Discover the process of creating a water droplet icon in Adobe Illustrator, beginning with the basics of drawing a circle, adjusting the ellipse's top anchor point, and finally adding an accent line to refine the droplet shape. This tutorial also guides you in adjusting the width of your accent stroke, creating a more realistic water droplet design.
Key Insights
- The water droplet icon starts as a simple circle, with the top point of the ellipse adjusted to be sharper to mimic the shape of a droplet.
- Adding an accent line, created with the arc tool, enhances the droplet's shape. This line should be reduced in size to fit inside the droplet and rotated by 180 degrees to match the droplet's angle perfectly.
- The width of the accent stroke can be customized using the width tool in the toolbar, allowing for a realistic water droplet design that is wider in the middle and thinner towards the edges.
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In this video, we'll be working on our water droplet icon. Let's begin by previewing our icon in our PDF and we'll see that we have a water droplet with a little line on the bottom right-hand side.
Ultimately, this water droplet is a circle that's angled at the top with a thin line that gets thicker in the middle and thinner towards the edges. We can recreate this in Illustrator, so let's go back into our Illustrator file and we'll scroll to the right, getting a view of our next artboard. Before we begin, let's make sure we're in our working layer and let's begin.
We'll start off with the ellipse tool and we'll simply draw a circle. Remember, if we hold Shift, we'll draw a circle, and next, within this circle, we want the top point to be up higher and sharp rather than curved. We can do this by selecting the top anchor point, as an ellipse naturally has four anchor points.
We'll use our Direct Selection tool, shortcut A on the keyboard, and selecting our top anchor point, we're going to use the handles to change how curved the lines come into this anchor. We'll reduce both handles all the way to the anchor point and we can see we now have a sharp top with angled sides. In order to make this look more like a water droplet, we'll grab the anchor, and clicking on it with the Direct Selection tool, we'll drag it up, holding Shift to make sure we're in line until we have the shape of a water droplet.
We can then use V on our keyboard to select the entire object and drag it down into the artboard. We're now ready to create the accent line on the bottom right-hand side of our water droplet. To do this, we'll use our Arc tool found in the toolbar and we're going to be creating an arc from the bottom all the way over to the side.
When we hover over the right anchor point, we'll know that we have our arc. Because this is formed from a circle, we know it's the same natural arc for the 90-degree arc we've created, so we simply need to hit V on the keyboard to select our arc and rotate it 180 degrees. This arc now perfectly matches the angle of our water droplet. However, we do want to reduce the size by clicking on the bottom right-hand corner and holding Shift as we drag it in, since this line will be on the inside of our water droplet.
Next, let's now change the width of our accent stroke. To do this, we'll select the path on the inside, and we can do this in a couple of different ways. The first way is to go into Properties, and from here we can adjust our stroke.
We'll click and if we go to the bottom, we can adjust the profile of our stroke. It's currently set to uniform, so it maintains the same stroke width throughout. However, if we select Profile, we can select Width Profile 1, and we'll see that it's sharp at the edges with a longer width in the middle.
Additionally, we can select other various profiles to see the examples and know that these different profiles will give us different options for our look. For now, let's go back to the uniform profile and customize this ourselves by using the Width tool. Within our toolbar, we'll select the Width tool, and with the Width tool, we can adjust the width of our stroke.
Before doing so, let's zoom in, and now we're ready to adjust. Because we want the middle to be wider, we'll first start with the middle, clicking right in the middle and dragging out until we have the width that we'd prefer. In this case, we'll keep it where it is at roughly one point.
Next, we're going to want to adjust our anchor points on the ends to be thinner. To do this, we'll hover over the top of our anchor point with the Width tool, where we see the circle, and simply drag it down into the anchor point. We'll do the same thing on the top, hovering over the anchor point and clicking one of the edges, dragging it into the anchor point so that it's thinner.
Finally, if we want to adjust our middle width, we can do so by clicking the end, and we'll just pull it in a little bit more. We'll then click V and click outside and zoom out using CTRL + Minus (-) on the keyboard. We'll hit V again, click outside to view our water droplet.
Nicely done. Let's now create a selection box using the selection tool. Right-click to group both of these into one object and move our group into Final.
As one last step, let's double-check that our inside water droplet is transparent by double-clicking, going to Isolation Mode, and seeing that it is, in fact, white. Therefore, we'll change the fill to none. We'll double-click outside, and we've now completed our water droplet.
Nicely done. We'll change the name of our group to '11 Water Drop' and hit ENTER. Then we'll save our work using CTRL + S on the keyboard. In the next video, we'll work on our pipes icon.
See you there.