A fun personal project designers and illustrators often take part in is ’36 Days of Type’, or equivalent challenges like ‘Daily Drop Cap’ where artists express their style on a new letter or number every day. Initials have received decorative treatment throughout history, with examples dating as far back as early biblical texts. In today’s tutorial I’ll take you through the process of decorating a letter in Adobe Illustrator with a range of vector embellishments. We’ll make use of some really useful techniques that you’ll be able to make use of in all kinds of illustration projects in the future.
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My chosen letter for this tutorial is an ‘S’, but it would be fun to play around with all the different letterforms to see how they each provide a different canvas to work with. Using some of the unique features of Illustrator and its powerful shape building tools, we’ll add a range of patterns that follow the shape of the letter, and create some embellishments to decorate the inner spaces.
Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. Use the Type tool to enter the letter of your choice and pick a nice font, which will provide the foundation for your creative style. Here I’m using an elegant modern serif named Goku.
You are a very professional designer. –<-<-<@
This was the coolest tutorial! Definitely a good, quick lunch-time activity to get my mind off of the daily work grind for a bit!
I hope you enjoyed your creative getaway :-)
Great tutorial as usual !
Thanks very much!
I am pleased again like before.. Actually I love your presentation. It is easy to find out.
Thank you Biju!
Great tutorial! thanks for share it!.
Great tutorial! thanks for share it!.
Thank You so much chris! Its amazing.. Keep adding more tuts :)
Thanks Chris for your awesome blog. You are a great professional designer and your blog helps me to learn more things about design.
Super-Duper blogs! I love it really!! . Thanks for Sharing This Useful Information .Would come back to visit soon, again Thanks. Really important for a designer
Wow! That looks so easy! Must try! LOL
Thank you!
Su
Wow! All these years and I never knew how to make a dotted outline so simply and here you have it explained in a way that I am saying to myself, duhhhhh! Love, love, love this tutorial!! I can think of a hundred ways to incorporate this into my work. Thanks! Another brilliant, well explained, easy to follow tutorial!