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

In this video we'll be creating our cloud icon. So 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 a higher resolution. To do this we'll go back into illustrator. So let's scroll over and down in our perspective.

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 we'll go to place. Place is the word that illustrator uses when you're bringing outside images into the file.

We'll select place and from here we'll open up 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 hand corner down to the bottom right hand 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. And 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 let's first rename our linked file double clicking it and typing cloud low res or low resolution and next we want to lock this layer so that if we select it won't accidentally move. To do this we can go over to the left and hover clicking to the right of the eye icon.

When we click here we'll see that the layer is now locked. Therefore if I try and select it or move it I won't be able to do so 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 starting from 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 side of the circle and top of the circle intersect and 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 and we have our first circle for our icon.

Next let's create the next circle. To do this we'll drag about where the top the circle and the left side of the circle intersect and click over and hold in shift. We'll drag and I'm simply going to move it over to the right with the keys on the keyboard so it's in alignment a little bit 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 in shift and we have our circle here. I can move it with the arrow keys and we'll finish our final circle here dragging over hold in shift and releasing right about there.

While we do have these three circles making out the top left and right outline of our shape we still do need the bottom part of our shape. To do this we're going to go back into the shapes and this time we'll be selecting 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 we're going to drag a rectangle all the way over until we meet the other center of our circle and the bottom of our circles and we'll release. We now have all the shapes that will make up our cloud. However we need to combine them into one shape together.

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. However 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 be selecting 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 and as we click and drag we'll see that it makes 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.

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 and next let's unlock the cloud low res and with this unlocked we can actually toggle the visibility of it clicking on the eye icon to the left of the layer to see that we've made a successful cloud icon. Let's now delete the cloud low res image by going down to the bottom right hand side and clicking the delete selection and now we can move our cloud icon into our final layers. To do this we'll double click path and rename it five cloud and hit ENTER.

We'll then click on to the selected art on the right hand side and drag it into final. Finally let's align our object clicking on the horizontal line center and vertical line center. We'll save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard and we've now completed our cloud.

Nicely done.