SPRAYING, DUPLICATING & TRANSFORMING OBJECTS IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
As REPETITION is such an important fundamental of creating effective design, knowing some tools to help you repeat objects can be very, very, very handy ; )
KEY TOOLS:
THE SYMBOL SPRAYER
How does it work? The symbol sprayer works very like it sounds...it sprays and object(symbol) that you create in Illustrator similar to the way a spray can sprays paintWhere is it helpful? If you need to have several copies of a small object to create texture or a repeated effect it is much quicker than copy/pasting the object. What else can it do? If you click and hold on the symbol tool you will bring up several other symbol tools such as the SCRUNCHER AND THE SIZER. Each of these tools will do various things to the symbols you have sprayed. EXPERIMENT!
THE ROTATE AND DUPLICATE TOOLS
The Rotate tool allows you to rotate objects which is not super helpful for repetiton. HOWEVER, if you use the COPY option that is in the rotate options, you can get some fantastic circular repetition happening in your designs.
create any shape that you want to repeat. make sure it is on LAYER 2
Select both the circle and the shape you just created
Click on Rotate tool or the shortcut R
Hold down Alt and click the center of the circle
The Rotate Tool window will pop up. Click on PREVIEW. Click COPY. Select a degree to rotate your object that will divide into 360( Math!).
Click OK
Now to keep applying the rotation click Ctrl + D or CMD + D on the Mac
You can delete the layer with the inner circle in it if you like and just keep the rotated images
Happy rotating!
THE TRANSFORM TOOL
WATCH THIS HANDY VIDEO FOR LEARNING ABOUT TRANSFORMING OBJECTS IN ILLUSTRATOR
Click on any object in Illustrator
Go to Effect > Distort & Transform> Choose Transform
In the dialog box you have several options for how you want to transform your object. Try several of the sliders and angles
The most fun comes with deciding how many times you want illustrator to copy these transformations. Try different number of transformations and click OK.