Drawing symmetrical shapes is another tricky thing in Illustrator
but let me give you two quick
techniques to do that
first of all the pen tool can be very useful
you might think that this heart shape needs quite
a lot of anchor points to do I can do it
in two anchor points and I'm not trying to show off I'm just trying to tell you
that if you learn how to work with this then you can do these things easily
so for example here I would start by
just setting up my handle point
click and dragging the first anchor point hold down the Alt key
you can already set up that v-shape then
go just below the other anchor point
draw one side of your heart and hold down the
Alt key again to split the bottom handle
and then you click and drag on the top
and look at that with two anchor points
we drew the heart and it looks quite nice as well it's symmetrical
because I took care of making these handles symmetrical
but that's obviously something that you don't really have to
learn to do because again this is all
about using the Pen Tool but what if you
are not that good at with the Pen Tool
you can still do things perfectly symmetrical you just have to do the following thing
this is one method that I like
but I will show you another one as well which might be even more effective
so I will just click at the bottom point or than shifty this is
crucial you have you want to make sure
that line is straight and holding down
the shift-key make sure that it is now
I'm just going to change the color again
maybe to something very different for our stroke maybe
a bright blue will do and I will also make sure
using the appearance panel so we can see
what I'm drawing so that's my line and
then now I do it slightly differently I will
continue this line here and then I will
just click and drag actually it's just
hold and click and drag out the handle like that
then come to the other side, that looks already better
then we can finish off and click and
drag and then just just holding down
the command key I adjust it slightly
let's say that's the hard shape that we wanted
pressing shift X can swap quickly the stroke and fill color
on a selected object so I started off using
for the stroke now becomes the Fill and
once you have one side and you make sure
that the center point is completely vertical
that's when you use the Reflect Tool
which is 'O' the shortcut you click
in a center point you can click anywhere
on the symmetry line and then you click and drag
and hold down alt and shift or
option shift and that's going to keep it completely symmetrical and duplicate
Alt to duplicate, Shift is to keep it symmetrical
yeah my heart is not as much nice as I did in the beginning with just 2 anchor points
but once you have two halves it's still not joined together
so what you want to do at this point having the two selected you use the Shape Builder
people who has been using Illustrator for a long time probably would use Pathfinder which is great as well
but Shape Builder is even faster. That's the tool here in the Toolbar.
You select both sides and just drew over the two
and then it becomes one shape.
all right now another technique
would be if you want to see
automatically while you are drawing
the other side so it's like a simultaneous
symmetrical drawing this is slightly more
tricky here what you need to do
first of all is to draw a straight line again you
can even use the line tool for this you
just draw a straight line and once that
line is placed down you put it in a Group
that's when you need the layers to make sure that what you are doing is going to be set up correctly
so Cmd+G or Ctrl+G is going to make a group from that line
notice I don't even have any colors on that line, it doesn't need any colors. You will see why.
Once it's in the group that's all we needed, and then you set up an effect.
Illustrator has all these effects and they can be applied as live effects which is amazing
again makes it possible to make changes to them so they are non-destructive
So I go through the effect menu and I go to Distort and Transform
and I choose Transform. It is a very powerful effect.
If you learn one effect in Illustrator this should be the one
because with this you can do so many different things
what I will do here is I want to reflect the x-axis so I want to reflect that way
I would like to make a copy
so not just simply reflect what I'm drawing but I want to copy it
already and then I can decide whether I
want to draw on the left side or on the
right side of my symmetry I will draw on the left side so I set up
my reference point to be on the right side
that makes the center of symmetry
this empty line that we created that's
all you needed to set up. So reflect X
Copy 1 and set that point up there
that's all you need once you click OK
this effect is set up on this group
the appearance panel tells me that the effect is here
and if I click on this I can always make changes to it
and if I come up here
you can also see that whenever you apply an effect to an object
illustrator will fill in the circle meaning that it has
something more than just a simple Stroke and Fill
so the appearance remember
don't forget the appearance is a very important thing that we use
so once you have that ready you go into the group itself and you start drawing
So I'm going to use the Pen Tool now and what I
will do is I will set it up just so we
can see it into a stronger color
something like that and I will start drawing from the bottom
holding down SHIFT I can draw straight lines
just like that now when I go in here I can
see already that I made a mistake because I didn't lock that line there.
that's also something that you should do before you do anything else
you lock that one single line that doesn't have any color at the moment
so locking it makes sure that you don't actually continue drawing that
instead you drawing a separate line
and what's important, and that's the last steo
you see I started drawing but I don't see a reflection of it on the other side
the reason for that is because this path that I'm using has to be placed within the Group
so if I drag this here within the group
and I zoom back, see it's already there
so that's all I needed to do
and now if I continue drawing so whatever I do here
I'm just going to continue using the Pen Tool
whenever I place down a new section
I see it immediately on the other side
and I can come up here in the center point and
there you go we have the symmetrical shape
Just to show you this in action if I keep drawing the same line
you can see that is all
happening simultaneously and that's a
very effective thing again if you are
drawing anything that needs to be symmetrical
I'm talking about Batman logo for example, anchors
all kinds of things which can be extremely useful
and the good thing is once you have a
group set up like that you only have to put
your line into that group so this group you do it once
Once it's set up with the effect and with everything the way I have done it
so just to show you if I delete this whole path
as long as I draw a new thing and it's
pleasing to that group I can draw
straight away in symmetry