In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke McClelland shows you how to use Adobe Illustrator to create a filigree emblem worthy of being used in your money-like design.

Deke begins with a dark background covered with intricate, scaled, hypotrochoid patterns based on last week’s Spirograph technique:

Next, he adds some scalloping to the edges of the black background circle using the Distort & Transform effect called Zig Zag. By setting the points to Smooth, the default sharp corners of the Zig Zag effect become gentle waves:

By duplicating the effect and turning it 9 degrees, Deke creates a second set of scalloped edges that will come in handy for the next step.

After moving the two scallop shapes to the top layer, deleting their fills, and applying a 4-point white stroke and a 6-point black stroke to each, the result is this intertwined braid around the edges of the Great Seal of Deke:

In order to make the braid a continuous shape (as opposed to looking like two intertwined lines), Deke moves the Transform effect up above the Stroke effects in the Appearance panel. Then to give his emblem a more American-currency hue, he changes the white stroke color to a pale green.

He also applies that pale money-green fill to the 5 character and gives it a shadow by creating a copy of the fill and using Transform to move the shadow down and to the right:

Deke then adds another Stroke effect to beef up the shadow, applies a thin stroke above the green fill, and uses the Offset Path effect set to a negative value (-3) to really sell the currency effect:

Finally, the filigree lines created with the Spirograph pattern are given the same pale green color. In the video, you’ll see the quick tips Deke uses to select all those paths and make sure no pale green lines extend beyond the emblem. The result is this currency-like seal:

Next week, Deke begins his Halloween techniques weeks!

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• All Illustrator courses on lynda.com
• All courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator Insider Training: Drawing without the Pen Tool

In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques video, Deke McClelland shows you how to create a Spirograph-style pattern from a single, continuous path in Adobe Illustrator. Yes, it’s true, two weeks ago, Deke showed you a similar technique, but the fact is, although that project was legitimately a Spirograph-esque design, it was not a legitimate unbroken hypotrochoid. Those of you who may remember using a Spirograph know that the magic of it involved creating the design without ever lifting your pen from the paper. And Deke has discovered two ways to achieve that continuous line effect with Illustrator, which he demonstrates in this week’s episode:

The first step involves squishing a standard circle shape into this unassuming ellipse:

That ellipse is then duplicated 11 times using the Rotate tool to make copies, and each copy is turned 30 degrees from the previous copy’s opposite anchor point. Once the entire rotation is complete (and this is admittedly tedious), you can delete all the center anchor points and join the remaining half-ellipses to make a single path. After converting all the outer points to smooth points, you’re left with this regulation hypotrochoid:

The second approach Deke demonstrates in the video also starts with an ellipse. But in this case, rather than duplicating whole ellipses and then efficiently cutting half of them away, Deke creates an open shape (like a lowercase cursive letter l) by cutting the shape open with the Scissors tool, then slightly rotating half of it:

Once you have this open shape, it can be duplicated and rotated using Transform Effect:

With either approach, there are a few fine tuning tweaks needed to perfect the shape, which Deke demonstrates in the video. In the end, you can combine the two shapes and apply the Multiply blend mode to mix the ink colors for a nostalgic, single-path Spirograph-like piece of artwork.

For members of lynda.com, Deke also has a third approach for this kind of effect called Scaling circles into complex patterns, where he shows you how to use the Scale tool to make very intricate, lace-like designs.

Deke will be back next week with another free technique!

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• All Illustrator courses on lynda.com
• All courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator Insider Training: Drawing without the Pen Tool