laurel-wreath

Illustrator Tip #27: Draw a Laurel Wreath Vector

laurel wreath

This tutorial will show you how to create a beautiful vector laurel wreath easily in Adobe Illustrator using the Illustrator brush. You will learn techniques on using Transform tool to give it a unique and random touch to the leaves. So let’s get started.

1. Let’s begin by drawing 3 leaves with different tones. Rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise and draw a rectangle and send it to the back. The width of the rectangle should be half of the size of the leaves boundaries and the height can be the same. Place the rectangle in the middle and set the color and stroke to none (very important step!). This rectangle will act as the tiling boundaries for the brush pattern.

laurel wreath

2. Select your leaves with the rectangle and open up your Brushes panel. Click the New icon below of the Brushes panel to create a new brush. Select New Pattern Brush when prompted for brush type to create. Leave the rest of the settings at default will do. Your laurel wreath brush is now created.

laurel wreath

3. Draw a 8 shape using the pen tool and remember to close your path. Select the 8 shape and apply the laurel wreath brush pattern we just created.

laurel wreath

4. The above vector laurel wreath I created looks too neat and I wanted to have a more rugged and natural laurel wreath. Let’s see how to do this with Transform Each. Go to Object > Expand Appearance to expand the brush. By deafault all the shapes are grouped after expanding so go to Object > Ungroup to ungroup the shapes. Select all the shapes and go to Object > Transform > Transform Each. Enter the settings below and and tick Random and Preview to see how it looks. Play with the settings to tweak your laurel wreath until you are satisfied.

laurel wreath

5. Finally, I used Direct Selection Tool to select some of the leaves and gave it a different tone to make the colors looks more rich and beautiful. I selected most of the leaves in the middle as you can’t see the shape of the middle leaves when it overlaps with the next group of leaves. Applying a different tone really helps to solve this problem.

laurel wreath

I hoped you have learnt a lot in this tutorial. Find out how your can create a similar seamless leaf pattern which you can use for wallpaper in this premium tutorial.

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