How to make your own Christmas card in Illustrator

The best way to say Merry Christmas!

Dezember 17th, 2014, 9:48 am

Jumper-MockUp-PSD

In this tutorial we will show you how to make a cool Christmas card in Adobe Illustrator. You will see that it’s very easy to make one. But for that you need to know how to use a few Illustrator tools.

Let’s start!



A4-format-with-black-background-white-frame

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First open an A4 document and make a black background (#0a0a0a). Then divide the artboard in two pieces. One will be the front cover and the other one will be the back cover. Use white (#efefef) to make the frame, but remember that in the middle (where the card will be folded) you should make a double line.



expand-minus-front

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Make a triangle and then with the Pen Tool make the inside lines. Then select everything and go to Object>Expand and then to Window>Pathfinder>Minus Front.



Duplicate

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After you duplicated the shape, select the whole line and duplicate it again. Then Right click on the second row and click Reflect Horizontal. After that, adjust everything and make it look good. Use the eraser tool if the lines go over frame.



dashed-line-expand-round-corners

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Now with the Pen Tool make a path and go to Window>Stroke and check the Dashed Line button. Make 4pt dash and 4pt gap. After that go to Object>Expand Appearance and Object>Expand. Then go to Effect>Stylize>Round Corners and set Radius to 10pt.



Unite-Black-all-minus-front

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If you want, you can make lines between the motifs like we did. Now let’s make a Christmas Tree. Make a tree shape and inside just play with paths (pen tool). Then select everything and go to Object>expand then select all black (in the tree), go to Pathfinder>Unite, then again, select everything and go to Pathfinder>Minus Front. Duplicate the tree once and make sure it’s still selected, then press Ctrl-D to duplicate the tree at the same distance.



play-with-paths-reflect

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Duplicate the dots and the line and Reflect it Horizontal. Then make a zig zag path, duplicate it and Reflect it Horizontal. After that, intersect the paths and make them look like squares.



first-motif-duplicated

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For the next motif, take the top row and bring the shapes closer to each other like you see in the picture. Then select the row, duplicate it and Reflect it Horizontal. Again bring them closer to each other (and you should have a pattern like we have in the red rectangle). The green selection is just for you to see how we’ve made what’s inside the red rectangle.



start-from-the-bottom

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Duplicate the rows and put them like you want. We started with the bottom rows to see how much space we had left.



duplicate-the-motifs-and-make-the-back-of-the-cover

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Now, with the motifs that you already have, fill the whole card. For the back cover we just duplicated the front cover and reflected it Vertical. For a nice look, we recommend that you bring the Frame layer to the front (by dragging it on top of the layer box).



text

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Make a circle in the middle of the card and type your text there.



decorations

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Now just use your imagination and play with shapes and lines to make it look exactly like you want.



make-it-look-like-a-christmas-decoration

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We want to do one more thing before we are ready. We think the circle will look cooler if we make it look like a Christmas decoration. For that, play with shapes.

This is it. It’s a very simple and cool Christmas card!

I hope this tutorial helped you to learn more about the tools and that you are now able to make you own Christmas card.

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