Felt Effect, Heart Shaped Badge Inkpad Tutorial

by Lindsay in Vector Tutorials

Feeling crafty? Well so am I, so join me as I create a hand stitched, felt effect, heart shaped badge.

First off we need a heart shape. Rather than draw a heart freehand I want to create a symmetrical heart with two circles and a square, like this. So you can see the alignment of my shapes as I create the heart, I’ll make sure I have no stroke on and I’ll lower the transparency of my fill colour, which will emphasise where they overlap.

Okay that should be good, so I’ll start with my square. Using a second finger to constrain the rectangle tool to a square, I’ll drag my shape out. To create the shape I need, my square needs to be rotated at a 45 degree angle. To do this I’ll select the rotate tool, and as I begin to drag add a second finger to the screen to constrain the angles my shape turns at. Simple.

Choosing the Oval Tool, from the Shape sub-menu, I’ll create a circle pressing a second finger to the screen to constrain my shape as I did with the square.

I want to turn on Dynamic Guides from the settings menu, as this will help me align my circle and square. Then switching to the Selection Tool, I can drag my circle into position. You can see the Dynamic Guides are helping me align my circle to the centre of one side of the square. My circle needs to be a bit bigger, so with the Resize Tool, I’ll just drag until the circle matches the side of the square. That will do.

Now my first circle is the right size, I’ll switch back to the Selection Tool and use Duplicate in Place from the Edit menu. Because I have the shapes transparency turned down, you can see the circle get darker as the second one gets pasted on top. Right, I’ll just drag it in a straight line to the opposite side. Adding a second finger as I drag my shape will constrain it to a straight line, and my Dynamic Guides will tell me when my shapes are all lined up.

Perfect. Now all that is left to do is select all my shapes. I can do this with the Selection Tool and dragging a marquee around that encompasses all my shapes, or use either Select All or Select All in Layer. Then from the Path menu, tap Unite and pow there’s your heart! If bits of your shape are slightly messy, as mine is, you can tweak any anchors that aren’t quite working. Like here I have a slight bulge! So I’m going to convert these two anchors from curved to straight, by simply double tapping them with the Selection Tool as my active tool. If while creating your shape you ended up with some extra anchors, you can always remove them with the Add Anchor Tool, which despite its name also removes anchors. Just remember to try and keep your shape symmetrical. Don’t forget you can always use the undo tool, to go back to aligning your shapes and try again.

Now my shape is made I can turn my fill transparency back to 100%. And to keep my new shape safe I’ll head over to the layer menu, duplicate my layer and lock the original so it can’t accidentally get edited.

In my new layer I want to create some stitching around the edge. With my heart shape selected I’ll turn on my Stroke, using a colour I have saved in my Swatches menu, which I will make available in the description, and turn off my Fill colour. Right, now I need to decrease the size of my shape. If you use the Resize Tool you will notice that while it keeps your shape it doesn’t match the outline of the larger heart. I’ll undo that and go about this another way.

As I want to decrease the shape by about 20 pixels, I will increase my stroke size to 40. Now from the Path menu, I’ll use Outline Stroke. You can see I now have two separate paths. I don’t want the outer path so I’ll select that and delete it. I will also take the time to tidy up any clusters of anchors that have appeared, remembering to keep my shape symmetrical, by deleting the opposing nodes too. That’s better.

Turning off my fill colour, I want to reapply a stroke. I have a colour saved in my Swatches menu, in the Stroke menu I can thin my stroke down to about 5. While in the Stoke menu, down at the bottom I will use the Dashed Stroke settings. I’ll set my dash to 12 and the gap to 27. You can see my line changing as I adjust the sliders. That looks good to me. So I shall lock this layer in the Layer menu and create myself a new one to add some text to.

Selecting the Text Tool I’ll drag out a text box, it doesn’t matter where I do this as I’m going to place my text on a path, and type in my text. I am using Palantino Bold at 100 pt and again using my Swatches menu I’ll change my fill colour. For my path I want quite a shallow oval, I don’t need to worry about any stroke or fill it has as these will disappear when I add my text.

That looks good, so I can use the multi-selection tool to add the text to my selection (with both objects being in the same layer I can also use Edit, Select all objects in layer), then from the Path Menu tap Place Text on Path. There’s a little handle at the beginning of my text to move it along the path until its in the right place and I can still edit my oval if I want to. I think that looks good.

My next bit of text will remain straight, so in a new layer I’ll drag a text box and add my text. This time I want to change my font and the colour.

My final bit of text will again be on a path. Because I want this text in the same font and colour as ‘Inkie’s’ I can simply duplicate the layer and unlock the copy. Right, I want my text to arc the opposite way to Inkie’s, to do this I will select Reverse Path Direction from the Path menu and this will flip my text round for me and the control handle will allow me to move it into a more readable position. With a double tap of the path, with either the Selection tool or Text tool, I can change the text. With it still selected, I’ll change the font size and adjust it until I’m happy.

Finally as Inkie is such a star I’m going to add some little stars to my badge, with the Star shape. For more help using the Star shape you can check out my Shape Tool video, which explains how the Star Tool works. Once I have drawn one star I can use Duplicate in Place, from the Edit menu, and using a second finger to help me drag my shape in a straight line, position it on the other side of my text.

Right, I’m pleased with that but it doesn’t look very felt like does it. I already have a felt texture in my camera roll, which I saved from an image search earlier. In a new layer I can import it from my camera roll and completely cover my artwork. To sort this little mess out I’m going to lower the transparency of the ‘felt’ layer, 30% looks good. Then I’ll head to my heart shape layer, unlock it and make it my active layer so I can use, Edit, Select all in Layer, then from the Edit menu tap Copy. Heading back to my felt layer, I can paste it on top of my felt texture. To create my mask I want to select both my heart shape and the felt layer, using Select all in Layer, from the Edit menu, then open the Path menu and tap Mask.

Very nice, even if I do say so myself. I can add a few finishing touches, adding a darker outline to my original heart and a drop shadow and there you go a hand stitched, felt effect, heart shaped badge.

Red heart: FF0013
Light brown (stitching and Critter Café text): DA9E24
Dark brown (Inkie and Since text): 4E393A

Fonts used:
Palantino, Bold, 100pt, 50pt
Savoy, 100pt

Lindsay