| St. Patrick's Day Shamrocks in Illustrator, p. 3 | |
(If you arrived on this page from a search, you should begin the tutorial from page one.)
Step 12. Now we need a stem. Activate the arc tool. It's on the Line tool popout menu. (If you have Illustrator 9, you'll have to draw the stem with the pen tool. Make a curved line). Draw an arc about a inch or so long. In the stroke palette, set the stroke width to 10 and choose rounded ends for the stroke. (If you can't see the stroke palette, go to Window > Stroke to show it.)
Step 13. We need to make the stem into an object; right now it is a stroke. Go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. Before you could see the stroke; now you can see points around the shape.
Step 14. With the stem selected, swap the fill and stroke colors by typing Shift + X so the stem has no fill and the stroke is the same color as the three hearts.
Step 15. Position the stem over the bottom points of the hearts as shown. Hover the mouse over the corner of the stem's bounding box to get the rotate cursor (the small double headed curved arrow cursor) and click and drag to rotate it if necessary to make it the right orientation for the shamrock. You can tell from the bounding box I rotated mine slightly.
Step 16. Select all three hearts and the stem, and hold Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) and click the Add to Shape button on the Pathfinder palette as before. This will combine all of the pieces into one object.
Step 17. Swap the fill and stroke again (Shift + X) so your shamrock has a solid green fill and no stroke. If your fill color wasn't green, change it now. I suggest you save now.
Now you can make a simple solid filled shamrock. Next let's use the gradient mesh tool to make a shaded shamrock.
Continued on Page 4...
©2005 Sara Froehlich
