Wednesday, 27 June 2012

How to create a snowman: additional elements


Better Late Than Never.
Though I did manage to teach you on how to make a snowman. I wasn’t able to finish this 3-day tutorial and discuss on adding it to a scene and put up additional elements. As an apology, I’ll be going to give a freebie at the end of this tutorial(trees, rays, snowflakes) excluding the snowman of course that’s what this tutorial is about.
complete.gif
Ok so we have our snowman, all we need is to add it to a background and also put in some elements to make good use of it.
Rename
Before we proceed on making the other elements we need to lock our snowman layer, then create another layer and name it “background”, put it under our snowman, then hide the snowman layer after doing so.
Simple Sky
Now we’re ready to begin. First is to pick the Rectangle Tool (Ctrl + Mdraw a rectangle occupying the whole art board and using the gradient tool pick a blue and a white color then drag across the rectangle from our bottom right portion towards the top left. Now we have our simple sky.
Snow Field
Next is to draw another rectangle, this time occupying 1/3 of the artboard, this will serve as our snowfield, using the gradient tool set up a gradient of a skyblue color(C=20 M=0 Y=0 K=0 or #C7EAFB) to our left and white to our right. Move the middle slider more to the blue side just so that the white will occupy more of our gradient, while our rectangle is selected, begin dragging across it using our Gradient Tool (Ctrl + G).
When you’re satisfied to how it looks, now comes the fun part, the small humps of snow.
Snow Field with Snowman
We will use the Warp Tool (Shift + R), begin pushing and pulling parts of the snowfield. You may change its brush size while holding Alt + Shift + Drag. Now Let’s see what we’ve done, let’s see this it with our snowman…Perfect!
Bark of Tree
Done with the snowfield, let’s continue trees. They’re not as hard as it looks.
Use our Rounded Rectangle tool and draw a simple horizontal oblong, pick a gradient and use (left) 16,37,50,0 or #D6A477 (right) 43,52,80,30 or #6C5635 drag across, this will serve as the bark of the tree, set its stroke with outside and its weight to 3pt, Press Ctrl + 2 to lock it.
Trees Outline
For the leaves, imagine there are three overlapping triangles. Decreasing its size upwards, with that as our guide let’s begin drawing our leaves, delete the 3 triangles, then set stroke to outside with2pt of stroke weight.
Pine Tree
For our leaves fill = 50,0,100,25 or #6C9D31 stroke = 80,35,100,30 or #326631. Get our snowman’s shadow and duplicate it, put it under our tree and we have our tree!
Snowman with Pine Trees
Group it as one object and duplicate it. Set up random size to produce depth in our drawing.
For the sunrays. I’ll include it on my other upcoming tutorials, for the mean time you may download the rays at the last part of this tutorial.
Paste the rays at the bottom just above our simple sky. And set its blend mode to overlay. Click here to learn how to create vector sun rays ^_^
Snowflakes
Then for our finishing touches, will add the snowflakes, Change the font to Wingdings and pressCapital T on the keyboard. Expand it and set the stroke outside with a width of 2pt, pick a sky blue color as its outline and change it stroke corners to round.
Finished Snowman
Duplicate it across the sky just like what we did for the trees, and we can have a pretty interesting scene. You can use this technique for other projects and other occasions as well.
The promised freebies maybe downloaded on this link
Download Christmas Freebies
Comes in AI and EPS format

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