Go Effect>Stylize>Inner Glow and set a black inner glow to Normal blend mode at 100% opacity and set the blur to 140px and then open the Transparency panel and set the blend mode to Soft Light and reduce the opacity to 70%. Make sure there is no stroke on the shape. I duplicated the original polygon shape up the top of the layer stack and filled it with white. This is definitely a step where you want to check out the video to see exactly what I did and how you can do it. Next, we need to create a bunch of custom gradients and use the gradient tool to apply a different gradient to each shape based on the color group that we created earlier. Select all the triangles that we just drew and open the Gradient panel and click on the gradient thumbnail to quickly apply a gradient to all the triangles at once.

Check out the screenshot to see what I drew, or check out the video and watch me do the drawing in real time. Go View>Smart Guides and View>Snap to Point and then grab the Pen Tool and click to on each point where a triangle would connect and draw out each triangle one-by-one. Select all the little ellipses and then click the little folder icon in my swatches panel and tick on “Convert Process to Global.” We now have our group of color swatches for the gem. This way I know I’ll have two different colors for each gradient that will fill each triangle we draw. I placed little dots at the beginning and end of each gradient and sampled the color closest to that dot. In order to get a custom color group, I placed the graphic of the original hex gem that I am copying and I placed a small ellipse near the first color I want to sample and then I made sure the ellipse was selected and then use the Eyedropper tool and sample the first color I want to sample. This step is vital! Creating a Custom Global Color Group Check out the video to see how I set up my guides. I then created a customized triangle which I also converted to a set of guides.

Select this shape and go View>Guides>Create Guides. Grab the Polygon tool and drag out a shape and use the up/down arrow keys to make sure the shape you’re creating has six sides and rotate the shape so the side are straight and the top and bottom of the shape have the points. The inspiration for this tutorial (CLICK HERE) Creating the Shapes to Create the Custom Guides We will create custom guides with shapes, lines, and even the Pen tool, we’ll work to create an entire global color library quickly, we’ll work with some gradients, layer strokes, mask different objects, work with raster effects, and much more to build this gemstone and create the sense of depth that really makes the polygon shape jump off the artboard. In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, we’ll create this cool 3D geometric gemstone using simple drawing tools.

Polygon tool illustrator