Snowflake Tutorial

It's Christmas time, and we thought you'd like to learn how to create a nice little snowflake in Illustrator. Believe me, it will come handy, especially if you'd like to create a greeting card for your beloved ones!

1. Basic Drawing:

For the basic drawing we will first turn the Rulers ON. You can do it by pressing Ctrl + R (OR View: Show Rulers). Drag two guides (one vertical and one horizontal) from these rulers as shown in the picture below and use the crossing point of these guides as the center point of the Snowflakes. Open the Tools panel from Window menu and select the Polygon Tool. Holding down the Alt/Option and Shift keys simultaneously, click on the crossing point of the two guides and drag to draw a Hexagon.

Open the Stroke window from Window menu (OR press Ctrl/Command + F10) and set the stroke weight to 5. You can choose any color for the stroke but keep the Fill none.

Use Rounded Rectangle Tool from the Tools pallet and click anywhere around the hexagon. A Rounded Rectangle window will open. Set Corner Radius to 5 and click OK. Delete the rounded rectangle that will appear on the canvas.

With this Rounded Rectangle tool let’s add a trunk to the hexagon. As you can see on this image.

Let’s add a few branches to this main trunk. Using the same Rounded Rectangle tool draw a small branch and holding down the Alt/Option key drag this branch to make few more copies and arrange these as on the picture below.

We'll need to remove the unwanted parts of these branches. For this I will first combine all the five branches in one shape. Open the Pathfinder window from Window menu (OR press Shift + Ctrl/Command + F9). Select all the 5 branches, hold down the Alt/Option key and click on 'Add to shape area' icon in the Pathfinder window.

Now draw a rectangle on the unwanted part of these branches.

Select all the 5 branches (which is a single shape now) and the rectangle and click on the ‘Subtract from shape area’ in the Pathfinder window. Then press the Expand button.

You should get the same result as below.

Let’s complete now the other side of the trunk. Select the branches, click on the reflect tool from the Tools pallet and click on the horizontal guide. A reflect window will open. In this window, select Horizontal (radio button) and press the Copy button.

If you did right, you should get this.

2. Pattern Creation:

You have now drawn a branch of the Snowflake. Let’s move on and complete the pattern. As we have to put these branches on each corner of the hexagon we need to have six copies of this set. The rotation angle would be 360 divided by 6 which is 60 degrees.

Select the complete trunk set, select the ‘Rotate’ tool in the Tools pallet, hold down the Alt/Option key and click on the intersection point of the two guides (horizontal and vertical). A Rotate window will appear. Put 60 in the Angle field and press the ‘Copy’ button. Repeat this process to get all the 6 trunk sets. Or press Ctrl/Command + D four times after making the first copy.

Here is how it will look like. You can edit the stroke of the hexagon from Stroke panel to suit the design. I have made it 8 here.

3. Convert the drawing into a Shape:

Cool! Let’s convert the drawing into a shape. Select the hexagon and from the Object menu select Expand. While the hexagon is still selected, hold down the Alt/Option key and in the Pathfinder window click Merge.

Select the complete drawing with Ctrl/Command + A, hold down the Alt/Option key and click Merge in the Pathfinder window. You will notice that the complete drawing is a single shape now.

4. Final touches:

The snowflake is nearly ready, we came to the last part of this tutorial, which is coloring. Add a decent background with a nice blue gradient in a separate layer below the snowflake layer.

Using Direct Selection Tool (the white arrow) select the snowflake and change its color to white.

While the snowflake is still selected go to Effect menu and select Outer Glow from Stylize sub menu.

In the Outer Glow window set the values as shown in the picture below and click OK.

This is how the final snowflake should look like - or something similar at least :)

Well done! Hope you'll have a nice time decorating christmas cards!