Vector Super Bouncy Balls

I had a need to create a lot of unique, colorful super bouncy ball designs in vector format, but wasn’t quite sure of the best way to go about it. Patterns had some potential, but not as much flexibility as I would have liked. After some thought and a bit of research on the web, I came across a 4 step tutorial by Adam Wagner at gomediazine.com on making quick and easy swirly designs in Illustrator that looked like a winner for my purposes:

First: Make a few circles with complementary colors. Now, set the blending mode to multiply and turn the opacity down to about 60%. The more circles you have to begin with, the darker and more intense the final product will be.

Second: So I wanted a darker final blob, so I copied and rotated the first group of circles.

Third: Take warp tool at about 50% strength and make a few sweeping passes through your circles. You should end up with something like this.

Fourth: Use the smoothing tool (found under the flyout in the pencil tool) to clean up some rough curves. Go back to the warp tool to add a little more character to the blob until you’re satisfied!

See, I had trouble making four steps out of that! Once you’ve mastered that process, don’t be afraid to use the wrinkle, pinch and bloat varieties of the warp tool. Have fun!

In order to customize this method for my super bouncy balls, I used lots of bright, primary colors as my palette. I found I needed to be careful not to get too enthusiastic with my warp tool, otherwise I would end up with a hole in the middle of the blob by warping an edge around to the inside.

After the colorful blobs are created, I create a stroked circle and place it over the portion that I want to cut out and use for my ball design. Then selecting both the colorful blobs and circle, I use the Pathfinder>Divide tool to make a circular cutout of that area.

Note: The stoke on the circle comes in handy for highlighting any previously unseen hole after the Divide filter has done it’s job, by stroking that hole and acting as a flag to let me know I need to go back and revise the blob a bit.

Once the Divide filter is finished, I ungroup the objects, lasso all of the bits and pieces that I don’t need and delete them, then group the rest, leaving me with a bouncy ball design.

When I’ve finished few dozen versions, I create duplicates, rotate them a bit and make new versions by Edit>Edit Colors>Adjust Color Balance.

Add a border, some simple highlights and align everything:

When I’m happy that it’s all good, I save the file with the transparency versions intact. As a final step, I flatten the transparency of the file to make it compatible with legacy versions (due to limitations of my client’s output device) and save under a different filename to avoid overwriting the original.

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