Kendra Schaefer

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to make fantastic 3D arrows that work great with logos, presentations, and websites. This tutorial is a bit long, and it’s best to have some previous Illustrator experience, but I think a beginner won’t have too much trouble following along.

This tutorial was created in Adobe Illustrator CS3.

Step 1: Draw your basic arrow shape

Open up a new Illustrator web document and select your line segment tool.

With your line segment tool selected, draw a line. This line will be the “handle” of your arrow.

TIP: If you hold the shift key while you’re creating your line, the line will be perfectly straight. Only release the shift key after you have released the left mouse button.

Now, let’s make the line thicker. Select your line (to select a whole object, click the solid black arrow in the tools palette, then click on the object. You should see a blue box form around the line).

In the Stroke drop-down box at the top of your screen, change the stroke width to 40.

Let’s give the line an arrowhead. There are a few ways you can go about this. One is to draw a triangle and “attach” it to your line, but we’re going to cheat and use the easier method.

Make sure your line is selected, and go to Effect > Stylize > Add Arrowheads

From the panel that appears, you can choose whether you want arrowheads at both ends or at one end, and what shape you’d like them to be. There are 27 default choices. I’m using number 4 of 27, with one arrowhead.

TIP: Check the “preview” box in the Add Arrowheads panel to see a live preview of what your arrowheads will look like.

Now, let’s change the color of the arrow. You can choose any color. Interestingly, this isn’t the color the arrow is actually going to be when we’re done, so it doesn’t matter what you pick, but it’s helpful to make the arrow a bright color so that when we convert it to 3D, we can see the 3D shadows easily. If we leave it black, it’ll be hard to work with it later.

To change the arrow’s color, make sure the arrow is selected, and then double-click the stroke color box at the bottom of your tools menu. I’m choosing red.

Step 2: Convert the Arrow to 3D

With your arrow selected, go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. Set the degrees at: 48, -26 and 8. If you feel comfortable enough to do so, you can go ahead and customize the settings here.

Step 3: Break the arrow into its component parts

With the arrow selected, go to Object > Expand Appearance

You’ve now broken the arrow into pieces that you can color one by one. Now we need to ungroup those pieces so we can work with them individually. With the arrow selected, right click. In the menu that appears, select “ungroup”.

Because multiple groups are formed when you expand the appearance of your arrow, you’ll probably need to “ungroup” multiple times. Keep selecting, right clicking and “ungrouping” the arrow until only one side of the arrow is highlighted when you select it. I had to do this three times before I got the desired result.

Step 4: Color the arrow

Now the fun part. Open up your Swatches panel on the left. In the Swatches menu, under “Gradients”, choose a gradient palette to work with. I like the Gradients > Brights palette, so I’m going to work with that one.

TIP: If you can’t see your “Swatches” palette, go to the Window menu and make sure the checkbox next to “Swatches” is selected.

Select a single “piece”, or side, of your arrow. With that piece selected, click on one of the gradients in your palette. The color of that one piece will change to the gradient you selected.

Then, with that piece still selected, click on the gradient tool in your tools palette. Drag a line across the selected arrow piece in the *direction* you want your color gradient to flow. I like to make sure the darker gradient colors appear near crevices and corners, which gives the appearance of realistic light.

Continue doing this for each piece of the arrow. Click on a piece, and with that piece selected, click on a gradient color. Then select your gradient tool, drag a line across the piece in the direction you want your colors to flow.

TIP: You can select multiple pieces at the same time by holding the shift key while you click each piece. You can have the same gradient flow across multiple surfaces this way.

Step 5: Add Effects

Looks nice as-is, and if you’re happy with the results, you can just save it and be done! But I think I’d like to add a little bit of transparency so that my arrow appears to be made of clear glass or plastic.

Select the top piece of the arrow handle.

Now, go to your transparency palette, and change the opacity of that piece to 77

Do the same for the piece of the handle facing you. Select it, then change the opacity to 73.

And there we go, a transparent glass arrow. This same technique of converting an object to 3D, breaking it apart, ungrouping it and changing the colors of each piece can be used on any object, including letters and lettering. It’s easier to work with a 3D object that doesn’t have many curves in it, as when you break curves apart, they tend to get messy during the conversion, and become difficult to work with, so stick with straight lines and hard edges until you’re comfortable with this.

If you’re familiar with Illustrator already, you can add additional effects like sparkles, gloss, reflections and shadows for even better results.