I was sitting around answering questions in the Illustrator subreddit when I found a link to a neat tutorial on faking toothbrush splatters in Illustrator.
So I tried it out.
I added a wrinkle to it that the tutorial didn’t bother with; instead of having a lot of duplicated shapes with grained-up gradients over flat fills, I just added a new fill to my shapes with the Appearance palette, then gave them various linear and radial fills that I added the grain filter to and set to multiply mode. Less shapes are better, in my mind, because it’s a ton easier to go in and tweak things for just the right curve.
(You could also just draw the grainy gradients inside the shapes, which upon reflection would probably be a bit faster, but I dunno, I just like the technical sweetness of the Appearance palette sometimes.)
I’m pretty happy with how this turned out for a 15-minute doodle. I may have to do a more involved piece using this effect sometime in the future.
Here’s the AI source if you want to poke around.
(If you’ve read Rita, please do not try to read any significance into my color choices – this is just me picking random colors that felt fun together.)