How to Create and Spray Symbols in Adobe Illustrator

If you're using Adobe Illustrator and want to create grass, rain, snowflakes, or anything else that requires hundreds or thouands of the same graphic, and you don't want to spend cumbersome amounts of time copying, pasting, moving, and rearranging each graphic so that they all look they're naturally scattered throughout your artwork, symbols is the way to go.

In my Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer with Lights illustration, I used symbols to create the snowflakes. Here is how I did this, in the following order:

1. Creating Symbols


2. Spraying Symbols

How to Create Symbols

1. Create your graphic in Adobe Illustrator. Let's say it's a snowflake:
   


2. Make sure your Symbols window is visible on the screen. Your Symbols window should look like this:
   


3. If you can't find your Symbols window on the screen, select Window, then Symbols to make it visible:
   


4. Select your graphic by clicking it once.
   


5. With your graphic still selected, click the three lines and the tiny triangle under the close X in the upper right-hand corner of the Symbols window, then select New Symbol...
   


6. The Symbol Options box should appear.
   


7. In the Symbol Options box, rename your new symbol whatever you wish, or just leave it as "New Symbol.". You can leave the other Symbol options as they are. The Symbol options are for use in Flash, which I will cover in a different tutorial. Click OK.
   


8. Your new symbol should now be in the Symbols window:
   

Repeat Steps 1-7 to create new graphics and make symbols out of each of them.

Now you are ready to spray your symbol.

How to Spray Symbols

1. Make sure you're in the same document you created your symbol in, and that your Symbols palette is visible. You can delete the snowflake/graphic. If you do this, the snowflake symbol will still be in the Symbols window.


2. If, like my snowflake, your symbol is white with no outline (or stroke, as it's called in Illustrator), it's a good idea to copy and paste a graphic of any color other than white into your Illustrator, and lock the layer it's in and create and select a new layer, as I did with the sky in my Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer with Lights illustration:
   
   
   
   Click to see up close.


3. Click the symbol in the Symbols palette or Symbols library you want to spray to select it.
   
   


4. With the symbol you want to spray still selected in the Symbols palette or Symbols library, click the Symbol Sprayer, next to the Column Graph Tool in the Toolbox. If it's set to another tool, press Shift-S.
   
   


5. Click and drag on the graphic you copied/cut and pasted to start spraying!
   
   
   After you're done spraying, click on any snowflake. A rectangle will appear around all the snowflakes. This is called a symbol set, and each snowflake is a symbol instance.


6. Save your document.

Next: How to Edit the Symbols You've Sprayed