This tutorial was written to teach you how to do quick and simple vector water drops in Adobe Illustrator. Water drops are something that many people have problems with for some reason, but they can be quite simple. Today I’m going to show you a simple way to make these with very little hassle. Lets get started.

1. First open up illustrator, and start a new drawing. Go to your gradient pallet, set the type to radial, and change the black to blue.

2. Select your ellipse tool from the tool pallet, and draw and ellipse on the screen.

3. We need to make some changes to the gradient here, so select your gradient tool, and select the bottom of the ellipse and drag until you reach the center of the ellipse.

I should look something like this when your finished.

4. Now we’re going to add a highlight. Select your ellipse tool from the tool pallet again, and draw a small ellipse in the upper left of our water drop.

Set its fill to solid white. Transform the highlight until it looks right to you. Then change its transparency to about 30% Here’s what mine looks like so far.

5. We need to actually change the transparency of the main water drip to about 40%. This will show anything below through the drop, and soften our blue. By the way, grey works well or even better on some surfaces.

6. Now that we have something that more resembles a water drop. We need to add a slight shadow to the main drop. Select the main body, then go to the effect menu and select Effect->Stylize->Drop Shadow.

Mode select depends on the surface, but since we’re working on a white background, I’m just setting it to Normal. Set the opacity to around 75% with offsets of 1 pixel, and a blur of 2 pixels. Use a dark blue color for the shadow.

7. Wow, it’s starting to look like a real water drop! To bad water drops are not perfect, but we can fix that.

It’s time to grab the good ol warp tool, and mess up your hard work. Set the size and hardness to what works best for you. I used three different warp sizes; 100px, 75px, and 50px. Pull your shape around until it looks a little more like a water drop. Water drops can take on any shape, so use your imagination. If you get an edge that’s a little to jagged, use the Path Simplify command in the Edit menu. Don’t forget to move your highlights when your finished! Here’s how mine came out.

Once you get the hang of making these you’ll find that this is easier then a lot of the tutorials on the web. The only drawback is that their not perfect in regards to simulating true water drops. That would take another entire tutorial to evolve them into something more realistic. For most practical uses though, these work great. That’s it. Thanks for reading.