Creating Flowers

This tip uses an Xtra that many of you may have used very little, The Bend Xtra. Well below, I've come up with a great way of using the tool with Polygons that creates various types of Flower designs.

Version: 7 and above

1) First lets setup the first Polygon you'll draw. You're going to be making a Hexagon so double-click the Polygon tool and enter six for the number of sides like above.

2) While holding the Shift key, draw a polygon of any size in your document. While still selected Clone the polygon.

3) While the clone is still selected, Scale it uniformly at 10%.

4) Now create a palette of flowery colors. Above I imported several colors from the Crayon color library. Bright saturated colors are the best.

5) Give both polygons Basic color fills. Then remove the lines.

6) Select both polygons and Blend them together. Give the blend about 50 steps, just enough to not see any banding.

7) Now lets set up the Bend tool. Double Click the tool in the Xtra Tools palette. Now enter 5 as the bend amount.

8) While the blended polygons are still selected, hold the Shift key down and start dragging the Bend tool over the shapes. You'll start to see them bend around like shown above. When you get a good shape made, release the mouse button.

9) Now you'll have a nice flower shape ready to go. Since the blend is still active, you can edit the colors to your liking.

You can also get more drastic results from the Bend tool with a higher value. Above I used a value of 10 in the Bend tool options.

The options just don't end at the Bend tool either. Try out different types of Polygons or Stars. Above are a couple more examples of using different kinds of polygons with different Bend values. You can get a whole virtual garden in no time flat, and you don't even need water.

10) Above I used my original flower petal blend. I then cloned it and reduced it two times for an overlapping petal design. Then I added a small circle with a radial fill for the middle part of the flower.

For the this final illustration, I duplicated the flowers and applied the 3D rotation tool to them. Then I created stems using the Creating a Curvy Gradient Line in the Tips Archive. I hope you have lots of fun with this one, look around at real flowers to see if you can mimic their shapes.