by Chad Neuman

The Pathfinder palette is a useful to when using Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a tutorial on creating text and gradient clouds using this palette.

Step One
Open Adobe Illustrator and open a New Document. Select the Text tool. Type out the word, “Clouds” and highlight it and change the font to one that is thick. I used Cooper. Set the Fill color to Black and the Stroke should be set to None.

Step Two
With the Selection tool selected, hover over the “Clouds” text and right-click over it. Click Create Outlines. This will outline the text.

Step Three
Hover over “Clouds” again and right-click. Click Ungroup.

Step Four
Now we can move the various letters and re-size them with the Selection tool. Click-and-drag a corner bounding box to resize it and click-and-drag over the letter to move it.

Step Five
Click-and-hold the Rectangle tool on the toolbar and click the Ellipse tool. Click-and-drag a few circles. Hold Shift to make perfect circles.

Step Six
Choose the Rectangle tool and click-and-drag along the bottom of the circles.

Step Seven
Cover up any areas in the middle that aren’t covered, using the Ellipse, Rectangle, or Rounded Rectangle tool.

Step Eight
Go to Window>Pathfinder to open the Pathfinder palette.

Step Nine
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag around all the shapes and click the Add icon on the Pathfinder palette (the top-left corner of the palette). This will make all the shapes one shape.

Step Ten
Click-and-drag the various letters with the Selection tool and place them so they’re partially covering the cloud shape we created.

Step Eleven
Click-and-drag around all the letters and objects with the Selection tool. Click the Add icon on the Pathfinder palette.

Step Twelve
Change the Fill color to the gradient swatch on the Swatches palette. You can change the angle of the gradient by using the Gradient tool from the toolbar. Click-and-drag over the object to set the angle. Change the two colors in the gradient by clicking-and-dragging them from the Swatches palette onto the Gradient palette.

Step Thirteen
Add a few birds by drawing them with the Pencil tool.

Step Fourteen
Draw a few with the Pencil tool and move them over the cloud object by clicking-and-dragging with the Selection tool.