Introduction

This tutorial is to teach you how to draw a simple flower, or in this case, a daisy using Adobe illustration. This tutorial can be completed in just a few minutes using Illustrator 9.0 and above. Lets get started.

Part 1 The Pedals

Open up Adobe Illustrator and start a new drawing. Any size drawing will do for this tutorial. I’m using my standard web template sheet which is 980 pixels x 600 pixels.

First thing we need to do is turn off our fill, or set it to white, and set our stroke color to black. Now we need to draw a polygon. Select your Polygon menu item from the tool pallet.

You can place your polygon anywhere, any angle, or even size you want on the screen. Just give yourself some room to work. Here is what mine looks like.

The polygon is going to be the basis for our flower pedals. In fact you can apply this method to a vast number of different shapes to get flower or flower like effects. Now, in your File menu go to Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Pucker & Bloat You will see a dialog like the one below. Slide the transform slider to the right until you reach the desired setting.

I found my optimal setting at around 78%. When finished select OK. You should now see an outline of your flower pedals in black.

Now it’s time for a little color. Gradients work best for these types of flowers so I’m going to apply a simple orange to yellow radial gradient. Here is what mine looks like now.

Play with colors to see which work best for you. Try using different colors and strokes. You can even turn them off if you want. Experimenting is where I have come across some of my best work. When your ready, move on to Part 2.

Part 2 Building a Better Flower

Now that we have our flower pedals we need a allergy filled center, and of course a simple green stem. Start by selecting your ellipse tool, and drawing a circle in the center of your flower. Remember to hold down the shift key as your doing it to get a perfectly semetrical circle.

Now that we have our circle, lets apply a dark to light brown gradient. Select the Gradient window tab and select radial from the drop down menu. You can select whatever you like for starting and ending colors. Since I’m thinking daisies, then brown is it for me. Here is what I have so far.

Looks good so far, but what is a flower without a stem? Using either the Pen, Arc, Line, or Pencil tool draw a simple line from your flower onto the white space. Set its fill to transparent and it’s stroke to a forest green color. It should be a little thin, so lets fatten it up a little by changing the stroke width.

My stem looks best at about 5 pt. Depending on the size of your flower this can change drastically. Best just to play around with the size until you get something that your happy with. Since you already have your stem selected we need to send it to the back of our drawing so we can hide the end underneath our pedals. Right click over the stem and select Arrange -> Send to Back This simply puts the stem to the back of the display order.

Once you’ve finished you’ll have a flower like the one below.

See, told you it was simple. I wanted you to see some variations so move on to part three to see what we can do with our little daisy.

Part 3 Power up our Daisy!

Lets look at some variations of our daisy for use in different themes we might have.

A simple change of stoke to charcoal can give your daisy the ruff drawn look like this:

Not ruff enough for you? How about applying a sketch effect like this one.

Don’t like orange and yellow? How about an antique blue effect with a little drop shadow and some blending effects.

Nice, but it’s a little too perfect. You can easily make a basket of this single flower by minor edits with the Smuge tool like this:

Ok, enough with the daises and periwinkles. How about a marigold?

Or even a sand stone mum?

You can even get more radical and apply some twist effects.

Let your imagination run wild. There are literally millions of variations you can perform on a single simple flower like this one. That’s why it’s important to play around with various ideas as you work. You can always Undo a mistake and start over. That’s it. Thanks, and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

BCK