Premium Tutorial: Pirate Ship

By Diana Toma

Create an attractive pirate ship inside a glass bottle in this illustrator tutorial! Learn how to draw a pirate ship souvenir in a glass bottle from scratch. You will also learn how to draw the ship’s hull, rope pulleys, sails, cannons, anchor, barrels, helm and the glass bottle in this tutorial.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Requirements: Adobe Illustrator

What will you get?

• Instant download of PDF e-book (25 pages)
• Detailed step by step tutorial
• Learn the techniques to draw a pirate ship in illustrator
• Learn to do rope brush and create realistic glass bottle effect
• Comes with Ai file for easy reference

Tutorial Preview:

1. Open a new document. Take the Pen Tool and draw the ship's hull as shown below. The biggest hull is filled with a linear gradient from (R=212, G=121, B=86) to (R=121, G=47, B=24). Fill the smallest hull with a gradient from a light brown (R=182, G=104, B=74) to a darker brown (R=71, G=30, B=9). To make middle hull, just copy the smallest hull and scale it larger, then fill it using a similar gradient.

2. Next, draw the top brown hull and fill it (R=121, G=47, B=24). Draw the stripe on top and fill it with a linear gradient using black and dark gray. Now, draw the shape to define the back side of the ship and fill it with the same gradient used above for the first shape.

3. Draw the black shape that you see below for the ship's head. Copy the same shape and offset the position of the shape behind it and fill it with a linear gradient from gray to black like in the image. This will create the sides of the ship's head. Also, draw a very flat semi-oval shape for the floor of the ship and fill it with brown (R=124, G=65, B=30). You can adjust the points to fit perfectly using the Direct Selection Tool.

4. Next, draw the black protruding shape as shown below. Copy it and Paste in back, change the fill color to gray and offset the position by moving it up a bit. Do the same in the right side of the ship. Now Copy and Paste in back(Ctrl/Cmd+B) the shape drawn above for the back of the ship, change the fill color to a darker brown and move it a bit up. Also draw 6 white squares using the Rectangle Tool as small windows.

Here is how the ship should look so far

5. Group (Ctrl/Cmd+G) the 6 white squares then Copy and Paste in front (Ctrl/Cmd+F) a copy of it because you will need them again. Create 3 extra copies of the windows and hide it first, we will use it later. Select both the back shape of the ship and a group of the squares then click Subtract from shape area and Expand from the Pathfinder Panel. This will punch the window holes into the wood.

As there are 3 layers of wood behind the woods, we will need to repeat the above Steps 2 more times. Do the same with all the wood layers of the ship behind the current one, using the copies of windows you have duplicated. Once you are done, the windows will reveal the background.

Select a group of the windows and ungroup (Ctrl+Shift+G/Cmd+Option+G) it. Select just one square, go to Object>Path>Offset Path and create a bigger one behind it then fill it with a linear gradient using the colors: (R=232,G=191,B=183), (R=195,G=98,B=59) and (R=121,G=47,B=24) like the image below. Now select both the white square and the bigger one behind it and click Subtract from shape area and Expand so you end up with just the frame. Do the same for the rest of the windows.

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