A Christmas Tree

[iamtheblues]

I'm trying to get to grips properly with Illustrator. It's a tough program to learn, especially having cut my graphical teeth on Xtreme, but I like the different tools, though. The Roughen Effect made this tree look a bit different. The work is not my own inspiration, but from a tutorial.
Seasons Greetings,
Bob.

[steve.ledger]

Nice pine spines effect Bob.
Mind sharing the tutorial source?

[iamtheblues]

I found the tutorial as a result of following the link in Albacore's thread.
I ploughed my way through the top ten sites and cherry picked the best looking tutorials from the ten sites and created .pdf files of them. My idea was to try to adapt the tutorials for use in Xara Xtreme, but this particular one wasn't translatable as Xtreme doesn't have the roughen effect. I suppose I could have made a custom brush and then made it in Xara, but I was curious to learn some of the unfamiliar tools in Illustrator. The Christmas Tree tutorial came from n.design studio. I liked the 3D Fruit Bowl which is linked on that page, the 3D effects tools intrigue me too. In my version the fruit turned out a bit waxy. But Illustrator does have its drawbacks, it feels very clunky in comparison to Xtreme, but a lot of that may be my unfamiliarity with the different ways the tools operate, and the number of dialogue boxes mean it's not intuitive to work with.
Saludos,
Bob.

[Albacore]

Here is a tree I did years ago with instructions very similar to the way Gary did his partial tree with Christmas lights. Sorry about the size of the instructions tried to get it smaller but the text was hard to read. I thought this worked and it was fairly easy to do.

Mind you the best Christmas card I did was a simple basic green triangle and then I used the "Scribble" effect.

[fredbassett]

That tree looks really good, nice job. And thanks for the tutorial/technique info.