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 has four anchor points naturally.
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 in to 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 we'll hold in shift to make sure we're in a line until we have showing 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 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 a couple 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 one 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 do this customized ourself 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 to 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 and 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.