Tutorial: How to draw 3D Chess Pieces In Illustrator

This tutorial will show you how to draw a 3D Chess Piece in Adobe Illustrator CS5 that you can apply to other chess pieces. Here is the finished images.

1. Open Adobe Illustrator click File and New to open a new page. Select your Pen Tool.

2. With your pen tool selected start to draw the path shape below. The shape is half the chess piece. Do not close the path off press your black selection tool to select it. The image below shows the path drawn out for the Queen Chess piece.

3. Now deselect your fill colour swatch to none and pick a colour for the stroke. See the image but I chose a light grey colour: C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=10

4. With your path selected go to Effects - 3D and click Revolve to bring up your 3D options.

5. Now set your options the same as the image below. It might be defaulted this way but do check so it is correct.

6. Press the preview button to check that your 3D path looks the same as the image below.

Your 3D chess piece should start to take shape.

Now it is time to add a drop shadow effect.

7. Go to Effects - Stylize - Drop Shadow.

Use the same optoins as the image below.

 8. Select ok and you will have your finished product. 

Now you have made a simple 3D Chess Piece! I hope you found this tutorial useful. You can repeat these steps with all other chess pieces other than the Rook as it does not work with this. When I will figure out how to do a nice 3D Rook chess piece I will add it to the blog to complete the chess set.