Tutorial Details
- Program: Illustrator
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Completion Time: 1 hour
Download Source Files
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
We’ll be using Adobe Illustrator to create this tutorial. A water ripple effect can easily be achieved using a radial gradient. Besides this, I will be showing you how to create realistic water droplets using the gradient mesh tool.
Step 1
Let’s get started by drawing a circle using the Ellipse Tool. Hold Shift as you drag on the canvas to make it a perfect circle. Next, change it to a gradient fill in the tool palette. By default it is a white to black gradient.
Step 2
Open up your Gradient Palette (Window>Gradient). Change the Type to Radial and select the gradient end point (square with an arrow icon). Set it to blue using your Color Palette.
Step 3
Select the first gradient point and set it to a dark blue. Click beside it to create a new gradient point, and set it to white. Repeat this to create a new gradient point beside this new point, and set it back to blue.
Step 4
Let’s continue repeating the steps until we have something as shown below. You will notice the darkest point is set in the middle. Don’t worry too much how the ripple will look like at this stage, as we can tweak it later on.
Step 5
Select the circle and you will see a bounding box appear. Drag a corner and squash it into a an oval shape.
Step 6
Now we will start creating the background. Draw a new Rectangle Shape. By default it will use the radial gradient we have created.
Step 7
Open up your Gradient Palette again. Change it to a Linear Type this time. Keep the start and end points. Delete the rest of the unnecessary points. Finally, select the start point and change it to a lighter blue.
Step 8
Send the background to the back by pressing (Ctrl/Command + Left Bracket). Resize the background so that we have more space on the top. Select the Gradient Tool and click and drag from top to bottom to change the gradient direction.
Step 9 – More Ripples
Let’s draw more ripples to make it look more realistic. Draw a new oval shape using the Ellipse Tool. Select the Scissors Tool. Then cut it at the bottom left and top right. This will break it into 2 segments.
Step 10
Drag the 2 segments into the ripple. You can resize it by dragging the bounding box. Repeat the above steps to create more ripples, as shown below. Have fun adding new ripples until you achieve a great looking ripple effect.
Step 11 – The Ripple Brush
Let’s start creating the brush for the ripple. Draw a long thin oval with the Ellipse Tool. Select the Pen Tool, hover it to right corner, and hold Alt/Option. It will change to an arrow icon. Click the point to change it to a corner point. Do this for the left corner and bottom pont.
Step 12
Click the bottom point and press the Arrow Up key to move the point until the baseline becomes straight as shown below. Open up your Brushes Palette (Window>Brushes). Then drag your shape to the palette to create a New Art Brush.
Step 13
Select all the ripples and choose the new art brush. The brush effect will be applied to the ripples. If the ripples appear too thick you can change the stroke weight to make it thinner.
Step 14
Now we will need to expand it so that we can fill it with a gradient. Select all the ripples, and go Object>Flatten Transparency. Set the Raster/Vector Balance to 100 and click OK. It is grouped by default after your flattened it. Press Ctrl+Shift+G/Command+Shift+G to ungroup it.
Step 15
Select each ripple and give it a different color gradient effect. With the Gradient Tool, we can select and drag to change the gradient directions. We can also also use the Color Picker to pick colors from our main ripple. To do this, select a gradient point first, then select the Color Picker and hold Shift as you click the main ripple to sample the color. With this in mind, we can quickly apply the gradients to all the ripples.
Step 16
Here is the final ripple. I have set the darkest ripple in the middle and it get’s lighter towards the edge.
Step 17 – Water Droplet
Let’s create the water droplet. Draw a blue circle using the Ellipse Tool. Go to Object>Create Gradient Mesh. Use the settings shown below.
Step 18
With the Direct Selection Tool, select the second point from the bottom. Set it to white using the Color Palette. Next, select the second point from the top and give it a lighter blue.
Step 19
Select the 3 points in the middle row and set it to a darker blue. Next we will start to edit the gradient mesh. Select the point beside the white point and drag it away from the white point. Do this for the other side and the 3 darkest points. Our goal here is to make the white highlight more oval instead of circle.
Step 20
Finally we move the water droplet above the ripple. Click and hold Alt/Option as you drag to create a duplicate. Repeat it until you have 3 water droplets above the ripple.
Step 21
Squash the second water droplet and resize it smaller using the Transform Tool. Also make the top water droplet the smallest. Finally, I make my final tweaking to the ripple by transforming it bigger as I felt it is too tight.
Step 22
If you are unhappy with the color for the the water droplets, you can further adjust it. Here’s how to do it. Select the 3 droplets and go Filter>Colors>Adjust Colors. Check Preview and increase the Green to make it look turquoise.
Step 23
Below is our final image of a serene water ripple effect.
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Nice Cool!
Will you only post illustrator tutorials? :/
Nice first tutorial :D
brilliant! great tutorial, vectors! vectors! vectors!
Simply awesome. This site is gonna be sweet!
Cool effect thanks!!! And wiiiiii his is my first post in vercortuts….. keep doing cool stuffs!!!
Cool tutorial! Looks so different from photoshop… Time to learn!
Hey, what a awsome tutorial! Finally some vector tutorials :DD
Cumpz from Portugal \o/
Very nice tutorial. Thats a good start ! good luck for vectortuts.
Finalyyy!!!!
Nice!
Amazing!! I Love PSDTuts and now we got VECTORTuts! Nice for your firts tutorial!
Good tutorial. I’m not a fan of vectors, but this tutorial is simple to understand.
David Carreira
How can you manage with so many sites at the same time, Collis? High powered Red Bull?
But Good job with PSD-, Net-, Vector-, Fla- and God knows whats next? How about site for graphic/web designers gathering together for network (job, portfolio guides/ideas, experience)?
Erik
Very nice!
Hey there – congratulations on the first tutorial.
Let’s hope this site will go from strength to strength. Thanks for posting!
very sweet!
off to a good start :), only thing I did not like are the water drops, they could have been better shaped much better than plain unrealistic circle drops.
A good start, and its nice to see your family growing. Maybe this effect could have been a little more lifelike though.
Great first Tut!
NICE TUT. Watr drops are not realistic.
Expecting something great from this new site. Thank you Collis for developing a new site based on vectors.
Vector tuts, first tutorial, I love it! Keep ‘em coming!
Wow this is really great.
Thanks for all the feedbacks. Qvectors made a good point, the water drops could also be done with layers of shapes to mimic the water reflection. If you pull it off well, it might look more realistic than done with gradient mesh.
Thanks to you guys I spend more hours on all of your tut sites than doing actual work! Congratulations!
Looking forward to poking around Ai.
Sweet tutorial!
I’m still wondering of how you can manage so many quality sites though.
Great job!
good launch!!
alas the wait for vectors is over!!
xpectin greater tuts frm yeh!!
godspeed!!
Great start! Congrats on the new site!
Another great tutorial site! Thanks a bunch.
im SO excited for this site
i love you all Collisand all other for workin hard and putting all these great sites
Collis is makin history, its already happening!
I would like to thank you for your wonderful job and for every advice! Keep going this way!
Ciao from Italy
Nice site to start. Keep it up.
Really simple, nice work. I don’t like so much the white tone on the wave, but it looks good anyway.
So what are the categories gonna be for this, coz I could do illustrations in vectors and such, check it out at http://www.swaymedia.com.
How will you teach somehow to draw is the question? isnt that like a pre-requisite to any a vector illustration tutorial..
Nice tutorial! I like the ripple brush. I am excited to see more.
I’ve do this in ilustrator (or I’ve try to do :D ) and the final result is not so good.
I’ll need to learn more tutorials :P
David Carreira
Really nice effect!^^
Thanks you for the tutl!
Shame on me, I should try more often Is.
Thanks for sharing this great tut!
Really cool, I’m gonna try it in the vacation.
Vectortuts 4 the win.
grtz
Thankx
Haha, thats really funny, yesterday I was checking out psdtuts and nettuts (like I do at least 3 times a week) and I wasn’t thinking to myself “they have photoshop and web development, and they’re missing illustrator/vector tutorials” and here we go! Pretty awesome…you guys just read my mind, impressive.
nice. please keep some simple tuts going here as I personally have no clue on illustrator. I’ve learned a lot over at psdtuts, so I’d definitely love to increase my skills on illustrator as well.
Great! I cant wait for more vector tutorials.. Thanks!
Very nice.. Love the transparent options.
Good work.
great!!
Vectors are awesome.
Fantastic! Very much looking forward to future posts!!
that was cool Im gonna try this one, thanks for sharing.
nice tutorial..real nice result.
hi! i dont know why, but in the Step 22, i cant find the effect ‘color’ in my Illustrator. why?
thanks, the tuto is really nice!!!
congratulations
;D