Wednesday, December 19, 2012

How to make your own tattoo design (3)

Read the first two parts of this tutorial:
How to make your own tattoo design (1)
How to make your own tattoo design (2)

Now we have the main part of our tattoo design and it's time to personalize it by adding several decorative elements. A tattoo design can be easily personalized by adding an element with a special meaning for the person who will get the tattoo. This element can be almost anything: a letter, a name, an ideogram, a zodiacal symbol, a flower, a scorpion or a spider, a butterfly, a star, a ribbon, etc.

For this tattoo design I've decided for a butterfly (because a lower-back tattoo is a feminine tattoo and the butterflies tattoo designs are one of the most popular choices when it's come to the feminine tattoos.)

So, let's get a nice butterfly for our tattoo. If you have your butterfly in an .ai or .cdr file, you can just open it in Illustrator and copy any element you want to use. If you have your butterfly saved as a raster image (like .png, .jpeg or .gif) you can place it on your artboard (File -> Place), preferably in a new layer. Once the raster image is placed on our artboard you have to convert it into a vector image (Image trace + Expand). Now you can get ride of the image's (white) background and you can scale the image without losing quality.


Edit the butterfly: choose a different Fill color, change the stroke, rotate the butterfly, resize it, rotate it again etc., until you are pleased with the result.


The last step: align the elements of your tattoo design. For that, select both elements (the group and the butterfly) and choose Horizontal Align Center from the Align panel (if you don't see the Align panel open it from Window -> Align or use the Shift + F7 key combination)

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