
Every Friday on the blog I share a Fast Friday tutorial. I teach you how to do basic designer-things fast & easy in programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
In today’s Fast Friday Tutorial, I’m going to show you the fast and easy way to create a waterdrop in Adobe Illustrator.
As a graphic designer, there are certain tricks you need to have up your sleeve, or in your back pocket- at all times. And the ability to create and manipulate basic shapes is one of them!
Check out other tutorials in the links below. Otherwise, fire up Illustrator and get ready to make a basic waterdrop.
Other Easy Illustrator Tutorials:
- How to make a snowflake in Adobe Illustrator
- How to make a heart in Adobe Illustrator
- How to make zig zag lines in Adobe Illustrator
- How to make chevron in Adobe Illustrator
- How to make wavy lines (ric rac) in Adobe Illustrator
If you learn better by watching than by reading, click the link to see this tutorial on Youtube:
Step 1: Make a Triangle

Open a new canvas in Illustrator to work on. It can be any size and any resolution you like. 72 dpi resolution is good for digital art, or go up to 300 dpi if you intend to use your graphic in print.
Select the Polygon Tool from your toolbar. If you don’t see it, that’s because it’s nested under your Rectangle tool. Click the little arrow in the bottom right corner and hold down until more options appear.

With the polygon tool now selected, click once on your canvas to bring up the Polygon options panel. You can see my radius is set at 250.57px as default, or maybe it’s from the last time I used it? — don’t worry too much about this, because you can edit it later on.
Move the arrows up and down to get 3 sides. Can you see where we’re headed with this?

Now you have a perfect, equilateral triangle.
Step 2: Direct Select and Round the Corners

The next thing you want to do is grab your Direct Selection Tool. This is the all-white arrow in your toolbar (different from the regular selection tool), and the keyboard shortcut is A.
Drag over the bottom two corners of your triangle to select both at once. This will only work if you’re using the Direct Selection Tool.

You’ll see the points/controls on the corners turn blue to indicate that they are indeed selected. There’s also two little dots that appear in the corners. Click and hold on one of the little corners, and start moving your mouse up towards the center of the triangle.
See the corners getting round? Good. Drag them all the way up until they cant get any rounder.

And voila! Your perfect, fast and easy waterdrop is complete.
You can fill it with any color you like, mess around with the stroke and stroke weight, etc. until it fits your needs.
But what if you want to make it a little bit more.. realistic looking?
Optional Bonus Step 3 : Make it look like a REAL Waterdrop

If you want to make your waterdrop appear more 3-dimensional, then go ahead and click on the gradient tool. When the gradient panel appears on the right-hand side of the screen, choose the second gradient Type: Radial.
Double-click on the fill to adjust the colors. I went from white to dark blue. You can also use the Direct Selection Tool again to adjust the points and move the gradient around within your waterdrop.
So how did it go? Were you able to create a fast and easy waterdrop in Illustrator? Drop a comment below if you have any questions.
Want to save this tutorial for later or share it with friends? Pin the image below!

Need help learning how to do something else in Illustrator? Let me know by dropping a comment below.
Happy Illustrating,

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