Making a guitar pick

Finished Product

Sometimes in illustrator you cant always use the pen tool to create things easily. Like for instance a guitar pick, it can be made with the pen tool but it also can be made by using one of the warp tools. So lets start, create a new document name it what ever you would like and make sure its in pixels.

Now that we have the document open grab the ellipse tool and just click on the art board. Set the hight and width to 210px each and the fill color to black.

Now select the circle and go effect > warp > arch upper. When the pop up dialog comes up match my setting on it. That is horizontal, bend 67%, horizontal distortion 0%, and vertical distortion 44%. Then click okay.

So now we have something that looks like a guitar pick. Lets make illustrator recognize it as this kind of shape instead of the bubble. With it selected go object > expand appearance. now you can see its outlined as the guitar pick not as a circle.

Now lets turn this this around so the tip is facing down. Grab the corner of the guitar pick when its selected and hold shift and turn it until the tip is down not up. Make sure you have the rotation cursor when trying to do this, if not you will just resize the guitar pick.

Grab the text tool and type some text into there. Choose what ever font you would like and scale it to your likings.

Now to give it a shine and gloss effect grab the pen tool and create a curve over the guitar pick. Make it look like the picture below:

Now that we have the shape over the guitar pick we have to lower the opacity to 10%.

Select the text and create outlines of it. Do that by right clicking and selecting create outlines.

Now select everything and click divide in the pathfinder panel. Now grab the direct selection tool and click the object you made with the pen too. ONLY CLICK WHATS on the out side of the guitar pick!! If you dont it will delete the gloss we just made. ALSO dont have a stroke, the stroke will out like with the gloss and it would ruin the feel and look of it.

So we are done! Want to suggest anything? Leave a comment!

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About Robert

I'm a sophomore in high school and I try to help anyone with what I can, that was the reason me and will decided to start this site. I am all about macs and avoid any windows computer when I can. I am currently learning how to program in objective-c and what I learn I will try to teach. I'm also proficient in the Mac OS and Illustrator.