How to Make Vines in Illustrator

You can make vines in Illustrator with several tools, including the Paintbrush and Pen tools, which let you draw any arbitrary vine shape. For a faster vine illustration, use the Spiral tool. Once you understand some of the parameters that impact this shape's appearance, you will be able to create vine-like drawings. Note that you can use a range of values for the tools that make these drawings, so try out different values as you work through this project.

Instructions

1. Click the spiral-shaped icon from the tool palette to run the tool for drawing spirals, which will simulate the vine's shoot.

2. Click the canvas to make Illustrator display a dialog box with options for the Spiral tool. Type a number close to 200 for the Radius text box, to set the size of the circular portion of this shape. Type a number close to 50 for the Decay text box. This parameter tells Illustrator how much you want the spiral to curve.

3. Click the second drop-down control above the canvas to open the gallery for styling the spiral, then click the icon at the lower left corner of the gallery to open the Swatch libraries menu. This tool lets you load additional swatches for the gallery.

4. Click the "Patterns" item, then click the "Nature" and "Nature foliage" items in that order. These actions load the styling gallery with patterns from nature, including those suitable for simulating vines.

5. Click the "Leaves tropical color" swatch from the gallery to stylize the spiral, then type "40" in the Stroke text box to increase the width of the spiral and complete the vine's shoot.

6. Click the ellipse icon from the tool palette to run the tool for drawing ellipses, then drag on the canvas to grow an ellipse roughly one 10th the size of the vine spiral. This new shape will represent a leaf on the vine.

7. Click the V-shaped icon from the tool palette to run the "Anchor conversion tool," which lets you change a shape's curved segments to straight segments and vice versa. Click one end of the ellipse to make that end pointy. This action creates a leaf-life shape. Click a green hue from the leftmost drop-down box atop the canvas to color the leaf.

8. Press "Control" and "C" simultaneously to copy the leaf to the clipboard, then press "Control" and "V" simultaneously to create a duplicate of the leaf. Click the black arrow icon on the tool palette to run the Selection tool, then drag both leaves to connect with your vine spiral. Create and position additional leaves to cover the vine, using the instructions from the previous step and this step.

References

• "Illustrator CS5 Bible"; Ted Alspach; 2010
• "How to Draw What You See"; Rudy De Reyna; 1972