Points & Paths

To help celebrate St. Patrick’s day and the luck of the Irish is an Illustrator tutorial on how to create a clover, four-leafed or otherwise. The basics of this project involve the use of 3 circles and some Pathfinder magic to create the clovers.

1. Draw the first circle
Create a new document using pixels or points as the unit of measurement. Set the fill box in the toolbar to None and leave the stroke black.

Next, select the Ellipse tool and click in an empty area of your document where you want to create the first circle. Enter the values shown below and click OK.

2. Create the remaining circles
Using the same technique from Step 1, create two more circles. One using the values on the left and the other using the values on the right.

The reason for the varying sizes of circles is to ward off symmetry and perfection. I like to have a little human touch in my work so changing things up with sizes and shapes helps. Here’s what you should have so far.

3. Positioning
To make life easier for this step, enable Smart Guides (View > Smart Guides). Next, use the Selection tool and hover the right side of one of the smallest circle until you see the “anchor” label appear.

Now your cursor is over an anchor point so click on it and drag it into the larger circle and line up the selected anchor point with the right anchor point on the larger circle. See the image below for guidance.

For the other circle, click on the left side anchor point and line it up with the larger circle’s left anchor point. The end result is shown below.

4. Make it pointy
Click and hold your cursor over the Pen tool in the toolbar until the flyout menu appear and select the Convert Anchor Point tool.

Click on the bottom anchor point of the large circle to change it from a smooth point to a corner point.

To make this point pointier, use the Direct Selection tool to select just this bottom point and then click and drag down while holding down the Shift key to keep things aligned.

5. Dividing then merge
Select all of the shapes and click the Divide command on the Pathfinder panel.

Ungroup the results (Object > Ungroup) and click an empty area of your document to deselect the shapes. Use the Selection tool to select the top shape amongst the now divided shapes and hit the Delete key on your keyboard. You should have something similar to what’s shown here.

Now select what remains and click the Unite command on the Pathfinder panel to merge all of the individual shapes into one. At this point, if it were Valentine’s Day, you could stop and you’ve got yourself a heart to work into a design. Alas, this isn’t the end result we’re looking for.

6. Color and arrange
Select the heart/clover shape and swap the stroke and fill boxes in the toolbar by holding down the Shift key and then hitting the X key. Choose a shade of green for the clover. I used the pre-made Foliage color palette (Window > Swatch Libraries > Nature > Foliage) to select from. After coloring, make 2 copies of the clover. If you want a 4-leaf closer, just make an extra copy.

Use the bounding box on a selected shape to rotate it so you end up with something similar to what’s shown here.

7. Add a stem
A clover’s not a clover until it has a stem. Set the fill box in the toolbar to none and use the color from your clovers as your stroke color. On the Stroke panel, set the weight value to 10.

Use the Pen tool to draw a simple curved path that starts in the center of the clovers and ends a little ways down from them. Here’s what I’ve got.

Raise a pint of good cheer as you’ve just made a lucky clover. But, why stop there? With the various tools and features in Illustrator, you can customize your clover beyond the basics as seen in the feature image for this tutorial.

• Use different size circles in Steps 1 and 2 to vary the look of your clovers.
• For more randomness, resize the clovers in one grouping and also vary the colors of the leaves on each clover as well.