~ Free Graphics for U ~ We talk about Graphics

In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, Guilherme will be walking you through a special technique of his, he calls it a unique “origami” effect. He’s used this technique many times in many very different and unique abstract pieces, such as:

Here is what we’ll be making:

About the Author

Guilherme Damasceno is a 17-year-old Brazilian designer. He has been using Adobe Photoshop for about five years, sometimes adding some Adobe Illustrator to his works. Most of them are experimental, done for pleasure, and this scenery helped him to develop some unique techniques with both of these programs.

Currently he is studying Physics of Materials at Federal University of Uberlândia.

Introduction

OK, let’s start with the Origami drawing.

It’s not a really hard thing to be done, just need some creativity to be discovered and well-used.

First of all: choose your color scheme. It can be in many colors you want. I like the black and white one, but you can try some different ideas. That’s a personal taste.

So make your first rectangle with the Rectangle Tool. Be sure of the colors of the Stroke and Fill colors if you’re going to make with more than two filling colors. Then, pick up the Direct Selection Tool (shortcut is A) and select just a whole side of the square (can be any side).

Next, click on any part of it, but not on the corners, and try to make it with some perspective, but just on that side. Your result should look like this:

Step 2

Select the whole shape and copy (ctrl+c) then paste in front (ctrl+v). Hold shift and, with the Selection Tool (shortcut is V), move the second shape trying to make a column with them. Then duplicate the column and make a more complex shape. It’s not supposed to be 3×3, 4×4 – it can be whatever you want.

Keep doing it and you will have something like this:

Step 3

If you want to make the piece with more than two filling colors, you must color the shapes right now. I’m going to use pink, yellow, blue and white:

Step 4

Select the full composition you got until now and duplicate it in a random way, rotating and changing the sizes. We want to achieve something like this:

Step 5

Now comes the nice part. Pick up the Direct Selection Tool (shortcut A) and select some parts of the object, click, hold and drag. Don’t do it with big parts of it, or it will get too boring.

You must get some part like the one in the picture below.

Step 6

Repeat it a few times, but nothing too exaggerated. Keep in mind that this is useful for minimalistic stuff, so try to make something soft despite of polygonal shapes, and the distortion you’re going to make depends on your goal with the origami.

If you’re using a stock, think in how the origami will interact of it; if you’re doing an abstract artwork, remember your main idea for the piece. And here are four of my distortion results – two in this color scheme and two in the black & white scheme:

Step 7

You can make a lot of origamis just with one creation process, getting the composition in Step 4 copied or in your ctrl+c and then distorting it in different ways again. Merge some results to get a well-composed origami. I merged my two coloured results:

Completion

Thanks for reading this tutorial! I hope you found it useful. If you have any comments or questions, please use the form below to leave a comment!