Today, I thought I’d do a design using Illustrator.  I have to be honest, I really don’t use the app all that much.  It’s not that I don’t like it, I just never have the time to learn what it can do.  So I went tutorial surfing today to get the learning process started!

I came across a pretty good site that has some good beginner and intermediate stuff.  The site is vectordiary.com.   The stamp tutorial in particular was the inspiration for this design.  After going through the tutorial (10-15 mins), I decided to make my own stamp and put a little twist on it.  Since I like to cook and I love BBQ, I thought I’d use a photo of Jenni out in the backyard grillin’ up some ribs.

Here’s the finished design.  It’s hard to see, but I added some artistic filters to the image on the stamp so it looked a bit more drawn.  I also gave it some depth by tweaking the final image in Photoshop using the Warp tool and adding some shadow.  It could probably use a bit more work, but I think it turned out pretty good.