If you’re a digital artist, it’s probably that you have heard of many of the Adobe Illustrator tools, including the blending mode, but if you’re just starting to work on digital media or if you’ve been working so far in Photoshop, you have been missing all the amazing tools that Illustrator has to offer. On today’s tip we will learn how to use the blend tool on Illustrator, which is a great complement to generate gradients, 3D objects or fractal-like drawings, it requires just a couple of steps to learn how to use it and the things you can achieve with it are really great.

First of all, you can find the blend tool at the Illustrator toolbar, click on it to use it immediately or double click to set up your preferences.

On the Blend options you can decide if you want the blending to take place on a smooth way, through a certain amount of steps or a determined distance. You can also decide if the blending must follow the path or align with the canvas.

Now you need to create the elements that you want to combine with the blend tool, it’s important to state that each object can be the starting or ending point of the blending mode, you can mix either strokes or fills, that we leave it up to you.

Now select the blend tool and click over one of the elements, then click over the second object and there you have it, that’s how the magic happens. You can know that you’re doing things right because when you place your cursor over the first element you will see an X next to the blend icon, and when you’re over the second object, a + will appear instead of the X.

You can make a lot of experiments with the blend tool, you will get awesome graphics most of the time, just be creative and take full advantage of this great Illustrator tool, see you tomorrow with more tips.