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Illustrator Tutorial: Fireworks for New Year

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New Year is approaching soon and you are still stuck on the New Year greeting design. Here is a quick tutorial to help you create a 2009 Happy New Year card. You will learn how to create realistic vector fireworks in this tutorial. The final fireworks look simple yet elegant, perfect for sending to your clients.

1. Drawing the Fireworks Pattern

First, we will draw the fireworks pattern. Go turn on the rulers by pressing Ctrl/Command+R. Next, drag out 2 lines from the Rulers to form an intersection. This will be the middle point of the fireworks. With your Pen Tool start drawing the fireworks pattern. Make sure each line drawn is an individual path.

Slowly draw the fireworks explosion and make sure it looks neat and tidy. The final shape should look like an exploding flower as shown above.

2. Creating the Brush

We will now draw a very thin oval using the Ellipse Tool. Open up your Brushes Palette and click the New Brush icon and select New Art Brush for the brush type. This will be the fireworks brush.

Apply the new brush to your fireworks. Set the Stroke to 0.5pt if the lines are too thick. Above is the final effect. We will need to expand the brush to apply the gradient in the next step. To do this, select your fireworks and go Object>Flatten Transparency. Leave the options as default and click Ok. The brush lines will expand into shapes.

3. Adding Gradients to the Firework

With your shape selected, change the Fill to a Radial Gradient from white to purple as shown above. Your fireworks wil look something like above.

We will now fix the fireworks’s gradient. With your Gradient Tool, click and drag from the middle to the top direction. This will apply the radial gradient from white to purple to the end.

4. Adding Outer Glow Effect

Select your fireworks and go Effect>Stylize>Outer Glow. This will add a glowing touch to your fireworks to make the fireworks look more realistic. Follow the settings above to achieve the glow effect. Make sure the color is changed to purple to get a purple glow.

We will now create the next fireworks. Alt/Option drag the first fireworks to create a duplicate beside it. Go to your Gradient Palette and changed the colors to create an orange fireworks. Remember to add an orange outer glow to it too.

Continue doing the previous step to create your third blue fireworks.

5. Adding in Your New Year Message

Arrange your fireworks as shown above. You can scale and rotate the fireworks to create the image you want. Finally, type in your New Year Year. You can see that I slightly rotate the New Year text up to suggest prosperity and progress for 2009.

To apply a gradient to our 2009 text, we will need to expand the text into shape first. Go Object>Expand. By default it is grouped after expanding. Press Ctrl/Command+Shift+G to ungroup it. With the text selected, use the eye dropper to pick the gradient from the orange fireworks. Using the Gradient Tool, click and drag from top to bottom to create the effect above.

Here is the final fireworks design. Hope you have a fun time creating your own fireworks!

About The Author: Tony Soh

Hi. I'm the founder of Vector Diary. Illustrator is my passion and I have written numerous tutorials on illustrator helping people learn illustrator. My most popular tutorial on learning illustrator in 30 days has been a hit. It makes learning illustrator so easy and has benefited more than 20,000 people worldwide. Also, I've revealed some of my secret techniques in the premium tutorials. So don't forget to check it out!

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