Using the blob brush tool and live trace in this Illustrator CS4 tutorial.

This week we’ll look at creating this beautiful vector butterfly. You can download the background I created in photoshop, to place your new vector butterfly, on the home page under the photoshop downloads section.

This is not a lesson in complex shapes with the pen tool. Instead, this tutorial is intended to explore the the blob brush tool and the use of underpainting. In order to get ready to use the blob brush tool we’ll take advantage of the live trace option in Illustrator CS4 to quickly get our black butterfly outlines. Typically the live trace feature is a feature that requires some editing and manipulation but it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you have trouble with complex shapes and the pen tool. I created nearly all of my butterfly outline by hand because I wasn’t exactly satisfied with the live trace results, so if you’d like to follow along without any fuss right click the outline image I made to the right to download it and use as your live trace image.

The objective of using the live trace feature is to get the black outlines only. To do this set your live trace options to black and white, (ignore white), and play with the threshold until you get the smoothest basic outlines. Try to make sure you don’t get any floating paths. That is, we want the black outlines to be entirely connected as one shape. This isn’t extremely important, but it helps to keep a simplified and organized workflow.

With the outlines finished, it’s time for this weeks tutorial; the blob brush tool. This is a great new brush in illustrator CS4. The main difference between the blob brush tool (shift b) and the paint brush tool (b) is that the blob brush makes shapes with color fills while the paint brush creates paths with strokes. This makes the blob brush ideal for underpainting and filling in color without creating a special shape with the pen or other such tools first.

To understand how we’re going to use the blob brush tool, watch the demonstration video to the right. Here, I have a top layer with the butterfly outlines on it (locked), then a layer below the butterfly with nothing on it. Select the circle to the right on the empty layer in the layers panel to activate it. Press shift b on your keyboard to select the blob brush tool and start painting in around the first wing like shown (note: make sure you don’t have the same color as the butterfly outlines selected). Then with your selection tool (v) select the blob brush shape we just created and fill it with a gradient like the one shown in the video. Repeat this process for the upper wing on the right side.

To create the iridescent yellow highlight over the wings get your ellipse tool and draw out an ellipse like shown. Fill the ellipse with a radial gradient with white on both ends at an opacity of zero. Add a golden yellow to the far right side as illustrated in the picture below. Set this highlight to a blending mode of soft light. We’ll need to mask this highlight with the two blob brush color shapes we made to keep the highlight confined to the wings. Select both blob brush shapes and press CMD c, double click the white space next to the highlight icon in the transparency panel to enter masking mode. Press CMD f to past in place and fill with solid white. Click on the color icon to get back to normal editing mode.

Now let’s group the two blob brush shapes and the highlight by selecting one with our selection tool (v) and shift click the other two and press CMD g. Call it top wings or something similar for identification.

For the lower wings I used an orange yellow gradient. Linear for the right wing, and radial for the left wing as pictured to the right. So use your blob brush on a new layer or choose a new color and illustrator will create a new sub-layer for you.

For the wing tips I used the dark linear gradient shown below. I also filled in a few spots with yellow for color contrast.

That’s all there is to it. As you can see the blob brush tool can be very useful. I hope you had fun making our butterfly. Till next week.