How To Draw Complex Flowers In Adobe InDesign CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to look to make this floral kind of curly, twisty patterned thing. At the end we'll also look at how to change the colors, you can pick different colors to use to get it to fit with your project. All right, let's go and learn how to do that now in InDesign.

To make that kind of pretty flower looking thing we're going to start with the Polygon tool. So, click and hold down the Rectangle tool or the Ellipse tool, and find the Polygon tool. First thing we need to do is, if you click once it will tell you how many sides, and the Star Inset. The Star Inset is, 50% is kind of your traditional shape of star. If I delete that, click once and then if I change it to say something like 5% it just gives me kind of like dulled edges. So decide on what kind of shape you want, it doesn't matter. They all have that kind of different feel for this design.

I'm going to change out my Fill color, set to a Gradient. So I'm going to drag it out. A cool little trick while you're dragging out and you want to kind of play around with the star a little bit, add more sides to it. If I use the up and down arrow by themselves, it does Gridify, which is kind of cool, but not what I want. So while I'm dragging out, if you tap the 'space bar', tap it once, that's it, nothing happens. Now use your up and down, well, up and right. So right and left does the Star Inset, and the up and down does how many stars you got. So it's totally up to you to see what you want. So just pick a-- it doesn't really matter, they all have different looks.

So, how many stars do I want? I practiced with about six, that looked good. What I'm going to also do is hold 'Shift', so that it's a perfect height and width. The other thing to know is your reference point needs to be in the center so that when it rotates in a second, it rotates from the center around. Next thing is, we need a Gradient, I'm going to use 'No Stroke'; thank you very much. And my Gradient, go to 'Window', 'Color', and go to 'Gradient'. I'm going to pick 'Linear'. Make sure, if it doesn't fill it, like it did here-- it's actually put a Gradient around the Stroke. You can kind of see it there, see it's light on this side, dark on this side. So what I'm going to do is make sure I'm going to turn that back to 'None', and just make sure that you're identifying your Fill.

To do it, can you see over here, either your color or this panel here, just click on that kind of Fill swatch just to make sure it's at the front. And in here, I'm going to pick Linear, actually no, I want 'Radial'. And we want the inside color to be a bit darker than the outside. So click on the 'White House' and pick a color from this color well down the bottom here. But I want it to be like a darkish color, it's up to you. This end over here, mine's picked CMYK, yours has probably gone to the Gray Scale slider. To change it to look like mine click on the 'Black House', and click in here, and switch to 'CMYK'. Then pick another color. Just make sure it's lighter than that first color. If you get it wrong, you can click on this, toggle them back and forth. Up to you.

Next thing I want to do is, I would-- you can do a spiky star, looks quite cool, I'm going to do slightly curved edges. So I'm going to go to 'Object', with it selected, so I'll make sure, let's grab the Black Arrow, make sure the star is selected, go to 'Object' then go down to 'Corner Options'. And we can kind of give it, instead of square edges, we can give it rounded ones. You can do some fun stuff with some of these other ones as well. They all have different kind of end result. You can increase them up to make them more bendy, to a point. Close to a certain point, if this doesn't get to be more round. It's up to you, I'm going to go with that. Looks good. Keep going, Dan, Okay.

The next thing I want to do is make it quite big. How big? Just make it a bit bigger than your page. I'd like to make it really big, but it's a little hard to work on. So we're just going to make it about that sort of size. I'm going to try and see if it can be in the middle. It doesn't have to be. So the next trick is, the kind of rotation, and repeating bit. So to do it, we need to find over here, on our Tool bar here, underneath the scissors, click and hold down, yours might be set to the Rotation tool or the Free Transform tool, pick these guys. So we're going to do Rotate first, this has to go first, rotate. Then, once you've picked it, double click it. What it does is, it allows you to type in the Rotation we're going to use. I'm going to use 15°. Instead of clicking on OK, click on 'Copy'. You'll notice it makes a duplicate of it as it's rotating.

Next thing we're going to do is open up the Scale tool, and double click that and decide on how much smaller we want this. I've just picked 90% and instead of clicking Copy, we're going to click the word 'OK'. Great! So that's the hard work done.

Next thing we want to do is Step & Repeat, and InDesign-- I've got that Star selected still. I've got 'Object', 'Transform Again', and then there's this one here, 'Transform Sequence Again'. So it’s going to transform, not just what I did last time, which is Scale, it's going to do the whole sequence, which is Rotation and Scale. You can see there, it's got a handy shortcut. It's got that shortcut that nobody remembers, that one's the 'Option' key on a Mac and the 'Command' key, '4'. So 'Option-Command-4'. I'm not sure what it's on a PC, sorry, but just check it, it will be in there. So I'm going to hold it and just keep on clicking, I'm clicking the mouse until it gets down to our cool little floral spiral thing. I'm going to grab the Black Arrow, and hit the 'W' key. So I can kind of see without all the blue lines around the outside, but that's an interesting shape. And depending on your settings, everyone's going to look slightly different, they'll be slightly different colors. What I might do is scale this up-- so it covers the whole background. And, that is our weird floral pattern.

So that felt like the end, and I did, I stopped the video, and then I was like "Man, I don't like that color." I picked on washed out colors so I was like, "I'm going to change it" and I go, "Hey, I will show you one nice little change to colors." We could go back to the beginning, and change the Gradient but there's a nice trick we can do, we can grab the Rectangle tool. I'm going to have a Fill of None, actually a Stroke of 'None', and a Fill of whatever color you want to change it to. I've got our colors from Maynooth Furniture, that we're using. You can just mix your own color, I'm going to use the Green. And I'm going to drag a box that covers the whole thing. It's kind of harking back to some of the stuff we did before, remember Color Modes? So this color on top is set to Normal. We can change it by going to 'Effects', and 'Transparency'. And what I'd like to do is go from Normal, and play around with these. Multiply, not very exciting. I had a little play around with this. And in this case, Color Burn works, not exactly how I want. Color Burn, watch this, I wanted to change it to Green, but Color Burn does a really nice thing, makes it a lot more rich. Can you see, with that off, with this kind of green switched to Color Burn, kind of gives it a really kind of strength to it. But this is not exactly what I wanted, I wanted to change the color so I'm going to go back to 'Transparency' and instead of Color Burn, 'Hue', in this case works.

So you might have to play around with the top color to decide which you want. Watch this. With him selected, I can go through now and decide, actually I want to see what it looks like in pink. And I want to see what it looks like in orange, and green, and all sorts of stuff. Transparency Mode set to Hue will give you the option to go off and adjust the color. Maybe get it close to a brand color that you might need to match. All right, now I'm actually finished with this video. Bye now.