Illustrator Flower with Live Paint

posted by Liz

Growing flowers in Illustrator CS2/CS3
I made some new desktop wallpapers for elixir on Friday and decided to share my technique in making one of them.



This tutorial is labeled CS2 and up because it requires using the Live Paint tool and I believe that the first version of Illustrator to implement Live Paint was CS2. Just so you're aware.

To practice making this flower, try copying mine using these directions:

1. Draw any shape/size circle. Set the fill to none. With the circle selected, go to Effect>Warp>Shell Upper. You can see my settings below.



2. Go to Object>Expand Appearance to re-fit the shape guides. Now copy and paste the shape. Rotate and move the new petal a little so that it starts to form the flower.



3. Do this a few more times, like so, until you have a whole flower. Mine has five petals.



4. Now the fun part! Select all the petals, go to your toolbar and click on the Live Paint tool.



5. Move the paint can over the illustration to highlight each segment in red as you pass over it. Choose a color and click inside a segment to apply it.



6. You can choose a stroke color at any point. My stroke is the same on every petal and is simply the same color as my lightest green, so that the outside petals do not appear to have a stroke. Here are the five greens I used, from lightest to darkest, via their hex codes. You can see that I moved from lightest to darkest as I worked from the outside of the flower to the center.

D2E298 (same for stroke)
C2D37D
B3C15F
A5AF48
949933

7. Download this wallpaper (and two other versions of it) full size from the desktops page.