D2 tutorial 2 Hamm

In this tutorial I will be showing how to create a geometric flower-esque shape.

Start by opening a new document window, and make it any size that you would like. For the sake of this tutorial the document is 180 mm by 180mm

Next you will need to create the first ellipse, use the ellipse tool and place it in the center of your document, If you just click and do not drag a window will pop up with spaces for a height and width, for this example I have used 160mm x 40mm.

Next we will create the geometric pattern itself by copying the ellipse 8 times in a circular pattern. The easiest way to do this is to use the rotate tool, which is located just below the eraser tool.

Select the ellipse and then with the rotate tool selected alt+click on the center of the ellipse which should bring up another dialog box, enter 20 into the angle and click copy

It should look like this

now just press CTRL+D 7 more times until you get this.

We will now need to separate the main shape into smaller pieces by using pathfinder. Select all of the ellipses then go to Window>pathfinder and click Divide.

We will now need to get rid of all of the excess pieces, delete all of the inner pieces until you have just the main outer pieces which will look like this

now we will be placing gradients into the pieces themselves starting with the following 6

After you have filled those you will continue filling the next 6 places, this will continue for the next 8 steps.

When all is finished you will come up with something that looks like this