How to Make Coffee Steam in Illustrator

Consider the following scenario: You spent the entire night creating a dynamic coffee cup illustration for your client, only now he wants you to make it steam. You know you could do it with Photoshop, but can you do so with Illustrator? The good news is that making coffee steam in Illustrator is almost as easy as brewing a cup of coffee.

Instructions

1. Open your coffee cup illustration in Illustrator. Draw your basic steam shape with the pen tool. Set the fill to white and the stroke to no stroke. Make sure to close the path.

2. Draw two or three smaller paths above the steam layer to create hole shapes in the steam. Don't change the fill or stroke color. Select all of your paths and Option + click on "Subtract from shape area" in the Pathfinder palette. The holes will appear to punch through the bottom steam shape.

3. Apply the Gaussian Blur effect (under "Blur" in the Effects Menu) of 6 to 8 pixels. Now add a "Radial Blur" effect set to "Zoom" and with a value of 75 to 90. Finally add an "Outer Glow" effect from the Stylize submenu set to white; "Hard Light" mode; 90 percent opacity and a 20 to 40 percent blur.

4. Set the Transparency blend mode to "Overlay" with an opacity of 50 percent. The steam will now fade into the background. Tweak the opacity as necessary.

5. Make a copy of the layer. Drag it up in the image to look like the steam is floating upward. Rotate or stretch the new steam shape and reduce the opacity by 25 percent.

Tips & Warnings

• This will not work with very old versions of Illustrator (prior to 9) that don't have live effects.