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How to make a cir­cle color spec­trum in Illustrator

So you want to make a color spec­trum like this, using Illus­tra­tor? Here is how you can do it.

Start by mak­ing a new doc­u­ment in Illus­tra­tor. The size does not really mat­ter because Illus­tra­tor is res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent. I pre­fer to have my doc­u­ment in RGB col­ors because it gives me the free­dom to move it over to diver­sity of dif­fer­ent color pro­files later on. Besides RGB has wider color spec­trum and thus brighter colors.

Hit Com­mand + R to make the rulers vis­i­ble and drag one guide from each of the rulers, one hor­i­zon­tal and one vertical.

Select the Polar Grid Tool. You will find it under the Line Seg­ment Tool. The Polar Grid Tool is very cool and is great to know its abil­i­ties. Start by drag­ging from the cen­ter, where the guide­lines intersect.

Drag a lit­tle out from the cen­ter. Don’t worry about pro­por­tions for now. While still hold­ing the mouse move your other hand over to the arrow keys. The left and right arrows deter­mine how many sec­tions you get for the grid and with the up and down arrows you can con­trol how many cir­cles are within the grid. Choose to have four Con­cen­tric Dividers and six Radial Dividers. Don’t let go of the mouse yet.

Now move you hand over and hold down the option key to draw the grid from the cen­ter and add the shift key to make a per­fect cir­cle. Release the mouse but­ton. You could also do all this by click­ing with the mouse on the cen­ter of the guide lines to get a dia­log box to fill in the mea­sure­ments but I thought it would be worth it to show you both methods.

Select the grid and make it to guides with Com­mand + 5 or go the long way via the View menu down to Guides and to Make Guides in the sub menu.

Draw a rec­tan­gu­lar box with the Rec­tan­gu­lar Tool. The height should be the same as the gap between the three out­most cir­cles. The width is not that impor­tant, just make it long. (If you feel bet­ter you can mea­sure the diam­e­ter of the inner cir­cle and mul­ti­ply it with π (3.14) to get the cir­cum­fer­ence of the circle.)

We are going to blend the spec­trum based on six col­ors and that is the rea­son we divided the cir­cle into six sec­tions. We also need to split the rec­tan­gle box into six divi­sions. This time we are going to use the Gra­di­ent Mesh tool.

To start with it is good to use a color like this green one for the whole area because as you will see later on con­trasts nicely with the guides and allows us to see clearly any direc­tion lines.

Select the Gra­di­ent Tool. Click in the mid­dle of the left edge of the box. The first divi­sion is there.

Then click approx­i­mately into the cen­ter of the top edge.

And after that add two ver­ti­cal dividers on each half so we have six sec­tions in total horizontally.

Using the Direct Selec­tion Tool, (the white arrow) select all the anchor points, except those who align with the cir­cle. Hold­ing the left­most bot­tom anchor point, move the selected area so that the next set of anchor points align with the next radial guide line.

While still selected grab the Rotate Tool (just hit R) and Option + Click on the anchor point you just released and type in –60° in the input field. (For other num­ber of sec­tions you can put in 360/number to get the cor­rect degree)

Repeat this over and over always skip­ping the last aligned anchor points until you reach the end. It should look some­thing sim­i­lar to this:

The most tedious part of this work starts here. You have to drag the direc­tion lines out to shape the cir­cles outer side and inner side. It’s also impor­tant to do the same with the cen­ter line. But you have the guide lines to help you. If you find this dif­fi­cult to do please don’t give up. It’s just that you need more exer­cise. You’ll be great the sec­ond time you do this.

When you feel that your cir­cle is good enough, select one set of anchor points, and chose the first fill color of your spec­trum. You can add to your super power by defin­ing Global col­ors for your spec­trum. It’s simple:

First make a new Color Group and drag into it the col­ors you need for your spec­trum. Dou­ble click each color and check the Global box in the Swatch Options. This will make it easy to edit the col­ors later through the Swatch Options instead of hav­ing to choose the anchor points every time.

Ok, on we go and color each sec­tion. Now you can go back into the Swatch Options and fine tune your col­ors to get bal­anced spectrum.