In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, we’ll create this cool 3D geometric gemstone using simple drawing tools. We will create custom guides with shapes, lines, and even the Pen tool, we’ll work to create an entire global color library quickly, we’ll work with some gradients, layer strokes, mask different objects, work with raster effects, and much more to build this gemstone and create the sense of depth that really makes the polygon shape jump off the artboard. I hope you love it!
The inspiration for this tutorial (CLICK HERE)
Creating the Shapes to Create the Custom Guides
Grab the Polygon tool and drag out a shape and use the up/down arrow keys to make sure the shape you’re creating has six sides and rotate the shape so the side are straight and the top and bottom of the shape have the points. I made sure my shape was 550px across. Select this shape and go View>Guides>Create Guides. I then created a customized triangle which I also converted to a set of guides. Check out the video to see how I set up my guides. This step is vital!
Creating a Custom Global Color Group
In order to get a custom color group, I placed the graphic of the original hex gem that I am copying and I placed a small ellipse near the first color I want to sample and then I made sure the ellipse was selected and then use the Eyedropper tool and sample the first color I want to sample. I placed little dots at the beginning and end of each gradient and sampled the color closest to that dot. This way I know I’ll have two different colors for each gradient that will fill each triangle we draw. Select all the little ellipses and then click the little folder icon in my swatches panel and tick on “Convert Process to Global.” We now have our group of color swatches for the gem.
Use the Pen Tool to Draw Triangles
Go View>Smart Guides and View>Snap to Point and then grab the Pen Tool and click to on each point where a triangle would connect and draw out each triangle one-by-one. Check out the screenshot to see what I drew, or check out the video and watch me do the drawing in real time.
Creating Lots of Gradients
Select all the triangles that we just drew and open the Gradient panel and click on the gradient thumbnail to quickly apply a gradient to all the triangles at once. Next, we need to create a bunch of custom gradients and use the gradient tool to apply a different gradient to each shape based on the color group that we created earlier. This is definitely a step where you want to check out the video to see exactly what I did and how you can do it.
Adding Shape & Depth with Inner Glow
I duplicated the original polygon shape up the top of the layer stack and filled it with white. Make sure there is no stroke on the shape. Go Effect>Stylize>Inner Glow and set a black inner glow to Normal blend mode at 100% opacity and set the blur to 140px and then open the Transparency panel and set the blend mode to Soft Light and reduce the opacity to 70%.
Creating the Glowing Sparkle
Once we’ve created and completed the color and 3D effects to build out this shape and make this gem look like it is living in 3-dimensional space, we want to stick a glowing sparkle onto the shape. Grab the Ellipse tool and set the fill to solid white and then go Effect>Blur>Gaussian Blur and blur the circle until it looks like a little glowing light. Grab the star tool and use the up/down arrow keys to choose four arms for the star and then hold your Cmd/Ctrl key and pull the star arms out until you get a glam star shape. Use the Move tool (V) to position the glam star above the glow.
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