Veerle's blog

Today I want to show you how you can create a spiral ornament in Illustrator and reuse this ornament throughout your artwork multiple times resized, rotated, mirrored, whatever… by turning it into a Symbol. I’ve talked about Symbols before and I showed you how to use the Symbol Sprayer Tool. This time I’ll focus a bit more on the creation of the ornament itself. Like always I’ll talk you through the entire process step by step. By explaining every little detail of each step, this tutorial should be a good exercise for the beginners among you. You’ll learn to use a lot of several tools along the way and you only use the Pen Tool a tiny little bit. Hope you enjoy and learn :)

Draw a spiral and a circle

Start by selecting the Spiral Tool from the Toolbox and draw a spiral (click and drag). Hold down the shift key while doing that. You can also hold down the spacebar meanwhile to move the position of the object. While we are still holding down the mouse we can use the up or down arrow keys to add or remove segments of the spiral shape. Once you're happy with everything release the mouse, then the shift key.

Select the Ellipse Tool from the Toolbox. With exception of the arrow keys, the same keys can be applied: use the Shift key for a circle, use spacebar to put the circle in position. Release the mouse, then the shift key.

Draw sperm head

Draw 2 other circles as shown in the image above. Us the Shift key and the Spacebar again while dragging to position them in the correct spot.

Now select the Scissors Tool and click on the 2 intersections as shown above. Select the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) to select the segment of the path you've just cut and hit the delete key (once or twice depending on how you've selected the path) to get rid of the path segment.

Repeat the above steps for the other circle: click the 2 intersections using the Scissors Tool and delete the path segment.

Select the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) and select the 2 intersecting points on the smaller circle: click on the first point, hold down Shift and click the 2nd point. Hit command/control + j to join both points (Object > Path > Join). Do the same for the other 2 points. You might need to lock the spiral first to be able to proper select both points: select the spiral shape and go to Object > Lock > Selection or hit command/control + 2. Don't forget to unlock the path again when you're done Object > Unlock All or just hit command/control + alt/option + 2.

Select the Selection Tool (black arrow) from the Toolbox and select the smaller circle and the other object that forms the shape of the sperm head. Go to the Pathfinder panel (Window > Pathfinder) and option/alt click the Add to shape area option. Turn the stroke into a filling by toggling the arrow/switch icon above the Stroke and Fill at the bottom of the Toolbox. Now select both spiral and sperm head and duplicate the object by holding down the option/alt key while dragging the object.

Create the other side of the spiral ornament

Double click the Scale Tool and uncheck the Scale Strokes & Effects option. This way when we scale the object the same stroke weight will be remained. Scale the object down to almost 1/3 of its original size.

Place the smaller spiral into position as shown above and delete 2 segments of the spiral. Move the ending point of the bigger spiral using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow). Just click in the point and drag.

Connect both spiral objects

Select the Pen Tool. Click in the ending point, hold down the mouse and drag into the direction of the smaller spiral as shown in the image above on the left. Now click the in ending point of the smaller spiral while holding down the mouse and dragging upwards as shown in the above image on the right. If the path isn't perfect you can select the Direct Selection tool, click in a point to select it and tweak the curve by moving its handles.

Create a Symbol

Ornaments are usually elements that you'll use more then once in your design. It's useful to create a Symbol from your creation. This way you not only save yourself time it'll also keep your file low in size. If you are familiar with Adobe® Flash you'll know what Symbols and instances are. It's exactly the same in Illustrator. Even the shortcut used to create a symbol (F8) from an object is the same. Symbols are reusable objects which are stored in a Symbols Library. You can create your own libraries of Symbols or you can explore the many libraries that come with Illustrator accessible via the panel's menu. Just click the top right arrow icon on the panel: Open Symbol Library. There is a whole bunch to explore.

To create a Symbol you simply drag the object into the Symbols panel. To reuse it you drag it from the Symbols panel onto your canvas. To edit a Symbol, just double click it in the in the Symbols panel. Doing this will bring you into Isolation mode. You'll see a grey bar at the top with a 'back' arrow. After you've done editing, click the arrow and your Symbol will be updated. Editing the Symbol means that all instances of that Symbol will be updated in your artwork. If you want to change an instance of the Symbol you've used in your artwork, you'll need to Expand it first so it's 'disconnected' with its original Symbol. You do this by going to Object > Expand and check the Object and Fill option. Now you can edit the paths apart from all other instances.