Kendra Schaefer

With Christmas right around the corner, we Illustrator users are sure to get a pile of requests for holiday artwork. This tutorial was inspired by a set of candy cane icons I recently made for an upcoming project.

I created this lesson for intermediate Illustrator users. You will need to know your basic tool sets and how to use Illustrator’s color and gradient functions in order to complete this tutorial. I work with Adobe Illustrator CS3, but you should be able to follow along with any of the CS-series Illustrator versions.

Step 1: Create a custom brush

The tool set for this step is:

First things first, let’s set up our artboard to make life a little easier on ourselves. Go to the View menu, and make sure that Show Grid is turned on. Then, also in the View menu, enable Snap to Grid.

Then select your rounded rectangle tool. I like to set my corner radius to about 8px. Draw a rounded rectangle like the one shown below. You can see that my rectangle is 3 grid columns wide, and 6 grid rows tall – it doesn’t matter how large you make yours, but keep to generally similar proportions.

Copy the rectangle multiple times, until you have a row like the one below. It’s very important that the rectangles are aligned properly and spaced at exactly the same distance apart. Grid snapping should make aligning them easy.

Turn off Snap to Grid in your View menu.

Select all the rectangles in the row by dragging a box around all of them with your selection tool, or by clicking each one while holding down the Shift key. Then, select your Shear tool, and skew the rectangles so that they’re slightly tilted.

Again, select all of the (now tilted) shapes in the row, and drag the whole row into your brush panel. In the “New Brush” selection window that appears, choose Art Brush, then click “OK”. Then, in the next menu, be sure to choose tints in the Colorization section. If you don’t select “tints”, you won’t be able to change the colors of this stroke later on.

You should now see a new brush pop up in the panel. Everything else should be fine as-is.

You can now delete the row, and everything else, on your art board – your brush is saved in your brush panel. Now would be a good time to save your document, if you haven’t already.

Step 2: Create your shapes

The tool set for this step is:

Okay, with our brush done, we can move on to making our basic candy cane shape. In this step, I’m going to be using the pen tool, but I know that not everyone knows how to use it well. If you’re more familiar with other tools (like shapes + Pathfinder, or the brush tools), it’s fine to use those instead. The goal is just to get a candy-cane shape that is created with a stroke, and no fill.

If you’d like to give the pen tool a go, or you already know how to use it, go ahead and follow the diagram below to draw your candy cane shape.

When you’ve finished drawing, select and copy your candy-cane shape. You should now have two of them, so your artboard should look like mine:

Step 3: Color, size and position

Apply the new custom brush you made to one of your candy cane shapes by selecting one of your shapes, then clicking the brush in the layers palette. Change the stroke width until you’re satisfied that the shapes look vaguely candy-cane-stripey. After that, change the stroke color to white. I’ve put my white candy cane on a green background below so you can see it clearly, but you don’t need to do the same.

Okay, you’ve got the stripes – set them aside. Take your other candy cane shape, and turn the stroke color to red. Make the stroke nice and thick (mine’s 40pt), and add rounded ends to your stroke by clicking the “round cap” button in your illustrator panel. Below is the progression of shapes, as well as a little diagram of how to add rounded ends to your strokes.

Select your red candy cane. Go to Object menu > Path > Outline Stroke. Then click on your white candy cane. Go to Object menu > Expand appearance. This converts your strokes and brushes to actual shapes.

Set your white striped candy cane on top of your red candy cane. If you try to do this and the white stripes are set behind the red, right-click on the white and in the menu that appears, go to Arrange > Bring to Front.

Resize the red and white as necessary.

On the next page, you’ll learn to add shading, gloss, and effects.