Adobe Illustrator: How to Make a Heart

5 min readJun 27, 2024

Vector drawing can be pretty different to drawing with a pen and paper. Sure, you can use the pencil tool and draw as if you were drawing on some paper, but you’ll also be using techniques such as the pen tool or using simple shapes to create more complex ones.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you two very simple methods for creating a heart.

· Method 1: Creating a Heart With a Rectangle
· Method 2: Creating a Heart With a Stroke

Method 1: Creating a Heart With a Rectangle

For this method you’re going to draw a rectangle (shortcut: M). Then, round the corners by dragging one of those dots at the corner of the rectangle. Don’t click it first, or you’ll just be editing the one corner. If you drag on one of the dots without clicking, you’ll edit all of the corners at once.

Then you’re going to go back to the Move tool (shortcut: V) and rotate it. The angle doesn’t really matter, but I’m holding Shift to make the recentangle snap to 45°.

Then you’re going to copy it (Ctrl+C) and paste in place (Ctrl+Shift+V). Once it’s copied you’re going to flip it. Make sure the reference point is set to centre in the Transform panel (you’ll find this in the Properties panel, and if you don’t have that open just go to the “Window” menu and then find “Properties”).

Then, flip it using the “flip horizontally” button in the transform panel. My mouse is hovering over it in the below image.

Now, we’re going to use the shape builder tool to remove the excess. The shortcut for that is Shift+M. Make sure both of these rectangles have been selected before moving to the shape builder tool.

You can hold Alt (or Opt if you’re on Mac) to minus shapes, so we’re going to do that first, and then we’re going to add the heart pieces together. You don’t have to hold any buttons down to combine shapes with this tool. You can click and drag to add or subtract multiple shapes at a time.

And now we’re left with our heart!

There’s a lot you can do to customise this style of heart, like experimenting with different angles or lengths of the rectangles you start off with, so be sure to have a play around.

Method 2: Creating a Heart With a Stroke

Our second method is going to be making a heart using the pen tool and a stroke. And no, you will not actually be using the pen tool to make the entire heart outline.

Instead, much like the rectangle method, we’re going to start with a straight line at an angle.

Then, we’re going to exit the pen tool (use Escape or switch to another tool), and copy it (Ctrl+C) and paste in place (Ctrl+Shift+V). Then, we’re going to flip it. You want the reference point to be on the side you want the shape to flip to. For me, that’s the centre-right reference point. We want the bottoms of the lines to meet in the middle.

Then, we’re going to join the two lines. Select them both and use the shortcut “Ctrl+J” to join them.

You can tell it works perfectly because this little dot will flash up on the screen in the V the two lines make. If you miss it, you can always select the object again with either the Move tool or the Direct Selection tool to see it.

Then, we’re going to increase the stroke on this V shape and also change the stroke settings to give it round caps.

Now, my heart here is very long, so I’m going to use the Direct Selection tool and move that anchor point up a bit.

This method can be much more easily customisable than the previous method.

Once you’re happy with how the heart looks, you can expand it. The stroke and round caps aren’t actually set in the object; they’re an appearance. But we can bake that by expanding our shape.

Just go “Object” at the top and then “Expand”.