How to make your own tattoo design (4)

Read the first parts of this tutorial:
How to make your own tattoo design (1)
How to make your own tattoo design (2)
How to make your own tattoo design (3)

In order to personalize even more my tattoo I've added some text in the lower part of my tattoo design. Because the butterfly is both a symbol of the ephemerality and a symbol of the joy of living I've decided for a Japanese expression "今を楽しめ" - equivalent with the famous Latin maxim "Carpe Diem".

In order to match the text with the rest of the tattoo design I've changed a little the text's appearance: Control Panel -> Make Envelope -> Warp Options -> Style: Arc Lower (see the image below)

And the final result:

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)

How to make your own tattoo design (2)

Read the first part of this post here.

Now we have a copy of the symbol we want to use for our tattoo design in the Symbol panel and an instance of the symbol on the artboard. Next, we have to convert the symbol's instance to regular artwork by breaking the link between the symbol and the symbol instance - in other words, we'll expand the instance (if you don't expand the instance, every time you'll edit the instance you'll modify the symbol and, simultaneously, all the symbol's instances). Click on the Break link to symbol button in the Symbol panel in order to expand the instance (see the image below):

Changing the fill color: If you want, you can change the fill color (see the image below) or the outline color of your artwork (in this case it is not necessarily need to change the colors, because black is the main colour for the tattoo inks).

Now, we have one half of our tattoo design, it's time to duplicate it in order to complete our design (being a lower-back tattoo, the design must be symmetrical). Follow these steps: with the artwork selected go to the main menu -> Object -> Transform -> Reflect -> Axis -> Vertically or select the Reflect Tool from the Toolbar (short key: o). Check the Preview option in order to see the changes in real-time and click on the Copy button when you are satisfied with the result. (see the image below)

Now we have on the artboard two overlapping objects: the initial artwork and the mirrored copy (being the last object created on the artboard, the later one is selected). We need to move horizontally one of the two objects (the copy) until we'll get a design appropriate for a tattoo. We can move the selected object (the copy) by hitting several time the right arrow key or by dragging the object (if you choose to drag the object in a new position you should keep the Shift key down in order to constrain the movement to the horizontal or vertical axis)

After the copy has reached the desired position (see the image below) it's indicated to group the two objects together and to lock the layer => select the two objects, click on Ctrl+G and the objects are now grouped. Is preferable to group the objects instead to unite them in a single new object because if you are not satisfied with the result and you want to change minors details of your artwork (like the orientation, the angle between the two objects, etc) it's very easy to ungroup the objects and and make the necessary adjustments.

How to make your own tattoo design (1)

In this tutorial I'll show you how to use Adobe Illustrator to draw a personalized and unique lower-back tattoo.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator and start a new document. If you consider to print your tattoo-design in order to show it to a tattoo artist it's better to select CMYK as the Color Mode for you document.

2. Open the Symbol panel. If you don't see the Symbol panel go to Window -> Symbols. Click on the Symbol Libraries Menu button (see the image below) or choose Window -> Libraries. Illustrator comes with a pretty large collection of symbols, grouped in categories. When you open a symbol library, it appears in a new panel, not the Symbols panel.You can explore the categories until you find a symbol which seems appropriate for your design.

Tip: if you find a library which contains symbols that you might want to use repeatedly in your future projects, you can validate the Persistent check box and the library will be automatically opened when you start Illustrator.

If you're not satisfied with the symbols from the Symbol Libraries you can make you own symbol - you can create symbols from most Illustrator objects (paths, compound paths, text objects, raster images, mesh objects, and groups of objects).

Anyway, in the Florid Vector Pack I've found a symbol which I can use for my tattoo design. Open the Florid Vector Pack, click on the 19th symbol to select it and drag it on the artboard (see the image below). The symbol is automatically added in the Symbol Panel and now we can edit it (you can not delete or edit the symbols from the Symbol Libraries).