Creating a High Resolution Cloud Icon in Illustrator: Step-by-Step Tutorial

In this video, we'll be creating our cloud icon. To begin, let's open up a preview with our PDF and view our cloud icon example. Instead of creating this icon from scratch, we actually already have an example of this icon in a low-resolution format.

We're going to trace over it to create the icon in higher resolution. To do this, we'll go back into Illustrator. So let's scroll over and down in our workspace.

We're now going to place the image that we already have on our fifth artboard as an example. To do this, we'll go to File and then Place. Place is the term Illustrator uses when bringing external images into the file.

We'll select Place and from here we'll open the C drive in our unzipped folder, selecting the cloud icon JPEG. We'll then click Place and here we'll see a little preview of the icon, and we can determine where we want to place it. Let's drag from the top-left corner down to the bottom-right corner to place our cloud icon.

In addition, let's now take this image that we've placed and drag it from Final into Working layers. If we click outside the icon, we can see what it looks like. Let's change our view and zoom in.

As we can see here, we have a nice shape of a cloud; however, this is obviously not a great-looking icon based on the resolution and how pixelated it looks. Instead, we're going to trace over this file, creating our own icon of a cloud. So let's begin.

The first thing that we're going to want to do is lock our linked file of the cloud. To do this, we can go over to Working and first rename our linked file by double-clicking it and typing "Cloud Low Res" or "Low Resolution." Next, we want to lock this layer so that if we select it, it won't accidentally move. To do this, we can go over to the left and hover and click to the right of the eye icon.

When we click here, we'll see that the layer is now locked. Therefore, if I try to select or move it, I won't be able to because it's locked. We're now ready to create our icon.

Let's begin by creating the circles that make up each of the different cloud edges. We'll do this with the Ellipse tool. Now let's start drawing out the circles that make up the cloud.

We'll start with the largest circle here. We could guess where the middle is and start drawing a circle out holding Shift and ALT, or we can drag up to the top-left corner where the left and top sides of the circle intersect, then begin dragging down and to the right until we've completed our circle. We'll then release when it's roughly the size of the cloud circle, giving us our first circle for our icon.

Next, let's create the next circle. To do this, we'll drag around where the top and left sides of the circle intersect, click, and hold Shift. We'll drag and simply move it over to the right with the keys on the keyboard so it's in alignment a little more, and this looks good.

Finally, let's draw one more circle on the left-hand side and the right-hand side. To do this, I'll click and drag, hold Shift, and we have our circle here. I can move it with the arrow keys, and we'll finish our final circle here by dragging, holding Shift, and releasing about there.

While we do have these three circles making out the top left and right outline of our shape, we still need the bottom part of our shape. To do this, we're going to go back into the shapes, and this time, we'll select the Rectangle tool. With the Rectangle tool selected, we're going to want to make a rectangle that fills the bottom part of our shape.

So let's simply start from the center of our left circle and drag a rectangle all the way over to meet the center of the right circle and the bottom of the circles, then release. We now have all the shapes that will make up our cloud. However, we need to combine them into one shape.

In order to do this, we'll be using a new tool called the Shape Builder tool. With the Shape Builder tool, we can combine each of these shapes into one shape. Before doing so, we need to make sure that we have all five shapes selected.

To do this, we'll use V on our keyboard for the Selection tool, and we'll simply drag a selection box. Next, we're going to select our Shape Builder tool found in the toolbar about halfway down. With the Shape Builder tool, we can create shapes by hovering over each of these individual segments that the Shape Builder allows us to create shapes from.

For example, if we simply wanted to make an outline but keep the rectangle connected, we could click and drag. As we click and drag, we'll see it creates the total shape. If we click and drag over each of the segments here from all of the highlighted selections, we'll see that we have our total cloud. And there we have it—we've completed our cloud icon.

Let's now remove the background image that helped us trace this cloud by first deselecting our shape using CTRL+Shift+A on the keyboard. Next, let's unlock "Cloud Low Res, " and with it unlocked, toggle its visibility by clicking the eye icon to the left of the layer to confirm we've made a successful cloud icon. Let's now delete the "Cloud Low Res" image by going down to the bottom right and clicking Delete Selection. Now we can move our cloud icon into our final layers. To do this, we'll double-click the path and rename it "Five Cloud, " then hit ENTER.

We'll then click on the selected art on the right-hand side and drag it into Final. Finally, let's align our object by clicking Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center. We'll save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard, and we've now completed our cloud.

Nicely done.