How to make seamless floral wreaths in Illustrator

I love making and using brushes in Illustrator. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to turn your drawings into seamless floral wreaths using Illustrator’s pattern brush tool. These floral wreaths are very easy to make and they add that extra something to logos and cards.

I’m using a few hand-drawn botanical graphics that I scanned and vectorized in Illustrator. Follow this tutorial if you want to know how to digitize your drawings.

Watch on YouTube

Please subscribe to my channel if you want to see more Illustrator and design tutorials. I release a new tutorial every other week.

Watch on YouTube.

How to make seamless floral wreaths in Illustrator

I’m going to show you how to make a simple floral wreath from a single illustration. You can use the same method with more complex wreaths (watch the video).

Open your drawing in Illustrator. Because we are working with vector graphics, the size of the artboard and graphics is not important.

Make sure your graphic is horizontal. It won’t work the same with vertical illustrations.

Select your illustration using the Selection tool (V) and go to the Brushes panel (Window > Brushes). Click on New Brush at the bottom of the Brushes panel or drag your illustration to the Brushes panel.

Select Pattern Brush from the menu.

The Pattern Brush Options panel will open.

Creating a circular brush is really easy. It’s much easier than creating a border brush. Just use the following settings:

• set the corner tiles to None (optional)
• set the Side tile to Original (should be the default option)
• make sure Fit is set to Stretch to Fit
• set the Colorization Method to Hue Shift (you won’t be able to recolor it if you don’t change the Colorization Method)
• click OK to save the brush

To test the brush, use the Ellipse tool (L) to create a circle that has a stroke color and no fill. Then go to the Brushes panel and click on your brush.

There’s a small gap between the illustrations because Illustrator unites the lowest point of an illustration with the highest point of the next. It will not merge them if you don’t have straight lines.

That’s it! You can now create as many seamless floral wreaths as you want using this simple method.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know if there are any Illustrator and Photoshop tutorial that you want to see.