Flourish Tutorial #2! Glowing vector brushes

I have a quick and easy new tutorial for you all today! I’ve been experimenting with making blends in Illustrator to make my images “glow”, and I’ve found a couple ways to make the process faster and easier for us all. Stuff like this can make your website headers and other graphics really stand out, and it’s very fun and fast to do. So let’s get started!

First, open up a new document in Adobe Illustrator. For my image, I chose a landscape layout and RGB mode. Create a rectangle with the Rectangle tool and fill it with a dark background color. Now go to Object > Create Gradient Mesh.

Using the direct selection (white) arrow, select a point in the middle of the grid and fill it with a light purple color.

Now select the points to either side of the center, and fill them with a darker purple/red color. This will give us a nice background to work on. You can also experiment with dragging points around to affect the mesh and adding more colors.

Create a long, thin rectangle using the rounded rectangle tool and fill it with white. With the white rectangle selected, go to Object> Offset Path. Fill the new rectangle this creates with a light purple color. Repeat the process one more time and fill the outermost rectangle with black, then change the black rectangle’s transparency to 0.

Select all 3 rectangles and go to Object > Blend > Make.

You should now have a cool glowing object like the one above. Success! Now to make our brush:

Select the blended object you just created and drag it into your brushes palette. A dialogue will open up asking you for details on the new brush you’re creating. Select New Art Brush, name it, and set the colorization method to “tints and shades”. Hit OK, and be sure to save this brush before you close your file if you intend to use it again.

Now that you have your brush created, the world is your oyster! You can apply this easily to strokes and objects for all kinds of interesting effects. I created a simple flowing line here, and set my transparency to Lighten, 100% opacity.

Create more curved lines, and experiment with the stroke size and opacity of your lines to create some depth and visual interest to your image.

For a nice finishing touch, create some glowing spheres using the same method we used to create our light brush. Make a small ellipse using the Ellipse tool, fill it with white, and offset your path. Fill the offset with black, 0% transparency, and blend the two. Now you can copy and paste the sphere wherever your lines intersect to make a groovy flare effect. These also make nice stars, or little Tinkerbell fairies if that strikes your fancy. Be creative!

Here we are at our final image again. You can add text here to make a cool header for a website, or keep adding to it with whatever you like. I hope this helped simplify the process of making a glowing brush for you; it’s a neat effect that should be fun, fast, and simple to do. Now get out there and make some glowing space-fairies!