As promised here comes my very first tutorial. With Christmas fast approaching I’ve decided to make one for the season. The one that I’ll be teaching you is an in-depth beginners tutorial on how to create a snowman in which you can create some colorful postcards out of it just like what I’ve made below and also other cool stuff for the christmas. For some you may find this a little to detailed but I’ve created this one specifically for those who want to learn the basics of Illustrator. I’ll also mention some shortcuts I used while making this tutorial. This will be our day 1.
Software used: Adobe Illustrator CS2 – you may use other similar vector-based editing softwarebut the instructions written are made to work well on Adobe Illustrator CS2.
- Difficulty: Beginner – Intermediate
For the 2nd day tutorial: How to create a snowman : Coloring
For the 3rd day tutorial: How to create a snowman: Additional Elements
If you’re interested on how this is done then join me and follow through.
Ok let’s get on with the character, actually it’s pretty simple, here’s what we’ll need:
- Snow, Lots of it.
- 1 Magician’s Hat
- 2 Twigs (any type of tree would do as long as it’s brown)
- 1 carrot (just take the orange part)
- 1 Scarf (choose a clean one)
- and coals, coals, coals…ooops almost forgot, coals
Put them all together and voila!!…our snowman.
Okay, okay…now let’s get serious. hehe
Open up Illustrator and let’s do some character designing. Set the size of the art board to 500 width and 500 height.
The first step in the creation of snowman is to start with the line-art.
Let’s start with the major shapes, create two circles and set the stroke weight to 3 pt.
Once you’re finished with the basic shapes, let’s get to smaller parts such as the nose, eyes, and so on…using the pencil tool draw the eyes and fill it with a black color, after that, create the nose using the pen tool, start from the tip followed by the roots then closed it to the tips again be sure to make stroke a little thinner than the two balls of snow let’s make it 2 pt.
Now we have the eye and the nose, let’s continue with the mouth
For the mouth, we have to use some circle filled with a black color, Start with the upper end.
While clicking the black dot and holding the alt key, you can drag it to duplicate the object, notice the icon have changed as you drag it. This will make your work smoother and faster rather than using the copy + paste method.
After you’ve finished the mouth, do the same thing for the buttons on the chest part of our snowman.
Now we move and add another element, which are the arms, there maybe some other methods on doing this but this is how I do it. From the picture below I drew some simple lines, one big line with 2 lines sprouting out of it. Be careful not to cross the long line for you might encounter some problems.
Click Object > Expand in order for us to add points and be able to modify it later.
The strokes are now converted to points, but still there are some lines intersection so let’s optimize this object a bit to reduce the number of points we need to edit.
Click on Window > Pathfinder or you can press Ctrl + Shift + F9.
As you can see the lines are a bit messy but you can edit it using the Direct Selection Tool or you can simply press A for the keyboard shortcut. Use delete key for deleting unnecessary parts.
After cleaning, Use Swap fill and stroke or Shift + x for the keyboard shortcut.
Change the stroke to Align Stroke to Outside to retain the shape of the twigs and leaving it untouched by the outline. Edit the points using the Direct Selection Tool and tweak at your own fancy.
Repeat the same process until you have two twigs. With some points modification and tweaking, we will now have something like this.
For the next part, the scarf…(snowman gets some chillin’ moment sometimes). Use thepen tool and set the weight to 15 px, change the stroke cap to Round Cap
With the object still selected, go to Effect > Warp > Arc Lower and set the bend percentage to 85%.
After doing so, do Click Object > Expand Appearance. Remember when using this option, that once you’ve expanded an object, you have no way to return to its complex appearance. Next is click Object > Expand, you are making the expanded object to have points to manipulate the objects appearance. Use the Pathfinder (Ctrl + Shift + F9) to merge the unwanted points then clean up the object using the Direct Selection Tool. Swap the fill and change the stroke weight to2 pt and Set the Stroke to Outside Now you will have something like this. Whew!
Make the lower part of the scarf using the process mentioned above except the use of the Warpfilter, now you’ll have something like this.
Let’s add some details under the scarf. Draw some ends using the pencil tool and set its stroke weight to 1 pt.
Again Object > Expand then Merge, Swap fill and stroke.
and the Set Outside Stroke set stroke weight to 0.5 pt and you’ll have something similar to this one.
We now have this.
Let’s continue with the hat. To create the hat let’s create a circle as shown below, copyand paste to back create another object which we will need for the hat’s body:
Click Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel and follow the settings below, just change the settings of the rotation along the x-axis to 25 degrees and change the two axis rotation to 0 degrees.
You’ll get something like this a somewhat cylindrical object, which is perfect for our hat.
Copy (Ctrl + C) the object and Paste in Back (Ctrl + B) so that the object will be in the same place but a one depth lower than the original object. Move it a little lower by pressing Shift + Arrow Key Down twice and changed it color to red so that we can get something like this.
Again Draw a bigger circle similar to the perspective of the first circle and place it at the bottom so that we can have something like this.
Drag across and Group (Ctrl + G)it into single object.
Position the hat slightly inclined above the head so that it will not look that stiff and add some feeling of gravity.
And as a result we now have our snowman outline ready to be colored.
Next day we will get to color our snowman and put in some shadows and highlights to add more depth to the drawing.
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