Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorial: Waves

I’m going to go through a tutorial to create a wave pattern using Illustrator and Photoshop. I followed a great video which I will link at the end.

Firstly, create a document of 800 x 800 pixels.

Using the rectangle tool, create a square that fits that shape of your artboard and fill it black.

Lock the layer with the rectangle and create a new one.

Using the line tool, create a line and give it a white stroke at 3pt.

Go to effect > distort & transform > transform.

You want about 20-25 lines using the copies option in the dialog box. Give them enough spacing.

Expand the appearance so all the lines are separated.

Go to Object > Envelope Distort > Reset with Mesh.

4 rows and 4 columns is good but you can have more if you want.

Now have some fun by selecting the direct selection tool and playing with those nodes and points to warp the lines.

Once you have finished that, open up Photoshop and create a file that’s the same size as the Illustrator file.

Fill the background with a colour of your choice. I went for a dark blue/black.

Copy the warped lines that you created in Illustrator and paste them into your Photoshop document as a Smart Object.

Open up the Layer Style dialog box by double clicking the layer. Go to Gradient Overly and play around with some gradients. This is where you can have a lot of fun and play with a lot of options and end up with something like this:

This is a simple and fun tutorial that lets you play with some of the tools in Illustrator and Photoshop. For the video I used to follow this guide, check below.