Illustrator offers some very powerful tools for doing damage to your designs. In this tutorial, I want to show you how to quickly create a grassy hill using the Crystallize tool.
1) Start with a new document (Cmd/Ctrl + N), and give it a name. In a fit of originality, I called mine ‘Quick Grassy Hill’. Set the dimensions to 600px wide and 400px high.
2) Using the Pen Tool (p), sketch out a rough hill shape.
3) Select the Stroke in the Tools palette, then set it to none (/).
4) With the hill shape still selected, click on the Gradients panel, then click on the default gradient swatch.
6) Using the Gradient Tool (G), click and drag in the direction of the arrow to set the gradient angle and length to something like this. This will give it some appearance of light and depth, but if you want to make the hill look even better, you could use the Gradient Mesh Tool to create some curves on the gradientto give it a real 3D feel.
If I did that, though, it wouldn’t be a Quick Grassy Hill (maybe I’ll come back to it in another tutorial).
5) With the hill still selected, go back to the gradient palette and set the colours of the gradient to R = 0, G = 120, B = 0 and R = 0, G = 69, B = 0.
7) Now to make us some grass! Select the Crystallize tool, which is kept under the Liquify Tools.
8) Double click the Crystallize Tool icon to open up the tool options dialog. Here are the settings I used, but you might want to experiment for different types of grass:
If you want finer blades of grass, set the complexity and detail higher and the size lower.
9) Zoom in to the bottom left hand corner of the hill, then simply click and drag to start making grass. Do short sections, stopping to see how it’s going and if it’s not looking good simply Undo (Cmd/Ctrl + z) and try again.
Tip: Keep the center of the cursor (the little plus) within the green to prevent the tool pushing the blades of grass into the hill.
10) Keep going around the top of the hill until you’ve covered it in grass. If you’ve crystallized the underneath of the corners of the hill, simply grab the Pen Tool (p) and click the tips of the spikes to delete them.
And there you have your grassy hill, ready to be dropped into your designs!
If you enjoyed this, you might also like my tutorial on creating a 3d pipe using Illustrator’s Revolve tool.