3 Ways to Create a Heart Shape in Adobe Illustrator

Hello and welcome to another Every Tuesday tutorial. In this week's tutorial to celebrate Valentine's Day, which is just a couple days away, I wanted to share three different ways that you can create hearts using Adobe Illustrator. So these are just heart shapes, and you can see there's a few different kinds right here, so I'm going to walk you through all of them. These first two are hand drawn using the mouse. This one is symmetrical, so it's the same on both sides. This one is not symmetrical. And then we have a pill-shaped one, and then kind of a more plump one right here, a wider one. So I'm going to walk you through all three different types and how I created them. Depending on whatever you're using them for, you may want a different look. So for the very first one, the hand drawn one, we're using the pencil tool. This one's really good if you're a beginner with Adobe Illustrator. So all you want to do in order to access your pencil tool is just hit the letter N on your keyboard, and then you can just freehand it using your pencil tool. And it's really that easy. And if you don't like how it's looking, you can redraw sections. You just want to make sure that you begin along the same path. Otherwise, you'll draw a brand new path. So I'm just going to get in really close to that path and make sure I start on the path and that I finish on the path right here. And you can see how it adjusts just like that. So I can edit it and adjust it like that. And if I want to smooth some areas with it still selected, all I have to do is come over here to my toolbox, just hold down your mouse, and you can choose the smooth tool. And then you're just going to draw it along the path, and that'll smooth out and remove some of those points just to give you a smoother path in general. You can also adjust any points that you have using your direct select tool, which is keyboard shortcut A. I will link a video in this video's description of how to use the direct select tool for adjusting points. That'll be really helpful if this is something that you're interested in and you want to learn more about. It can be really, really helpful. So this can just go in and adjust points that you already have to kind of perfect your shape. You can also use the delete anchor point tool, which is part of your pen tool set over here. So if you come over to your pen tool, hold down, you can see we've got the delete anchor point tool right there. So if you have any extraneous points that you may not need, you can delete them and then you can use your direct select tool to adjust them. So that part's a little more advanced, but if you're a using the pencil tool and smooth it out using the smooth tool and you'll be totally fine. So that is the hand-drawn version of a heart. Let me just add some color to this so we can see it really well. And if you'd like it symmetrical, like if I like the left side of this, but I don't like the right side of it, or I'm just looking for a more symmetrical heart in general that's hand-drawn, then I'm going to show you how to do that. So I'm going to make a copy of this. So just hold alt on your keyboard, click and drag. And if you want to keep it straight, just hold shift and that'll keep it straight. So now we want to cut off this part and we want to replicate this part and kind of reflect it. So it's the same on both sides. So I'm going to hit M on my keyboard for my rectangle tool and I'm going to find the center point right there and drag this down. And now I can select both the heart and the rectangle just by rubber band selecting, which basically means just click and drag out a rectangle and both of these will be selected then. And then you're going to come over to your pathfinder palette, which is over here. If you don't see it, you can get to it by going window, pathfinder, and you just want to hit this icon right here for divide. And then you want to ungroup because even though this divided everything, they're still grouped together. So command shift G or control shift G on a PC and that will ungroup. And now I can delete the extra pieces that I don't need anymore. And obviously this is looking a little funky right here. So I can actually just delete this point. So I'm going to hit hyphen on my keyboard for my delete anchor point tool just to make that transition a little bit smoother. And I can adjust that too, since it wasn't perfectly centered from top to bottom before. All right. And now I need a copy of this. So I'm going to hold alt click and drag while I'm dragging. I'm going to hold shift to keep it straight and then you can right click transform reflect and you want to reflect it over your vertical axis. So hit okay. And then you're just going to bring it together. I'm holding shift as I'm bringing it together to keep it nice and straight. And once it's connected, I can select both of these and then just hit the unite icon right here in my pathfinder palette. And now it's one shape. So now I'm symmetrical on both sides. So if I want to, I actually think I want to squish this up a little bit. There we go. So that is how to make a symmetrical free-handed heart and an asymmetrical free-handed heart. So that is method number one. I'm going to color this a different color so we can see them all. All right. So now we're going into kind of this pill shaped version of a heart. So in order to create that one, you're just going to grab your rectangle tool. So hit M on your keyboard and you're just going to draw out a skinny rectangle. And if you're in illustrator, creative cloud, then you have these live corners, which are super helpful. So you can bring those in. So you have what looks like a pill shape right here. And if you're not on illustrator, creative cloud, you can do that same thing with your rectangle by selecting it and then going effect stylized round corners, and you can get the same kind of outcome. So with illustrator, creative cloud, it's just a lot easier because you have these live corners that you can bring in. So you can round your corners automatically. That's one feature that I really, really love that illustrator introduced. Okay. So once you have your pill shape right here, you're going to rotate it 45 degrees. So right click, transform, rotate, choose 45 degrees right here, hit okay. And now we want to make a copy of this. So hold alt, click, drag while you're dragging, hold shift. And now we want to reflect it in the same way that we did for this free handed symmetrical heart. So right click, transform, reflect, and make sure vertical is selected right here and hit okay. And now what you want to do is start moving it towards the other one. And while you're moving it, hold shift to keep it straight. And you kind of want to slide it until you see a heart appearing where the two overlaps. So this shape right here. And that actually looks pretty good. And now we're going to select both of these. And then we're going to come over to the Pathfinder palette and hit the divide icon one more time. And then ungroup everything because once again, it stays grouped until you ungroup it. So command shift G or control shift G on a PC to ungroup. And now we're just going to remove those extra pieces. And now we can select what remains and hit the unite icon over here in the Pathfinder palette. And now we have a heart. So that is a pill shaped heart. Let me recolor it right here. So we've got a shade of red. All right, so this is a different kind of shape than our free handed ones, obviously. And then this one over here, this more plump or wider heart is probably the most complex out of these three different types. So the first thing you want to do to get this type of heart is to draw out three different circles. So we're going to come over here and grab our ellipse tool. And you're going to hold shift and drag out a circle. It can be any size that you want. And once you have your circle, we're going to replicate it. So hold alt, click and drag. And I'm going to hold shift to keep it straight and align it so it kind of matches up. You can kind of see those smart guides appearing. If you don't have your smart guides on, I definitely recommend turning them on for this because it'll be really helpful. You can turn on your smart guides by going view smart guides, and then they'll be turned on. And now I'm going to create another circle. So they're kind of forming a triangle right here. So I'm going to hold alt, click and drag and have this one kind of align right in the middle there. And that's looking exactly the way I need it to. So now we're going to go into outline mode. So you can get to outline mode by going command Y or control Y on a PC. And now I can see the center points of each of these circles. So I'm going to grab my pen tool. So I'm going to hit P on my keyboard for my pen tool. And I'm just going to click on each center point. So I'm going to draw a triangle right here that connects them all and close it up right there. And that's all I need to do. Now I can exit outline mode, command Y or control Y on a PC, and I can delete this bottom circle. I don't need that anymore. And now it's kind of looking like a bird face or something with a beak and two eyes. We actually want to take this triangle and make it a little bit larger and we want to scale it up uniformly. So I'm going to grab this anchor point that's right on the tip of this triangle right here. And I'm going to hold shift and click and drag it out. So it's a little bit bigger right here. Okay. So once I have that, now I want to group all of these together. I want to merge them all together. So I'm going to select all of them, come back over to my pathfinder and hit my unite icon. So now they've become one shape and I need to delete these points because they're unneeded. So I'm going to hit the hyphen key on my keyboard and I'm going to delete these points. So now I'm getting more of a heart shape. So that's beginning to look like a heart right here. So now this part is the only part that's kind of weird because otherwise it would look like a perfect heart. So in order to fix that, what we want to do is grab this point first. So hit A on your keyboard for your direct select tool, click on the anchor point. And now we just want to drag this handle downward and that will force this curve of this path to be more natural. So I'm going to grab this handle, hold shift, and that will keep everything nice and straight as I drag it down. And that looks really good, just like that. But now I need to drag the handle of this point down and I need to make it match exactly where this one hits. So I'm going to drag a guideline so I can see exactly where it needs to hit. So you want to make sure your rulers are turned on. If you don't have your rulers on right now, hit command R or control R on a PC and that will turn your rulers on and off. And all you want to do is click on the top ruler and drag a guideline down. I'm going to drag it until I hit the circle or that end of my handle right there. And now I can see exactly where this needs to hit. So now I can select this point with my direct select tool and I can grab this handle and hold shift and drag this down until it hits that guideline. And now I know both sides are exactly symmetrical without having to slice it in half and reflect it. I already know that everything's perfect. And that's it. And now we have our heart. If you want to turn off that guideline, just hit command semicolon or control semicolon on a PC and that will get rid of it. Let me color this a different red right here so we've got all of our shades. And there are our different hearts using three different methods. So we have our free-handed ones, an asymmetrical and a symmetrical one, we have our pill-shaped one, and then we have our wider plumper heart right there. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please subscribe and don't forget to head on over to my site every-tuesday.com for even more design tutorials and freebies. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you next time.