Drawing a beveled star may seem like a very basic thing to do in Illustrator. But doing it well is a whole other story.

In the following tutorial, I’m going to show you a simple way to design a beveled star in Illy so all the points are the exact same dimensions as well.

So here goes:

1. Draw a vertical path.

2. With the path selected, go to Effect>Transform. Enter a roation angle of 36° and 4 copies. Click OK.

3. Go to Object>Expand Appearance, which will result in 5 paths, grouped.

4. Draw a star (hold down Shift and Option to constrain it to a right-side-up, 5-pointed star).

5. Center-align the star and the line group horizontally. You may have to move the star up or down so that each line bisects the star’s points.

6. Select the star and the lines and go to Pathfinder>Divide.

7. Take the Live Paint bucket and color every other shape for the beveled look.

That’s it!

It seems like a simple tut. But wathing how simple shapes like these are created in Illy is the foundation to understanding depth perspective in illustration.