A few months ago, I went to a local garden nursery to get some roses for our 8th wedding anniversary. They had roses in several different colors like white, yellow, orange and purple. I asked a clerk “Don’t you have red roses?” And he just said “No.” I was shocked. Roses are supposed to red. My wife hate yellow roses, anyway. As usual, I had no choice, you know? So I got MacBook out of my backpack and launched Adobe Illustrator CS2. In a matter of 5 minutes ago, I created a red rose.

The following tutorial shows simple steps to design a rose with Adobe Illustrator CS2. The photo used in this tutorial comes from WebShot.

1. Let’s first use Polar Grid Tool to draw a group of several circles.
2. The next step is to fill the circles with gradient colors. And set the gradient type to Radial.
3. You don’t want to manually adjust the locations of anchor points to reshape the circles. First, add two sets (or more) of anchor points by pressing Command + Option + Shift + A while all circles except the outermost one are selected with Direct Selection Tool. Then choose Distort & Transform > Tweak under Effect. Tweak will roughen the shapes nicely.
4. Next, select the outermost circle with Direct Selection Tool and apply Tweak and Roughen after adding anchor points.
5. The last thing I would do is to accentuate the border of each ring by applying Style > Inner Glow.
6. It won’t be easy to assimilate an Illustrator object into a Photo, but you may want to use Photoshop or whatever to lower saturation and adjust light a little bit.

Illustrator CS2 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.