Snowflake Designs

    These are just some designs I tried out with in Adobe Illustrator. Despite their complicated appearance, they are really easy to make. 

(I have the Photoshop CS6 package.)  

For those who know a little bit about Adobe Illustrator: 

-You make a sphere, it really does not matter what size because you will be adjusting it. My advice is to make it larger at fist and those inexperienced with the program, it makes it easier to see what you are doing, you can do what is easier for you.

-Next you click the white mouse at the top of the side menu (it is important to click this first otherwise you will get an error message) then click on the pen tool and click the change anchor points tool (it looks like a sideways V.)

-Click at the top of your circle and the bottom of your circle. It should now look like a leaf shape. You can adjust it to make it bigger or smaller, longer or shorter. 

-Press Ctrl+Alt, hold and drag (this is to copy the leaf shape, it copies any shape/grouping/whatever and is a good thing to keep in mind in future).

-Line the leaves up until they are vertical to one another. There will be a neon green line that will say intersect when they are perfectly matched together. You can either click and drag the leaf into place or you can use your arrow keys.

-Highlight the leaves. Right click and press group. These are now one group and you can drag them all over you paper without them separating. 

-In the menu bar at the top click on effects and then click on distort and transform. Hover over distort and transform and there will be many options that pop up on the right. Click transform. 

-A control box will pop up. You can change the angle of your leaves by degrees. For my project I changed my leaf angle to intervals of 15 degrees. Press preview and you can see the tentative changes before they are permanently made. If you just want jut a black outline make sure to have no fill selected beforehand. You can change the number of leaf sets by using your up and down arrows. Click ok.

-Your shape should look similar to a flower. 

-Using the menu at the top of the page, click object. Then click expand appearance.

-Highlight your group and go back to the menu at the top of the page and click on distort and transform again. If you hover over you will get the same list of options. Click pucker and bloat.

-This is the fun part. By dragging the slider you can control how distorted your flower shape will become. Click preview to see any changes made beforehand and when you are satisfied click ok. 


 Where you able to follow all of that? I hope so! Here are the patterns that I created with the steps above.