Ai Part VI: Creating Symmetrical Curves

This is the sixth tutorial in the Illustrator Beginner’s series. We’ve already covered placing sketches, using the Pen tool, tracing sketches with the Pen tool, making symmetrical vector files and using the Ellipse tool. This lesson covers creating symmetrical curves by making the smiling mouth. Here’s my sketch. You can either work on the same layer as your other shapes or create a new one to work on for the mouth. If you want a refresher on using layers, you can refer to the first tutorial.

Start by drawing one half of the smile using the Pen tool. Start your first point at the corner of the mouth and make the second one near the middle of the mouth. Hold down the Shift key while making the line curve. If you need a refresher on the Pen tool, check it out here. The reason for holding down the Shift key is it makes your curved line end pointing in a straight line or parallel to your page edge (instead of being angled up or down).

Next, draw the crescent shape for the cheek. Start by making the top curved line with the Pen tool, then click off of the line. Remember you can hold down the Command/Control key to quickly switch between the Pen and the Selection tools. Now, start drawing again by hovering your mouse over the last point you made. When you see the slash next to the tooltip, click on the point. Then complete the shape by hovering over the original point until you see the circle. Click on the point and pull out your curve. Note: If you try to restart your curve on the first point you made, you’ll probably have trouble with trying to make the right shape (you end up with a distorted blob). If this happens to you, undo the last line (Command/Control Z) and start at the opposite point instead.

Now, select the two parts of the mouth to make a copy. To select multiple objects, Shift click on the second object or draw a box around all the objects you want to select with the Selection tool. Now that your objects are selected, hold down the Option and Shift keys while dragging the objects to the right. You’ll want to press the Shift key after you start dragging, otherwise you’ll deselect the shapes.

With your copied half mouth selected, double click on the Reflect tool.

A dialogue box pops up. Select Vertical and click OK.

Your mouth should have flipped. You may need to move it around to get it to line up with your sketch.

Now connect the two mouth halves with the Pen Tool.

Open up your Stroke palette. Go to Window > Stroke.

The Stroke palette pops up and I set my stroke to 2 pt. This will thicken up your line a little.

Now, let’s make your line into a closed shape. Select just the mouth and not the cheeks. Go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. You’ll notice your stroked line is now a closed shape. I usually don’t do this step until the very end, so I can change the stroke weight if I want.

You can also outline your stroke by using the Flatten Transparency. Flatten Transparency will also convert dashed lines and brush effects which the Outline Stroke doesn’t do. Go to Object > Flatten Transparency to use it. Move the slider to 100% Vector.

Finally, select the cheeks and the smile and use the Add to shape area from the Pathfinder palette. Again, I probably wouldn’t do this step until the end. Just in case I wanted to change something, but I figured it was good to show for the tutorial.

Here’s my final mouth. I was originally going to do the stem in this tutorial too, but this one ran long. So, it will get done in the next one.

This post was written on IllustrationInfo.com. Content copyright 2009 Cory Thoman.