Creating Spirographs with Adobe Illustrator
Reviewed: Geetesh Bajaj
Date Created: November 23rd 2005
Last Updated: February 25th 2009
Here's how you can make a spirograph in Adobe Illustrator:
- Create a new document in Illustrator and draw any shape. For
this tutorial, I selected the Ellipse tool (keyboard shortcut
L) and drew a longish oval as you can see in Figure 1.
Figure 1
- Press the / key on your keyboard to make sure that the oval
has no fill attributes.
- Make sure your oval is selected, and them click on the Rotate
tool (or activate it with the keyboard shortcut R) from the tool
bar. Now click outside the oval area to set an anchor point as
you can see in Figure 2.
Figure 2
- Once this anchor point has been determined, select the oval
and Alt-drag it to create a duplicate. Since we want to create
a spirograph densely populated with lines, drag it very close
to the first oval, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
- Keep pressing Clrl+D to add more overlapping copies to complete
your spirograph. Figure 4 shows the completed spirograph.
- Save your spirograph to a file.