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How do you make simple wavy shapes like in here ?

wavy shapes

I used to do it with drawing a rectangle and twirling it with Illustrator twirl tool, but it was gone in I don't even remember which version and got replaced with a wierd one that's hard to control and twirls a part of the shape, not the whole shape. I can not find a filter that does what the old tool was doing either.

Any ideas appreciated!

Illustrator, using the blend tool.

Clearly, one should do it in Illustrator, but I can't use Illustrator and make them in PS + prolly Mesh Distort on a Smart Layer.

your favorite method of making waves

farting in the bath?
throw a cat amongst the pigeons?

In photoshop, just make a stripe and go edit>transform>warp.

I usually freehand one with the pencil tool in Illustrator - and once I get it where I want it, I duplicate it and futz with the bezier points.

Originally posted by: unata
I used to do it with drawing a rectangle and twirling it with Illustrator twirl tool, but it was gone in I don't even remember which version and got replaced with a wierd one that's hard to control and twirls a part of the shape, not the whole shape. I can not find a filter that does what the old tool was doing either.

my coworker says the same thing about that tool & technique...


I never used it myself...
but, I could see its value now, as both my coworkers insist on using those gottdamn shapes on everything latelywith freaking gradient fillses... I hateses waveses with gradient fillses.

way too much time wasted on the damn things... then, worst of all, the final PDF that the creative effort goes into need to be optimized [sic]... erm, degraded in quality... to below 250k so the whole effort is so badly boogered-up I cannot for the life of me understand why all the work

Arigato - blend tool? Could you elaborate please?

same idea as this tutorial:
veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/using_the_blend_tool_and_distort_zig_zag_effect_in_illustrator/

It's the very first wave shape that I am interested in. With the old twirl tool it was easy to try a few different options and see which curve I liked the best. Now I actually have to draw?

*whine whine...*

If you don't want to you can hire me to do it for you.

this is slightly off topic, but for those who uses Fireworks, there is an extention that generates random shapes. This is in case you got sick of the waves and need a strong vector line in your design but not sure what it could be. I am sure there is something like that for Illustrator too and something that generates more interesting results - I just haven't found it yet.

random shapes