Creating cool twirls and spirals with Illustrator

Cool twirls and spirals with Illustrator

Here is an amazingly cool Illustrator tutorial about creating twirls from Veerle Pieters a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. Twirls from Veerle, you might say. (Sorry!)

The Spiral Tool can be selected by holding your mouse down on the Line Segment Tool. Once you have created a spiral you like, copy (command/control -C) and paste in front (command/control -F).

Now select the Rotate Tool (R) and click once on the centre of the spiral exactly where the line ends. Now click anywhere else on the spiral and drag to turn the copy slightly. You will now have two spirals coming from the same point but, unfortunately, they will be crossing each other at some point.

To make sure they don’t cross, select the Scale Tool (S), and with one of the spirals selected, just like before click once on the centre of the spiral exactly where the two line ends meet. Now click somewhere on the outer side of the spiral and drag to size the spiral so it doesn’t cross the other anywhere. (This takes a bit of doing, you’ll find it much easier if the decay percentage of your spiral when the Spiral Tool is double clicked.

All that remains is for your two end points to be joined (command/control -J) and now your twirl can be filled in with a colour and used.

There is another way. Create a 10 pixel triangle and copy it. Go to you Brushes palette and select New Brush… and choose Art Brush, make sure the arrow points the same way as the triangle. Then, after you’ve drawn you’re spiral, give it a stroke value and apply your new brush. The triangle will be applied throughout the length of the twirl and this way you get a more perfect looking spiral.

In fact, this spiral can then be set as a new Art Brush and then you can experiment applying this spiral to lines to create differently distorted spirals! Happy twirling!

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This article was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Illustrator.
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24 Responses to “Creating cool twirls and spirals with Illustrator”

  1. matt mcarthur, on May 22nd, 2007 at 9:44 am, said:

    No matter how much I think I know, there always seems to be some technique to using the creative suite that has evaded my attention!

  2. Rob Cubbon, on May 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 pm, said:

    You’re right, matt! That’s why I love doing this – I’m always learning. There’s so much you can do with just circular, oval and triangular Art Brushes. All this with transparency that’s why there’s so much vector out there!

  3. matt mcarthur, on May 23rd, 2007 at 8:10 am, said:

    …not to mention gradient meshes.

  4. Rob Cubbon, on May 25th, 2007 at 12:26 pm, said:

    … I feel another post coming on …

  5. Acoustic tabs, on March 27th, 2008 at 4:17 pm, said:

    very interesting. I am not very good ad vectorial art, I rather spend my time with Photoshop but each time I see such things, I like to read the tutorial, maybe I learn something more.

  6. Ecommerce templates, on March 27th, 2008 at 4:18 pm, said:

    A good tutorial on how to work with vectorial art. I think I also have some actions and brushes that creates similar stuff in Photoshop for doing it fast.

  7. Rob Cubbon, on April 4th, 2008 at 11:37 pm, said:

    I’m not sure how you’d do a spiral in Photoshop but I’m sure it’s possible. Thanks for popping by, guys!

  8. Wordpress Hosting, on June 6th, 2008 at 2:38 am, said:

    simple yet elegant. Perfect!

  9. forex, on August 25th, 2008 at 5:31 pm, said:

    Nice article,thanks for sharing @rob

  10. Rob Cubbon, on September 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm, said:

    Thank you Wordpress Hosting, it’s nice to be described as perfect.

    @forex. No problem, you’re welcome.

  11. Text Effect, on December 9th, 2008 at 7:17 pm, said:

    niche title that make i click :)

  12. WebGrafikler, on December 24th, 2008 at 1:27 am, said:

    Thanks for sharing, nice article.

  13. WebHosting, on January 21st, 2009 at 12:28 pm, said:

    absolutely great! your doing great job sharing such wonderful and colorful things on this site. its worth reading your article.

  14. Rob Cubbon, on February 22nd, 2009 at 1:06 pm, said:

    Thank you, Text Effect, WebGrafikler and WebHosting for your encouraging comments.

  15. Quit smoking guide, on May 14th, 2009 at 8:43 am, said:

    Simple nice and might be great thing to look for.

  16. Peter O, on May 25th, 2009 at 8:45 am, said:

    My assignment right now is to create an artwork rich on swirls. I’m usually doing most of my work in Photoshop but for this I realized Illustrator would be the better option. Thanks to the triangle art brush feature which offers perfect swirls I can focus on composition.
    Thanks for sharing the tutorial!

  17. Pet Snakes, on May 27th, 2009 at 2:12 pm, said:

    Love your writing style and the design of your blog, its very original! Well done, look forward to reading more.

  18. Rob Cubbon, on June 6th, 2009 at 5:21 pm, said:

    Hello, Peter O, yes, making your own brush shapes is a real boon with Adobe Illustrator. I’m glad you guys liked the post and the blog.

  19. sajibe, on July 13th, 2009 at 7:41 pm, said:

    i need to make a spiral jigjag can any one instruct me how can i do it

  20. Rob Cubbon, on July 13th, 2009 at 10:38 pm, said:

    Hi sajibe, could you tell me what a spiral jigjag is?

  21. sajibe, on July 16th, 2009 at 7:39 pm, said:

    i need to show u a image to make u understand
    how can i upload it

  22. Rob Cubbon, on July 18th, 2009 at 1:57 pm, said:

    Hi, sajibe, go to my contact page and there you will find my email address you can send me an image that way. Please give me the most detail about what you are doing design-wise and I’ll see if I can help you.

  23. Multiwp, on January 15th, 2010 at 4:32 pm, said:

    Great blog well done. i like your blog style.

  24. Catalin, on March 10th, 2010 at 9:44 am, said:

    thank you, good tutorial

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