Finished Drawing
Introduction
We will explore some typical drawing commands, alignment functions, gradients, and even some layer functions is this tutorial. This tutorial should not take longer then 30 minuts using Adobe Illustrator CS, CS2, CS3, or CS4. Lets get started.
Getting Started
First we need to open Illustrator and create a new drawing. Any drawing size is ok, but for this tutorial, an 800×600 point drawing would work best. I’m using RGB colors, but your welcome to use anything other then black and white. Finally set your fill color to white and your stoke to black on the Tool Pallet. Now we are ready to start our drawing.
Putting Our Shapes Together
To start out our drawing, we are going to use the Ellipse Tool. Select the Ellipse Tool, and while holding the Shift key ( to keep the circles height and width uniform ) draw a circle on the screen. We need to create two circles directly on top of each other. One will be for the “fuzz”, and the other will be the strips. So, select the original circle using the Selection Tool, then the key combinations 
Ctrl+C to copy the circle and Ctrl+F to paste a copy directly over the first. I’m making my circles 306×306 points using the Transform Window. Now we have a ball without strips, so lets add some. 
Select the Ellipse Tool once again, and draw a new circle on the screen just as you did before only slightly smaller. Now make a third circle even smaller inside the one you just made. You should see something similar to what I have here. These two circles will become the basis for our strips, but first we have to clean them up a little. Select both of the circles like I have above, and using the Alignment Window we need align our circles both to the center and vertically to center. 
Once you do this both circles will be perfectly aligned. You should now see something like the image here. 
Our next problem is that we need our two circles to be hollow (like a donut), but it’s an easy fix. To remove the center from our circles we’re going to use the Divide Command. Go to your Pathfinder Window. Select the two newly aligned circles, and use the Divide Command. 
This command divides all objects and intersecting lines into a solid cutout object. Now you can select the inner circle and delete it to make the larger circle hollow. Since the tennis ball has two strips we need to make a copy of our donut and paste it on the screen. Use the Selection Tool to place the donuts in what ever orientation you prefer. I am going to put mine at about a 30 degree angle. Do not worry about being perfect. Eyeballing it is just fine for most uses. 
It’s finally time to finish our strips. Select the two donuts you just created, and the top circle of your ball. Once again we are going to use the Divide command to flatten and divide the pieces, so we can delete the ones we do not want. Once you have divided the selection, select everything other then the three main ball sections and delete them with the Delete key. Once your done you can move onto colorizing and effects.
Adding a bit of color
I am going to colorize my tennis ball first. This just allows me to get a better picture of what is happening when I apply my effects later on. First I want to apply a yellow to white radial gradient over the three surface pieces of the ball like the picture here. To do this I select the three pieces with the Selection Tool while holding the Shift key. Then I will set my gradients using the Gradient Window. If your using Illustrator CS3 or CS4, you will find the gradient I’m using here in the Gradient->Simple Radial swatch library. Illustrator CS2 and below users will have to make the gradient from scratch. 
Lets just leave the gradients as they are for the moment, and work on the strips. The first thing we need to do is get the select the original circle we drew using the Ellipse Tool. You could use the Direct Selection Tool to select the circle, but I have found that sometimes it is easier to lock and/or hide the paths we are not working with to prevent mishaps. Since I have not used this approach in a tutorial yet, we will be using it today. Go to your Layers Window, and find the paths you want to lock and/or hide from editing. You’ll notice that by default Illustrator shows small icons on the paths to make it easier to find them. You can hide the layers by clicking on the eyes and/or lock the layers by selecting the box next to the eye icon. Since I am going to be applying color to my ball here, I am going to leave the pieces visible, but locked from editing.
Cleaning Up the Shape
Now that the yellow pieces are out of our way it is time to work on our background circle. First thing we need to address is the size. A tennis balls “fuzz” is on the surface of the ball, so we need to make the background circle slightly smaller then the one on top. You can use the Transform Widow to accomplish this without having to do anything weird. As you can see in this picture my circle is 306×306 points. I want to make it just a tad bit smaller. So I am going to change it to 300×300 points. If your ball is larger you will have to make a larger change, and vice versa. Don’t worry, transforming an object uniformly won’t change the center of the object, so we will not have to realign it again. Once you have the size set to where you want it, we need to apply a radial gradient to the circle. Select the circle using the Selection Tool, then go to your Gradient Window and select Raidel. Now change the left color to white (should already be set), and the left color to a light grey. Now we can go back to our Layers Window and unlock the layers we locked before.
Adding Texture
Now it’s time roughen up our ball a little by adding a “fuzz” effect. Start by selecting the three ball paths like above. Now we need to apply a Roughen Effect over the surface to simulate fuzz on the tennis balls surface. Go to Effect->Distort & Transform->Roughen you should now see a dialog like the one pictured here. These are the settings that work best for my tennis ball, however I would play around with the settings to see what best suits your taste. When finished select OK.
Final Cleanup
Now we make a few alterations to make our ball look round. The center white highlight is about where I want it, so I am going to leave it alone, but the two outside ones have to be changed. Select one of the smaller pieces, then go to your Tool Pallet 
and select your Gradient Tool. Illustrator automatically sets the center of our radial gradient to the center of the piece. What we need to do is change the this, so that the gradient is consistent over the entire ball. Select the center of the highlight on the center piece, and drag until you reach the outside edge of the ball like the picture here. It may take a few trys to get the shading just right. I have spent hours shading some complex objects to get them just right, so this is pretty simple even for a beginner. Finished. Your tennis ball should now look like the one at the beginning of this tutorial. I will say that although this ball looks good enough for a simple shirt or sign. You will have to add more defined textures, text, and shadows in order to use it in prints. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.
BK
