I’m having so much fun making snowflakes in Adobe Illustrator, I thought I’d create a quick tutorial to show how I do it!

1. Create a new document in Illustrator. If you want your snowflakes to be white, it’s helpful to set a background color so you can see what you’re doing. I usually drag a quick rectangle shape to fit the document, set the fill to my color of choice, and lock it by selecting the rectangle and going to Object -> Lock -> Selection.

2. Draw the first “leg” of your snowflake by creating an elongated shape or pattern of some kind.  I do this mostly using the line and circle tools, but you could experiment with any shape. This is the shape that will be repeated in a circle to make the snowflake.

3. Once you’re satisfied with your shape, click on the Rotate tool.  Hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click on the bottom center of your snowflake’s first leg. This will bring up the Rotate dialog.

4. The angle of rotation should be set to a number that, when repeated, adds up to 360 degrees.  I usually go with 30, 40, or 60. The lower the number, the more legs your snowflake will have.

5. Once you’ve set the degrees to rotate, hit the Copy button. You’ll see one repetition of your initial pattern appear… if you don’t like what you see, hit Ctrl+Z to undo and repeat steps 3 and 4 to try a different angle. In this case, I initially set it to 40 degrees but decided 60 would look better.

6. To finish off your snowflake, simply hit Ctrl+D to repeat the pattern until you complete a full circle.  Voila, you have a snowflake!

7. You can play around with different angles and shapes to get the look you want. For smaller or more detailed snowflakes, you’ll probably want thinner lines.  For larger snowflakes, thicker lines look best. It helps if you group your final snowflake (select all the pieces, right-click or Ctrl-click, and hit Group) so you don’t lose bits and pieces as you create more and move them around the page.

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look the very same.

Check out Calobee Doodles’ new design! It’s appropriately titled “Little Boxes” in honor of the many hours of Weeds I watched while I worked on it. It’s not a particularly complicated site, but I spent several evenings revisiting, tweaking, revisiting because I’m picky. I think I’m satisfied for now.

I had so much fun making all the teeny tiny doodles and icons for this site that I decided to challenge myself to make a whole page of them. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the results yet, but I’m thinking a print of some kind.

This evening marks the start of a five-day weekend–hurrah! I plan to spend plenty of time with the family, doodle a bit, and eat an unhealthy amount of stuffing.