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Matt Fons/4 min read

Creating a Curved Pipe Icon: Illustrator Tutorial

Curved Pipe Build

1

Draw the Curve

Pen tool with smooth handles — or modify an arc shape.

2

Set a Thick Stroke

Width and rounded caps give the pipe its body.

3

Outline the Stroke

Object → Path → Outline Stroke to convert to a fillable shape.

4

Add End Connectors

Small rectangles at each end suggest fittings or threading.

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This Illustrator tutorial walks through creating a curved pipe icon: illustrator tutorial, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we'll be working on our pipes icon. So let's start by scrolling over to our next artboard and we'll open up the PDF of our icons to view our pipes icon.

Looking at one pipe at a time, we can see we have a rectangle with our pipe that's curved, another rectangle, and then we can simply copy this pipe over to the next pipe intersection and add our water droplet without the accent line from the icon before. So let's get started. We'll go into Illustrator and we'll start working on our pipe.

As always, we'll start by selecting our working layer, and let's start by creating the pipe. Rather than creating a rounded pipe off the start, we'll start with the rectangle tool and we're simply going to start by drawing the area of the pipe that moves down. We'll drag a rectangle about this size, and next, we're going to add the part of the pipe that jets out to the right.

To do this, we'll use the exact same rectangle, hitting CTRL + C and CTRL + Shift + V to paste our second rectangle in place, and then we need to rotate the second rectangle, so we'll hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool and rotate it by going to one of the corners and holding Shift as we rotate. We'll then line up our shape so that it intersects, as shown by the pink lines, with the other rectangle, and we now have the start of our pipe. To create it as one shape, we'll drag a selection box over both rectangles, and we'll use the Shape Builder to create one shape out of both rectangles.

Next, let's create the top rectangle on top of our piping. To do this, we'll go back to the rectangle tool and we'll first deselect this shape. To do so, we'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect, and let's start by drawing a rectangle from one anchor point to the other anchor point.

We'll release, and we now need to adjust the size of this top rectangle. While we know it's centered on top, we'll simply drag the bottom of our rectangle up and drag the side out, holding ALT to make sure it moves from the center. We'll release about here, and I'm simply going to add a little more height to this rectangle, and that looks pretty appropriate.

I'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and view the work, and this looks like a good start to the pipe. We'll now need to add a second one to the bottom right-hand side. To do this, we'll hit V on our keyboard for the selection tool.

We'll select the top rectangle and hit CTRL + C and then hit CTRL + V to paste. Next, we'll rotate this rectangle, going to one of the corners and clicking and dragging while holding Shift, and finally grabbing our rectangle from the center, we want to center it on the right side of our pipe. We've now created a good-looking pipe; however, we do need to adjust the edges here.

To do this, we'll use our Direct Selection tool and adjust the live corners of these two corners. Therefore, we'll hit A for our Direct Selection tool, and selecting only the middle anchor here, we'll simply drag our live corner in slightly, and selecting the bottom anchor point, we'll drag this one in more drastically. For this corner, we can drag it in just a little bit more, and this looks good.

Let's now hit CTRL + S on our keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be creating the second pipe as well as adding the water droplet. See you there!