- In this movie, I'll share with
you the formula for creating a
perfect five-pointed star here inside Illustrator.
I'm going to go and switch over
to my documents so far, and I don't
need these stars, so I'll go ahead
and press Ctrl + A or Cmd + A on a Mac
to select them, and then I'll press
the backspace key or the delete key on a Mac
to get rid of them.
Now I want to add a background
to this stars layer, and so I'm
going to press Ctrl + 0 or Cmd + 0 on a Mac
to fit the art board on screen,
and I'm going to zoom out even farther,
so I have plenty of room to work,
and I'll go ahead and select the rectangle tool,
and now I want to fill this entire
bleed zone that's surrounded with
a red border with this rectangle,
and so I'm going to go ahead and
drag from one corner to the opposite
corner like so, and if you're working
along with me, and your smart guides
are turned on, then you should see
a heads-up display with a width
value of 1,032 points and a height
of 696, at which point, go ahead
and release the mouse button to create that rectangle.
We don't need any strokes, so I'm
going to go ahead and click on
the second swatch up here in the control panel
and change it to none, and now
I'll click on the first swatch
in order to change the fill, and I'm
going to set it to this shade of blue,
which will be available to you
by virtue of the fact that you
created a basic RGB document here inside of Illustrator,
and that blue is called R0G113B188,
and it ends up producing this effect right here.
I don't want this rectangle to get in our way
as we're adding stars to the document,
so I'm going to lock it down, and you
do that by going to the object menu,
choosing lock, and then choosing selection,
and the second you choose that command,
your handles are going to disappear,
and you will no longer be able
to select that shape, so notice
if I switch to the black-arrow tool,
and I go ahead and click on that shape,
I can't select it.
If I drag it, it doesn't move, and so forth,
and that way it won't get in our face in the future.
I'm going to zoom back in by pressing
Ctrl + 0 or Cmd + 0 on a Mac,
and I'm also going to turn on my
angled layer, so that I can see
the magnifying glass.
If you take a look at the final version
of the illustration, and I'll turn off
the lone-star layer here just so that we can see.
Notice that this perfectly rendered five-point star
is perfectly centered inside the magnifying glass.
In order to make that happen, I need
to find the center of this large circle,
so I'll go ahead and switch over
to my document so far, and I'll click
on the outermost circle to select it,
and notice that we have a center point.
You also notice that our points
are sort of off kilter here.
Notice these four points that are
surrounding the circle, and that's
because we rotated these shapes,
and that means we rotated their points as well,
but the center point is all we care about.
So with that center point visible
go ahead and press Ctrl + R or Cmd + R in a Mac
to bring up the rulers, and you can
just drag a horizontal guide out of
the horizontal ruler, and a vertical guide
out of the vertical one, but if
you want to save time, then press
and hold the control key or the
command key on a Mac, and drag
two guides at once out of the intersection
of those two rulers, and then drop them
into place right there at that center point like so.
But I made one big mistake, which is
that I put the guides on the wrong layer,
so I'm going to undo that modification.
I'm going to click on the guides layer
to make it active, and then I will
once again press the control key
or the command key on a Mac and drag out
from the intersection of those two rulers,
and then drop those guys onto the right layer.
Now I'll press Ctrl + R or Cmd + R in a Mac
in order to hide the rulers, and I'll
switch back to the stars layer,
which is where I'm going to draw
my five-pointed star.
I'll go ahead and select the star
either from this floating toolbar
or by clicking and holding on the
rectangle-tool icon and choosing the star tool
from the fly-up menu, and now I'll
drag out from that center right there
because the star tool, after all,
always draws from the center outward.
Now notice that we do have five points,
which is great, and if you have more
then go ahead and press the down-arrow key
until you have just five, and now
don't worry about the fact that
it's really super spiky.
Just go ahead and press the alt key
or the option key on a Mac in order to
create a perfectly aligned five-pointed star,
and also press the shift key in order to
constrain the star so it's upright,
and I'm looking for values in my
heads-up display around 285 for the width value,
but I'm having problems getting it.
There it was just for a moment right there.
That would do:
28523 with a height of 271.27,
but it's pretty hard to get exactly
those values because of all the
smart-guide snapping that's going on,
and so you may prefer to dial in
numerical values, in which case
I'll go ahead and press the backspace key
or the delete key on a Mac in order
to delete that star, and I'll just click
at the intersection of these two guidelines
to bring up the star-dialogue box.
Here's the problem.
What values do you enter in order
to get a perfect five-pointed star?
Well here's how it works.
You want to go ahead and change
the radius 1 value to 150, that's
just so you and I get the same size star,
and then you change the radius 2 value to 150
as well, in other words that same value,
so whatever size star you end up going with,
go ahead and enter that value again,
and then enter asterisk for times 0.382.
That portion of the formula right there
times 0.382 will give you a perfect
five-pointed star every time,
assuming that your points are set to five,
at which point, go ahead and press the tab key
in order to do the math, and in our case
that's going to translate to a radius 2 value of 57.3 points
and then go ahead and click OK
in order to create that five-pointed star.
And that, my friends, is the formula
for creating the perfect five-pointed star
right off the American Flag here inside Illustrator.