Recently I was hired to make a logo and the client had some very specific elements. One element was a background that looked like a sunrise. So I began to create a sunrise and thought it would make a good Adobe Illustrator tutorial.
Here is the final sunrise
I’m not going to go into the basic info on how to make shapes or gradients, instead I want to talk about the different tools, and the steps, I used to make the sunrise.
Step 1. First I made a sun. This sun is on the horizon so I made a half circle. To make the sun glow I used the gradient tool set to radial; using two colors yellow and white.
Step 2. Next I made the rays. I used the same gradient technique.
Step 3. I put the sun and rays together.
Step 4. With the sun complete, I now had to add the background. To make the background I used the Mesh Tool
Step 5. Finally I put it all together.
Personally I lik the rays standing out, but you can control your gradient to any effect; here are some options. Oh ya …If you notice the bottom sample, this technique is not so good for a sunrise, but it is a good technique if you want to create a sunburst style glow as a background
Applied Sunrise– Here are a few versions of the final logo with the background
Other Famous Examples– By varying the size and shape of the rays, the background and the sun, you can recreate your favorite sunburst backgrounds used by Disney, Dreamworks and General Mills. Here are a few examples that use a similar technique to create the background.
Thanks for stopping by, hope this technique comes in handy when you are designing in Adobe Illustrator.
3 comments
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Craig L-P says:
November 6, 2008 at 8:50 am (UTC -4)
Gary,
Thanks for sharing the step-by-step. Always need to see how another professional goes about their day to day work.
leen says:
August 5, 2009 at 12:31 am (UTC -4)
very nice.. i like
bobjfs says:
June 21, 2010 at 6:38 pm (UTC -4)
Didn’t learn a thing. Newbie, I guess.
How did you make each individual ray? What tools were used, not just the gradient? I mean, these are trapezoids, right? How’d you do that?