How to use Star Tool effectively in Illustrator

07.10.07

Filed Under: Art & Design, Tutorial

Star Tool secret tip... unveiled!

Adobe Illustrator’s Star Tool is a tool that not only can create lovely star shapes, it also can create the web badges which is popular right now in web design. To use Star Tool is very simple, just point your cursor to Illustrator’s Tools panel and select the Star Shape icon which grouped together with Rectangular Shape tool.

Then, you can start doing Star shapes by dragging across the canvas. Release the cursor to finalize the shape. It’s just that simple. But what if I want to have more controls to customize my Star shape? In this post I will teach you some essential tips so that you can use the Star Tool effectively.

Star Tool tips

The Star Tool consists of Radius 1, Radius 2 and Points, you can see this when clicking the canvas while using Star Tool and a windows appeared. Radius 1 is the outer point, Radius 2 is the inner point. Basically, the picture above sums up the essential controls to use while using the tool. But there is one thing I not very sure about the ALT, because I don’t know whether I got it right or not. Because when hitting ALT, the Radius 1 becomes inner point and Radius 2 becomes outer. However hitting ALT again does not change anything.

But the most useful tip is hitting the CTRL while dragging because, it can modify the Radius 1 and 2 easily. Plus, the minimum points you can decrease is down to 3. When writing until here, I found out that when hitting ALT with a 3 points Star shape, it becomes a triangle! I think it will make the Star shape in perfect angle, for example, 6 points star shape is made of 2 perfect triangles, 2 rectangles form a 8 points Star. But it won’t work for 4 points star shape, because it can’t be split to two!.

Haha, I learn something new while writing the post. Hope you learn something from this post too :D

Enjoy reading? Subscribe to RSS for future content!

Related Articles
7 Responses to “How to use Star Tool effectively in Illustrator”
    Leonard
  1. Leonard

    Hi, nice to meet you! I’ve supported you! Link Me, I’ll link you back :)

  2. jayhan
  3. jayhan

    Hi Leonard, thanks for the support! :D

    Linked you ;)

  4. Tim
  5. Tim

    Thanks for the tip!

  6. jayhan
  7. jayhan

    You are welcome Tim!

  8. jc
  9. jc

    Was just playing around with your tip and noticed something odd…but fun….when creating the shape using the ctrl pressed and bringing the points down to 3 with the arrows…..press and hold the alt + ctrl and move your mouse then let go of the alt key…..you should get a figure with lines on the inside rather than an empty fill….makes for some pretty interesting shapes..

    jc

  10. jayhan
  11. jayhan

    Really? i tried but can’t achieve the interesting shapes that you said.

  12. jc
  13. jc

    I’m using CS3 on a Vista system…..

Leave a Reply

Subscribe to comments feed RSS.