Clip Art Heart in Illustrator - Digital Art and Design

In this tutorial, we will create a basic heart shape using the Pen tool in Illustrator^R. Once we have this basic shape, we can use it as a starting point when creating many variations of clip art hearts.

We will start with a very large heart which will be 12 x 12 inches and 300 dpi. By creating a large basic shape, we have many size options for our finished clip art.

Start a new Print project in Illustrator.
With the Pen tool, you will draw one half of the heart shape. I used only three anchor points to create the first half. You may wish to use more. Use the handles for these anchor points to create the curves of the heart.

Point 1
Point 2
Point 3

When you are working on this half-heart, use the edge of the page (black rectangle) as a straight edge. Place the first and third anchor points at the edge. This will assure that when we duplicate this half of the heart, the two halves will match along the straight edge.
Click on the half-heart and drag it to the left side of the page. At this point, you may wish to use the bounding box to resize the half-heart. You can also select each anchor point with the Direct Selection tool and reshape the curves. When you have the heart in just the right shape, we are ready to duplicate the half.
Select the half-heart with the Selection tool and click Edit – Copy from the Menubar. Next, click Edit – Paste to get a second half-heart. We need to make this second half a mirror image of the first. Click Object – Transform – Reflect. In the Reflect dialog box, set the Angle to 90 degrees and click OK. Now we have two halves of our heart. Click and drag the second half-heart to align the two halves together, overlapping the first and third anchor points.
Deselect both halves. We are ready to join the top two overlapping points. With the Direct Selection tool and starting on the outside of the halves, drag a selection over the top points. From the Control Panel, click on the Connect Selected End Points button. Repeat this for the two overlapping bottom points.
Save your file. In the next tutorial, we will start creating the clip art variations.