Laasri Nadia's Blog
How to make your first CSS art

How to make your first CSS art

Laasri Nadia's photo
Laasri Nadia
·

6 min read

Many people know how to use CSS to style websites, but when it comes to CSS artwork, they get confused on how they are made.

So i thought it might be helpful if i share my humble experience with you, I am going to discuss some important CSS knowledge you will need to have, in order to make your own CSS art and enjoy it as i do, let’s start🚀

Useful CSS properties :

  1. Gradient

We can declare gradient in both background or background-image properties, it can take as much colors as you want separated by a comma “ , ”.

We have two types of gradients:

-Linear Gradients: can be controlled by directions(left,top,right,bottom) or angles.

-Radial Gradients: can be controlled by giving each color a percentage, setting a shape(circle,ellipse).

• Great website to generate gradients: cssgradient

  1. box-shadow

Give your element one or multiple shadows by separating them with a comma “ , ”.

I found that the “inset” property value is so much useful, it changes the shadow from an outer shadow to an inner shadow, this makes your element looks a little bit real.

• Great website to generate box-shadow: cssmatic

  1. clip-path

Clip-path is a very useful property when it comes to CSS artwork, this property will make it easy to draw a path that probably will take you so much time to do in a different way.

This helps to draw circle, polygon and paths by specifying which region you want to show.

• Great website to generate clip-path: bennettfeely

Make your first CSS art

After we discussed these properties above, you are now ready to make your first CSS art.

This is the one we will make together 😍

This is the HTML :

<div class="coffee-cont">
    <div class="coffee-cup"></div>
    <div class="coffee-hand"></div>
    <div class="coffee-tasse"></div>
</div>

The first thing we will do is style our coffee container : we will give it position:relative and position:absolute to the other elements inside this div (except the coffee-cup div ) so that their positions will depend on their parent’s position.

.coffee-cont {
    width: 500px;
    height: 500px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    position: relative;
}

let’s style our second div, the coffee cup we will use the radial-gradient for the background to make the center a little bit brighter than the sides.

.coffee-cup {
    position: relative;
    width: 250px;
    height: 190px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    background: radial-gradient(circle,rgba(208, 208, 208, 1) 5%,rgba(189, 189, 189, 1) 51%);
    border-radius: 0 0 150px 150px;
    top: 50%;
}

Again a radial-gradient to the element before the coffee-cup to generate our coffee's color. notice that we give it z-index:9 so that it goes over the cup.

.coffee-cup::before {
    content: '';
    display: block;
    height: 30px;
    width: 230px;
    position: absolute;
    border-radius: 50%;
    background: radial-gradient(circle,rgba(132, 102, 76, 1) 5%,rgba(86, 44, 8, 1) 96%);
    top: -7px;
    left: 10px;
    z-index: 9;
}

this code will generate the top of the cup:

.coffee-cup::after{
    content: '';
    display: block;
    height: 45px;
    width: 242px;
    position: absolute;
    border-radius: 50%;
    background: #cccccc;
    top: -25px;
    left: -1px;
    border: 5px solid #e6e6e6;
}

Let’s add the coffee-hand div, we will give it z-index:-1, this way it goes behind the cup element

.coffee-hand{
    width: 52px;
    height: 32px;
    position: absolute;
    background: #ffffff;
    border-radius: 32px;
    transform: rotate(-36deg);
    z-index: -1;
    border: 15px solid #dbdbdb;
    top: 56%;
    left: 66%;
}

Now we take care of the element in the bottom, we will use a circular radial-gradient, the center will be brighter. we need a shadow to add a nice effect to this element, for this we will use the box-shadow property with a darker color.

.coffee-tasse{
    width: 400px;
    top: 68%;
    left: 10%;
    height: 139px;
    background: radial-gradient(circle,rgba(69, 69, 69, 1) 13%,rgba(176, 176, 176, 1) 45%,rgba(143, 141, 141, 1) 96%);
    border-radius: 50%;
    position: absolute;
    z-index: -1;
    border: 2px solid #f0f0f0;
    box-shadow: 1px 3px 0px 1px #323232;
}

I added this ::after selector to generate another blurry shadow which will be displayed at the very bottom of this element

.coffee-tasse::after{
    content: '';
    display: block;
    width: 405px;
    top: 68%;
    border-radius: 50%;
    height: 145px;
    background: transparent;
    box-shadow: 2px 5px 8px 3px #bababa;
}

That's it ☕. Congratulations on making your first CSS art 🎉, now it is your turn to use all the things you have learnt and make something fancier! 👏

Check all the code here : @codepen

If you want to see more of my CSS artwork, check out my twitter, i tweet a lot about CSS there. 😊

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