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Woodcut Tutorial

Using: Adobe Illustrator CS and any subsequent version.

Here's a quick and dirty way of creating woodcut-style pictures in Illustrator.

Woodcut Cat
This example image was made by tracing a photograph using the technique shown in this tutorial.

Let's create a woodcut circle. First, draw a circle in Illustrator using the ellipse tool ('l' on your keyboard). Press 'shift' to constrain the ellipse.

Circle1

Now, using your pen tool (type 'p' to select), draw a rough circle inside the one you have drawn by clicking the pen tool and creating straight lines. Do not bother fussing about with the bezier whatnot or trying to be too accurate. After all, you are replicating quite an unsophisticated artisan work.

Follow up:

Circle2

Close the circle then draw another circle in exactly the same way on the outside of the ellipse.

Circle3

Close this circle. Delete the ellipse. Your circles should look like the picture below.

Fill the outer circle with solid black, no line and fill the inner circle with solid red, no line.

Circle5

There you have it! Easy peasy woodcut-style illustration. Obviously you can apply this technique to more complicated images.

Woodcut Matt

Happy creating!

PermalinkPublished: 11th January 2009 by Cat.
1675 views
Categories: How to, Design tools

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Pinkeye Graphics Limited is a small and lively company which specialises in producing the distinctive collaborative design work of Matthew Chatfield and Cat James. Here's the blog where they publish news about Pinkeye Graphics as well as other matters which they feel worthy of drawing to your attention.

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