InDesign Butterfly on Opening page

sushi sans's picture

Okay, I know this is totally, utterly lame of me to ask but I can't figure out how to create an object like the purpley transparent butterfly that InDesign uses (or even the transparent-y orange flower on Illustrator) on it's opening page. I'm quite lazy and have exhausted trying to figure it out on my own. Thanks for any help!


Sebastian Nagel's picture

:) complicated.

Metadesign has found an artist who scans objects with x-rays. He gets black and white images of the flower/butterfly/feather, which were colored afterwards.

I guess there are more simple ways to achieve a similar effect.

Can't find the link where I read this though :(

edit: ah, there it is:

sushi sans's picture

Wow, that is perfect. Thank you. I found a few neat sites full of x-rays of flowers and shells to work with. Thanks again. That link is amazing!


Paul Cutler's picture

That is a great link - thanks for passing it on…


Sebastian Nagel's picture

Actually I think the butterfly falls behind the other motivs. It has almost no structure compared to the others.

mili's picture

If you want to do something like that, in Illustrator CS2 there are some nice tools, gradients, transparency, gradient mesh, feather...

This was drawn in a couple of minutes, it could do with a bit of white in the petals and general fixing, but you'll get the idea.

sushi sans's picture

Hi mili,
That is exactly what I want to do! Can you be more specific on how you did it? I attempted it in Ilustrator with crappy results. I don't have the recipe right yet and was dragging and dropping colours onto my gradient mesh. It just became a gradient mess! :P If I make a circle do I colour it a radial gradient and then apply the gradient mesh? I need help!

Thanks so much!

mili's picture

sushi whisker,

After drawing the shape add the gradient mesh. Then you cold start by coloring all the edges with one colour, then add/change colours as needed. You also might need to add occasional mesh point. That quick one was done with 4 x 4 mesh and just three colours from the default pallette. I moved the points around a bit, too.

Transparency of the elements is 70%.

The middle bit has 9 mm feather in the edges and a basic radial gradient. It's also transparent (70%) and on top of everything.

Hope this helps, good luck!

sushi sans's picture

Thank you! I'm going to try and master this.

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