Tutorial: How to draw 3D Chess Pieces In Illustrator

This tutorial will show you how to draw a 3D Chess Piece in Adobe Illustrator CS5 that you can apply to other chess pieces. Here is the finished images.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator click File and New to open a new page. Select your Pen Tool.

2. With your pen tool selected start to draw the path shape below. The shape is half the chess piece. Do not close the path off press your black selection tool to select it. The image below shows the path drawn out for the Queen Chess piece.

3. Now deselect your fill colour swatch to none and pick a colour for the stroke. See the image but I chose a light grey colour: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=10

4. With your path selected go to Effects - 3D and click Revolve to bring up your 3D options.

5. Now set your options the same as the image below. It might be defaulted this way but do check so it is correct.

6. Press the preview button to check that your 3D path looks the same as the image below.

Your 3D chess piece should start to take shape.

Now it is time to add a drop shadow effect.

7. Go to Effects - Stylize - Drop Shadow.

Use the same optoins as the image below.

 8. Select ok and you will have your finished product. 

Now you have made a simple 3D Chess Piece! I hope you found this tutorial useful. You can repeat these steps with all other chess pieces other than the Rook as it does not work with this. When I will figure out how to do a nice 3D Rook chess piece I will add it to the blog to complete the chess set.

Tutorial: How to do a 3D Table Lamp in Illustrator

This tutorial will show you how to draw a 3D Table Lamp in Adobe Illustrator CS5. Here is the finished image.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator click File and New to open a new page. Select your Pen Tool.

2. With you pen tool selected start to draw the path shape below. The shape is like half a batten. Do not close the path off press you black selection tool to select it.



 3. Now deselect your fill colour swatch to none and pick a colour for the stroke. We are going to do the lamp shade part first. I chose a navy colour.

4. With your path selected go to Effects - 3D and click Revolve to bring up your 3D options.

5. Now set your options the same as the image below. It might be defaulted this way but do check so it is correct.

6. Press the preview button to check that your 3D path looks the same as the image below.

Now your shape will look similar to a batten.

7. Now hover your cursor around the top right corner of your path to transform the shape. I am going to turn to the left to get the desired effect.

When you let go you will start to see a lamp shade shape occuring. Keep transforming the shape until you are happy with the shape. Here are a couple of examples:

8. Once you have done this, press new layer and start drawing the path for the pole/base of the lamp. Do not close the path off. Like this image below.

9. We are going to do the exact same steps we used to make the lamp shade above. Once again deselect the fill colour and select a stroke colour as you can see above the part highlighted with a yellow circle. I chose a gold colour.

10. Apply the exact same Effects as the lamp shade Effects - 3D and click Revolve.

Your result should look like this image below.

Apologies for the shadow on my image, I do not know why that keeps happening!

11. Now move the Lamp layer above the pole layer so that the pole is not above the lamp.

Your finished result should look like this.

Now you have made a simple 3D Table Lamp! You can now add some detail if you like to the shade or a background. I hope you found this tutorial useful.

Tutorial: Scribble Text Effect Illustrator

Today I will show you how to do a scribble effect on text in Illustrator that would also be useful for a sketch effect or a black marker effect. So here is what the finished product will look like:

I used the Britannic Bold font, you do not have to use this but I would suggest picking a chunky font for the best effect.

1. Firstly, open Adobe Illustrator, go to "file", "new" and select your page size.

2. Then select the "Type tool" (T), choose your font and start typing your desired text.

3. Select all text and deselect the "fill colour" and "stroke" so that there is no colour on any on the text.

4. Open the appearance window on your page and with "type" selected on the Appearance panel click the top right button and select "Add New Fill". Make sure the default colour is set at black.

5. Select "Fill" in the Appearance window, click Effect - Stylize - Scribble. Edit the "Scribble Options", change the "Angle"to 45, the "Path Overlap" to 0 pt, "Path Overlap Variation" to 2 pt, "Stroke Width" to 1 px, "Curviness" to 0%, "Curviness Variation" to 50%, the Spacing to 2 pt and Spacing Variation to 1.5 pt.

Result from Scribble Options

6. Now to add a stroke to define the edges. Add a stroke of 1pt for black pen effect, 2pt for a nice solid edge or 3pt for the black marker edge effect. I am going to use a stroke of 2pt.

Now you have a nice Scribble effect on text that has a lot of uses.

I chose the "Back to School" wording as it reminds me of posters I used to see when school books where on sale and it was that time of year again!!! Thankfully, I do not have to worry about that anymore :) but if you ever need to do up a poster for this type of thing you have one element to start with. I hope your enjoyed my Tutorial.