The bright red Rolling Stones tongue and lips logo is a graphic design icon, and has been a pop culture fav for years! I don’t think you can beat it, so we’ll not create a direct copy of the original in this tut. Instead, let’s take a look at drawing our own Stones inspired tongue graphic, starting with a quick pencil sketch and finishing with a vector based graphic in Adobe Illustrator.

Start work with pencil and paper, use the original Rolling Stones logo as inspiration and follow the rough lines and shapes to produce a similar drawing.

Warm up your scanner and digitise your sketch. Save the scan to your desktop.

Open up Adobe Illustrator and go to File > Place. Position the sketch on the artboard, lower the transparency then press CMD+2 to lock the item in place.

Begin tracing each element of the sketch with the Pen tool. Use just a black stroke to visualise the paths on screen. Aim to use large Bezier curves to maintain a smooth outline without any harsh angles. When the path moves onto a different element, such as the tongue, simply close the path with a few rough lines. Once the tongue shape is filled with colour, this rough line won’t be seen.

Trace around the outlines of every other element to give separate shapes for the lips, tongue, mouth opening and each tooth.

Fill each shape with a relevant colour, so use red for the lips and tongue, black for the mouth opening and white for the teeth.

Notice how the teeth use rough outlines on the upper edges? These will need cropping down to fit under the lips. Duplicate the mouth opening shape, and press CMD+Shift+] to send it to the top. Group all the teeth together then use the Intersect Shape Area option from the Pathfinder palette to trim the teeth to size.

Select all the objects and add a black stroke. The original doesn’t make use of outlines, but we’re going a style of our own!

Duplicate the lips and tongue and send them to the top of the stack using the CMD+Shift+] shortcut. Use the Add to Shape Area option from the Pathfinder palette to merge them together.

Next, add a large black 11pt stroke to the shape. Align the stroke to the outside using the tiny icons in the Stroke palette. Press CMD+Shift+[ to send the shape back to the bottom of the stack.

Select the tongue and mouth graphics and increase their stroke size to 6pt. Also align these to the outside.

Then, select all the teeth graphics and increase the stoke to 3pt. This variation of stroke weights is a popular technique in Illustration.

Begin creating a variation of tone by adding a Linear Gradient across the lips, select a bright red and a slightly darker red swatch.

Add the same gradient fill to the tongue, adjust the direction to flow diagonally across the tongue, ranging from the shadows inside the mouth to the lighter tip.

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