Learn how to create an eco icon using Illustrator in this step-by-step guide. The article details the process of importing an image to trace and creating shapes using the pen tool, including a detailed description of drawing straight and curved lines.
Key Insights
- The article explains two ways to add elements into an Illustrator file; one is using the 'file place' option and the other is by directly dragging the image from the c drive into the illustrator file.
- For creating shapes, the pen tool is heavily utilized. By creating anchor points and manipulating lines and curves, various elements of the eco icon such as trapezoid, stem lines, and leaves are drawn.
- Instead of recreating identical elements, the guide suggests copying and adjusting existing ones. For instance, after creating one leaf, it is copied, rotated, and repositioned to create the other leaf of the icon.
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In this video, we'll be creating our eco icon. Let's start by scrolling to the right and getting a view of our next open artboard.
Before we begin, we'll check our PDF to view our sample eco icon. Looks like a plant with a plug on top. For this icon, we actually have another sample of this that we can trace.
We'll go back into Illustrator, and last time we used File > Place to add our icon. However, we also have one additional way to add elements into our file. To do this, we can actually open up our C drive and drag the image straight into our Illustrator file.
When we drop it here, we'll need to zoom out. However, we can see that the JPEG is here. We'll then resize it appropriately, dragging down and holding Shift to maintain proportions, and let's move it into our next artboard.
We'll then drag the other corner, holding Shift until we've filled our artboard. Next, let's zoom in. We can tell by the red lines that it's part of our working layer.
If not, we can drag it into our working layer, and because we're going to be tracing it, let's actually lock this layer by clicking the white space to the left of the linked file. Next, let's begin tracing. Rather than creating shapes like we did with the cloud tool, we're actually going to be creating shapes with the pen tool.
Shortcut P on the keyboard, or found in our toolbar. With the pen tool, we can create shapes simply by clicking anchor points. To do this, we'll start by clicking on the trapezoid.
We'll click a point on the top left-hand side. Holding Shift, we'll go over, making sure that we draw a straight line, and click another point. Then, moving down, we'll click the bottom right point, hold Shift to make sure we draw a horizontal line to the left, and we'll finish off our shape when we see the circle to the bottom right-hand side of the pen cursor, and we'll complete our shape here.
We'll then deselect using CTRL + Shift + A, and we're ready to now start drawing the bottom part of our icon. To do this, we'll make sure that we're intersecting with the top shape, and we'll click and drag down to the bottom. Next, let's create the bottom line.
We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and we'll click and drag across. We'll then hit CTRL + Shift + A, and let's see how far we've come. If we hide our linked file by toggling the visibility, we'll see that we just have to add the leaves and the top two lines.
We can continue doing this in our working layer, and let's start by adding the two stem lines. We'll click and intersect, hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and click and intersect with the path, CTRL + Shift + A to deselect. Before moving on to these two shapes, let's actually draw our top lines.
We'll start intersecting on the trapezoid, and click and drag, CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and click and drag when we see that it intersects, showing that both of these shapes are the same height. We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A. Next, we need to work on the two leaves. Well, we can create straight lines as we have in our current icon, as shown if we toggle the visibility of our linked file.
We can also create rounded shapes with the pen tool. To do this, we'll first start by clicking at the top of the stem, at the top of the leaf, and for our next point, we're going to click where it intersects with the bottom of this path. However, when we click, we'll click and hold, and drag out to the right, until we see the lines start to bend, and right here, we'll have handles adjusting how much our line bends.
We'll leave it here when it follows the line appropriately. For our second point, we'll simply close off our shape. As we can see, we can also manipulate this line using this anchor point. However, in this case, let's leave it right at the anchor point with no toggle and release.
Next, let's adjust our two handles, toggling the dimensions of these bends. We'll hit A on the keyboard as a direct selection, and from here, we can adjust the handles going inside and out to adjust how much it bends, as well as the angle on which it bends. Sometimes, this takes a little bit of work to match it appropriately, but I think this is a good leaf.
Rather than recreating the leaf on the right-hand side, let's simply copy the leaf we have by using V on the keyboard for the selection tool, clicking on our leaf, and hitting CTRL + C and CTRL + V. We'll then need to rotate our leaf, going to the top right, and rotating it by clicking and holding Shift until we've rotated it 90 degrees. Finally, we'll rotate it so that it hovers over the additional leaf.
As a final step, we'll select all three objects with a white fill, and we'll change the fill from white to none so that it's transparent. We'll then unlock our linked file or our original low-resolution background image and toggle the visibility. Here we can see we've created our icon.
We'll delete our linked file, going to the bottom right and deleting this, and finally, we'll drag a selection over the entire icon, group it by right-clicking and selecting group, and we'll align it within our artboard. Depending on the size of yours, we can also adjust the size by holding Shift and again aligning it appropriately. We'll then rename it by double-clicking, typing 10 ECO, and hitting Enter, and we'll move it into our final layer.
We'll then hit CTRL + S to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be working on a water droplet. See you there!