From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

Draw with symmetry - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

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Draw with symmetry

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- [Instructor] In addition to mirroring existing artwork in Illustrator, MirrorMe can also create symmetry as you draw new objects. So anytime you want to create a symmetrical object, all you have to do is make half of it and let MirrorMe do the rest. Here in my document, I've placed a scan of a pencil sketch of a butterfly. And since I want the butterfly to have a symmetrical appearance, it's a perfect candidate for using MirrorMe to speed up the drawing process. If I look in the Layers panel, I can see that I put the butterfly on this sketch layer. And above that, I created a new empty layer called mirrored. I'll open the MirrorMe panel by choosing Window, MirrorMe, MirrorMe Panel. And with the mirrored layer selected in the Layers panel, I'll click on the button in the MirrorMe panel to apply symmetry axes to that layer. I'll drag out an axis and put it in the middle of the butterfly and click Apply to Layer. Note that I'll get mirroring from left to right because the left side is the active sector, as indicated by these small triangles here and here. If instead I wanted to draw on the right side and have that reflected on the left, I could just hold Option or Alt and click on the right side, and now that's the active sector, as you can see by the triangles. But instead, I want to draw on the left. So again, I'll hold Option or Alt and click on the left side. Now I can just take any drawing tool, paintbrush, blob brush, pen, or pencil, and start tracing the sketch of the butterfly. I'll take the paintbrush, and I'll just roughly sketch out the butterfly on the left side only. And you can see that as I draw, everything I do on the left side is mirrored on the right. Once I'm done with the rough outline, I can edit these paths, and my edits will be mirrored too. I'll switch to the PathScribe Tool, which is part of Astute Graphics VectorScribe, and zoom in on my butterfly and see where I might want to make some changes. So maybe I want to connect these wings, so I'll select that point on the left, drag it so it touches the body, and I can see it touch the body on the right side. I'll click on the head and attach that to the body too, and the antenna, and so on. All the edits are reflected on both sides. When I'm finished, I can zoom out and click Remove Axes and deselect. And now I just have regular Illustrator paths for the whole butterfly, and I can continue to work with these however I like. So here we saw how you can use just one symmetry axis in MirrorMe to help you quickly draw and edit a perfectly symmetrical object. It's a really nice way of working when you only have to create half of the paths and know that MirrorMe will create perfectly reflected copies on the other side of the axis.

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