Decorating Easter Eggs in Illustrator CS

Virtual Easter eggs are fun to make. You can use them as elements to decorate cards or add to other illustrations. And since you're using Illustrator, they're vector and fully scaleable.

This week we'll be making Easter eggs, drawing, coloring, and dividing them using the pathfinder palette. Once the colors are chosen, we'll be using brush strokes and symbols to apply decorations.

Drawing the Eggs

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Today, the correct answer is the egg!

Type D to set the fill and stroke colors to default white and black. We'll be removing the stroke later, but for now it will let you see the outline of the egg. Choose the ellipse tool from the tool box and click once on an empty area of the art board to open the ellipse options. Enter 225 for the height and 150 for the width, and click OK. You should have an oval with a black stroke. (You can use other measurements. Just make sure the width is 2/3 of the height.)

Fill the egg with any pastel color, and remove the stroke by making the stroke color box active at the bottom of the tool box and then clicking the null button. You have a simple colored egg. Duplicate your egg by clicking on it, then holding the option key (Mac) or the alt key (PC) while dragging away from the original and dropping it. If you prefer, cmd/ctrl+C to copy it, and then cmd/ctrl+V to paste. Make as many eggs as you want.

Coloring Plain Eggs

Change the color of the eggs by clicking on any color in the Swatches palette (Window > Swatches) or moving the sliders in the Color Palette (Window > Color). Rotate some of the eggs by clicking them with the Selection tool (V) and hovering the mouse over the corner of the bounding box. When you see the double-headed arrow cursor, click and drag to rotate.

Continued on page 2…

©2005 Sara Froehlich