Tips and Tricks: The Tilde Effect

You will not believe how such a small effort can create such a cool effect. I found this trick online and haven’t been able to stop playing with it for the past hour now. First, open an illustrator document. I chose a background color so my designs would pop more but a background color isn’t necessary. You’re basically ready to begin experimenting so choose any shape, line, or drawing tool from the toolbox and add a stroke value and color (remove the fill color or it will not work). When you are ready hold the tilde key down as you stretch the shape across your document (the tilde key is the small squiggly line to the left of your 1 key). Holding If you are holding down the tilde and using your mouse to stretch the shape across the page, begin moving your mouse in whatever direction you’d like and it begins multiplying the image over and over again until you end you release the tilde key. For the yellow star, I held the shift key as well so it constrained the shapes and created an outlining effect, whereas with the light blue star, I did not hold down the shift key and made small circles with my mouse. As you can see, I tried this with several shapes to see the different affects each would make and I’m sure I have much more to learn about it but I hope you all enjoy this fun, easy tutorial as much as I did!

Let us know what you thought of this technique!

Written by: Karly Poole