Adobe Illustrator Tutorial: How to Draw a Blaster

In this tutorial we learn how to draw blaster using just geometric shapes, mostly ellipses and rectangles with shape builder tool.

6 min readApr 9, 2020

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This tutorial is useful for graphic designer beginners and user interface designers who wants to master their illustration skills, and for everybody who loves design ❤️

If you don’t like reading, I recorded the video tutorial:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9rELUYs3Ms

Step Zero

Take paper and pencil and draw different variations of your blaster to understand better form and proportions and make it unique.

This is not a necessary step, but a pleasant one. Put music, open a beer or make a coffee, drawing is a big pleasure. Don’t be afraid of uneven lines, the software will do that part for you later. Now just enjoy :)

Raw sketch, you can use it for this tutorial

Let’s go 👟

Basic Shape Creation

Create artboard in size 1080x1080px and call it “Blaster”
Place drawing in the center of artboard drawing you just made or use my from above

3. Double click on “Layer 1” in the layers panel, then mark “Template” checkbox and call this layer “Drawing”

4. Create a new layer and call it “Shape”, draw there 2 ellipses as on the screenshot below, rotate a little bit the “handle” ellipse

It doesn’t have to fit 100% drawing shape, just try to keep general proportions and make sure that all lines intersect

5. Now the coolest part. Select both ellipses, press on the “Shape Builder” icon inside the toolbar or just press “Shift + M”, then holding mouse left button go through both shapes

6. You should get something like that, there are 2 excess parts remained, remove both of them

7. Create 3rd circle, this time hold “Shift” key to make it round

8. Now, a little bit weird thing to do. Take the new circle and clone it to the right side, you will get 2 circles

9. Select the “trigger” circle and make it around 500% times bigger with the scale tool (double clock on the scale icon)

10. Align that huge circle with the trigger line

11. Choose all shapes on the layer, activate the “Shape Builder” (Shift + M) tool again, and holding the “Alt” button choose everything outside of blaster and trigger form

12. Combine handle and base into one form using shape builder

Great job 👍

Main form is ready — let’s dig into small details.

Small Details

1.First, create a simple rectangle, then round its corners to maximum by dragging small circle points in corners

2. Now next to the rectangle which corners you just rounded draw circle in the same height (mine is 65px) and align it with the one line

3. Next, create line and circle

4. Select all small details and align it to one line as you like

5. Near the handle, I found one redundant point. Fewer points — smoother shape you get, let’s remove this point and smooth it a little bit.

‘A’ is a quick key for the point selection

Here is the final result 😋

Colors 🎨🖌

This is my favorite part, colors!

Hide the “Drawing” layer by clicking on the in the layers panel

2. Create a new layer and call it “Background”, draw 1080x1080 rectangle to fit all artboard space and fill it with dark blue color (#1a0d37), then lock the “Background” layer by clicking on small rectangle right to the eye icon in layer’s panel.

Select all shapes and change fill color to white color for now.

3. Click on the base shape, open Gradient panel (Window — Gradient), and create to gradient from #EDF1FA to #CCDAEF

In order to be able to enter Hex values switch gradient color settings to RGB

4. Then press “G” key and change gradient angle approximately same as on the screenshot below, then remove black stroke around in properties panel

5. Use these hex value to color other elements as on the picture
Pink gradient:
#d84f9d, #e11a81

Light blue circle:
#47b8e6

Gray blue trigger:
#929fbe

Also, I made ray line stroke 8pt and moved decoration elements a little bit back to the handle

Feel free to use your own colors, I am not the best designer in the world. I believe you can do better :)

6. With a color that looks much better, but I feel that something is still missing, so let’s add plasma accumulator using tools we have learned

And the last touch 🍰

Select the newly created pink accumulator and holding “Alt” key (duplicate) move it a little bit down, then set Fill to “None” and assign white Stroke 4pt width

2. Press on the “+” button and add 2 new points as on the image below, then select all points outside of the accumulator shape and press “Backspace” to remove them

3. Now add 3 new points near the line end and remove the middle point with the backspace key, that should create kind of dashed effect, click on the “Stroke” inside “Properties” panel and select the Round corner icon