You dont have to settle for the ordinary, even when it comes to creating a starburst in Illustrator. In fact, this week Deke shows you two techniques for giving your stellar compositions a customized effect in this single movie. In the first example, youll start with a simple star shape path, then use such unintuitively named features as Roughen and Pucker, in order to create a celestial body to contend with. And even better, these are dynamic effects you can assess and adjust to your own taste:

In the second example, Deke shows a less adjustable—but no less effective—means of customizing the star shape he used in last weeks technique. By using a much more intuitively named feature, the Crystallize tool, you can make iterations of your original path, adjust the opacity, and end up with this effect:

Either way, youll end up with a couple of techniques in your bag of star-based tricks that allow you to take your celestial creations to new heights.

Every week, theres a new free technique from Deke. And lynda.com members can see the entire collection of Dekes Techniques here. Meanwhile, Deke will be back next week with a new Photoshop technique thats out of this world in a completely different way.