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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.