3D Perspective designs in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 3D Perspective Cubes Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, 3D perspective cube design in Adobe Illustrator. Today, we're going to look at creating 3D perspective shapes in Illustrator and we're going to do this by hand. We're going to create the perspective, the one-point perspective, by hand. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making a 3D perspective illustration in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Create the first shape: To create our 3D drawing, we will need a new file, so I'll choose File and then New. I'm making my screen size at 1920 by 1080. I'm working with RGB color. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, which is going to work just fine for you, you'll see just a different dialog before creating your document. Now we need some ruler lines here, so I'm going to choose View and then Rulers and Show Rulers because the ruler allows me to drag down some guides. I'm going to draw my 3D perspective in this sort of area, assuming that this is the horizon. I'm making my horizon up the top here, and I'm also going to pull it over towards the right. This is my vanishing point, if you like. Let's go to the Layers panel. I'm going to lock down this layer, so that's just locking down these two guides. Remembering, of course, that guides in Illustrator are just shapes. They're just shapes like everything else and so, they'll move if you don't lock them down. I'm going add a new layer. Because I locked this layer, I need a layer to be working on. I'm going to target the Rectangle Tool and I'm going to drag out a square here. I'm working in this panel here for my 3D perspective. I'm holding the Shift key as I do, so that I create a square. Now I'm going to fill my square with a color. This is just a color I'm using for a temporary purpose. Next up, I'm going to target the Polygon Tool and in this case, I want a triangle, so I'm just dragging out a triangle because it's not going to look like this when I've finished. I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool which allows me to select on any points on this triangle. What I'm going to do is place this one up alongside the anchor point on my square. I'm going to drag this one into position over here and I'm going to take this one all the way over to my vanishing point. Now that I've got this shape in place and selected, I'm going to change its color, again, just temporarily. Now, I'm going to go and do the same thing, so I want another polygon, a three-sided figure. If yours isn't coming up as a three-sided figure, when you click on the polygon tool, click once in the document. At this point, you can set your polygon to how many sides you want. Mine was preset to three, so I'll click "Okay." Here's my polygon. Switch to the Direct Selection Tool by pressing the letter A. I'm going to drag my anchor points into position. Let's take this one firstly across to the vanishing point and it needs to be lined up perfectly. Now let's go and take this one. It's a little hard to see my square right now, so just going to drop it close by and now I can zoom in and get it in even closer. Finally, this anchor point, click on it, so only it is selected and move it into position. Now if we want to double check everything at this point, we can choose View and then Outline. In outline view, we can see an outline of our shape. We're seeing just the lines that comprise our shapes and nothing else. That just makes it a little bit easier to see that everything is perfectly lined up, which it is. Choose View and then Preview to return to the regular view of your document, press Control or Command Zero to zoom back out. With this shape selected, I'm going to double-click on its color and again, change the color just temporarily. Now that we've got our starting shape created, in the next video, we're going to go ahead and apply our global colors and also make sure that the shape and the Illustrator are set up, so that it's going to be easy to create other shapes based on this one. 3. Pt 2 Create more shapes: Now that we've created the first of our 3D shapes, there's a setting in Illustrator, we need to disable. You'll see here when I select this square that the live corners are accessible to me and that option is just going to get in my way. So I'm going to choose View and then Hide Corner Widget. Now when I select the shape, you'll see that there are no corner widgets, this is going to help being able to make selections in a minute. Now, we're ready to deal with the color, and what I've chosen to do is to make the darkest color, this one here, and I've used successively lighter colors here. Now I'm going do this using tints and shade. So I'm going to start by selecting the darker of my colors. It doesn't matter if the darkest of your colors as this one here or this one here, just select the darkest one. Go to the Swatches panel, and you're going to click here on "New Color Group", and you're going to select "Selected Artwork", "Convert Process to Global", "Include Swatches for Tints", and click "Okay", and that gives us one global color here, and that's the color that is applied to this shape here. Then we're going to choose Window, and we're going to choose Color Guide. Because we created this color as a global color, we now get a selection of alternate global colors we can use. I've got quite a few global colors showing here because I went to the Flyout Menu and I chose Color Guide Options, and I set my steps to seven. You may want to set your steps to a higher value so you've got plenty to choose from. What I'm going to do is to choose a slightly lighter color here, and I'm going to command Click, or Control Click on another lighter color. I'll click the Flyout Menu, and I'm going to choose Save Colors as Swatches. These are going to be my global colors. At this point, I can just innate in them up by dragging them into the same color group and get rid of this one. Now, I'm going back to my shape, I'm going to select this panel here and I'm going to apply this global color to it and make sure that each of these other shapes has a global color applied to it. Now, we're ready to go ahead and to duplicate the shapes. Let's go to the Layers panel. What I've got here is a layer with a series of objects in it, so I'm going to select over all of my objects, I'm going to group them, so they'll travel as a single object or a single group. Now, at this point, making duplicates, I could simply make a duplicate of my group, but it's probably going to give me a bit more options if I make a duplicate of my layer. I'm going to drag my layer onto the New Layer icon, and then I can lock down the previous one. Now, this means I've got a second copy of my original shape, and what I'm going do is go to the Direct Selection Tool. Because what I want to do is select over just the end of this shape, I don't want to select these anchor points here because this is what I can do now, I can move this shape around to create an additional shape. I'm just going to place it in the position I want it to be in. I'm going to go to the Swatches panel, and I want to create a new swatch for this particular groups, so just going to go, and select over the group. This once locked down, so we're not even targeting it. I'm going to click here on the "New Color Group" and I'm just going to click "Okay", so I have a second color group here. Now, at this point I'm going to click on the "Color Group" and click the "Recolor" dialog. I'm going to click "Edit" and I want to re-color this second color groups, so I'm going to target it here, and I'm just going to drag around to find another set of colors for it. Now, I've got my wheel in segments here, but you can get the regular wheel if you wanted to. I'm happy with this. I'm just going to click "Okay", and I'm going to save the changes to my color groups. I've got a second color group here, these are not global colors though. If we wanted global colors, we could select over this shape and go and create these as global colors and remove the original set. We would then apply these colors to our shapes and then double-click on this, make sure it is this global color, make sure this one is that global color, which it is, and so too is this one. We're going to repeat this, we're going to take the layer, drop it onto the New Layer icon, we'll lock down the other layers, we'll grab the front face of this shape and drag it around. Now, the reason why I said we're going to develop things in this area is that if we drag it over here, it no longer makes sense because it's missing this side panel. We'd need to add a side panel to it if we were to place it in this position. I'm just going to leave it in this quadrant, so it makes sense. I can drag it into any position, I can drag it in or out. Now, if I want this to be a different set of colors, I'm going to again select "Over My Shape", and I'm going to make a set of colors for this. I'm going to click the "Recolor" dialog. I'm going to click "Edit". I'm going to select the color group to use. I'm going to change the colors of this color group, and then click "Okay", and "Yes". If I want this to be global colors, I'm going to need to create them as global colors, and that means I can get rid of the set that is not global colors. We can double check this to say when we select this place that it is actually colored with a global color. I'm going to continue and add some shapes to my illustration. 4. Pt 3 Add and Resize Shapes: Let's look now at creating some extra shapes and resizing them. We'll go back to the last pallet. I'm going to lock down any shape I don't want to use. I'm going back to this blue shapes. I'm going to unlock it and duplicate it. I'm going lock down one version of it and go ahead and readjust the positioning of this version here. If I want it to be on top of everything, I can just drag it to the top of the last palette. I'm happy with the blue color, but at this stage, I want the face of this shape to be a bit bigger. The way that we do that is to make sure that we're on the direct selection tool and we select over just this face because we don't want to alter the vanishing point, but we do want to make this bigger. We'll go to the scale tool. I'm going to ''double-click'' on the scale tool, because that lets me access the dialogue. I want to a uniform scale and I don't want to scale strokes and effects. I don't want anything here to be scaled except for the shape itself. I'm just going to wind this up to about 120, well, probably actually 130. You can say that choosing these anchor points here has meant that the entire shape has now been sized up in proportion. I'll click "OK''. Now we have this shape here that is a larger size and we can continue and create shapes based on other shapes. I'm going to use the colors that I already have. I'm going to target the shape. I'm going to select the Direct Selection Tool, go to my shape, drag it into a new position. Position it above everything else. If I'd prefer that look, I'm going to reselect this and just move it back and I'm going to enlarge it. Again, I'll go to the scale tool and I think I'll drop this one up about 125 percent and click "okay". Again, If we want to move it around, we can just go and select over the face of it and just move it wherever it is that we want it to be. Now I'm going to continue and add a few additional shapes before we go on to the final step. In the next video, we'll have a quick look at taking one of these shapes into a different quadrant. 5. Pt 4 Place a shape in another quadrant: If you do decide you want to take one of these shapes into a different quadrant, this is what you're going to do. We're just going to isolate one of the shapes that we can use. I'm going to use this one at the top. I'll drag and drop it onto the new icon. I'm going to unlock it and I'm going to grab it with the direct selection tool, the duplicate, and just move it across into this panel here. What it's missing is this shape down here, and it's also got an extra shape here that it doesn't need. We're going to move things around a little bit. I'm going to open up the panel and open up the group. I'm going to decide which of these shapes I want to keep. Well, I want to keep this one across the top because this is this plane here. But it's this plane here at the back that I want to move. What I'm going to do is go and target it, and I'm going to zoom in and move it. With the direct selection tool, I'm going to select over the corners of this plane, and it's going to be hard for me to lock everything else down as I do this, so I'm going to grab this element and bring it across here and I'm going to grab this one and bring it across here. Again, I'm going to look at this in outline view with view outline just to check that I've got everything really neatly lined up. Let's just go in here and just make sure that the alignment is perfect. Looks like it's good there. Let's just go down here and make sure it's good down the bottom as well. It looks pretty good to me. I'll choose View and then Preview. I'll zoom back out. Now we've got a shape which will work in this quadrant of the grid. We just had to rebuild it slightly so that the panels that we were seeing are the ones that we would see if we were standing at this point and looking towards a vanishing point. We'll see this side of the shapes, but the side of this one. What we're going to do is just unlock everything here. I'm going back to the direct selection tool, just going to put this back a little bit. 6. Pt 5 Place a shape in line with the Vanishing Point: To finish my design, I'm going to put a shape here right over this line. Now I want to use a green one so I'm just going to go and locate one of the green ones and make a duplicate of it. I'm going to unlock it and bring it to the very top and lock everything else down. At this point, I just want to show you a keystroke that's going to make it easy to unlock and lock layers. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and just click here. Click once to turn the locks on and once to turn them off. You just want to toggle this until you have the locks on every other layer turned on and only the layer you want to work with is turned off. Now I can go and grab this one and I'm going to put it up in this position. It's going to be centrally located right across the middle of this shape. Now it's got a panel here that it doesn't need. Because we're looking at it face on, we're not going to say they side panels on that shape. I'm going to take this panel here, which is the one in question, and either just hide it or remove it. It doesn't really matter too much what I do. The important thing is, is that it's not in the middle of the illustration. We're not able to see it because we shouldn't be seeing it. 7. Pt 6 Finishing touches and wrapup: At this point I'm pretty much done. So I'm going to the last palette. I'm going to get rid of my guide, so I'm just going to turn them off. I'm going to add a layer, so it's going in at the top. I'm going to drag it to the very bottom because on this layer I want to create a rectangle that is the size of my art board, which is 1920 by 1080. It's filled with a solid color and I'm going to the Align panel and make sure that the options say aligned to art board. I'm going to center it on the art board and I'm going to fill it with a gradient. I'm going to the swatches panel. I'm going to choose Open Swatch Library and gradients and I'm going to choose Sky. We're going to fill the shape with the gradient using the gradient tool and now I can just test out my gradients behind my shapes and when I find one that I like, I may want to adapt it for use and I like this one so I'm going to make it a radial gradient by just selecting Radial. Then I'm going to my Gradient tool and I'm going to make my gradient start underneath the central point of my illustration and just pull it out. Actual fact, I think it might look better, a little bit buried inside it. Now we can change all the colors in the illustration if we want to, to do that we're going to need to come in here and to unlock all of these layers, then we can go select all and we can apply a color change. So I'm going to the re-color dialog. I'm going to click Edit. I'm going to lock my color relationships. Now I can start spinning around and just say what I can do in terms of re-coloring my shapes. If I wanted to, I could just come in here and split off a set of colors. I'm just being really careful to make sure that they orangey brown shapes. The three colors that are used to color them are all going in the same direction so that I don't have something that's green on them. I'll re-lock my colors and I can make a further adjustment. Truly quite liked that purpley look. If you're happy with that, you can click to add a new color group and just click okay. There's a way of creating 3D cubes in perspective in Illustrator, it's a perspective that we've created ourselves, that's one point perspective. Your project for this class will be to create an illustration in one-point perspective yourself using these cube shapes. Post the image of your completed illustration as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were not previously aware. As you were watching this class, you will have been asked if you would recommend the class to others. Please, if you did enjoy and learn from the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend the class to others and secondly, write in a few words why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Illustrator for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode, soon. 8. Pt 7 3D Perspective Stars: Once you've created your 3D perspective illustration, you may be interested in taking it a step further and actually creating an illustration that has stars in it. I'm going to show you quickly how you go about that. I'm going to choose "View Rulers" because I want to be able to see my rulers. I'm going to drag down my horizon line and then I'm going to drag across a line that's going to give me my vanishing point. Everything's going to be relative to this point here. Let me just get my Layers palette back here. I'm going to lock everything down and add a new layer. Now, I'm going to create a star. I am going to the Star Tool here and I'm just going to drag out a five pointed star. If yours is not coming out as a five-pointed star, just click on the "Art board" instead of drawing the star and just make sure it's set to five points. I've got a five pointed star here, which I'm pretty happy with. I'm going to fill it with an orange color. I'm going to choose this color. Next up we have to make our triangles. Again, they're triangles, even though it looks like you would create four-sided elements, we're just going to create triangles because that's going to give us our dimensions. I'm going to create a triangle with three points. I'm going to color it a bit darker so I can see what I'm doing. Go to the Direct Selection Tool. I'm going to anchor this one point just over here on the star. I'm going to take this one all the way out to my vanishing point, and I'm going to take this one to line up to this point of the star. I'm going to do that again. This time I'm going for a slightly lighter orange and my triangle's going to be in here. I'm going to grab the anchor point, lock it in there, lock the second one in at the inside of the star there, and then take this one all the way out to the vanishing point. We'll do that again. The Direct Selection Tool, I'm going to anchor this one here, anchor this one into here, and take this one all the way out to the vanishing point. We'll do it again. I'm going to choose a different orange for this. Take this one into this point here, this one into this point, and this one all the way out here, again to the vanishing point. Now, there's one more we need to do. I'm just going to make my triangle and we're going to test out which one we need. I don't think it's going to be in this area here, but I think it's going to be here. Let's just go and test it. I'm going to put one anchor point here, one anchor point in here, and take this one all the way back to the vanishing point. You can see that this is just a little bit of a triangle here. We don't need very much of it, and it needs to be behind this triangle here and behind the star. Let me just make this a bit darker so we can see clearly what the problem is. It's not the shape, it's in a perfect position, that's perfect shape. It needs to be behind this star and behind this shape. Let's go to the Layers palette, let's just rearrange things here. It's going to be the topmost shape because it's one we just created. I'm just going to pull it behind everything. Now we have a star with all of its shaded panels. We might want to do a little bit of re-coloring here, but we've got the star, so I'm going to leave you to recolor it. I am going to check it in Outline View though, because Outline View just lets us make sure that everything is in the right spot. When I drew this the first time, I did discover that I had a point that wasn't quite lined up here, but this time I've got everything. When you select direct, the only point I'm seeing is the one at the vanishing point, so everything looks pretty good. Again, what we'll do is, we'll select over this shape and we're going to group it with Object Group. We'll make a duplicate of the layer by dragging it onto the new icon. We'll lock down the previous layer. We're going to Direct selection tool because we want to select just over the face of the star, because that allows us to move it around. When we get into position we want it to be in, we'll double-click on the Scale tool if you want to, and you can enlarge it or shrink it as need be. That's an additional challenge for this particular 3D effect where you can create a star. Let me just show you one other thing that you can do with this once you've created them. I'm going to turn off that other star, I want this one here. I'm going to select over the front and over only and I'm going to move it up here so that its along the horizon line. I'm just placing it here, I'm going to select the entire shape and I'm going to make an Art Brush out of it. I'm going to click here on "New Brush" and I'm going to choose "Art Brush" and click "Okay". Now, in earlier versions of Illustrator, you won't have the Stretch Between Guides option, but if you do have it, I suggest you use it. Click on "Stretch Between Guides" and just move this guide to just past the tip of the star because this will allow you to bend and stretch it in this area, but not in this area. I've got it drawing this way. I'm going to start my stroke and finish it. The starting point of the stroke would be where the star is and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to click away from that star. I'm going to my "Brush Tool" and I'm just going to draw my star. You can see that having drawn original 3D element, we now got an opportunity to use it in different ways. In this case, in drawing a dimensional star using a brush.