Monday, January 6th, 2014

Multicolor Sunburst in Illustrator

So, you know how to make a sunburst in Illustrator – here’s how to color it

Some time ago I wrote a post and created a YouTube video to show how to make a sunburst in Illustrator. This is one of my most popular posts and the video has been popular too – seems like it really hit a spot with a lot of readers.

Now, today I received an email from a reader asking how to make the sunburst multicolored. Turns out it isn’t as simple as selecting a ray and recoloring it – because when you select one ray you select them all. However, once you know how to break them up, it works just fine.

To do this, follow the instructions to create the circle, add the dashed line, expand it, select the inside anchors and choose Path > Average. This gets the sunburst made.

Now, to break the shape up, select it and choose Object > Live Paint > Make.  Now you can use the Live Paint Bucket tool to color each piece of the sunburst – or not. You see the Live Paint > Make command breaks up the shape (in a way that Object > Expand does not) so you can now select each ray in turn and color it.

If you want to see the change happen, watch the Layers palette when you do the Live Paint > Make command – it turns the compound path into a set of individual vector objects – just what you need to have to be able to recolor them. The plus is that once the shape is broken up like this you can recolor it in the usual way by selecting each shape and color it or you can use Live Paint. You get to choose which works best for you.

Now, one side effect of this is that the spaces between the rays is filled with color – typically white. So you can’t put a solid color behind the rays and have it show through. There is a solution – open the Layers palette and locate the filled white circle shape at the bottom of the expanded sunburst shapes and delete it. Once it is deleted you can add your own background filed shape behind the sunburst.

It’s one of those things that is simple when you know how but not immediately obvious how you do it.

Thanks to the reader who asked the question!

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Illustrator

posted by Helen Bradley @ 6:52 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, April 19th, 2013

Illustrator – Create a Vector Sunburst

Learn to create a vector sunburst in Illustrator – This works with all versions of Illustrator including the new CS6. The process is simple and uses a stroke to make the sunburst – it is quick and doesn’t require a lot of fiddling to create.

Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a sunburst vector shape in Illustrator.

Before we get started creating our sunburst effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. Here I have a sunburst and it’s just offset in this rectangle, but you could have a circular one if you like.

We’re going to start with circular and then we’re going to crop it to a rectangle. So if you’re ready let’s have a look and see how we create this effect in Illustrator. And we’re going to start by creating a brand new document so I’ll just choose File, New. It doesn’t matter too much what my document looks like.

I’m going to start with the Ellipse tool. So, I’m going to select the Ellipse tool and drag a shape on my image. And I need this to be a perfect circle so I’m going to hold the Shift key as I draw it and then just let go. I want this to be black stroke and no fill so I’m just going to click on the fill here and turn the fill off.

Now let’s go to the Appearance panel for this selected path and I’m going to click the Stroke option. And I’m going to set the stroke to about 200 points. And when I do you’ll see that we get this sort of circle all the way around our shape which is pretty near exactly what we want when we click the Dash Line option. Now with the Dash Line option I can set the dashes to whatever I want and this is going to affect how many of these sunbeam things there are around the shape.

So let’s just go to 20 and try that. This is what I’m a little concerned about. You can see that there’s an uneven spacing here, but you’ll see that you can adjust that by clicking this option here. So just work out how many points you need to get the number of sunrays that you want for your particular shape. I’m going to do a few more in this one rather than less so I’m going to 10 points. And when I’ve got what I want I’m just going to click away from this. And this is the basic shape. Now before we can do anything with this shape we’re going to first have to expand its appearance.

So with the shape selected I’m going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance and then Object, Expand because I want this dialogue here. And I’m going to expand both fill and stroke So I’ll select both of those and click Ok. And now each of these sunbursts is a separate shape and I need now to close up the middle. And I can do that by grabbing the Lasso tool. It’s the easiest tool to use. And all I’m going to do is just drag around because I want to select all the nodes and pointers’ handles in the middle.

Now I’m going to choose Object and then Path, and I’m going to choose Average. And with Average I’m going to select both Horizontal and Vertical and click Ok. And what that does is it just closes up the middle nicely for me. So I’m going to click outside my shape and here is my sunburst shape. So with it selected I can then go to what is now my fill color and I can choose a different fill color for it. And we could fill it with a gradient.

We could do anything we liked at this point. So let’s see now how we’re going to crop it. So I’m going to select the Rectangle tool. I’m going to start by drawing a rectangle and I’m just going to hold the spacebar as I bring it in position over the top of my sunburst because I want to work out exactly where the sunburst is going and where the rectangle is going relative to it. So I think that’s a pretty good position for me. So I’m going to let go of the spacebar and let go of the left mouse button and now select all my objects. I’m selecting other everything, and in the Pathfinder I’m going to select Crop. And that crops the shape to the size of that rectangle. And we lost our fill here so let’s just click on the fill and put the fill back on.

So here is a shape that we could save to our Symbol library. And those sunbursts are very, very easy to create in Illustrator as vector shapes. And of course if you add it to your Symbol library then you’ll have it available anytime you want to use it. And it’s very easy to create ones with different numbers of rays in them.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my videos on this YouTube channel and please like and comment on the videos. Look out too for my website at projectwoman.com. There you’ll find more tutorials and tips and tricks for Illustrator, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, GIMP and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Illustrator, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 6:36 amNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Create a Vector Sunburst in Illustrator

I’ve been looking around for some time for a good way to make sunbursts in Illustrator. Those methods I’ve seen suffer from one of two problems, one is that some use a triangle shape which is repeatedly copied and rotated to create the sunburst – I’m lazy so that’s too much repetition for me to be bothered doing. In addition, getting a good balance between width of the ray and the number of rays is also a problem with this method so it’s a lot of trial and error. The other method uses a dash line stoke on a circle but it suffers from the problem that the middle of the shape never closes up to a good tight fit.

So, I’ve come up with my own take on creating sunbursts in Illustrator. What I like about it is that you can decide as you are making it the number of rays so you can make lots of thin rays or a few really thick ones and it’s all done automatically so there’s not copy and rotating involved. You can also adjust the spacing between the rays on the fly. The final thing I like is that the middle closes up nicely into a small circle.

The finished sunburst can be saved as a symbol so you can reuse it and, of course you can crop it to fill the artboard and color it to suit – I’ll show you how to do all this. Here’s how:

Step 1

Start with any sized document in Illustrator. Select the Ellipse tool, hold Shift as you draw a circle on the screen. Set the Fill to No Fill and the Stroke to black.

Step 2

Choose Windows > Stroke to display the Stroke palette. Click the Dashed Line checkbox.

Here you determine the width of the rays and the gaps so don’t leave here till you have it right. Adjust the Weight value so you can see the rays – ignore the fact that they don’t meet in the middle but you will want to set a large enough value for weight that they come close to meeting – if you don’t the inside points will be difficult to select later on. Weight only affects the length of the rays and not their number or spacing.

Set the Dash value to a value that gives you the number of rays you want. The larger the Dash value the smaller the number of rays.

This is a Dash of 36 pt:

This is a Dash of 8 pt:

Make sure that you have an even arrangement of rays around the circle and that two rays aren’t joined together or too close to each other – which can happen. If it does, try a slightly different value for the Dash – sometimes changing it by one or two points is all you need to even everything up.

If you want to adjust the spacing between the rays, enter a value for Gap – again, check that the rays look balanced before continuing. The larger the value of the Gap, the fewer the rays you will have.

Step 3

Now use the Selection tool (V) to select the Circle. Choose Object > Expand > Select Fill and Select the Stoke checkboxes and click Ok.

Now your vector shape is the rays themselves – not a stroked circle.

Step 4

Click outside the shape to deselect it. Select the Direct Selection tool (A) and drag over all the inside anchors leaving the outside ones unselected. This is a little fiddly and you’ll find that the smaller the inside circle the easier it is to do.

If you have lots of narrow rays you may need to enlarge the Illustrator window and zoom in close to be able to start your selection not on a path.

Step 5

Right click your selection and choose Average > Both and click Ok. This positions all the anchor points at the center of the shape closing up the rays perfectly.

Step 6

Now you can select the shape and resize it.

You can change the fill color and add it as a symbol to the Symbol library by dragging and dropping it into the Symbol pane.


Step 7

While you’re on a roll, create a few more sunbursts with less or more rays that you can then add to the Symbols collection and then save as a Symbol set you can use any time.

To save the Symbols, remove all but the symbols you just created from the Symbols pane by selecting them and drop them on the Delete Symbol icon.

Click the Symbol flyout menu and choose Save Symbol Library and save the symbols to a file on disk. In future you can select the same flyout menu on the Symbols pane and choose Open Symbol Library to import the symbols back into Illustrator so you can use them.

Step 8

To use a sunburst symbol, drag it from the Symbol pane into the Artboard.

To recolor it, right click it and choose Break Link to Symbol, then select the shape and alter the Fill color and add a stroke color if desired. If you plan to crop the sunburst to the Artboard size following step 10 below, don’t recolor the shape right now.

Step 9

To trim the sunburst to the shape and size of the Artboard, first size it to fill the Artboard.

Step 10

Drag a rectangle over the Artboard to the exact size of the Artboard.

Select both the rectangle and the sunburst under it using the Selection tool (V).

Display the Pathfinder palette by choosing Window > Pathfinder and select the Intersect option.

Step 11

The sunburst will be cropped to the Artboard shape.

Step 12

You can now set its fill color and stroke to suit.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Uncategorized

posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:13 pm32 Comments links to this post