To make easily something thicker I would use 3D. The difficulty of having plausible curve bends jump up, if the wanted form is more like questioner's example. Before blurring:Īfter blurring, reducing the opacity and tweaking the placements: Width tool is used to taper the curves (=half ellipses) to make the shadows end smoothly. It can be made easily by drawing a couple of black curves to the wanted shadow areas and blurring the curves.

Delete remnants and select good fill and stroke:Ī slight shadow makes the 3D appearance stronger.

It's fixed by fixing the effect (=Object > Expand Appearance) and applying Object > Path > Simplify:Īdd vertical lines to the right and left to get fillable areas. It makes circular roundings which look out non-smooth due steep changes in the curvature. Next step is to add effect Stylize > Round corners. But I inserted them separately and made the needed shorter push. In the bottom there was one line missing nodes due poor calculations. Add to the selection also those nodes which were made by the vertical line in the uppermost and lowermost node rows. Select with the direct selection tool all nodes which were made by the middle ellipse. After applying 'Outline' ungroup and remove everything, but the splitted horizontal lines. Pathfinder panel has button Outline for it. There seems to be also some faint coloring to create a shadow like in 3D renderings.Īn example (nothing fine formed, only a coarse and quite thin ring):ĭraw a bunch of equally spaced horizontal lines, three ellipses and a vertical line in the middle Theoretically it can be made in 2D - just bend some lines.

3d effect illustrator