Leopard Rainbow Design Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

Today I’m going to show you how to create Rainbow Designs like this one right here in Adobe Illustrator so the first thing I recommend you do is change the background color of your illustrator artboard to Black that will make a life easier because we’re creating a design for a dark t-shirt so

You can do that by heading over to file document setup then check this box over here and change the color to Black and then if you hit OK and then you’ll see the background color apply now the first step to our design is actually creating the rainbow from scratch you can do that

In illustrator and then customize it to your liking which is really cool and you can get really creative here so to start off with that I would like to draw a rectangle so choose the rectangle tool from your toolbar just draw one out and make sure to center it horizontally

Right here on your artboard because now whilst having this selected we can draw out some rulers to help us out the rulers you can draw out from the side or from the top and if you don’t see these ruler bars then hit Ctrl r that should

Unhide them so click on these draw a ruler and drop it right here on the center point of your rectangle and now we can delete this draw out a different ruler from the top to about the middle of our app board it doesn’t have to be

Exact though in this case so kind of like this and that will give us a starting point to start drawing out our rainbow so the next thing you need to is select the pen tool you can also hit p on your keyboard to do that make sure

You’ve got no fill color selected and just a stroke of white by the way my app bot Dimensions right here in case you’re wondering are 450 pixels by 540 pixels and then using a one pixel stroke width right here is fine you can still see it

Quite well so we’ll start off by just drawing a line over here I hold down shift to make sure it comes out straight from the bottom if you don’t hold shift you’ve got this sort of variation so do that let go and then click on the middle

We kind of want to draw the first arch of this rainbow and it doesn’t have to be perfectly geometric it can be a bit wonky looking you want to essentially repeat that process until you’ve got about four five or six different arches like this that are sort of moving down

In size I’m always holding down shift after I’ve clicked by the way with the pen tool to keep these sort of looking a bit tidier and there we go it just makes life a lot easier afterwards as well right so once you’re done with that you

Will need to select all of your Strokes they’ve just created and increase the stroke size a bit make them quite a lot bigger so these are nearly touching and then you will also see how you have to kind of rearrange them because these ones at the bottom have way too much

Space in between whilst the ones at the top don’t you can also readjust some of these Anchor Point handles right here and essentially now it’s just a matter of tidying up this design a bit because at the moment it’s still a bit too crowded or a little bit too close this

Takes a minute or two but once you’re done you’ll have a really nice base to work off of for any types of rainbow designs that you want to create so there we go that looks a lot tidier now I actually went ahead and removed one of these arches because I feel like there

Was too many of them and they were getting too thin so I think with this layout it is a lot better so what’s next is we want to add some texture to these because at the moment they’re just very plain we will color them in in pink but

You know nevertheless there’s usually a lot of decorative stuff in here like dots Hearts zigzag lines there’s many different ways to approach this so in order to do this you want to highlight all of your shapes then hit Ctrl C on your keyboard to copy these and then

Ctrl F to paste them in front so now we’ve got two sets of these wide arches but we want to change the color the straw color to Black and then turn down this stroke kind of like this there we go and now we can use these lines to

Work with to decorate our rainbow a bit so a few things you can do first of all the basic one is heading to the stroke panel so I’ve got one of these selected right at the bottom heading to the stroke panel you can enable dashed line

And you can mess around with the width up here with the dash size so if you increase that as you can see you get thicker dashes you can change the Gap around so that way you get more or less you can also in enable round join and

That way you can sort of create some dots that are floating around and it does take a bit of messing around with these settings to get the right look so there we go that’s some dots for you and there they are getting more and more if

You turn down the Gap so definitely some cool ways to mess around with this and that looks quite cool you could also technically make these white right and then you could remove the shape behind let me just select that there we go so you could do something like this as well

Where there’s just dots and not um you know another shape behind just as an example um let’s do this line next and here I wanted to show you something with the effects panel so we can actually create some cool effects on these rainbows by heading to distort and transform zigzag

And as you can see that’s already created an interesting effect but we want to change The Ridges per segment and turn this up that will make it more rigid in a sense you can change the size if you want to turn this down make sure it doesn’t sort of overlap the actual

Rainbow arch and then you can also change it to smooth if you wanted to so that way it’s a more of a smoother line there’s a lot of different settings to mess around with and this is definitely a fun one to give this a different feel

One more thing I wanted to show you this is actually really cool one is let’s say you wanted to paste some hard shapes onto one of these and there’s a quick way to do this and let’s say you’ve got a hat ready I’ll show you a quick tip to

Creating a heart as well why not while we’re here in case you don’t have like a pre-made heart shape you can just use the rectangle tool with a fill color selected you can turn this by 45 degrees and then you can drag it over enter outline mode control y you need to make

It so the edges right here touching the center of the other rectangle and then we can drag another one down right here at the bottom so now as you can see we’ve got kind of a heart shape and we can combine these with the path finder window right here so use the unite

Function and then we can actually turn this into a hard by just selecting the outer Corners at the sides and at the top and then turning those in with the round corners option so that is sort of a quick way to create a heart shape if

You don’t have one ready you can also create one with the pen tool but that often turns out quite wonky but there we go we’ve got a little heart ready make this hard quite a bit smaller than the actual width of your Rainbow Arch so let’s do it about this much let’s change

The color to Gray in this case that’s just going to make it easier to see in a bit so pull this down duplicate it over to the other side of the artboard and then select both of these hearts and head up to object blend make there we go

That already looks quite good we’ve got a repeated heart pattern but let’s head back to object blend blend options and let’s change these a little bit so by default we’ve got smooth color but we want specified steps if we change this number right here you can see the

Spacing gets a bit less so let’s do about 11 and we can also change the orientation which makes no difference yet but it will do once we’ve got it applied to the arch so once you’ve got a blend that looks like this then you can with the shift key on your keyboard you

Can select both the stroke one of these black Strokes that you’ve got and the blend select both of them at the same time then head up to object blend replace spine and there we go now we’ve got our blend perfectly pasted onto this Arch and we can still change the

Settings the blend options to mess around with this so the orientation changes it from a straight upwards layout to this layer that actually follows a curve we can also still change the steps to have more hearts on there by the way we’ve got the Hat overlapping

At the bottom that’s fine we can easily fix that afterwards so let’s hit OK that is another great look right there obviously it looks a bit wonky in black and white and gray but we’ll change the colors a bit one last thing for some of these arches I would recommend using a

Leopard pattern because those do really really well for these Rainbow Designs especially for different awareness topics so actually inserting a leopard pattern into these arches can work at wonders too so let’s delete two of these black strokes and then we’ll actually use these arches for the leopard print

So here we go that’s the pattern I will leave a link to it in the description I got it from creative Fabrica but I’ve also got a video showing how to create these patterns in illustrator from scratch if you want to make one yourself and I just want to duplicate these and

So I’ve got a you know wider range of pattern to work with so now we’ve got four of them sort of next to each other and these are in PNG format which will work it’s all right you can technically vectorize them as well first but you do

Not have to vectorizing also kind of makes it less seamless with with patterns sometimes so now that we’ve got this these sets of patterns I want to group them first of all Ctrl G so now we’ve got the pattern grouped and we need to outline these shapes right here

For this to work so before I outline a lot of these shapes I typically like to duplicate them off the artboard just in case I need this version later on where it’s still editable so now that we’ve got a backup copy we can head we can

Select all of this head to object expand appearance object expand and then hit ok now first thing you notice is now we’ve got these sort of overlapping shapes right here with the dots and with the hats so let’s quickly trim these off select everything hit shift M which will

Bring up the shape Builder tool from your toolbar hold down alt to erase shapes like this just quickly draw over them and then we’ve got that bit sorted out now I want to draw this pattern over make sure it covers our artboard or our rainbow more like that’s the one

Important part align it to the center of the artboard like this and bring it to the very background so Ctrl shift opening bracket takes your object to the very back of your designs of your layers and now we need to make a second copy of this because we’ve got two arches to

Paste it onto or into so while you have the pattern selected hit Ctrl C and then Ctrl b as well that way it gets pasted behind itself and now we need to apply a clipping mask for these so let’s start off with the top Arch select that one

Select the pattern as well while holding down shift that way both are selected then head to object clipping mask make and let’s do the same for the bottom one right here so click on that shift click on the pattern in the background hit object clipping mask make and there we

Go that has been completed successfully so now we’ve got the two patterns implemented into a design as well which is really nice and we’ve got the colors they’re ready which we can now use to easily color in the rest of the Archer so use the eyedropper tool you can hit I

On your keyboard to access that or obviously go to your toolbar and then just click on the pink right here in your design and while holding down alt you can paste it onto other parts for design as well so quickly color this in and make it look nice you can have it

Sort of contrasting pink you can have some of these looking white as well on the pink that probably look good so let’s say we make this one wide and the next one as well you can sort of do it interchangeably you’ve got a lot of different options here to mess around

With colors and different objects that are decorating your rainbow right so there we go all the colors have been applied and all that’s left now is adding some text to this design and I’m going to add the phrase last day of radiation and I want to put the word

Last over here and sort of have it cut out of the rainbow which can look quite nice so let’s start off with the bottom part of the sentence though because that is more easily done so we would have last right here and then day off let’s make that text color white and let’s

Change the font to one of my favorite groovy fonts which is abstract groovy you can get this font totally for free for commercial use you can find it on the fonts.com I’m pretty sure or just Google for abstract groovy the name is up here and then let’s put radiation

Underneath in a different font let’s write radiation to begin with and let’s use apricots I do like that combination of fonts so we’ve got a nice little script font down here and a groovy one above so there we’ve got radiation apricot is my phone I’ve been using for

Ages I can’t remember if it’s on Creative fabrico or creative Market but I will try to remember to leave a link in the description in case you want to use the same font but you don’t have to do that it’s just an option so now that

We’ve got these two words sorted out and I don’t want to make day of really really big and draw out to the size by the way because I feel like that would be a bit overpowering I do want the word radiation to be at least the same size

So it’s in a similar Focus but now we can add last at the top right here so let’s copy this up and change it to last as a bid to Big I just wanted solve on this side right I want it to cover the left side of this rainbow and at the

Moment you cannot read it but we’re going to fix that by first of all outlining this piece of text so select your text and we’ve now got this new bar inside of Adobe Illustrator by the way which you can use to more quickly outline text with this little button

Right here in case you hadn’t noticed that yet and now we’ll head over to object path offset path let’s change this to I think yeah I think six pixels or five pixels could work well and now we’ve got sort of a larger version of the word last right here and I’m going

To change the color of this from white to black you need to plain black right here six zeros and then what we want to do next is we want to copy this right here the black text by hitting Ctrl C on our keyboard then you want to select the

Rainbow which ideally needs to be grouped that is something I forgot earlier but if you select everything hit Ctrl G then this will be grouped and now we can utilize the transparency panel over here to create a transparency mask so hit make mask untick the clip function then click into the

Transparency mask with this over here and then hit Ctrl F on your keyboard that will paste this black text straight in front of itself into the mask and that means it’s going to be cut out of the rainbow so if we click back into the actual other thumbnail right here which

Is our design so we’re clicking out of the Mask now if we draw this over this rainbow as you can see it’s had those shapes cut out of it which means we can actually now delete the black bit of the text you might need the direct selection

Tool for that so we don’t want this physical black outline anymore because it has now been erased from the actual rainbow now if I draw both these out you’ll see what I mean there we go so now we don’t have a natural black stroke anymore but it’s just being cut out so

That’s a neat little effect and now you can read the word last a lot better than before so we’ve got last day of radiation now I just want to fill in the gaps a little bit on the edges right here which we can just you can do that

With different types of shapes but I think using for your hearts is probably applicable right here for this design so let’s just paste a few of these in here rotate them change the size about maybe the color as well quickly pick another color and then add another one right

Here on this side and there we go so that’s filled in a bit of the Gap that we had and I think I think that looks like a decent design you could obviously mess around with the colors of these as well but I think keeping them white is

Quite good for legibility that way the phrase stands up more against this pink rainbow design suitable for breast cancer awareness if you want to learn seven hidden workflow tips for illustrator that can help save you time and hassle make sure to check out this video next foreign foreign