5 Steps For Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays

5 Steps For Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays

This tutorial shows you how you can make sun rays in Adobe Illustrator, I’m using the CS3 version.

Before you start make sure you set your Fill color to None and Stroke color to Black or whatever color you prefer.

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -1

Step 1 : Draw a circle.

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -2

The one I drew was 100 px in diameter.

Step 2 : Setup weight for the circle

Select Window>Stoke (Ctr+F10) to bring up the Stroke Panel and click on the Show options to view all the Stroke options.

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -3

Step 3 : Increase the Stroke Weight

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -4

Now increase the Stroke Weight until you get something similar to a circle. For a diameter of 100 pixels, a weight of 100 pixels should do it.

Step 4 : Use the Dashed Line option

Now Click on the Dashed Line option and… tadam!!! You have your Vector Sun Rays. But what if you want to spice things up?

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -5

Step 5 : You play with the Dash/Gap Values!

Let’s try a 3-4-1 setting

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays -6

Now a 5-3-2-1-12 setting

Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays

Make sure that before you use your customs sun rays you expand your circle by using OBJECT>EXPAND from the menu bar.

As you saw you can get some funky, retro vector sun rays for your backgrounds in less than a minute. Your Vector Sun Rays are ready to be used in your backgrounds. You can easily add a Radial Gradient in Illustrator to add a bit of depth. You now have a cool background for your next illustration.

Keep a close eye on our blog for more Drop-Dead Tutorials.

Do you want to learn more about how to work with Photoshop?

See our Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials. They are all FREE. Also, check all Free Vectors Category.

47 Comments on “5 Steps For Drawing Complex Vector Sun Rays

  1. Great trick, haven´t seen this yet,

    I always used one of the preinstalled shapes in Fotoshop, but this ist much better.

    Thank you for the info

  2. I can’t tell you how many times I have searched for a “quick” tutorial on how to do this in the past, and only found crappy tutorials on it. Brilliant in it’s simplicity. Thanks a ton!

  3. This kinda makes me really happy and really angry at the same time.

    To think of the time I would have saved….

    thanks!

  4. Try this in InDesign too for some really crazy designs. More flexibility with strokes in InDesign.

    Thanks for this though.

  5. Well just a quick comment, that some RIPS can’t handle it. Had a customer that used this technique about 2 years ago. When a poster was printed the line width got up to well over 2000pt and the RIP went crazy, lotts of ines everywhere. You may need to expand appearance to make sure you get what you see.

  6. hi

    can you tell an easy similar way to do the same in PHOTOSHOP and not illustrator ? I use photoshop 7 …

    thank you very much and waiting for your reply curiously.

    Jessy

  7. Thanks for writing Jessica .
    It is actually very easy to do this effect in Photoshop as it is in Illustrator…and be sure that you will see a tutorial on this subject in the near future.

  8. A very GOOD tutorial…. I’ve always had a hard time trying to create that in illustrator.

    Thank you very much!!

  9. OMG…this is SO much easier than the other tuts I’ve seen for this effect. You are a genius! Thanks :)

  10. I hate to be the clueless one but I need some help. The last line of the tut says to expand with OBJECT > EXPAND. When I do that, the circle turns back to a full black circle. I only get the options to expand stroke and fill, the “object” box is grayed out. What’s wrong? What do I do the accomplish the expand? Thanks!

    • I get the same results. The same black circle when I expand my radial.
      I have CS2 could that be the problem?

  11. I did Object>Path>Outline Stroke to get the individual rays and that did the trick.

    Thanks for the awesome tutorial!

  12. very nice technique !! I had been wasting so much of my energy on this lately.
    Respect

  13. oh wow!! ..and here I was thinking of the most complex ways to try and draw sun rays. I’m really glad I found this tutorial.. Thanks!! :)

  14. wassup, im really feeling this post but the other links arent working. You might wanna make sure your site works in IE 7 cuz you know that browser is prone to errors sometimes.

  15. Ugh, this is ridiculously simple, I feel ridiculous for having spent hours trying to do this using masks and star shapes and all kinds of complicated Pathfinder tools. Illustrator is such an awesome tool, but so hard to penetrate sometimes. Thanks for making it this much easier!

  16. sooo simple !!! i’ve thinking about ‘arrays’ and stuffs like that….ha ha ! THANK YOU VERY MUCH for sharing

  17. I million thanks for your super efficient tutorial. Clean, simple and brilliant! Sure could have saved me
    some time on another recent design project…

  18. wow, this is way easier to do than the rotate-duplicate method. really cool and super easy steps to follow. thanks!

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