#How to use magic wand tool illustrator how to
#How to use magic wand tool illustrator mac

Real distressing looks more or less random and doesn’t repeat itself. The grunge brush technique is easy and convenient (the brush comes with Illustrator), however it might not look very realistic - especially if you have to make the brush really thick, big or to repeat it a lot to cover the design. Adobe Illustrator Technique #2: the grunge vector element Once they’re all selected, you can delete them.Īnd here it is, our distressed blimp. To see them, select everything ( CMD/CTRL +A), then use the magic wand once more ( Y) to click on one of these left over points. Ai sometimes leaves some transparent elements that need to be cleaned up too. The 7th and last step is to use the magic wand tool ( shortcut: Y) to get rid of the blue we don’t need in our final design.Ĭlick anywhere on the blue strokes to select all of them. Depending on the complexity of your design, that can take a few seconds. Go to the pathfinder ( Shift + CTRL/CMD + F9 by default in Ai CS3) and click the merge option. Then, go again to Object > Expand in order to expand everything. To do so, select your vector object and your brush strokes (I used CTRL/CMD +A since these are the only things I have in my art board). Here, we’ll expand the brush strokes like that we can merge them with the design using the pathfinder tool. Once you’re satisfied with the result, time to move towards step 5. Quick tip: to quickly toggle the brush stroke on and off, switch the stroke color to your background color by tapping the X key repeatedly. These would have been over the top in my opinion, and wouldn’t have looked so realistic. Also, watch how I tried to leave out of the blimp the big chunks at the top left of the top stroke. You want to cover most of your design, but also make sure that you won’t go overkill with it. I would also not be afraid of editing the paths afterwards with the direct selection tool (keyboard shortcut: A) to modify their directions. one before settling on 3 pt., because it looked the best. You should play with how you position/draw the paths with the brush tool, with the stroke thickness… For instance, I was hesitating between a 2 pt. In my case, 2 strokes were enough.Įxperiment with different thicknesses, placements. Play with the brush tool and make a couple brush strokes in order to cover your vector element. Here I picked a really loud blue (something like #3FE6FF). The reason for this is because we’ll use the magic wand tool later to select the brush strokes we are about to make, and we don’t want anything else but these brush strokes to be selected. Now, we’ll have to pick a random color that is not used at all in the design element we’re planning to grunge out. Then pick the first brush and the brush tool. Make your way through the menus to pick the “ Artistic – Chalk / Charcoal / Pencil” brush set. Open the brush panel from the left toolbar (or with F5), then click on the menu icon at the lower left corner. Don’t forget to de-select your vector art or else you will apply the brush to it. Once this is done, we’ll move to step 3: select the brush tool and get the brush that interests us. You might be prompted to select what you want to be expanded.

#How to use magic wand tool illustrator mac

To do this, select all ( CTRL+A or CMD+A, depending if you are using a Windows or Mac box), then go to the menu “Object” then “Expand”. Step 2 is easy as well: make sure your vector object or group is expanded. The Step 1 is easy: open your vector file. Our subject will be a vector of a blimp I created a few weeks ago and used for one of my Studio’s entries for Signalnoise’s retro poster competition, “ Air traveling”.

#How to use magic wand tool illustrator how to

This tutorial will demonstrate three easy to understand and easy to apply techniques for adding a distressed or grunge look to a design using Adobe Illustrator.īe sure to check out some other tutorials the graphic designers at Go Media have whipped up as well! Adobe Illustrator Technique #1: The Grunge Brushįor the first technique, we’ll learn how to take advantage of Illustrator’s brush tool and of some of the brushes that come bundled with it. Jeff Finley asked me to compile a list of some common distressing techniques as a supplement for his eBook “ The Designer’s Guide to the Apparel Industry.” Distressing graphics is a pretty integral part of designing t-shirts. Hey designers, attend our all-inclusive soul-fulfilling three-day design retreat, WMC: Off-The-Grid, this October 5 – 7th.