Ryan O’Shea

Urban Tree • 1
 Graffiti Hall of Fame in Amoreiras, Lisbon
by Christina Nunes | http://www.flickr.com/ChristinaNunes/

My use of this image was made possible by its licensing under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License.

2 • Urban Tree Ryan O’Shea Ryan O’Shea

Urban Tree • 3
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
. . . I S A V E R Y O D D T H I N G .

Inspiration
I found this image while browsing
Flickr for graffiti images. I was looking
for something interesting to use to
experiment with Illustrator’s Live Trace
feature, which converts bitmap images

+
into vector paths.

{
Live Trace
I ran a Live Trace on the image with
about 7 colors. After some color
tweaking, this was the final vector
tracing.

Warp Filter
In order to make the graffiti look like
the top of a tree, I applied a Warp
filter, heightening it in the center while
keeping the edges relatively short to
create an elliptical shape.

Creating the Trunk: Brushes

4 • Urban Tree Ryan O’Shea Ryan O’Shea

Urban Tree • 5
 Final Product: The Urban Tree
6 • Urban Tree Ryan O’Shea

Urban Tree • 7
Background
I created a rectangle with a simple
yellow-to-green radial gradient fill.

Pinwheel
I grabbed an image with this type of
pattern from the web and ran a Live
Trace on it. I then applied a radial gra-
dient fill to smooth out its appearance.

Decoration
I made copies of the shape from a
downloaded brush, rotated in incre-
ments around a center point ( + radial
gradient fill) to create a flaring decora-
tion in the center of the image.

The Canvas
8 • Urban Tree Ryan O’Shea
 Urban Tree Base text layer in Hobo Std font

3d Extrude & Bevel Filter,

conversion to wireframe

Drop Shadow

Stroke changed to a charcoal brush

Underlining made with charcoal-

like brush

The Text Caption

10 • Urban Tree Ryan O’Shea
Ryan O’Shea
a ryan o’shea project
This document was created, edited, and
assembled by Ryan O’Shea.

ryanoshea.com

Copyright © 2010 by Ryan O’Shea.

This work is licensed under a Creative

Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Portions of this work were based on ‘Graffiti
Hall of Fame in Amoreiras, Lisbon’ (www.flickr.
com/photos/arteurbana/2422239746/) by
Cristina Nunez (www.flickr.com/photos/cris-
tinanunes/), made available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
Generic License.

Fonts: Aller, Vegur, Orbitron, Hobo Std