Ask Ninja 12: Vector swirls and curls
Ninja January 21st, 2009
In one week, I got emails from 3 brides-to-be, 2 bands, and 1 curious student all asking:
Q. How did you create the swirls in your First Kiss Illustration?
First Kiss
A. I drew all the paths using Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool—no fancy shortcuts. This was before I discovered the handy swirl tool. I would endlessly tweak and make many trips to my local Kinkos for large-format prints.
Now, I wouldn’t leave you hanging. Here’s my tutorial on making swirls and curls in Adobe Illustrator. It does require basic knowledge of the pen tool. If you’re not familiar with the pen tool, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has a great pdf guide and practice exercises here.
And for the truly pressed, I’ve included links to free vector swirls and curls at the end of this post. Now, on with the tutorial.
Step 1—Draw a spiral
Click and hold down the mouse on the Line tool to reveal the other tools. Select the Spiral tool.
Click and drag outward. If you’re a bit of a control enthusiast, you can also click on your art board, and a Spiral Options window will appear. Here, you can enter the spiral radius, decay, spiral segments, and spiral direction. I’m using the default 80% of decay, 10 segments option.
Using the Direct Select tool (white arrow), you can choose points and drag them outward to alter the spiral’s decay. Or as mentioned above, you can change the decay in the Spiral Options window.
Set the stroke weight to 10 pts.
Step 2—Covert to outline and modify shape
Object > Path > Outline Stroke
I like to work in outline mode, so I can see stray points more easily and then delete them. To access Illustrator’s outline mode, hit ⌘ + y. If you’re on a PC, substitute the ⌘ symbol for the Ctrl key. To exit outline mode, hit the same key combination again.
Once in outline mode, use the Direct Select tool to choose points and drag them to alter the line weight of your swirl.
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