Introduction
In this lesson, the class was introduced to the bevel, extrude and revolve functions in Adobe Illustrator.
Using the revolve function.
Here you can see I have used the revolve function to create a 3D style coffee cup in Illustrator. I did this by following my tutor’s demonstration..
The first thing I did was create a basic shape using the pen tool of the cross section of a coffee cup.
I then removed the fill and added a stroke so that I could round off the edges of the cup. I used the direct selection tool to edit each node’s Bezier handles and create curves to make my cup look more realistic.
Next, I selected the two nodes on the bottom of the cup and cut them with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + X. I pasted the bottom part of the shape onto a new layer and now my cup and lid were two separate shapes. This meant that I could colour them separately.
I removed the stroke from the lid shape and added a grey colour fill.
After that, I went to the Effect menu at the top of the screen, selected the 3D option from the drop down menu and selected Revolve. That brought up this menu shown below. From here, I was able to change the angle that my lid was viewed from by moving the cube around in the menu – or by changing the presets above the cube. Below that, there is a preview window with options to change where the light source for the shading was in relation to the object. You can change the lighting on the object by moving the nodes around on the ball, and adding and deleting them. you can also use the options on the side of the ball preview window to change things like the lighting’s intensity or colour. I experimented and found some settings I was happy with, and clicked OK.
Now I had my coffee cup lid.
To make the main body of the cup, I repeated the same process of removing the stroke and adding the colour that I wanted – which was brown.
I then selected the Revolve function once more from the Effect menu, and moved the lighting nodes to where I wanted them in the preview window. I now had a cup and a lid.
I moved the cup layer underneath the lid layer so that the lid was on top of the cup, and re-seized some elements to make the cup look the way I wanted. Now, I had finished the illustration.
I used the Extrude & bevel tool as well as the Revolve tool to make an illustration of a mouse eating some cheese.
