Technique Question - Ornamental/Grunge

[Gidget]

I am very interested in the grungy or ornamental style and am quite curious to learn if there are some common approaches or techniques. I tend to do things quite methodically, and then read a tutorial or technique and say, oh, that was easy.

As an example, how would you approach something like this? Create individual paths, use a custom brush, symbols perhaps? The link is to an example image on istock. Thanks for any thoughts!

istock example (http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/plant_life/botany/flowers/1574094_decorative_design_vector.php?id=1574094)

[LSR84]

Well I think this kind of effect is really easy to do. If you closely look at the picture you can see that the whole image is based on one single shape. This is a really cool example how to achieve a good looking result in a fast way.
You just create a shape you want and than:

You can create an art brush of it and draw with the shape via Brush tool - this is a good way to create some crazy freestyle stuff (a Wacom tablet is not bad):)

You can make a symbol of it and than use it with the Symbol sprayer tool.

Or you could copy/paste the shape a few times and than make every one a bit diffrent. Group it copy/paste the whole group resize it and repeat this as long as you want.

Maybe this helps.
Ciao!

[VectorMike]

i would do something like that as a copyand paste to another layer.

that way I could adjust the color mode and opacity on each different layer to get that effect.

[FreeTransform]

For more deatailed ornaments, I sketch them out on paper (I doodle in meetings!), then scan the sketches, then draw over them with the brush tool, with simple round calligraphic brush, set to have some variance in width (I use a Wacom, so the pressure make the lines thick and thin). Then I expand the strokes, and tweak the curves. It's quite tedious, but can be sort of zen-like. Here's one of mine:http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2263788