Step By Step Swirls For Your Cover Designs

Need to add colour swirls and curves to your design? It's surprisingly simple using Adobe Illustrator. Even a novice should be able to handle a few elegant swirls as long as you get the right instruction. You can find the simple steps of creating simple and elegant swirls below which I've found to be very versatile that you can use them for textures, greeting cards, posters and designs for postcard printing services. We have even thrown in a few extra styling ideas so that you can integrate it with your layouts via Photoshop. Read on and see what you can do.

1. The first most obvious tool that will help you create swirls or curves for your design in Adobe Illustrator is the Swirl tool. So let us start with that. Just go look for the Swirl tool in the tools window. If you do not see it, just click and hold on the “Arc tool” icon to see the other tool options.





2. Now, just go to the canvass and then click and hold the mouse button as you draw your spiral.





3. Once you have the swirl type that you want, go to Object -> Path -> Outline Stroke.





4. After this, change the path properties a bit to add more details to our swirl. In our example, we are using a red color, and a 6pt stroke.





5. Also do not forget to change the width profile. For our example, we will be using width profile 1.





6. It should result in a nice and simple basic swirl.





7. Now, you should know that you can easily edit how the swirl is rendered. By just clicking one on the canvass with the swirl tool selected, you will see a window appear letting you set how the swirl render properties..





8. To create really big swirl, you should increase the radius. 80 and above is pretty big already. The percentage of decay determines the curliness. Higher numbers mean curlier spirals, but the limit range that you can put in is 5-150%. Segments determine how many points the swirl will have, and the style of course lets you set the orientation of the swirl. Just experiment with different settings until you get the right swirl that you want.





9. Besides the swirl, we are also going to use the Arc tool. This basically gives you more curves, but less of the looping involved when compared to the Spiral tool. Just click and hold the Spiral tool in the tools window, and select the “Arc tool” in its place.





10. Now, click and drag the tool in your canvass.





11. Take note that you can use the arrow keys (up and down) to change the overall angle of the ark. Once you are satisfied, just release the mouse button again. Apply the stroke properties we talked about earlier to make your arc fatter and of course more shaped.





12. Now, just keep repeating and adjusting your arcs until you have the right kind of curves that you want.





13. Great! Now just mix and match your arcs, swirls and colours to get great look elegant swirls for your digital designs.

Now it should be easier for you to create simple swirls and curves like this. Just experiment with your own creativity.

More Graphic Design Tutorials here.