Try to Blend In

I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS4, but I believe the same techniques are available in older versions of Illustrator at least back to the CS version.
This is the quick explanation. This is for you if you are familiar with Illustrator. In my next post, I will go into detail and provide pictures for those who are less familiar or don't know about the techniques I'm using.
Vertical Multiwidth Blends
1. Find two palettes you'd like to blend and open them in two windows of your browser. I leave the two windows open so I can share my blend on each page when it is complete.
2. In Illustrator, start a new document. Make it the size you'd like your final image to be (I make mine 300 px wide)
3. Right click one palette image and choose "copy image"
4. In Illustrator, paste image (CTRL+V on a PC)
5. Repeat 3 and 4 with the second palette
6. Scale both palettes to fit in your artboard. Arrange them with one on top and one on the bottom and scale them vertically so they each take up 1/4 of the total height or less. You should have white space in between the two palettes- this is where your blend will go.
7. Use the Live Trace tool to convert each image to vectors.
8. Select both images and choose Object>Expand then Ungroup twice (CTRL+SHIFT+G)
9. Now you have 10 little rectangles of color. Select the left most colors of each palette. Select Object>Blend>Make (ALT+CTRL+B) The default settings will do quite nicely, but I will explain how to change them later.
10. Select the next colors to the right, top and bottom and make another blend.
11. Repeat with the remaining 3 colors in each palette.
12. You could stop here. I like to rearrange the order of the stack of colors to the most pleasing image to my eye. I select each blended color group, right click>arrange>"bring to front" or "send to back" and just try different orders until the image looks the way I want it to look.
13 Export your image and share!

Hope some people try it. I would love to see your results. Detailed explanation coming up next.

1. Find two palettes you'd like to blend and open them in two windows of your browser. I leave the two windows open so I can share my blend on each page when it is complete.

I'm going to use:

and

2. In Illustrator, start a new document. Make it the size you'd like your final image to be (I make mine 300 px wide)

3. Right click one palette image and choose "copy image"

4. In Illustrator, paste image (CTRL+V on a PC)
(EDIT > PASTE)

5. Repeat 3 and 4 with the second palette

6. Scale both palettes to fit in your artboard. Arrange them with one on top and one on the bottom and scale them vertically so they each take up 1/4 of the total height or less. You should have white space in between the two palettes- this is where your blend will go.
You can experiment with different heights for a different gradient effect.

7. Use the Live Trace tool to convert each image to vectors.
Live Trace is a nifty tool that coverts raster images to vectors. This works very well on images such as palettes due to their simple shapes (rectangles) and finite number of colors (5 or less)


Here are the settings that will always work with palettes:



Repeat with second palette.

8. Select both images and choose Object>Expand then Ungroup twice (CTRL+SHIFT+G)

then

9. Now you have 10 little rectangles of color. Select the left most colors of each palette. Select Object>Blend>Make (ALT+CTRL+B)

result:


I like the default blend setting, but there are some interesting variations you could make by changing the Blend Options. Another thing to play with...

10. Select the next colors to the right, top and bottom and make another blend.
11. Repeat with the remaining 3 colors in each palette.

12. You could stop here. I like to rearrange the order of the stack of colors to the most pleasing image to my eye. I select each blended color group, right click>arrange>"bring to front" or "send to back" and just try different orders until the image looks the way I want it to look.

13 Export your image and share!

You are so kind to explain this! I have Corel and I have not dug in there much. I hope to have time to try something like this. Sometimes I think I should get the Adobe program but it's too expensive. These blends are so so ....so lovely.

Thanks Highwireart!
I'm a big fan of Illustrator since I've been using it so long, but I'm sure corel can do most of these things.
It isn't about the software, it's about the artist- this I know for sure :)
I will make photoshop tutorial for these soon. I'm sure those techniques will work in most graphics apps, they are actually very simple :)
I lean toward vectors when I can in case I want to print it out really big in the future.