456 Islamic design 2: The eight eight-pointed stars

- In this movie, I'll show you how to adorn each one of your 16-pointed stars with eight of these smaller eight-pointed stars which is a necessary step in order to achieve the final intense, but mathematically precise, Arabic pattern. I'll go ahead and switch over to our document so far which features those 16-pointed stars and the first thing we need to do is figure out how big our eight-pointed stars should be, and that means drawing an eight-pointed star between a pair of these existing 16-pointed stars. The problem is that, while these path outlines right here are real, nothing else is.

Everything else is a dynamic effect so there's really nothing to snap to here. And so what we need to do to solve that problem is expand this entire layer. Now, I don't want to lose the original dynamic effects, however, so I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer by clicking on the flyout menu icon in the upper right corner of the Layers panel, and then choosing Duplicate "16 points". And now I'll turn off the original, just so I don't hurt it, and I'll double click on an empty portion of this layer in order to bring up the Layer Options dialog box, and I'll go ahead and rename this layer expanded and I'll change its color to dark green or frankly anything else you like, and then click OK.

And now go ahead and select everything on this layer by clicking in the upper right corner on this little wedge right there, and then go up to the Object menu and choose Expand Appearance, and you will expand the dynamic effect to static path outlines. All right, now the thing about the Star Tool, which is the tool we're going to use to draw the eight-pointed star, is that it draws shapes from the center outwards. So we need to find the exact center between these two points right here, and to do that I'm going to turn on the Guides layer, and then I'm going to click on that layer to make it active.

And I'll go ahead and select the Line Segment Tool which you can get by pressing the "\" key, and then I'll go ahead and drag from this point right there to this one, and you should have your smart guides turned on by the way so you can see exactly what you're doing. All right, now that I've found the distance between these two points here, I want to find the center of that line, and you can do that by going up to the Window menu, then choosing the Attributes command. And then make sure that you can see the second half of this panel which means that you may have to click on this little double arrow icon next to the word Attributes and then click on the Show Center icon like so, and that will show a center point right there.

All right, now you can hide the Attributes panel and then go ahead and right click on your line and choose Make Guides in order to turn it into a snapping guide. All right, now I'm going to zoom in a little farther here, and I'm going to click on the Expanded Layer to make it active. And I'm going to create a new layer on top of it by alt or opt + clicking on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. And I'll go ahead and call this layer 8 points this time around and I'll change the color to violet. And then I'll click OK. All right, now you want to switch to the Star Tool which you can get from the Shape Tool flyout menu right here and go ahead and hover your cursor over that center point and then drag outward like so until you snap into alignment with this anchor point or this one, it doesn't matter.

I'm going to go up right, however. And then, assuming that you're seeing the default five-pointed star, press the up arrow key a few times until you get an eight-pointed star as we're seeing here. And then, before you release, press and hold the alt key or the opt key on a Mac, so that all of the segments align with each other and then release the mouse button after which point you can release the alt or opt key. All right, now as you can see I've got round joins, I've got a two-point line weight, but I'd like to change the color of this stroke to red, like so.

All right, now we need to zoom out just a little bit, so I'll press ctrl + minus or cmd + minus a couple of times and then you want to press the "v" key to switch to the black arrow tool and go ahead and drag this guy by its bottom anchor point like so and snap it into alignment with the top of the bottommost 16-point star because this is where it really wants to be. All right, now go ahead and zoom in. And now I'll turn on the template layer just so that you can see what the original Tunisian stained glass window looks like. And notice that we have a segment going up like so that connects into the star.

And then we've got these lines coming off the bottom of the star, both horizontally and vertically. And that's what we're about to draw right now. Just because I'm not exactly following the template, I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. I just want you to see what I'm riffing off here. And then, I'll go ahead and switch back to the Line Segment Tool. All right, the first line needs to align to this segment right here, and if you want to test the segment, you can just go ahead and drag along it like so, and that way you're loading the angle of that segment. At which point now, I'll just go ahead and press the backspace key or the delete key on a Mac to get rid of it, and then I'll click right at this point there, so that I have precise alignment and I can see that I have an angle value of 67.5 degrees which makes a lot of sense because that was the angle value that we used in the previous movie in order to create the 16-point star in the first place.

All right, now I'm just winging it. I'm going to change the length value to 40 points and click OK. And I'm not really winging this. I've done this in advance so I know that this is going to work. And I'm going to change the color to the shade of green here. You can really change it to anything you like. Colors aren't important. It's just that I'm trying to keep all these path outlines from each other. All right, now I'll just go ahead and press the escape key in order to hide that panel. And the next segment needs to align with this guy right here so I'll just drag down along it like so and I can even see it in the heads up display it's going to be 315 degrees which, by the way, is 360 minus 45 because this is a 45 degree segment right there.

And now I'll press the backspace key or the delete key to get rid of it and I'll click at this anchor point in order to bring up the Options dialog box. It's telling me that the Angle value is all loaded up and ready to go. And now I'll change the Length to 40, and I'll click OK and you can see that we have two overlapping segments. Now for this next step to work, you're going to need the most recent version of Illustrator CC. If you don't have it, you're just going to have to drag things around manually. But the newest version has this tool called the Join Tool which is really great for cleaning up stuff like what I just created.

And so I'll press the "v" key to switch to the black arrow tool, I'll shift + click on this segment here, so that both of these segments are selected, and then I'll click + hold on the Pencil Tool icon and I'll choose the Join Tool from the bottom of the flyout menu. And then I'll drag around this outcropping here which tells Illustrator the stuff I want to get rid of, and then I'll release and you can see that it fuses things together exactly the way I was hoping it would. All right, now I'll press the "v" key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I'll go ahead and click on this path to select it. And then I'll right click on it, choose Arrange, and choose Send to Back, or you've got that keyboard shortcut of ctrl + shift + [ that's cmd + shift +[ on the Mac.

All right, now I'm going to switch back to my Line Segment Tool. And I'm just going to go ahead and drag right from here. And for all this stuff to work, you have to have Smart Guides turned on. And if you're not sure, you can go up to the View menu and choose the Smart Guides command. But if it has a checkmark in front of it, that of course means it's already on. All right, now I'll drag from this location to the right until I snap it into alignment. And, by the way, I am pressing the shift key as I draw this line in order to constrain its angle to exactly horizontal. And now I'll change its color to this shade of pink here.

And then I'll draw another line from that same anchor point down this time around, while pressing the shift key in order to constrain the angle of that drag to exactly vertical and I'll change its color to orange. Again, these are all arbitrary colors. I just want to keep everything straight. All right, now I'll go ahead and press the "v" key to switch back to the black arrow tool and I'll shift + click on these other two path outlines. I actually want them all in back so I'll just press that keyboard shortcut, ctrl + shift + [ cmd + shift + [ on the Mac.

And now I want to flip all three of these lines to the other side of the star. And so I'll go ahead and click and hold on the Rotate Tool and I'll select the Reflect Tool from that flyout menu. Then I'll position my cursor on this vertical guide right there, and you want to be really careful to make sure you have it aligned. And then alt or opt + click to bring up the Reflect dialog box. Set the Axis to Vertical, because after all you're flipping around the vertical axis. Turn on the Preview checkbox to make sure you're doing the right thing, and click on the Copy button in order to create a copy of those paths.

All right, now we need to rotate these points around the big 16-pointed star. And in order to do that using a dynamic effect, I have to set the center of the rotation. So I'll press the "p" key to switch to the pen tool and then I'll click right here at the intersection of these two guides in the center of the big star in order to set that anchor point. Then I'll press the escape key so that point is no longer active. I'm going to zoom in here just to make sure that I've nailed it. And it looks like I have, but I do not want to stroke.

So I'll go ahead and click on the Stroke option right there and I'll change it to none. So we have no fill and no stroke, just a lone anchor point. And now I'll go ahead and zoom back out so I can see what the heck I'm doing. And the next step is to target the layer by clicking on the circular meatball at the top of the Layers panel. And now you want to go up to the Effect menu and choose Distort & Transform and then choose the Transform command. And here, inside the Transform Effect dialog box, you want to turn on this bottom center point here inside the reference point matrix.

Go ahead and set the Rotate value to 360 divided by eight this time around which is 45 degrees. And now I'll set the Copies value to one and I'll turn on the Preview checkbox so that you can see that everything is working out nicely. At which point, clicking the Copies value again and press the up arrow key until you fill out the shape which will happen at seven copies, which gives us a total of one original plus seven, that is to say eight eight-pointed stars. And now click OK to accept that change.

All right, now we want to repeat that pattern around the other 16-pointed stars and that means we need to set another center of rotation using the Pen Tool. So go ahead and click right there at the intersection of the two center guides in order to create an anchor point and then press the escape key in order to deactivate that path so that we have a loan anchor point to work with. I like to make sure that it's in the right place so I'm going to go ahead and ctrl + spacebar or cmd + spacebar, drag around it. And because GP you previously turned on, that's give me this continuous zoom, but in any event, everything looks fine.

So press ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the Mac in order to zoom out, maybe not that far. That looks pretty good. And then I'll once again target that layer by clicking on its circular meatball, that's what they call it inside Adobe or at least they did when they first created the darn thing, and now return to the Effect menu and choose Transform..., the second command right there. And if Illustrator asks you if you want to apply a new effect, the answer is you do. So go ahead and click on that button. This time I want to change the Angle value to 90 degrees, and I want to reset the Copies value to just one for now.

And I'll click on that top center point in that tiny reference point matrix. Turn on the Preview checkbox. Looks great. Then in Copies value and press the up arrow key a couple of times in order to increase that value to three at which point you can click OK in order to accept that change. All right, now press the "v" key to switch to a black arrow tool. I'll click off the paths to deselect them, and I'll turn off the Guides Layer so that we can see what we've wrought. And, come to think of it, I really want this layer to be lower than the 16-points layer, so I'll go ahead and drag it down here inside the Layers panel.

And then I'll turn on the original dynamic 16-points layer and I'll turn off the expanded layer. And so there you have it, a patter of eight points of eight-pointed stars surrounding each of our 16-pointed Arabic stars here inside Illustrator.