Premium Tutorial: Frosty Christmas Window

Christmas is coming soon! In this premium tutorial, we’ll create a frosty Christmas window for this holiday season and try different backgrounds for it – starting from simple gradient, to vector landscape, to any winter photos. We’ll be using various effects, two types of brushes, pathfinder and transparency panels, and even one mesh object to create this wonderful holiday scene. You will also learn how to create realistic paper snowflakes from scratch!

Difficulty: Intermediate
Requirements: Adobe Illustrator

What will you get?

• Instant download of PDF e-book
• Detailed step by step tutorial
• Learn the techniques to create glass textures
• Learn to create realistic paper snowflakes
• Comes with Ai file for easy reference

Tutorial Preview:

1. Open Adobe Illustrator (I usually use CS3 version) and create new document 1000 x 700 px in RGB mode (if you don't plan to print it). You may want to use different dimensions - in this case keep in mind that some effects parameters would be different from my illustration. Rename the only layer in your layers panel to "BG" - here we'll be trying various backgrounds.

Create a rectangle (M) that matches your document (1000 x 700 px), give it no stroke and fill it with linear gradient that goes diagonally from blue (#72B6D6) to lighter blue (#C1D8E0). You can lock this layer for now, we'll get back to it later.

2. Now, create a new layer and name it "GLASS" - we'll be working on window shape and glass texture here. Create a rectangle that matches your borders again (1000 x 700 px) and give it no stroke and dark blue color (#296A7C). Now go to Object>Make gradient mesh, and enter 4 for columns and 4 for rows, press OK. You'll get a simple gradient mesh.

3. Our idea is to make the window lighter in the middle and darker on its borders. The easiest way to change color of mesh object is select points with Lasso Tool (Q). Select the mesh rectangle, grab the Lasso Tool and draw a selection around its 9 center points - they will get filled while points on the edges will remain empty. Now, just change the fill color to lighter blue (#5DA0AF) - the effect is ready! Now, with mesh rectangle selected, open Transparency panel and change its blending mode to Multiply.

4. Again, create new 1000 x 700 px rectangle (M) on top of mesh that covers entire artboard. Make it no stroke and medium gray fill (#808080 or K50%). Now go to Effects>Texture>Grain and enter following parameters: Intensity = 65, Contrast = 70, Grain type = clumped. You'll get the following results.

5. Now, with the textured rectangle still selected, go to Effects>Artistic>Plastic Warp, and enter the following parameters: Highlight Strength = 15, Detail = 9, Smoothness = 11. You'll have a glass effect now. The only thing left is changing this glass rectangle blending mode to Overlay in Transparency panel. You can lock the "GLASS" layer for now.

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