pt all the way to 5pts. You want to put emphasis on certain lines by making some lines bigger and some of the surrounding lines smaller. Just go through by mass selecting the lines and change their size. Here is a close up so you can see how my line widths vary. Notice how I make some of the lines bigger to stand out. This will be crucial for getting that movement feeling to it.

STEP 6:

Now for the fun part (by fun I mean tedious…again). I love this step because you can finally see the transformation happening. First, select one line at a time and notice how many anchor points there are. Most of my lines only have 3 anchor points, although some of my longer lines have more. Next, select the Width tool (shift + w) and hover over one of those anchor points. Notice how you can increase and decrease certain parts of the lines. Select one end of the line at a time and make it as small as possible. By making each of the end caps as small as they can be, it creates movements across each line. The line should go from thin, to thick, to thin again

TIP: I like to select the middle anchor point first and make it SLIGHTLY bigger than it already is. The reason for this is because if you make each end cap as small as can be, then the line will just disappear. You need to first set a size for the middle so it doesn’t conform to the rest of the line.

This is how it should look complete

STEP 7:

This step is optional, it really only matters if your are doing something similar to my piece, but if you want to try it and see how it looks then go ahead! I am going to add a couple shapes throughout the water to give it a kind of “current” running through the stream. Select the pen tool and start creating wide pointy shapes. These shapes don’t have to be perfect. They are just going to be there for subtle details. Make sure they look like a broken puzzle that has been pulled apart. You can do this by making your next shape kind of go in and out of the previous shape. It looks more natural this way.

Now that you have your shapes made, select one and go to the transparency panel. Change the transparency of each shape to a really low level. Mine are 18% and 35%. This makes the shapes really subtle but still adds details to the movement.

That just about finishes it! Now your scene has some pretty stylized movement going on through it. You can of course add some more details throughout. Maybe a little blur here or there will look good on your piece. Thanks for reading, I hope everyone finds this tutorial useful! I’ll end by showing some more examples of this style.

Related Article: Use The Gradient Mesh Tool to Create Photorealistic Images

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