Illustrator Trick #9: Colorful Waves

By Tony Soh

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This is a common trick to produce abstract colorful waves in illustrator. First you draw a curve line using the Pen Tool and drag a copy of it by holding Alt/Option. Select the Blend Tool and click the first line and hold ALt/Option while you click the second line to show the Blend Options. Change Spacing to Specified Steps and set it to 5.

Select the Direct selection Tool and edit the curve. Make sure the 2 lines intersect each other to crate a nice wave. Change one of the line stroke to a darker color to see it blend into a colorful wave.

This technique can be used to create nice colorful waves for background deign. Try blending 3 lines of different color to make it even more attractive.

Back to 101 Illustrator Tips & Tricks »
See Illustrator’s Blend Tool: A Comprehensive Guide for more uses of Blend Tool.

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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 learn illustrator 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!

Read more by Tony Soh

• Day 17: Blending Shapes & Colors
• Illustrator Trick #6: Copying Text Styles with Eyedropper
• Illustrator Blend Tool Experiments
• Illustrator Trick #10: Stitched Text Effect
• Illustrator Tip #1: Dotted Lines in Illustrator

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+Add Comment14 Comments

1. 
   virendra(INDIA) January 1st

   i have searched many sites no one given creating waves in corel

   at last yuor site told me about this.

   thank u

2. 
   student June 7th

   This isn’t very helpful. There needs to be more specific steps / directions.

3. 
   stef June 12th

   It IS very helpful. It’s quite simple, not much explaining to do. But I would have never known about it if I hadn’t read this, thanks!

4. 
   Bigbad July 6th

   Thanks for this small lesson!

5. 
   Iain August 3rd

   Totally frikkin’ epic! This is just what I needed for the last week – you saved my skin! Thanks!

6. 
   Jason at Viper Design January 26th

   At last I find a tutorial of how to create these designs! I’ve been buying this style of graphic off iStock but knew there must be a simple way to build them. Cheers

7. 
   Jorge April 8th

   Great stuff!!!
   I just saved a lot of time for a specific project

   Tanks a lot!!!

8. 
   Emily September 23rd

   Saweet!!

9. 
   Tania Ali February 27th

   Gr8

10. 
    Adeshina Ojo April 27th

    This is really cool, i have been searching the internet for so long on how i’m gonna do this but this tutorial is kinda helpful but how can i make the waves to have more than one color?

11. 
    lisa August 1st

    cool! thanks!

12. 
    Emad August 11th

    Cool ! Thank you … ♥

13. 
    marisol December 1st

    Yea this is pretty cool but for the people who really are barely getting starting to get familiar with the pen tool.

14. 
    Yasir Imran May 19th

    Awesome work you did for me, I was not familiar with the term ‘Blending’ and I was searching this trick from weeks, after lot of searching I found this tip. And spending something like 3.5 hours I managed to understand what you were trying to explain. If you have done it with snapshots I might get it quickly, Still many thanks for this great work.