1. First, draw a rectangle with a black fill to cover your artboard and lock this object (click the box next to the eye in the Layers window). Select the Flare Tool (one of the shape tools in the toolbar) and click anywhere on the artboard to bring up the Flare Tool settings. Enter the following settings:
2. This should create a glowing ball with a ring around it.
3. Decrease the height of the flare to 25% of its original height. To do this, go to 'Object > Transform > Scale' and enter the following setting:
You should now have this shape:
4. Go to 'Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform' and enter these settings. In this step you are making 17 copies of the flare and rotating each one 59 degrees. Feel free to play around with any of the settings to get a variety of nice results (and some ugly ones). The Transform Effect is awesome just to play around with and see what you can produce.
Here is how these settings should look:
5. For a different effect, try these settings for Transform:
Then change the blending mode to 'Hard Light' in the Transparency Window shown below (if you can't see it, make sure 'Window > Transparency' is checked):
To produce this effect (shown at 50% size):
6. You can also change the settings when you draw the flare to get an entirely different look. Here is one example. Make your own unique creation. If you come up with something cool, send it to info at slick tutorials dot com and I will put it up for everyone to see.
More Vector Graphics: 
