Bamboo has a fresh, Asian look and carries the connotation of a natural, renewable material. Bamboo plants are popular in residences and offices right now, adding unique overtones to almost any room. Because of the popularity and natural aesthetics of bamboo, it might be nice to incorporate the plant into some of your Adobe Illustrator designs. Here, the CPG How To illustrator takes you through a simple step-by-step process for drawing bamboo for Illustrator.
Getting Started
If you do not have Adobe Illustrator CS5 installed on your computer, now is a great time to either buy it or to download an evaluation copy from the Adobe website. If you have an older version of Adobe Creative Suite, now is the time to buy an Adobe CS5 upgrade because Adobe’s upgrade policy will change when CS6 is released. (Soon upgrade pricing will only apply to versions immediately preceding new releases.) In the weeks leading up to the release of Adobe CS6, the company is offering special upgrade discounts to give its user base a chance to adapt.
Now that you have Adobe Illustrator open, create a new document and get ready to follow this tutorial.
Draw a Bamboo Segment
Draw the bambo segment for Illustrator.
For this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, we will start by drawing a bamboo segment. We’ll use this as a building block for our bamboo.
Now, grab the mesh tool. and add a mesh point at the lower left of the path. Set the point to a yellow-green color
Add a lower Gradient Mesh point.
Add several additional mesh points as shown. Modify the color as needed to create the desired effect.
Bamboo with Gradient Mesh points, color and other edits.
Build the Bamboo
Now that you have created a bamboo segment, you can make copies of it, resize them and stitch them together to make a large bamboo stalk.
Building a large bamboo stick is easy for Illustrator users.
Copy and distort the stalk
What good is having just one stick of bamboo? Copy the entire stick and then click Effect on the Adobe Illustrator CS5 main menu and then choose Warp and then Twist. Choose different settings for each stalk so it looks different from the others. If you want to bend some of the bamboo, try selecting “Arch” from the Warp Options menu. Otherwise, you’ll have to go back to start and draw some bent bamboo from scratch.
Using the Adobe Illustrator CS 5 Warp Twist tool.
Make the Leaves
The next part of this Adobe Illustrator How To tutorial shows illustrators how to draw bamboo leaves. Draw them as shown. Grab the Gradient Mesh tool again to give the leaves some shades of green.
Draw the leaves for Illustrator bamboo and use the Gradient Tool to give them shades of green.
Create a symbol
Our How To illustrator wants you to select the leaves and drag them to the Symbol palette. You can open the Symbol window for Illustrator CS5 by clicking on Window from the main menu and then by clicking “Symbols.”
Illustrator How To: Create a symbol from the bamboo leaves.
Symbol sprayer
Select your bamboo sticks and then choose Object and then Lock and then Selection.
Use the Object menu to lock down the bamboo stalks.
Make a new layer and then grab the Symbol Sprayer tool from the Adobe Illustrator toolbox. In the top layer, spray some leaves on the bamboo.
Spray leaves on the bamboo.
Symbol Tools
Use the Symbol Sizer tool to re-size the leaf clusters (Click to grow, Alt-Click to shrink). use the Symbol Spinner to change the angles of the leaves. Try the other Adobe Illustrator Symbolism tools until you get the effect you like and you are done with this Adobe Illustrator tutorial.
Finish the Adobe Illustrator tutorial for bambo by using the Symbolism tools for Illustrator.
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