Tuto Illustrator : draw a wild pansy

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Introduction

Here is a picture of a wild pansy (found in my garden) that I propose to reproduce the Adobe Illustrator (CS5). This flower has five petals colored with 3 colors: yellow, white and purple; hence its scientific name 'viola tricolor'.

 

And here is the result after some effort (about 6 hours):

Design of the corolla

The corolla of the flower has 5 petals:

·         2 purple petals

·         2 white petals

·         1 yellow petal

To begin I draw the outline of the corolla...

 

… then I specify the outline of a petal (while taking care to minimize the number of points):

 

Once satisfied with the result I create a gradient mesh to draw the petal (Feather 3 pixels):

 

Then I draw the dark ribs with line "Charcoal - Pencil" color RGB: 88, 18, 155, thickness: 1 pt. transparency "Darken" and Opacity 50%:

 

The others ribs of the petal are made in the same way:

 

By zooming the picture we can see that the petal is covered with tiny bright dots (green arrow) and in order to reproduce these points I create a new Scatter Brush (simply by dragging the path in the Brush window) with the following options in the user form for creating the brush (red arrow):

·         Random Size, variation from 50 to 100%,
·         Random Spacing, variation from 200% to 800%,
·         Random Scatter, variation from -350 to +350%
·         No Rotation

 

Then, I create simple lines (thickness 1 pt.) as below, with the newly created brush, Transparency "Soft Light" and Opacity 80%:

 

Here is the result below for the first petal:

The next petal is made ​​with the same technique:

·         Gradient mesh

·         Dark Ribs

·         Bright points

 

The second petal is behind the first one:

 

The two white petals are also produced in the same manner as above:

 

Brown spots are paths of different colors with feather 3 pixels.

·         2 paths RGB color = 50, 3, 97 (below)
·         1 path RGB color = 88, 18, 155 (petal left)
·         2 paths color RGB = 19, 7, 17 (right petal)

 

The fifth petal is drawn as the previous ones (see below):

 

Brown spots are paths of different colors with feather 3 pixels.

·         3 paths color RGB = 54, 15, 3
·         4 paths color RGB = 96, 41, 0

Pistil

The filaments constituting the pistil of the flower are drawn with paths "Pencil - Thin" (taken from the standard library of brushes), thickness 2 pts., color RGB = 217, 203, 156:

 

The filaments are duplicated to completely fill the area of ​​the pistil:

Stem

The stem is a path of coulor RVB = 72, 94, 19 :

Background

The background is obtained using the "Object-Live Trace" tool applied to the original photo (option: 6 colors) with a Gaussian Blur 6 pixels:

 

And the final result is shown below: