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Last night, I came back home really late. My wife was already at sleep. A cold front came down from Canada. So it was cold. I wanted to have a cup of hot cocoa. I looked for my favorite coffee cup and couldn’t find it. I spent another 10 minutes in vain. Eventually, I became very frantic. After another 10 minutes of search, I still couldn’t find it and had to resort to Plan B. What’s my Plan B? Adobe Illustrator… I went to my work room, started up my iMac and then launched Adobe Illustrator CS2. In a matter of 10 minutes or so, I managed to recover my favorite coffee cup.

The following tutorial shows steps to design a coffee cup, using Adobe Illustrator CS2. There is nothing special in this tutorial if you are a member and have seen video tutorials like ‘#16: Designing a 3D Wine Bottle’ from the Illustrator Basics for Dummies series. You just create a shape, rotate it and then create a label and paste it with 3D Revolve > Map Art.

1. Using Pen Tool, draw a path for the right half of a coffee cup with no fill color. Use any color for the outline stroke.
2. Apply 3D > Revolve to the path. Create a 3D shape. Then adjust the path to get the right shape. When finished, apply none to the stroke color and go back to 3D Revolve Options. This time, you probably want to apply a gray color to Shading Color.
3. Next, let’s work on the coffee cup handle. It’s no fancy. You just create a shape with Pen Tool again. A simple way of making it look better is to give some 30 pixels of weight to the path stroke.
4. If you want some shadow behind and under the coffee cup, create a shape with Ellipse Tool. You probably want to apply gradation and also Stylize > Feather.
5. If you want a label on the coffee cup, create one with Type Tool at first. When finished, drop the text layer to the Symbol Palette.
6. Let’s go back to 3D Revolve Options by clicking on the effect icon in the Appearance Palette. Click on Map Art. Select the right surface and then choose the text layer you have added from the Symbol drop-down menu.

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Illustrator CS2 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.