Snowflake Tutorial

Looks like Rochester’s getting its first (sticking) snow of the season today, so I’ll be sharing a fun Illustrator tutorial on creating your own beautiful, unique snowflakes. 

The method shown is for CS6/CC, it might work the same in earlier versions, or perhaps there are a few adjustments. If you’re using an earlier version of illustrator, please comment or send me a note about any adjustments to make for your version so that I can share it here, too!

If you’ve never used Adobe Illustrator before, then I would suggest you cover some of the basics before attempting this tutorial. There are a number of classes available at Skillshare at a variety of levels.

If you'd like to see more examples of these kinds of snowflakes, I've got a set of 52 available as an .OTF dingbat font file here. 

To get started, open up Illustrator, create a new document. The one I'm showing here has six 4"x4" artboards, spaced out by 2 inches. 

Using the brush tool, draw a stroke. I'm using a calligraphy style brush here which gives some nice variations of thickness along the stroke, but this will work just as well with a basic brush. I'd suggest not using a brush that is very complicated or very large or wide though. For this first stroke, try to make it something not overly simple, but also not ridiculously complex. This should be helpful in letting you see how this works. Once you've gone through the entire process and gotten a hang of things, please, try every degree of complexity! I've done a curly line here that looks something like a cursive uppercase E. Also, don't fuss with your stroke after you've drawn it at this point— leave the weight, brush selection, color, and so on as they are!

After you've drawn your first stroke, switch to your selection tool, and select the stroke you've just drawn.

With your stroke selected, click on the top Effect menu, then to Distort & Transform, then click Transform.

In the Transform Effect dialog box that pops up, there are many options. At this step, only two should be changed. Since our snowflake will be six-sided, enter the number 5 into the Copies box (original + 5 = 6 total), and put 60° as the angle in the Rotate box (360° / 6 sides = 60° per rotation.)
What we're telling the Transform Effect to do with these selections is to make 5 copies in addition to our original stroke, and place them rotated 60° from the previous. The rotation point will be the center, which is the default selection (I'll have more about the rotation point at the end of this post!)

Clicking OK should have taken your stroke and repeated and rotated it, and it should look something like this. If it looks totally different, make sure you had selected only the one stroke and nothing else. However, these will all vary in appearance depending on the stroke you've drawn!

With your same original stroke still selected (or, select it again as per step 2. if you've unselected it) again click on the top Effect menu, then to Distort & Transform, then click Transform.
This time, leave the angle at 0°, check the box next to Reflect X  in the Options section, and enter 1 as the number of copies.
This will add a second transformation to your stroke to make one copy, reflected across the X-axis after the first transformation, resulting in a snowflake that has 6 arms that are symmetrical on both sides.

Clicking OK will then reveal your first snowflake! Not too bad, right? It actually gets easier going forward though, so continue with another.

Draw a new stroke with the same brush tool again. Don't adjust any of the options, just draw. I've shown my second stroke in the next artboard over to keep it separate from my first and easier to see.

Upon finishing your brush stroke and releasing your click, the stroke will then automatically go through the two transformations that you applied to the initial stroke; first rotating 5 copies, and then reflecting one more copy, though it happens quite quickly. If this doesn't happen, and you just have a lonely stroke by itself, perhaps you'd modified your first stroke before applying the transformations, which would have caused the transformations to unlink themselves from the same brush stroke.

Keep going! Try a few more, and see what snowflakes result from different lines. Curves, corners, zig-zag, long horizontals, tall verticals, and any combinations you can think of.

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When you've made a batch of flakes, it's neat to take a look back at your original strokes and be able to compare what sort of snowflakes were created from them. Command+Y will put you into outline mode where you will view the very basic stroke, without the transformation effects applied to it. To get out of outline mode, just use command+Y again. 

But wait, there's more!

Back up in step 4 I mentioned to not worry about changing the rotation point. Well, if you're ready to now, here's a bit about that.

If you're sitting in your desk chair, great. If you're not, pretend you are for a minute.  Push back from your desk, and ready, set, spin yourself around in your chair! That right there is an example of having your rotation point in the center, as we had for the above snowflakes.

But that's certainly not the only way to spin. If you're lucky enough to have a fire pole, pole-dancing pole, or smooth post like one that a basketball hoop might be mounted on nearby, approach said pole, reach with one hand to grab the pole, and proceed to rotate yourself around the pole, keeping that hand on the pole (imaginary versions still work here too). Now  your rotation point is that one hand. This is similar to a corner rotation point.

If you're still conveniently near the same pole, try this again but using both of your hands, so that you are facing in at the pole, and spin again. This is similar to a side rotation point. 

If you're incredibly good at visualizing things in your mind, imagine that you were somehow floating above yourself as you were spinning in each of these 3 different ways, and were able to see the difference in shape that was made from your body as it travelled around these points. The Transform Effect palette's options will let you change which side or part of your snowflake's stroke its rotation is based around. 

Here I'm starting with one snowflake which was created through the steps above. I've also shown a copy of the stroke to the left of the flake.

I've made 8 more copies of this snowflake (and it's artboard), arranged in a 3x3 grid. This is in outline mode, but all of these artboards include the full snowflake.

I've opened up the Appearance palette, and you should too, if you haven't already. It can be found under Window then Appearance.

If you've got any of your strokes/paths or objects selected, it'll say so right underneath the word Appearance. I didn't when I took the screenshot, so it says No Selection but it shows me what the appearance of what I'd previously had selected was. The order of things listed here from top to bottom are also chronological with oldest at the top and newest at the bottom, so when there are two mentions of Transform (because we used two distinct instances of the Transform Effect) the first (or top) one is the one we did first, the one that made 5 copies, and rotated our stroke 60°. Double click on the top instance of transform in the Appearance palette (when you've got one of your strokes selected) and that occurrence of the Transform Effect will pop up.

To the left of where the number of copies is listed, there is a similar 3x3 grid of boxes. The center one should be selected currently, but now it's time to try the others. There are 4 corner points (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right) and 4 side points (top, right, bottom, left).

I've gone through my 9 same flakes and changed the rotation point for the first occurring Transform Effect only, correlating their position in my 3x3 grid to which point their rotation is based around. For example, the bottom left snowflake is rotated around its bottom left point, and the top snowflake is rotated around its top point. The center flake remains as it was.

The different rotation points have tendencies of their own. For example, the center point tends to make the most dense final flake as it's got the most overlap when rotated (like when you spun in your chair). The corner points tend to be the most open looking, as they have the least amount of overlap (like when you spun around the pole with one hand). The side points are somewhere between the two. Of course, depending on what your original stroke looks like, there will be plenty of variation.

And so on 

From here, there's lots of variation to explore: different brush strokes, colors, weights, brushes, angles, numbers of copies and more. I'd love to see what you've created from going through this tutorial, please leave comments or tag me on twitter to show what you made! And thanks to Jess for asking how I'd made the Snow Ribbons dingbat font, which sparked this entire post.