Creating a wave pattern of lines in Illustrator

Creating a wave pattern of lines in Illustrator

Few weeks back, a reader sends me a picture of this stock vectors and asking me whether I can show him how to achieve the result. Well, it’s a illustration depicting a wave of lines that comes in different thickness and shades of blue. I did some tryouts and find that it’s not that hard to achieve.

For this tutorial, I will show you how to create the wavy patterns of lines similar to the stock vector above by using Illustrator at least version CS5 or above. This is because you will need to use a tool call “Stroke Width” which only available in mentioned version. Continue read on to find out more!

Lets start!

1. First, load up your Illustrator and create a new canvas with A4 size. Now, draw two curvy lines like in the picture shown below.

Step 1

2. Select these two lines and go to Object > Blend > Make to blend the lines together. In the Blend Options [Object > Blend > Blending Options], we use Specific Steps as spacing, for about 10 steps. Check the picture below for the other options.

Step 2

3. Once we have the desired blend, expand the blend by choosing Object > Expand. Tick the “Object” and untick the stroke and fill. Click Ok. Now you should able to select all the lines.

Step 3

4. Next, we can start color the strokes in different shades of blue. Here I’m using the color codes shown in the picture.

Step 4

5. To make the blends less boring, we can adjust the strokes so that some strokes are closer to each other, while some strokes are further from each other.

Step 5

6. Now, we are going to use the Stroke Width tool. We are going to make the stroke thicker at both end of the line, so that it looks like the line is from thick to thin at the middle.

Step 6

7. You can save the Variable Width created just now to the profile, so that we can apply it to remaining lines.

Step 7

8. Apply the Variable Width Profile you saved just now to all other lines. Then with different stroke widths to create the variety of line thickness.

Step 8

9. We are almost there! Finally, we can add a couple of curve lines at the bottom that go from the center to the right end, to enhance the 3d-ness of the pattern lines.

Step 9

10. In the final step, lets mask out the both side of the line edges, and tada! You just created a wave pattern of lines!

Step 10

Tutorial file download

For your convenience, below is the link to download the tutorial file that contains the final outcome.

Download

The button design above are part of the sleek button designs at Useful Web Button PSD file. Please purchase it if you want to own one of them. Check out my fresh GraphicRiver portfolio too.

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