Working with an object's stroke

For the next logo, we’ll explore a few new techniques for working with shapes in Illustrator. The new logo will consist of three ovals on top of each other. Rather than manually draw three separate ovals, we’ll make one oval, then copy and rotate the oval twice. We'll also work with changing the appearance of an object's stroke.

The finished graphic will look similar to the following:

Before we get started, let's make sure nothing is selected so we don't accidentally edit another graphic. We'll also reset the fill and stroke colors to the defaults.

Now, we'll use the Ellipse tool to start making this logo. After we draw the oval with the Ellipse tool, if we look at the Control panel, we'll see several options for modifying the oval we drew. We'll be focusing on the options that change the oval's stroke:

We have the ability to change the stroke color and width, or weight, of the stroke. We can also modify the stroke's appearance with the Variable Width Profile and Brush Definition drop-down menus.

Let's start off by drawing the oval and removing the fill color, then we'll adjust the weight and width profile of the oval's stroke to give it a unique look. Specifically, we’ll choose a width profile for the oval’s stroke that makes the stroke wider in some places and thinner in others.

We’ll be drawing the oval on the Atom Logo artboard, so let’s make sure that’s the selected artboard before continuing.

Now the oval has added dimension due to the varying width of the stroke, making it look like a calligraphy pen was used to draw the shape.

Rotating objects

We have one oval on our artboard — next, we’ll make two copies of that oval. The copies will need to be rotated in order to get the result we want. If we were to do a simple copy and paste, Illustrator would add copies of our existing oval onto the center of the artboard, and we’d have to manually rotate the copied ovals to get the result we're looking for. However, there’s a tool that allows us to both rotate and copy the oval at the same time, and gives us more precise control over the degree of rotation: the Rotate tool. Specifically, we'll use the Rotate dialog box to accomplish this. Double-clicking on the Rotate tool in the Tools panel will bring up the Rotate dialog box:

From here, we can specify the rotation angle of an object, as well as indicate if we want to copy the rotated shape instead of just rotating the original shape.

Let's create two copies of our oval — the first copy will be rotated 60 degrees from the original oval, and the second copy will be rotated 60 degrees from the first copy.

At this point, the contents of the Atom Logo artboard should look similar to the following image:

Challenge exercise: Adding more detail to the logo

In many logos representing atoms, small circles are included to represent the electrons that would be inside of an atom. In this section, you'll add those yourself, then group the shapes together and save the file.

1. Use the Ellipse and Selection tools to create the small circles on and inside the ovals, using the same techniques used to create the red star in the following section.
2. Group the shapes together.
3. Save the file.

The finished image will look like the following:

For a walkthrough of one solution for how to complete the challenge exercise, view the instructions contained in the following accordion.

We'll now create a third logo — this one will be a leaf.