This tutorial will teach you how to draw your very own ladybug using Adobe Illustrator 9.0, CS, CS2, or CS3. This tutorial is rather simple in terms of drawing, but contains a good number of concepts and ideas you will find useful in future, more complex, drawings. The entire tutorial should not take more then one to two hours for most people to complete. The entire drawing took me only 10 minutes to create with the screen shots for the tutorial. Of course the entire tutorial took a few hours to write.

To the left is the finished product of this tutorial. Although drawing a ladybug is easy, it requires quite a few steps, so I’m going to split this tutorial up so that our more bandwidth deprived friends can enjoy reading it. This should also make the tutorial a little more legible also. I would like to hear your thoughts on improving this, and my other tutorials, as you read along. Let’s get started.

Part 1 - The Main Body

First we want to open illustrator, and start a blank drawing. Once again, any size is fine. I’m using an 800×800 pixel layout for this drawing if your dead set on following along exactly as we progress. Set your Fill to white and your Stroke to Black. This will make it easier to work with our shapes.

Now let’s start by selecting the Ellipse Tool from the tool pallet, and draw an ellipse on the screen. This ellipse will be the main body of our ladybug. For the head we need to draw a second ellipse slightly smaller and below the first. Notice that my second ellipse is near half the size of the larger one. You should see what I have here. Don’t worry if your ladybug body looks more like a Junebug. We will fix this later.

If your ellipses do not line up correctly you can use the Align to Center tool in the Align Window Pallet. If you don’t see it on your screen, you can access it using the Window pull down menu. Just drag a window over both ellipses and select the second button on the Align Window Pallet. You will see your ellipses align to each other on your screen. Now that your ellipses are all lined up it is time to move on.

You may be asking why I drew the head second instead of first. I had originally, then I thought, it would be really good to mention the Send to Back command since life is not always easy. You never know when you will need to use it, and as long as you draw in illustrator, you will use it a lot. So select your smaller ellipse, right click on the screen, and select Arrange->Send to Back. You should now see the smaller ellipse behind the larger one.

Now we need to do something about that Junebug look we have going on. Select the larger ellipse again. We are going to make a quick and simple change to the shape of our larger ellipse by removing the lowest anchor point. Select the Delete Anchor Point Tool from the Tool Pallet. You should see four anchor points now on the quadrants of the larger ellipse. Select the lowest quadrant to remove the anchor. Don’t change any other features. Just removing this one point is enough to get the effect we want. When your finished you should see Something like the figure below.

Now that we have a good idea as to how our ladybug body is shaping up, it’s time to make some minor adjustments to the height and width to get our proportions correct before going further. Select your Selection Tool from the Tool Pallet. Select both ellipses by drawing a window over them. Using the grips, transform your junebug looking ladybug into a ladybug looking ladybug. Mine is a little long for a ladybug, so I’m going to make her a tad shorter, but otherwise I am happy with the shape. If you distort your ladybug a little too much use the Edit -> Undo command from the File Menu to restore your image.

Finally for this portion of the tutorial we need to apply a little color to our main body. I’m going to make my larger ellipse the traditional ladybug red, and the smaller ellipse, or head, black. Select the shape you want to colorize, then select the color you want by double clicking on the Fill square in the Tool Pallet.

Here’s the finished product for the first part of the tutorial. Next time we will start applying various body features to our little bugs.

Thanks for reading. The second portion of this tutorial will be coming shortly.

Go to Part 2 of This Tutorial