Engagement Announcement In Purple, White And Gray – An Illustrator Tutorial

This is part 3 in my series of tutorials for those who just got engaged (Congrat-ulations!).

In the two previous tutorials, we created Engagement Announcements using Microsoft Word, and today, we’re making one in Illustrator. You can obviously adapt this to be a Save the Date card, or even Wedding Invitations by making just a few changes (and perhaps doing a vertical instead of horizontal layout). To zoom in on the screen shots, just click on them and they will open larger in a new window.

If you’re new to Illustrator, you may want to take a look at my posts about the tools, notes and problem solvers and maybe read through another one of my Illustrator tutorials.

Today we’re making this card in two different versions:

and we’re using another vector file by one of my favorite designers, jlwDesign

This is how to do it:

1. Open a new document in Illustrator.

2. Draw a 6.25×4.5 box (which will fit in all standard size A2 envelopes).

3. Fill the box with R195, G160, B178 and make the border black.

4. Lock the layer with the box.

5. Download the Swirly Curls illustration here. (Read the License Agreement).

6. Unzip it and open the ai file. The easiest way to isolate the design element we want is to go through and click on everything we don’t want and delete it (don’t save the file after you’ve done that, just leave it open for now). Once you have only the swirly curls left, select all of them, copy and paste them into a new layer in your announcement document. While they’re still all selected, group them and then turn them 180 degrees (by right clicking and going to Transform – Rotate.) Go back and close swirly curls file without saving it.

7. On your card, pull the entire curly design as close to the upper left hand corner of your purple card as you can without too much of it going over the edge of your card.

8. Now, we need to tweak the illustration a bit, and what I did was this:

With your black arrow, click on the design and go to Object – Ungroup.

With your black arrow, click on the part of the illustration that is on the lower right hand side and drag it down into the corner.

We also need to delete a few pieces, so with your white arrow, click on the parts that you don’t want and hit Delete. I deleted these:

Now we want to make sure the design goes all the way out to the edge on the left and also that no parts are “hanging out” over the edges.

First, click with your white arrow on the leaf that’s too long on the bottom, and while it’s selected, switch to the black arrow. That puts a box around just that part of the design, and you want to pull on the handles until the leaf is inside the border.

Next, click on the white part of the design in the upper left hand corner and do the same thing, except this time, you pull the handles outward towards the border until it looks nice. You probably want to zoom in when you’re doing this, it’s pretty hard to get it perfect otherwise.

Next, click on the white part about halfway down and do the same thing.

Now, with your black arrow, drag around the entire design (except for the part in the lower right hand corner) and group it (by going to Object – Group). Make sure the layer with your purple box is locked when you do this, otherwise that’ll be part of the group. The curlies are a little bit too wide, so just grab the middle handle of the box around the design and push it to the left a little bit.

9. Lock this layer and add a new one for the text.

10. Select your text tool and type in your text. I put it in three separate boxes so that I could easily move them around. I used Bernhard Fashion BT 24pt with a 1pt border for the top box, and colored it R137, G53, B88. The middle box is Bernhard Fashion BT 28pt with a 1pt border in white, and the bottom box is Bernhard Fashion BT 21pt with a 1pt border, same color as the top box. Need help with fonts? Read my earlier posts about font ideas and how to add fonts to your computer.

11. Lastly, select your purple box and get rid of the black border (I like to have it there as a guide while I’m designing a card, but not when printing it.)

That’s it, you’re done. I would put two of these on each sheet, print them on heavy, white cardstock and trim them to size. I think rounded corners give them a nice, finished look, and it’s easy to achieve with a rounded corner punch, available at any craft store.

If you want to add a photo to the card, just create a new layer and to go File – Place and select one from your computer. What I did was place the photo on its own layer, created a new layer and drew a transparent circle. I then placed the circle over the part of the photo I wanted to show (but still on a separate layer), selected both and went to Object – Clipping Mask – Make. That turns the shape you drew into a clipping mask and you are left with just that part of the photo visible. I then added a drop shadow to make it stand out from the background a little bit. To do that, select your photo and go to Effect – Stylize – Drop Shadow. Play with the settings a little bit (with Preview checked) until you like it.

Filed under Design, Engagement, Illustrator, Tutorial | Comment (0)

Hummingbird Wedding Invitations

This tutorial is based on a Save the Date card we created earlier, so if you missed it and want to give these invitations a try, just hop on over to that post and put that card together first.

As always, if you get stuck, see if you can find help in my Illustrator tips or by doing a quick review of the Illustrator toolbar.

Turning your Hummingbird Save the Date card into a wedding invitation is so easy! This is how I did it:

1. Open the Save the Date card you created earlier.

2. Go to File – Save As and save it as Hummingbird Invite (or whatever you want to call it).

3. In your Hummingbird Invite document, go to File – Document Setup and in the dimension windows, put 5 for width and 7 for height (if you want to go the traditional route).

4. Unlock the bottom layer, click on your 5×5 background color square and in your Transform palette, put in 5 for the width and 7 for the height. If you don’t see the Transform palette, just go to Window – Transform and it will pop right up. Align your box with your document. Lock this layer.

5. I happened to like both where the illustration ended up by chance and the size of it on the invite, but you can obviously resize it and move it any way you want. If you want to do it my way, just leave it where it is and make sure that layer is locked too.

6. Go to your text layer and change your text.

That’s it!

If you want to keep the invite square, that’s obviously even easier. All I would do then is just make the illustration a little bit smaller and change the text. You may have to space it a little bit differently than I did on the 5×7 invite to make it fit, or change the wording slightly. Be creative and play around with the layout until it looks good to you.

Filed under Design, Illustrator, Tutorial, Unique Invitations, Wedding Invitation | Comments (2)

Hummingbird Save The Date Card – A 12-Step Illustrator Tutorial

This time, I thought we’d expand on our growing Illustrator skills a bit, and first create a Save the Date card, and then a wedding invitation using the same theme and color scheme. Remember, you can use the basic steps and designs in any of my Save the Date tutorials as a wedding invitation layout as well (or menus, or thank you cards, or anything really). In order to keep the length of the post manageable, this one is the Save the Date, and the next one will be the invitation.

My inspiration for the Hummingbird card came from a really cute vector file called Cyber Plant, made by vectorjungle. You can download the file (an eps document) here. Read the License.

To create the Hummingbird Save the Date card:

1. Unzip the file you downloaded. Open cyber_plant_life_2.eps in Illustrator. Eps stands for Encapsulated PostScript and they are usually vector files that you can work with in Illustrator.

2. With your selection tool, select the plant/flower and the hummingbird in the left hand corner (you’ll grab more than you need, but that’s fine). To select both, first click on one, then hold down the Shift key and click on the other.

3. Create a new, 5×5″ Illustrator document.

4. Paste the flower and bird in your new document. The illustration will be much larger than your document, but don’t worry about that yet.

5. With your Direct Selection Tool, select and delete the parts you don’t want. The reason we’re using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) instead of the Selection Tool (black arrow) is that it allows you to select only parts of a design, even if it’s grouped. It can be a bit time consuming, but worth every minute. If you have a larger area of stuff you don’t need, you can always click and drag around it (while using your Direct Selection Tool) and delete a few parts with one keystroke. When you have deleted all the parts (if you do exactly what I did), this is what you end up with.

6. Click on any part of the illustration with your Selection Tool and then ungroup (by either going to Object – Ungroup or right click on your mouse and hit ungroup). Now click on either part of the two large stems and ungroup them as well.

7. Now, with the Selection Tool (black arrow) select the bottom part of the flower stem, the one that’s floating on it’s own on the bottom and drag it up to match up with the top one. Zoom in really close (either by using the Zoom Tool, just select it and drag around the area you want to zoom in on, or by hitting Apple and + or Cntrl and + on PC. Use – in the same way to zoom out) and just match the two parts up (it doesn’t have to be perfect, one can overlap the other a bit, that’s fine). Then immediately select both and group them (by going to Object – Group, or right clicking on your mouse and select group, or hit Apple+G or Cntrl+G for PC).

8. The next step is to move the bird and flowers on the side over to the “main flower”. So select all of that by just dragging around it with your Direct Selection Tool and then immediately switch to the Selection Tool and just drag them over. Zoom in where the smaller stem meets the larger one. As you can see, they don’t really match up so we need to fix that. With your Direct Selection tool, select the little stem, and click on it until you get two white squares on the bottom of the stem. Now, with your Direct Selection Tool, grab the little white square to the right and just drag it down until it meets up with the larger stem. This will change the shape of the little stem, but that’s exactly what we want.

9. I didn’t like the look of the bird’s eye – it looked a bit dinosaur-ish to me – so I changed it a bit by selecting it with the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) and just pulling up on that little “handle” on the bottom. I also got rid of the little black “blob” in the corner of his eye by adjusting the handles there as well. The result:

8. Now comes the fun part – the coloring! Select and color the different parts of your resulting design as you wish. I made all the flowers the same color, but obviously, you don’t have to. If you want to do it the way I did, select all the different flowers, either by holding down the shift key and clicking on them with your Selection Tool, or by just selecting one and go to Select – Same – Fill Color (this only works if what you want to select has the same fill or stroke color, but it’s a good trick to know). If you want to make them all the same color, it’s a good idea to group them here. With the flowers selected, either click on a patch or fill in your color values in the color palette. I used R 239, G 183, B 192 for the flowers.

Note: if you want to save the color you just created, just click on the fill box in the color window and drag it down to the swatch window

To change the color of the stems and bird, select them and proceed as above. I used R 155, G 157, B 160 for mine.

10. Now select the entire design and resize it so it fits on your card (however large or small you want it to be).

11. Add a new layer and drag it so it’s on the bottom. Lock the layer with the illustration. Select the Rectangle tool, click anywhere in the window and create a 5×5″ box. Drag it so that it fits right in your document. Make sure there is no stroke weight or color, and fill your box with the color you want. Mine is R 255, G 252, B 213 with 42% opacity.

12. Add a new layer and lock the others. In the new layer, add your text, using any font you want. I used Century Gothic at 12pt, all lower caps for the general text, and Century Gothic, 18pt, all caps for the bride & groom. Done!

As you can see, this is really easy to make, and you can personalize it in so many ways by changing the colors, keeping more or less of the original design, changing the font and wording, add more illustrations… Or make a totally different card all together!

If you want to see how to turn this card into an invitation, make sure to check back here in a week or so.

Filed under Design, Illustrator, Save The Date, Tutorial | Comments (3)