Learn how to easily duplicate any object around a circle in Illustrator. This technique will allow you to radial repeat any shape to create a circular pattern with ease.
Transcript (Edited)
Today I’m going to show you how you can easily repeat a shape or object around a circular path in Adobe Illustrator. To begin, I will just grab my star tool.
I will just tap on the screen here, and for me, a 50 by 20 radius with five points will work. And I’ll just swap around my colors here. Then, grabbing my ellipse tool, I will make a circle, and 500 by 500 pixels will work for me. I’ll just drag this down here, and with my selection tool selecting both objects, I’ll select my circle to make that the key object. As you can see, there’s a thicker line around it, and in my align panel, I’ll just align the star to the circle, and then spacing 25 should be good. I will just distribute that vertically.
So now let’s just select our star, and with our rotate tool, or you can also hit “R” on the keyboard, and going into wireframe mode with command or control and hitting “Y”, you can hold option or alt, and with your star selected or the object you want to select the center point of the circle. So now our object or my star will rotate around the center point of the circle.
I was playing around with this, so this is how many degrees I want to do because I want 12 stars around my circle, and how you can figure that out is by dividing 360, obviously 360 degrees in a circle. And you can do this on your calculator, or you can also just do this in Illustrator by adding a dash, and if I do it by 12, it will be the exact same as 30 degrees. And then you want to hit copy.
So now Illustrator will copy that shape 30 degrees for you, obviously it’s whatever. And then if we just hold command or control and hit “D”, Illustrator will repeat our last effect. Then I’ll just get out of wireframe mode again by holding command or control and hitting “Y”. And just like that, you can repeat any object or shape around a circle in Illustrator.
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