2010 March | Allographics & Design

Archive for March, 2010

Wonderful Illustration Tutorial: Illustrating the Flower Pattern

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Illustrating the Flower Pattern

I discovered this fantastic tutorial on how to trace and draw flowers. This a must for any artist to see! Please checkout the blog site to see the true results in color and the sites beautiful background. Full credit to Web Designer Wall for this great tutorial and more. Go see their blog! Illustrating the Flower Pattern

Since Web Designer Wall was launched last week, I received several emails regarding on how I made the main illustration background. I thought I should put up a quick Illustrator tutorial so everyone can share. This article will outline the main steps on how I made the flower pattern in Illustrator. Hopefully, this can answer your question.

1. Sketch

Always draw your illustration on paper first. This will save your time.

flower sketch

2. Trace

The illustration was traced in Adobe Illustrator using my favorite tracing technique. First, import the scan in Illustrator and set Layer Opacity to 20%.

layer option

Then trace it with the Pen tool.

tracing pen tool

3. Coloring

After you’ve done the tracing, go to Colourlovers.com (or any color palette sites) and find the color themes that you like. What I did was copy the sample image from the site, then paste it directly in Illustrator.

color palettes

Now fill the path color by using the Eyedropper tool.

eyedropper

With the Eyedropper tool active, select the path, then click on the image to pick the color. That’s it. Quick and easy.

Posted in Design Basics | No Comments »

Don’t Miss Out on the Latest Trends in Online Marketing

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

With Google and Yahoo now indexing Facebook, MySpace and Twitter real time status updates, your website’s SEO options have expanded. BUT are you utilizing these resources? Are you blogging and incorporating your blog into your website and other social mediums like Facebook?

Real Time search engine results allow businesses to expand their inbound links and presence on the top two search engines. Real Time online marketing should be a part of your business’s marketing strategy. This new feature, which also includes other social media outlets like FriendFeed, brings search engine results to live real time streams.

If you are concerned about privacy and do not want your Facebook fan pages to be indexed, not to worry. Only those that have changed their privacy settings to Public will be indexed. Twitter allows you to protect your tweets in the settings section. So only accounts that want to be found, can and will be found.

But as mentioned, if you use these SM resources why would you not want to be found? If you are not on the variety of social media sites, are you missing out on expanding your business’s online presence and search optimization? Like anything new, there may be bugs to work out as in keeping up with the huge volume of streams, but this is something the search engines will monitor and work out. In the meantime, why not help your business out by joining the online social mediums and help boost your online presence.