: Creating circular symmetrical designs in Illustrator I was wondering how to create these kind of circular repeating shapes in Adobe Illustrator. I searched the internet for a guide on creating

@Turnbaugh909

Thank you all for your answers.
I googled mandala tutorials like @Billy Kerr said. Thank you for that.

While searching I came up to a tutorial that uses polar grid tool to create mandalas and tried to use it for simpler shapes.

1-Use polar grid tool to draw a circle. Click the circle then 'divide' in 'pathfinder'.


2-Ungroup the object, then erase the circle leaving one slice.



3-Group the slice then drag to symbols, export type: graphic



4-Mirror the slice and paste it until you get the circle back.



5-Select one slice and isolate it. Anything you draw inside that slice will be multiplied on the other slices when you exit isolation mode.



6-Now, exit the isolation mode and it will look like this.



7-Select the slice again and delete the line of the polar grid.



And that's it. I think this is one of possible ways to draw such shapes.
Thank you all for your help.

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@Turnbaugh909

One easy way is to use a transform effect...


Draw a circle and a line to use as a guide. (The line isn't all that important; it's just easy to see the rotation in this example and handy as a guide. The circle is important to get the correct rotation from the transform effect though).





Group the circle and the line and add a transform effect (Effect → Distort & Transform → Transform...) to the group. Set a number of copies and the correct rotation angle for the number of copies (tip: you can do math in the input, so put in "360/[number-of-copies]").





Draw inside the group. You can draw anywhere in the circle, you don't need to work within a single segment; everything will be rotated around the circle.





Hide your guide layers (don't delete the circle, it's needed for the transform effect; just make sure it isn't visible)...

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@Margaret771

The basic tool for all this in Illustrator is Object > Transform > Rotate > Copy. Type the rotation angle to be an integral part of 360 degrees ie. 360/2 , 360/3, 360/4, 360/5... etc.

Apply that operation to any shape once and then press Ctrl+D to repeat the transform and create a new copy. Repeat until you have a full circle.

Here's one shape and a full circle of 22,5 degrees a step rotated copies:



A clever design of the original shape helps to have more interesting patterns. Combining different shapes, rotation angles and colorings and applying also Transform > Scale and > Reflect are other tools to achieve continuity and variation at the same time.

It's a good idea to do as the commentators have written: See tutorials and check how some traditional designs are constructed.

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