Tutorial: The Flare Tool

What the heck is a Lens Flare tool doing in Illustrator? I always wondered that. The few times I’d selected the tool and actually drawn a flare, I couldn’t think of any reason I’d want to use it. I mean, it looks kind of cool, but I didn’t see a way to change the color or the arrangement of the circles. Turns out, I hadn’t dug deep enough. You really can do lots of cool things with the Flare tool.  Download this tutorial as a PDF.

Step 1: Draw a rectangle or square and fill it with black. You can put this square on its own layer, or lock it for now.

Step 2: Double-click the Flare tool. Enter the values shown here and click OK. Now, either click and drag out a flare, or click once on the artboard. If you do the latter, the flare will be drawn, and then the dialog box will pop up again so you can adjust the settings.

 If you view the flare in Outline mode, you can see that it’s a set of concentric circles. You can select each circle with the Direct Selection (white arrow) tool, and inspect its fill, opacity and transparency mode. Place the flare on top of the black square, and it will look something like this:

Step 3: Since the flare contains transparency, it will be affected by whatever color is underneath it. Try adding 100% cyan to the black and see what happens (if you prefer to work in RGB, you probably know how to make a blue-black. It hurts my head to think in RGB).  Also play around with different transparency modes and opacities.

Step 4:Now let’s get the Rotate tool involved. Squash your flare so that it forms an oval. Double-click the Rotate tool, enter 20° and click Copy. Press Cmd-D seven more times to make a complete circular shape:

Step 5: You can leave the shapes as they are, or if you want to re-color them, go to Object>Expand.You’ll end up with some very cool gradients that you can save for another project. Have fun!