Digital Illustration: Design a Fun Character!

1. Course Trailer: In this class, we'll explore digital illustration in character design fundamentals. I'll show you my own workflow on approach. I'll show you how I start illustrations, and I'll take you through Adobe Illustrator step - by - step so you get familiar with the process of converting hand - drawn sketches into full fledged vector illustrations. For the class project we'll be creating a robot character in any style you'd like. You can post your progress to get feedback and also ask questions in the discussion area to get help along the way. This class is geared towards beginners, and requires no prior knowledge or experience. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to have some fun. Let's grab a sketchbook, a laptop, and let's get started. 2. Inspiration: All right guys. We're starting our project and the very first thing I do is I start with inspiration. The reason I start with inspiration is because when you're embarking on designing a new illustration or something that you've never tried before, you have to really get understanding of the design vocabulary involved with the character or the thing that you're creating. With the robot, it's a cool design because it's simple but it's also very unique. There are so many different ways that you can make a robot, as you can see in this Pinterest board that I've created here. There's just so many ways to go about designing a robot. Honestly, you can get as simplified as you want it like this guy right here, where it's just straight geometrical shapes, or you can get as detail as you want to make it super realistic like this guy over here. I mean there's just so many ways you can take this project and honestly, I want to leave that up to you. I want you to make it as simple or as complex as you want to make it. How I went about it for this class is I went the simplified route because I wanted to make this a lightweight project for anybody to get into. Just jumping over to illustrate to your here, this is the final project that I came up with, and as you can see it's just very basic shapes. We have some light shading and masking going on inside the arms here to make it look like he has bendable arms, and just details right here with some shading, and then even some half-tones shading if we zoom in here too that's just applied as a stroke. I'm going to show you how to do all these things throughout this class. But just so you know, I always start with Pinterest because that's where I get my inspiration and it's nice because you can organize your inspiration in these very convenient little boards. Let's go ahead and move on to the next section, and we're going to start with sketching our robot. Now just so you know, the robot that I used for my base inspiration was this guy right here, and it might resemble my final project. You can see that just the spacing with his facial features, and then the very block like approach that I took with the robot. These are all what went into my final design and then there was one other one I thought that I use too. That was the main one. I think maybe just the general concept of the hands have that clam wrench looking shape. Yeah, but this was really the main one that I used for my inspiration and really just designed my own robot after and even took some of the accessory details like this little antenna, and I really just made it my own. This is how you can go about making an original artwork from scratch, but using inspiration that you gather online. Honestly, Pinterest is the best site that I've found to gather and organize all your inspirations. All right guys. With that being said, let's go ahead and move on to sketching our robot. 3. Sketching Tips: So in this video we're going to go over sketching and I'm just going to give you a few pointers of things that I would keep in mind as you create your robot. As you can see, this is the original sketch that I came up with for this project. The thing about it is it's not exactly straight and that's the one thing that can be frustrating about it. Because if you're just starting out with the illustration and you get to the point where you've got your sketch done and pull it into your computer and you're in Illustrator, and things aren't perfectly up and down straight, it can be a bit of an arduous task, lining things up or having to rotate multiple shapes in order to get your illustration to work. So what I recommend is picking up what is called gridded paper. That's what this is right here. I picked this up at my local art store and you can get it for pretty cheap. I think it's probably five to ten bucks for a pad and it just comes with a bunch of lined paper. So that when you're sketching, you can keep things perfectly straight and really just helps you maintain your artworks so that when you pull it into the computer, you can get started right away without having to worry about lining things up. So once I get to this stage of sketching and I'm ready to get started. What I usually do is I compile all the inspiration on a Pinterest board like I showed you in the last video. What I do is I hone in on one inspiration that really just sticks out to me and intrigues me. Then from there what I do is I just pull it into my phone and then I have something here to guide me along as I create my artwork. So I usually just set to the side and I'll work directly off the inspiration that I've found. This is not to say that you're supposed to copy somebody else's artwork. What I'm saying is that you can take from all of your inspiration and your research and apply the finer details in a way that other illustrators go about constructing something and apply it to your own piece. If you take a look at my sketch here, what I've done with this artwork is I've taken the facial features into account, for instance, as well as the block-like approach. I've even went ahead and took the artistic license of creating my own antenna and my own style. Then I also went about and made headphones for my robot, something that adds to this original idea and adds to the overall composition of this kind of artwork. All that you see here is just through trial and error and taking from multiple sources of inspiration and in a way synthesizing what I've seen being done and trying to do it my way in my own style. So in this step, I would just encourage you to pick one piece of artwork that you find on Pinterest and really hone in on the finer details of how it's balanced and composed and the way that artists went about expressing the overall picture as well as the finer details too. What I'm going to do is I'm not actually going to go ahead and recreate this robot on gridded paper. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what it looks like if you were just to do what I did using a regular sketchbook with no lines to balance out your artwork. I'll show you how to line it up inside Illustrator. So let's go ahead and do that and before we move into Illustrator, just keep in mind that you have to get the artwork to yourself. So if you can take a picture of it with your phone, just make sure it's lined up as much as possible or you can use a scanner or printer at home to scan in your artwork and make sure it's lined up before you bring it into Illustrator. But like I said, I'm going to keep this original sketch so I can show you how you can line it up if you decide to go with just free handing a sketch in your sketch book. 4. Starting the Illustration: We're ready to go ahead and jump into Illustrator finally. What we can do is first start by opening up Adobe Illustrator. As you can see, I have my robot scan up here at the top of the mountain, ready to go. I'm just going to open up my dashboard of applications here. Now for this class, I want you to know that I am using the most up-to-date version of Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator CC 2018. There's a lot of great new features and even a new tool that they've added to this program. But yes, it's the most up-to-date version. Let's go ahead and open it up. This is the starting screen for Illustrator. What we're going to do is create a brand new documents, we'll just click this button over here, Create New. What that does is it pulls up a box full of a bunch of pre-made templates that you can use, and this can be really useful. I've got things for mobile, web, print, film and video, and even art and Illustration. But what we're going to do is we're going to create our own document with their own dimensions. We're going to start by looking at this right panel over here. We're going to name our document something. I'm just going to put it as Robot Illustration. Below that what we can do is set our width and our height. Now to the right here, if we click on this dropdown, there's a bunch of different increments that you can use. You have points, pikas, inches, millimeters, centimeters, and pixels. We're going to use pixels because that's pretty standard. For this project we're going to make it something pretty large. So that if you want to export this out to the web or put it on a product later we have something that's reasonably large to start with. I'm going to start this document by making it a square. We're going to do a 1,000 and then tap down to go to high by 1,000 pixels. Since we're not putting this out to a physical printer our end, destination is going to be the web. We're not even going to mess with the settings below that. That's for bleed. We'll just go ahead and leave it as is. Then the other thing too is if you wanted to create multiple renditions, say if you wanted to try different colors for your illustration, you can create more than one art board within these settings. If you wanted to do 2, 3, 4 different renditions, you could do that. But since we're just going to do one project, I'm going to leave this set to one. Then we're going to create our document. The first thing I do with every illustration I start out with, is bring everything into the window and I center it up. There's a quite key command that you can use to do this. It's Command 0. That just simply fits everything inside your window and it brings it to the center. The second thing I do is I create some guidelines for myself. Because as I'm working with my illustration, I want to make sure everything's centered and looks good. What will do in order to make some guidelines for our self is bring up what's called rulers. You can get to that quickly by Command R. Now you see that there's rulers lined around our document. We can put our first guideline down by simply clicking on the ruler itself, keeping it clicked, and then dragging down. Then we'll see this dotted line that comes down with it. Now you'll hold "Shift" to constrain it. It's going to pop, to the nearest increment. It's right now at the center at 500 pixels. We're going to let that go. We got our first guideline. Now we're going to do the same thing for an up and down guideline. We're going to click on the left ruler, drag, bring it to the center of our document. Hold "Shift", and it popped it right in the center there. We'll let it go, excellent. Now we have our center point of our document right in the middle now, so we can build out everything around this center point. Now guides by default, they're locked once you've set them, if you tried to click on it and drag it, it just simply won't move. It's locked, if you want to unlock the guides, maybe you'd accidentally dropped it at the wrong point. You can hold option command semicolon, and that unlocks your guide. Now we can move this around. Just going to "Command Z" to undo that action. Then "Option Command semicolon" to lock those guides Backup. Now if you're working on your illustration and there's just something that you want to look at, and the guides getting in your way and you don't want that to hinder your view. You can just press "Command semicolon" and hide the guides. That will temporarily hide all your guidelines. But we're going to go ahead and bring it back up since we need a line up our scan. Command semicolon to bring them back, and now let's bring our scan into Illustrator. Now working on a Mac, I like that i can just bring in a document by simply dragging it into the program. What I'm going to do is minimize Illustrator for right now. Then we have our scan up here at the top of the mountain. I'm just going to simply click and drag this over the icon for Illustrator, what the Mac operating system does is brings up this window with our program. If I just hover over it, it'll pop me back into Illustrator. Then what I'm going to do is I'll roughly drop this around this center point that we made with our guidelines. I dropped our scan in there and you can see that it's not upright. There's easy way to fix this, all you have to do is with your black arrow selected, which is already selected. Because that's what every document starts us out with, is we'll go to the corner of our document and then you'll see this little symbol that comes up at the corner of our scan here. That's the rotation symbol. What we'll do is click and drag, and then just like we did with the guidelines, we're going to hold Shift to constrain it. This will lock it into 45-degree increments for rotation. Now that it's perfectly horizontal, we're going to let go. Our document is now upright. Our document right now it's small. We need to scale it up a little bit. There is a dedicated tool inside Illustrator called the scale tool. You can get to this by either clicking this icon over here or just simply pressing "S" on your keyboard. Then what you need to do first use the scale tool is just sent your reference point, because it needs to know where you want to scale out from. Since we set up some guidelines, we can set that reference point, which is this little circle here. I'll drag it out so you can see it. This is our center reference point for the scale tool. We're just going to drag this to the center guidelines. It locks right into bisection. Now one thing, since our document is blue and the bounding box is blue and our guidelines are also blue. I want to change what our document's outline looks like so that we're not getting confused as we work on our illustration. In order to change the lines of our document and the color that they have for the bounding box, we just double-click on the square icon for our layer. If we double-click on it, it'll give us the option to change the color for our bounding box right here. Right now it's at the light blue, and it's confusing us with the guidelines also being blue. Let's go ahead and make it light red. That's a good color, and we'll click, "Okay." Now the bounding box for our scan is a different color and we're not getting it confused anymore. Back to scaling our document, our reference point is now set in the center of drag this out so you can see it again. Then we just pop it right there in our guidelines, excellent. Now we can use the scale tool to just simply drag out. We're going to hold Shift yet again to constrain it, so it doesn't skew our artwork at all. We're just going to scale it up a little bit here and we'll see how big this makes our robot. Yes, scale is up pretty good. It's a decent size, I think want to make it even a little bit bigger. We're going to click down outside of our document again, and hold Shift to constrain it, and we'll release. That looks like a good size, I'm happy with that. Now what we need to do is line up our artwork, so it's straight up and down. Because if we don't do it, making these shapes within our illustration's going to be a bit of a pain, because we have to rotate everything. What we're going to do is just go back to our arrow tool, which is V on the keyboard. That brings us back to the black arrow tool, and we're going to make another guideline that goes right below the chin of our robot. We're just going to click on the ruler dragged down, and drop it about right there. That looks good, and now we can go to the corner of the scan and then just nudge it down a little bit here. Perfect. Now we need to get our robot to be centered with our center guideline. But first I'm going to go ahead and delete that extra guideline that we made. I'm just going to unlock our guidelines, Command Options, semicolon, select it, and then hit "Delete" on my keyboard. That's gone. Lock our guides again, Command Options, semicolon, and now with our document select and all we need to do is use the arrow keys on our keyboards and nudge it over. If you want to do a larger increment for that jumping and moving over all you have to do is hold down "Shift", and then it jumps further. I need to go back a little bit I'm going to use a left arrow key. Our artwork looks good right about there, perfect. That's really all we need to do to set up our document. I'm going to go ahead and lock this layer. Guys, now that we've created our document, we've set our guidelines and we've lined everything up. We can move on to creating our basic vector shapes and setting our colors, in the next video. 5. Coloring & Vector Shapes: We are going to work on creating the basic vector shapes for our illustration, as well as picking out the colors. First, I think we should pick out the colors. Let's go ahead and name this layer that we started with our scan, and just name as scan. That's a great thing to get into the habit of keeping things organized as you're starting out because it's really going to pay off in the long run when you look back at older documents and you're not sifting through a bunch of unnamed layers. We have our layer named and now we're going to work on picking our colors. For this illustration, I'm going to give you the entire color palette that I use and I have it conveniently written up in this notes document here. These are all my robots colors, I use a total of six colors. The main colors are really going to be either three shades of gray that I use, the light gray, medium gray dark gray, and then for the other parts of my robot, I have yellow, red, white, and then rich black. You can copy these right into Adobe Illustrator. My color picker is this thing right over here, you start out with picking your colors here. You can actually take these codes, these are hex codes is what they're called. I'm just going to copy the rich black here and put that right into the color picker. If i command V to paste it, it automatically changes the color to that rich black. I'm just going to hit "Okay". Now that we have a color selected, and here it's important that we have at least one selected first, what we need to do is setup our Swatch palette. What a Swatch palette is, is something that Illustrator uses specifically to organize color. I'm going to go to window at the top here and then scroll down until I see swatches right there, click it. This is the default Swatch palette. This is the default set of colors illustrator has set up for every document that you open inside illustrator. Since we want to create our own library of colors, we're going to go ahead and delete the current ones in here. You just do that by selecting the folder and then go into this little mini icon and then delete color group. Just say, yes, the same thing for these cold colors here. Delete color group. Now all we have left is this default set of colors and we can't delete it. I really wish you could to some extent, so you just keep your Swatch palette there. But what we're going do is we're going to create a new color group. We're going to just title this Robot Colors, say okay and now it's created as a new little folder here that we can put all of our colors into. For the first color, I'm going to put this rich black in there and then just drop that right into the folder. Then it just puts it right next to it. We got our first color, and then we're going to repeat this for all the other colors that we have in this note here, which can go right up the line. I'm going to add white, which is just F six times and copy that, and I'm going to speed through this part real quick so that it can set up this swatch for us. We have our swatch library setup. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take this panel that's out here by itself and we're just going to add it to our window for illustrator, and how you do that is you just click and hold this tab, drag it over and then we're going to drag it to the bottom here until we see a blue line. Once you see that, you just let it go. Now we have our Swatch Libraries setup right underneath, and it's quickly accessible to change our artwork any point in time. Now that we have all the colors that we're going to use, we're going to go ahead and start creating our basic vector shapes. What we're going to do is we're going to start out with a rectangle. Going over the tools panel over here, we're going to go to rectangle where that's M for the keyboard shortcut. What we're going to do is, as you can see, you can't actually draw a rectangle on here because everything is locked and there's not another layer for me to draw on. What we need to do is add a layer to our layers panel and that's going to be this little icon right here, Create New Layer, and it automatically creates a new layer above the currently selected layer. Let's go and name that to keep it organized and we're going to name this Head. As you can see, the color for this is the same as the last layer. Let's go and change it to something else just so that it's easier to see. Let's do purple in head. We're now ready to draw a rectangle and we're just going to begin the robot illustration by clicking on the top left corner up here to get our rectangle started. It's not a perfect square, so don't even bother holding shift, just follow the outline of the scan. That looks really close, just let go. As you can tell, it automatically filled the head with a light gray, which is perfect because that's the color that we want for the robot's head. We have our first shape created, and we're going to repeat this step for all the other basic shapes that we have inside of our illustration. I'm going to do the chin of the robot now. Then we'll move on to the neck here. If you find that it's hard to get into these small spaces, you can always hit Z to bring up the zoom tool. Then you can just click and drag to bring in closer. Then we'll hit them to go back to the rectangle tool. Now I find that when you get into these smaller spaces, it's hard to avoid having the rotation tool come up. What I usually like to do is just de-select everything by hitting Shift Command A and then you can just continue working on your shapes without being bothered by the rotation symbol coming up for the previous selected shape. So we're going to do the same thing for the neck and Shift Command A again. Right now everything's is just this like gray color. It's not going to stay that way. We're just trying to get our basic shapes started. Alright, go. Shift Command A and de-select everything, and then, alright that looks like all of our basic shapes. Actually, we have to deal with the ball on the antenna. Lets go and get that knocked out too. In order to pan around your document, you can just hold down your Space-bar. You'll get this little hand symbol and you can click and drag to move upward. To go to the circle tool or the circle shape, you just go back to the same tool, click down and then you get all these other options underneath that you can select from. It's called the Ellipse tool or L on your keyboard. Now in order to draw and start drawing out from the center of your sketch, you just hold down option in the middle of the circle. Then it comes up with that little circle symbol there. Then you just click as close as you can to the center of your circle and then drag out. We need to constrain this one because we want a perfect circle. While we have options still held down, we need to hit shift. We notice that the circle is a little bit off center. We're going to also hold down space-bar. I know this sounds like a lot of key commands to be holding down at the same time but as you get used to illustrator, this is really going to speed up your workflow. Hold down the space-bar and as you can see, we can move around the shape now. Just going to try to position that right over the center and that's pretty good. Someone to let go. Then feed go back to my black arrow tool and it's a little off-center and it's because this guide was causing it to snap to it. I'm going to hide the guides command semicolon. If at any point in time, shape that you've created, you find this a little bit small and you want to make it a little bit larger, you just need to zoom in a little bit. Z for zoom in and then click and drag. We're going to go back to the black arrow tool, select the circle and then you want to get this little symbol to pop up that has the diagonal arrows, which means you can scale out diagonals. Click and drag holding shift to constrain it to a perfect circle and I think this circle will be good at that size right there. Then I'm just going to use the left, right, up and down arrows to nudge this into its place. Looks good. Now to bring everything out back to a bird's-eye view will just hit that command zero to fit everything in the window. We have everything flashed out for the basic shapes and everything else is going to be custom shapes that we make in the next video. But before we move on, I want to go ahead and center all these rectangles that we've made. We're just going to use our black arrow tool and select and click down, drag until you see a bounding box that covers all the shapes. Select them all. Now we need to align them so that they're centered. How are we going to do this is we're going to pull up another panel called the Align panel. We're going go to window, align and line up at the bottom over here. I'm just going to drag this up. I'm going to pull this out, close this other panel and then we're going to drag this to the middle, right above our colors. That looks good. Now with the alignment options, there's, quite a few here. By default there's some more options that need to be brought up. We're going to go to this menu icon, show options. Then let's make this a little bit bigger here. So for aligning, you have three different options. You can align to your current selection. You can align to a key object, which just means you select an object and everything aligns around that object that you've selected, or you can align to the art board. For our drawing, since our head was probably the most centered shape that we made, we're going to click Align the key object. It automatically selected this bottom shape. All we need to do is just click the top shape because that's somewhere we want align everything to. It's align everything we just need to go back to the panel and select horizontal align center. That automatically shapes all of our shapes in accordance with the head of our robot. We can just hit shift command and de-select everything. At this point you're probably wondering, what about the eyes and the mouth? That's the last thing that we're going to do before we move on to creating custom shapes. So what I'm going to do is just turn off the color for this shape temporarily. You can do that by selecting the shape and then it hitting this little slash through to none at the side over here. Now we can see our eyes and before I go ahead and select the circle tool and start making the eyes, I want to actually start putting everything on a separate layer. Because right now as you can see, everything that we've made so far is on the head layer. What we need to do is just go down to create a new layer. Then let's just title this face elements. Now if we lock this layer at de-selects everything that's currently on that layer and we can't even move it. We can't do anything to it, so everything is safe. Then we can make the eyes on this layer. Let's go back to the circle tool. Will done option to get it in the center again. Click Shift constrained proportions, and it's not in the center again there. Let's hold down the space bar. Now it's automatically popping us all around because there's some snapping on. What I'm going to do is just let that go. Hit command Z to undo. What we need to do is we need to turn what's called smart guides off. That's just what you see right here, these little blue lines that try to keep you in sync with everything else, giving you an idea of where you're placing your shapes and all that. Sometimes that gets in the way when you need to create shapes that are a little bit off grid of everything else. In order to turn smart guides off, you just go to view smart guides and then click it. Or as you see here, they have a keyboard shortcut command you to turn them off. We'll just hit command you and we no longer see those blue guides. We are free to make shapes wherever we want. Let's go back and create this eye with a circle tool now. Click holding option center it, drag, shift to constrain. That looks good. Colors also again, hard to see. Let's go back up to our layer, double-click the icon and change this to teal. That's fine. Then go back to our black arrow tool, which is V on the keyboard. To copy this you just click Hold Alt to duplicate, drag and then hold shift so that it stays straight with the other one. Align it or that looks good, like go. Now we have two eyeballs. Let select both of them are just going to click One and then Shift click the second one. They're both selected. Since we created this handy swatch library, we can select the white here to color the eyes. Now we have two whites of the eyes. Now we need to create the pupils for each eye. What we're going to do is select one of the eyes and we're just going to do command C to copy and then command F to paste in front. Then we're going to scale that one down hold shift to constrain it, and then all to keep in the center there, and then let go. Then we'll select our black and the swatch library here. Cool. Then we're going to use the arrow keys to nudge that down until it hits the edge of the white of the eyes and zoom in here so I can see this actually. Too far. You need to zoom out. You just hold down option, click and drag the zoom tool there. Hold down the spacebar option over. That pupil looks a little bit big. I'm just going to scale this down a little bit. It's pretty good right there. Yeah, it looks good. Lunch it down with the arrow keys. Then I'm going to hold on all to duplicate it and then shift to keep it straight with the other one, and bring it to the other eye. That's on the other side now the only thing is it's behind the eye of the second eyes. In order to bring this to the front, all we need to do while it's still selected is hold down command and then right bracket, and then it pops it in front. Then the last feature that we need to make Is the mouth for our robot. We're going to make another circle and then hold on alt on all to keep it centered, spacebar to pan around and change the position of the shape. That's good. Now lastly, we're going to make this a half circle. The easiest way to do that is to switch to the direct selection tool, which is this white arrow tool up here. Switch over to that by hitting the keyboard shortcut a. Now we can select the individual vector points is what these are called. You can change the shape command Z to undo that. In order to make this a half circle, all you need to do is select this top vector point and then Delete on your keyboard, and now it's a mouth. Let's command zero to fit everything in our window again, and then shift command A to de-select everything. Let's bring back the head in here. Do that by going to that layer, select the head off of this layer, the head and then we'll just select this gray color down here to make everything the same color. Now that we have all of our basic shapes created, we're going to go ahead and start creating these custom shapes that don't really fit the mold of our standard geometrical shapes. There's two tools we're going to take a look at to make these custom shapes. The first one is the Puppet Warp tool, and the second is the Hand tool. We'll take a look at both of those in the next video. 6. The Puppet Warp Tool: We have our basic shapes created and now we're going to start working on our custom shapes within the illustration. What we're going to do is we're going to start by working on the arms, legs, and feet. Let's go ahead and create a new layer and let's just label this. We're going to zoom into our document and little bit here, so you have a better look at the arms. We're going to hit M for our rectangle tool. What we're going to try to do is get the thickness of our arm in here. We're going to try to line this up and make it so that we can just bend it because that's what the Puppet Warp tool is for its bending shapes. It's something that they just add in the recent update of illustrator and it's super useful. Let's make sure we have the right color selected. Let's go to our layers palette over here, get that light gray selected now. Let's just start on this edge by clicking, dragging and getting that thickness just right. We wanted to make enough room so that we can bend this arm. It's probably good right there. Let's try that. The Puppet Warp tool is this little icon over here with a pin in it, and you just select it. How this tool works is you place joints within your shape and then you can bend one of the pin joints. Let's go ahead and move this shape up a little bit here and inward a little bit. I think we might need a little bit longer. I'm just going to use this edge to drag out with our black arrow tool, cast pie a little bit better. We're going to make one joint here, another joint right in the center, and then another one right at the end. This is going to function like bones, I guess you could think of it as because we're going to bend this edge. Just click and drag and we have the bend of an arm. Now it looks funny, but you don't have to keep this the same way, you can go to this other joint and then adjust it as needed to. Then we'll go to this joint over here, reposition a little bit. It has more of a natural bend to it to look like an arm. Then we need to move this one up. Try to get it as close to your illustration as possible, and then we can de-select everything, Shift Command A. You notice there's a stroke on the shape, let's go ahead and select the shape again with the black arrow tool and then go to the stroke here, click on it and then hit None for stroke because we just want to leave that blank. That looks pretty good. That was a super quick way to make the arm. We're going to do the same thing for the rest of the limbs. Do this by clicking on it, holding down Option to duplicate it, drag it over to the armpit of the other side. Then we'll use a rotation tool and that's R, and then set our reference point right here in the middle and then drag our shape down. It's pretty close. Now we can even switch to the direct selection tool, adjust the white arrow and then adjust these anchor points if you want it to. That it looks closer to our illustration. It looks a little funky, I want to undo that, zoom in a little bit more here. Then you can also use these things right here, these are called Beziers curves. You'll notice as you click and drag on little balls at the end of them, you can adjust the curvature of your shape. You can do a lot of custom shapes with these Beziers curves. Then when you drag a segment, adjust both Beziers curves for you, just do a little bit more, an adjustment here. You got to make sure you select the individual nodes for the vector points in order to get the arms to conform. Yeah. That's looking pretty good there. Just want make sure this maintained the same thickness throughout. Yeah, that actually looks pretty good. Let's command zero to come back out here. Yeah, that looks good. Let's zoom in and work on these feet now. We're just going to create a brand new rectangle for both feet. Start at the edge here, spacebar to adjust the position and the shape. Then we'll go back over to our Puppet Warp tool, let's place a joint there, there and there. Drag over to bend the leg. Adjust the center one a little bit, let's de-select everything. It's looking pretty good. Then you'll notice after you de-select everything, you can't get back to the Puppet Warp tool without first selecting the shape with a black arrow tool first, you just select the shape and then you go back to the Puppet Warp tool and you can continue adjusting the joints as you need to. I'm thinking that's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and V for the black arrow tool, let's option drag to the other leg. We're going to use another tool called the Reflect tool. You can find that right under the rotation menu here and it's the one right underneath the Rotate tool, it's the Reflect tool. That or you can hit O on your keyboard to get to it. The anchor point, that's going to be our reference point for reflection is this one over here. We're just going to click on the point where we want it to reflect from. We're going to use the center point of the shape and then reflect. Cool. Let's move the shape over with the arrow keys. That looks good. Then we're going to use the Puppet Warp tool to also make the soles of the feet down here on the same layer. Let's go back to the rectangle tool M and just make some souls roughly the same thickness as our drawing. Let's create some pin joints here. Then go back to the center to drag down. Nice. Black Arrow Tool V, and let's Option drag that shape over here and see if this is going to work and see if we can rotate it into place. I think if we go back to the Puppet Warp tool, we can adjust a joint here to conform to our illustration. Now we have the arms, legs, and the soles of the feet created. Good. That looks pretty close. We're going to zoom back out now. That looks pretty good. That's how you use the Puppet Warp tool to create custom shapes. Now I'm going to show you how to use the Pen Tool to create shapes. 7. Using the Pen Tool: We're going to start by working on the hands for our robot. I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer for hands and just title this Hands, of course. Before we start working on the hands, we're actually going to go over to our Swatch library and start using the dark gray this time to make the hands. But before we do that, we need to make sure that the foreground color is selected and the stroke is not selected. That's good. We can just close out this little Color panel right here as well, and we're going to select dark gray. Going to zoom into this hand over here. The Pen tool is this one right here, it's the third menu option, below the black arrow tool. Just like I said, the Pen tool is super powerful. It can be a bit tricky to get started with it and learn how to use it, but once you get the hang of how to set your anchor points and bend bezier curves, it's going to be such a magical tool for you to create so many different letter types and shapes and custom illustrations with. As far as the basics go with using the Pen tool, you want to, for every corner on your illustration, you want to place a point. We're going to start by placing a point right on this hand and then for every area that you want to create a curve, you will click the place of point, but you'll keep it held down and drag. We're going to create a curve right here at the bend of the horseshoe-looking hand. Click down, drag and you'll see that two bezier curves come out from the Pen tool. This is what's going to create the bend in our segment. We're going to drag until it matches that curvature, let go. We're going to continue on, feel it out so that we can follow the curvature of this entire hand. We want to make sure that the color goes over the arm a little bit. We're just going to click down in the center here, drag out. You can also use a spacebar to reposition your anchor points, so you can move it around. I think that looks good right there. I'm going to let that go and continue on to this next curve. Click, drag out, and we're going to create a point for every corners, so every point gets a point. Now it's starting to create a full shape. Actually what we're going to do is for right now, just go ahead and turn off Color fill, so just select the none over here. Now we can just see the line that our shape is about to create. If that's a little hard for you to see, we can do like we've done with everything else, and just double-click this icon and change it to something that's a little more darker, we'll do dark blue here. It's a little bit easier to see. Then since this is a point, it gets a point and then we're going to click and drag to get a curve, use a spacebar to reposition, and for these tighter corners, you're going to want smaller bezier curves coming out of your segment. Sometimes you can even get away with just skipping to the other side and drawing a curve and making a curve out of the two, but as you can see here, if we do that, it's going to make two pointy curves, so we're just going to undo, Command-Z, and then create a small curve here as well. With the Pen tool, it's really powerful, but like I said, it can be tricky, so if you need to take your time with it, do so. I mean, it's going to take a while to get adjusted to such a custom capable tool, and you just need to take your time with it. As you can see I've undone my Pen tool actions several times just in the time that we've spent with this hand, so don't feel afraid to do that, and then you can continue your segment or you're shaping and place your vector points exactly where you want them. I'm going to click and drag for a curve here, spacebar to reposition, looks pretty good, and then it's a point, so it gets a point, and then we'll close the shape right there. We got our first hand made, and if we go back over to this Color picker and select the Color fill, it recolors it for us with that dark gray. Now let's just deselect everything and zoom out here to get an idea of how this looks in context with the rest of our illustration. It's looking pretty good. Zoom back in. If you want, you can always go back over your custom shape that you made with the Pen tool using the direct selection tool, which is A and adjusting any of these points if you feel like they're off in any way. We'll zoom in here a little bit and just see if there's anything we can tighten up at all. This curve right here looks a little weird, so let's select this node and maybe drag the bezier curve down a little bit. You can even tuck these bezier curves in if you feel like that will help your shape too. Let's let that go and see what that looks like, now, it looks even worse. Let's drag it back out here, and can always click outside just to see what that shape looks like. Let's turn off the Scan layer. Yeah, it's easier to see without the Scan layer. Let's select on the shape, click this node here, just trying to get more of a rounded about looking shape, not so edgy. It's okay if some of it looks edgy because this style of illustration portends to being a little bit less refined. That looks okay. This corner's a little bit rough here. That looks better. I think I want to move this arm in too. Since it's unlocked in our layers panel over here, we can still move this. Let's select the arm here and just bring it up so that it's behind the hand. Make sure that didn't affect anything else with the rest of the arm. Let's zoom out. Now it's looking pretty good, I'm liking that. Let's Command-Zero for everything in the window. Let's Option, drag right there, and then we can use a Rotation tool, bring that down a little bit. Let's bring the Scan back in so you can see it in reference. We need to bring it down a little here. Not too shabby. Now let's go ahead and create some custom shapes for the actual feet. Let's go back to the Pen tool over here. This is going to be a lot easier of a shape to create because there's less curves to create. What we're going to do is just click down and click every point. Just remember, each point gets a point. Same thing over here. Then you're going to have a little bit of curve on the heel, so we'll click down and then drag, and then we're going to close the shape up. Also, the other thing about the Pen tool, if you notice, if I try to close the shape, it's going to give me this really weird curve to close it. You can actually break off bezier curves just by clicking on it once, it snaps it off, and then you can close your shape just like that. Now we have a completed foot right there. Let's see like we've done with everything else and just select it, option drag and we're going to use the Reflection tool again. We'll reflect from this point right here, drag it over, and now we have an upright foot. Can use our black arrow tool to reposition everything, get it straight here. You'll notice that my foot in the original illustration was not exactly centered, so what we're going to do is we're going to adjust the shapes to conform to an upright position. We'll use the rotation tool, R on the keyboard, select this node over here, drag up a little bit. Yeah, it looks better. Can even maybe bring the shape in a little bit. There we go. Now in order to get the soles of the feet to show above, all we need to do is drag the hands and feet layer below the arms, legs and feet layer. We're going to go ahead and start coloring some of these other elements, their proper color here and it's probably a good idea at this point to just bring in my original project for reference. We'll just drag this into our document and we're going to have to scale that down a little bit, in fact this place is on it's own layer. Let's create a new layer, it's ref for reference, it's on its own layer, we can lock it. The arms need to be this medium gray and actually got the color of my feet and soles backwards. Let's go ahead and select both feet. Click the foot and then shift click the other one. We're going to select the medium gray here. Let's do that with the arms and feet. Now, a cool thing too is since we have the arms, legs and feet on their own separate layer, we can just meet all this one and select the medium gray for that as well and then the only thing that's wrong in this is the soles of the feet need to be dark gray. We'll click it, shift click and then select dark gray in our swatch. Cool, this is looking good so far. Now we just need to drag this arms, legs and feet layer below the body, let's do right there, everything popped into place as it should and the other thing is the chin in there like the pants of the robot needs to be a medium, great too. Starting to come together now. Let's go ahead and continue on by making the headphones and the antenna here. It's actually create that phones on their own separate layer, drag up below the head and headphones are going to be this medium gray and we're going to go back to the pen tool. Let's create this headphone first, we going to zoom in a little bit here and the pen tool is P in your keyboard too if you want to get to that quickly. For this one, since it's not exactly a straight corner and it's curved, we're going to start out being straight as possible with this point and then let's just see if we tap the curve there, what it looks like if we just do a really small curve. I think that's going to turn out pretty good. Click in the middle, drag to get this curve, do the same thing with this one, a really tight curve and then we can complete our shape. Then you can see that since our headphone layers below the head layer, it actually masked out part of the headphones, that's all we really need to create for that shape to give it that look of headphones being on his head. Let's just deselect everything. Let's turn off the scan and see what that looks like. That's good, we'll leave it like that and then we're going to select this shape. We're going to command C to copy, command F to paste in front and then we're going to use auto reflect, use this as the center point, click and drag, good and then we're going to go back to the black arrow tool and then just shift and use the right arrow key and move it over. Might need reposition this a little bit. Turn on the scan, see where we're at, maybe a little bit of rotation is all that's needed. Make sure that it's same height. Yeah, that's sound better. Let's pan up here and then work on the headphone brace. This is going come below the head layer too and then it's also going to be behind the antenna. Let's just create this behind the headphones, drag this down, brace and what color was this one? Let's see, this was the dark gray. Let's select dark gray in our swatch library and then start working on the shapes. We'll do the same thing with this one, just start with the point and then pull up a tight corner here, just a very small curvature, here we go and actually that shape was not exact, I'm going to undo that, I'm going to get him here a little further, zoom in. Looks good, I'm just going to snap this one to make it straight acrossed and then we need to turn off the colors. We can see the rest of the shape here. Snap that corner, snap the inner corner there and then you can hold shift to get a perfectly straight line too, makes it easier. Complete a shape over here, I want to follow that inner curve, that looks good, and snap, complete our shape. Let's bring the color back in and see what that looks like and then turn off the scan here, see what the balance of everything looks like, not bad. Let's bring the scan back in and now we can work on the antenna. Lets go ahead and create that above the brace layer. We'll just start out by making this base rectangle first and then let's go to the pen tool, zoom in a little bit here and then the color for this was a little bit lighter. Yes, the medium gray and then the shapes really easy because it's practically all points and it's okay if we go above that, right there. Yeah, super, simple shapes to create and then in order to move this shape behind the base of the antenna, what we going to do is command left bracket to move it behind, perfect. Turn off the scan, zoom out, see what everything looks like. It's really starting to come together now. Just some small housekeeping details to keep everything similar with our final project. The eyes aren't exactly the same, I want to move those up a little bit, we're just going to select and shift select the other one,and then use the arrow tool to move this up a little bit and then let's make this mouth dark gray and then the other thing too is the soles of the feet. Those are showing up at the bottom. Let's actually put those on their own layer. We're going to create a new layer and then do soles. You already have one sole selected, we're going to shift click the other one and then we'll take the meatball and move up to the soles. Now that it's on its own where all we need to do is drag it above the hands and feet layer, there we go, cool, looks good. The last thing that we need to do before we move on to our final video where we're going to work on masking, shading and texturing is just to line up the face elements. We're going to bring our guides back in, we just command some icon and we're going to zoom in a little bit here and just see where everything looks it's placed, and in order to get off phase elements to the center of what we're going to use, select the meat ball for that layer and we're going to group all these shapes by hitting command G on our keyboard. That's one object and in order to line it up with the head, what we're going do is shift click the head as well and now we're going go over to our align panel that we've set up earlier and we're going to go down to key object, aligned to key object and have it selected on the head here and then now we can just horizontal align center and then shift it all of her face elements, that looks good. It's commands here to move out. Great. It looks everything is really starting to come together. The only thing that we need to do as far as custom shapes go now is create that center rounded rectangle and that's going to be super easy, let's zoom in here real quick. 8. Repeating Shapes Along Circular Paths: Let's go to the Shapes menu and they actually have a rounded rectangle tool that you can use for this part. We're just going to start at this corner. Looks good right about there. Then this center shape is actually a dark gray, so we'll select that in the Swatch palette and we're going to create a separate layer for this chess piece. We're just going to put robot meter. Since it's selected, we'll go back to the black arrow tool and drag the selection up. Let's go in the center of that shape too. The only thing left now is creating the meter points as well as the meter arrow. To create the meter arrow, we're just going to use our pen tool again. We'll do this off to the side here. You'll notice that I've selected the red color for the arrow already here. Going to your swatch library and do that as well. We're going to do this off to the side. Make sure you're smart guides are up so you can see that it's in line with the other point there. Looks good. Then close that shape. Now I'll go to the black arrow tool and scale this down. Hold shift to keep the shape of the arrow. Then we'll drag this over the meter. This needs to be a little bit smaller still, zoom in here. Hold shift to constrain, and rotate. I think this is a little too small, I'll adjust this in a second. Yeah, pretty close. The last thing that we need to do to create this meter is create the meter points. Let's do that. We're going to start by just creating the first meter point. We're going to select our yellow color in the swatch panel. We're going to go to our rectangle tool, which is M on the keyboard. Let's go ahead and start here in the center. Just smart guide just getting in our way there. I think that looks good. Select it, let's horizontal line center with a head. Then let's nudge it up. Let's see, it looks a little bit larger than our illustrations. Zoom in here. I think this a tad smaller. There we go. Now it's a line. Then I'm going to show you this cool trick in order to get multiple copies to go around a perfect circle with equal spacing. What we're going to do now is create an ellipse and hold shift to constrain all to certain a center here, space-bar to move it around, and we want this top arch of the circle to reference our meter points for. Let's make this circle big enough. I think it's going to look at right there. It's like go turn off color. It's horizontal aligned center this as well with the head. We're actually going to go ahead and turn back our smart guides back on Command Hue. We're going to select the first meter point and we are going to hit our for our rotation tool. Then it's important to option click the center point of the circle. That's why you need smart guides on to see that. So option, click the center point here. This is going to bring up our rotate panel. What we're going to do is I have the very set increments in order to get this art store, right. We're going to put in 18 degrees for our angle. Then we're simply just going to hit copy, and that gives us one copy, 18 degrees apart from the first. Then in order to repeat this, a total of five times more, we're going to do Command t five times. Awesome. Then we're going to go to our Layers Panel and select every meter point. All seven of them. Then we're going to go back to our rotate tool and find the center of the circle again. There we go. Just click it there, and then drag this around. Well, roughly align this up at the center of a robot. Shift Command aided de-select everything. Looks pretty good. I'm digging it. We are getting so close to completing our illustration. What we need to do still is mask the lines for our illustrations arms to get the details, and for the shoes. Tidy up some of these points I saw on here. I think one of these arms. Yeah, I just need to tidy up this point real quick. I'm trying that behind their whoops. Tiny that point up. Yeah, it's good. Maybe try the curvature in a little bit. Then this chin shape needs to go behind. Let's try command left bracket to move it behind. That worked perfect. So we've titled those things up. Really all we need to do now is work on our masking, shading for the top part of the antenna, and the texture that I put in with a stroke here on the headphones. That's really okay. Let's go ahead and move on to the last and final video. 9. Shading, Masking & Texturing: Here we come to the last video, guys. We're going to make our final touches and get this illustration polished up. We're going to start with a thing called block chaining, and we're going to add some shade appearance to this antenna ball, just like we have in the original illustration. A lot of graphic designers use this as the means to shade their artwork within an illustrator. Let's go ahead and first grab our black selection arrow and select it. We're going to command C to copy, command F to paste in front, and we're going to do that one more time. Just command F to paste in front. Now we have two copies. I want to move this off a little bit, and then we're going to color the one below it darker and moving closer here. This one is going to be dark gray. Now, we're going to use a new panel that I haven't showed you yet. It's called the pathfinder panel. The pathfinder panel is a really useful panel, and you can cut and intersect, basically dice up your shapes however you want, and this can give you some very customized shapes. This is going to be another tool in your tool bar while you're illustrating. The one that we're going to use to create the shade is minus front. This is going to cut this circle shape out of the back circle. We're going to go ahead and select the back one first, front one second, and we're going to use the minus front command, and it just cuts that right out. Now, we have the back circle, which is the original shape that we created, and then we also have this front shaded if it were the backside of the object. Actually I think that's a little bit too big of a shade. I'm going to undo this whole thing, and we're going to take off smart guides, so command U. We're just going to move this shape in a little bit further. I want this to look a little bit more convincing than it did. If you leave it right there, it's going to look pretty good. Then select the front shape and then use the minus front command again. There we go. That looks better. If we zoom out all the way, yeah that looks really close to our original. Awesome. Let's go ahead, and now move onto the next stage of detail. What we're going to do is called masking, where we take smaller shapes and then basically contain them within another shape to give it this detailed look with the robot's arms over here, as you can see, these lines up and down the arms and legs as well. What we're going to do is, we're first going to move to the arms and legs layer, we're going to select it, and we're going to start by using the pen tool to create the lines. I'm going to go ahead and select the color that we're going to use first after I pick the pen tool here, and we're just going to switch this to stroke instead, because these are going to be strokes. Let's select light gray for the stroke. It's close at the pathfinder tool box. We're done with that. Let's go to the pen tool. Now for these, I tried to keep these like almost half circles or half ovals to make the arm look rounded. Now, let's go to the black arrow tool v. While that's selected, we can go to the properties panel up here on the right. Let's turn up the stroke a little bit. I think three maybe. Yeah, three looks good,. What we can do is select this, option drag, and position this along the arm. Let's rotate this one a little bit. Something with this one. It's looking good. Do another option, drag, rotate it here, maybe zoom in a little bit more here. Option drag again, rotate, and maybe let's space these out a little bit more. What we're going to do is now select this back arm shape. We're going to copy command C, and then command F to paste in front. We're going to bring this object to the front, and that's going to be shift command right bracket. Now, we need to take all these little strokes that we created. It's just going to be easier if we group them. That's going to be command G, and now we can select both the copied arm shade that we brought to the front and then these back strokes. Then we're going to go to object, clipping mask make. Then as you can see, the keyboard shortcuts command 7 if you wanted to do that quicker. Then now we have the arm details. Let's zoom out to get a look at that, and yeah, that looks good. Think it might even look a little bit better than the original. I think they both look good, but it's nicer to see a thicker stroke on the arm. You can see that detail much easier, and a lot thinner of a stroke on the original illustration. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and repeat this process for the other arm, and then the other two legs as well. We have our arms and legs sound with all the detailing, and now let's work on the feet. I did the same thing for the feet. I masked some dark gray lines within the feet, and then I also put a little polygon shape in there to make it look like a little nut that was holding his feet together for his ankle joints. Let's go ahead and start off with making the polygon, and actually we need to go to the hands and feet layers so that it shows up on top. We're on the right layer now, hands and feet, and then we have the dark color selected. Now we can just use the polygon tool to make the ankle joint. Let's click and drag, space bar to reposition, shift to keep it straight on the ankle, and that's probably big enough. Yeah, let's try that. Now we can just option drag over to the other ankle, hold down shift to keep it straight to you so it locks in there. It looks good let's get right there. Let's go ahead and just make some small adjustments to this sole here, before we start on the line work, and actually I'm just going back into the puppet warp tool here, and I'm going to adjust the center point, adjust to 10, select the other shape over here too. Just see if we can bring this up, just a smidge. Now, let's go ahead and work on a line detailing. Let's bring out the pen tool again, and let's switch this to stroke. Then the properties panel, let's kick this up to two. Let's leave it at two, it looks good. Then will snap this Bezier curve here. Hold shift to get a straight line down here, and then you can just drag out with this one again. Now, it's looking exactly like my original sermonis in the direct selection tool, the white arrow, and just nudge these over a little bit. That's not bad. Then we'll do the same thing we did with the arms. Let's select the foot and then Command C, Command F to paste in front. Actually, since I started the detailing on the sole layer, let's bring it down to hands and feet layer. Then do the Shift Command right bracket again for the hands and feet layer. Cool. Now we can just go and select that stroke, select the foot, and then Command seven to do a clipping mask. Before we do that, actually, I want to deselect this. Let's just go ahead and select this option drag and then O to bring up the reflect tool. Leave the center point where it is and then just drag to get that locked into place. Go back to the black arrow tool, knock this over a little bit, there we go. Now we have a copy to do for the other foot in a second. Select both the stroke and the foot and then Command seven to mask. Do the same thing for this one, Let's do Command C to copy, Command F, and then Shift Command, right bracket, select both shapes, Command seven, and we've masked the detailing. Sweet. It looks great. The last thing that we need to do now is just add the little bit of text string that I put on the headphones here. If we zoom in real close, we can see that I used a half tone stroke. Let's zoom back out here. This is pretty simple all we're going to do is go to the headphones layer here. We're going to zoom in, we're going to go to the pen tool. Then we're just going to make a stroke that rides along the inside of the headphones here. We're going to bump this stroke up a couple of points. Now what we're going to do is use a swatch for it. Then before we do that too, let's just go and copy this to the other side. Use a reflect tool. Now in order to get the half tone texturing that I got for the headphones, I actually used a third party pack from a small design company called True Grit Texture Supply and I'll show you what it looks like, It's this pack right here it's just the Vector Savior Distressed Vector Halftone Patterns for Illustrator. Now if we go into our swatches panel, I'm just going to drag this out temporarily, and we go to Open Swatch Library, they show up right here at the bottom. I love using third-party packs, because that means you don't have to do all the nitty-gritty work of setting things up, they're just there for you to use and apply to the aesthetics of your illustration right off the bat. I'm going to open up the Vector Savior Halftone Dots Swatches here, and they show up in their own panel. We're going to go to Large List View. Then the preset that I use in order to add a swatch to the stroke was the craft board medium. What we actually need to do is just flop these, switch these and then hit none for the color fill, so that the texture only gets applied to the stroke. The color of the texture is actually different than what we want it to be, because if we look in the original illustration, it was a dark gray and not a black. In order to change the color of that swatch, we need to go to where the swatch is in the panel. It's right there, you just got to add it to the main panel. We're going to double-click and it brings us into the settings for the original swatch. Then we're going to do Command A to select all. Then it brings the color up in the color picker for the swatch. Then while it's all selected, all we have to do is go to our original swatch panel and select dark gray, and then it changes it to dark gray. Then we'll hit the done up here next to the check mark, and it changed that texture to the dark gray. Now when we go to this other stroke over here, we're going to do the same thing. Then it's already changed so we can just select craft board medium, switch these two and then get rid of the color fill. All that's left is that for this one it had both the fill and the stroke as such. Let's change the filter that too, now it's looking similar. If you want to go in and refine this a little bit, you can too because you still have all the [inaudible] yours curves, and vector points to adjust the texturing. But I think I'm going to leave it at that, maybe it just this one a little bit so they look similar. Yes, it looks like we have finally accomplished all the polishing touches. Now what we're going to do, I want to add the swatch panel back to the bottom here, close that one out. Now let's go ahead and give our illustration a background as well, let's add another layer and drag that to the bottom. Then let's move the reference layer to the side over here. We're going to go here, name this background. We're going to turn smart guides back on so we can see the edges of our document, we go intersection point, just drag there, it's just using our swatch, we need to go to the eye dropper tool I and just select what we had for this one. Now if we want to put even more final touches on it, add this texturing here, I use another preset pack from True Grit Texture Supply. I think for that what I used was some vector texture frames. Let me take a look at this. Yes, mixed grit, I believe. We're going to go to vector textures in mixed grit halftone textures. We can just open this up within Illustrator. How he has this setup is it's all these textures are on different layers, you can turn them off or on. I'm going to select everything on this layer, then copy, Command C, then we're going to paste this into our background layer, so Command V. We're going to start off just by rotating this whole thing. Holding Shift to constraint it, so it's perfectly horizontal. Let's scale this guy up, hold Shift to constrain. Then let's actually so that we don't accidentally select anything else, let's make a separate layer for texture, and we'll label it as such. Slack every other layer including the background layer after we bring in the contents of the texture up, there we go. Now while the texture is selected, we're going to go to object ungroup. Let's pan over here, because we want to get rid of some of this. We're going to select half this texture and try to do maybe that right there in the middle, delete that. Then we're going to take this other half of the texture option, drag it over here. We're going to use O through Reflect tool to flip it around to the other side. We're just play with the positioning of this, so let's now just back a tiny bit. Now we're going to select everything on this layer and then go to what is called the appearance panel that's under Window appearance. Then we can actually mess with the opacity so that it's not such a dark black, we can bring it down. I think I did around 24 to 25 percent. Just to see how this looks, bring this up closer just to see. That's not bad. Honestly if it were me, I would probably work around with this texture a little bit and then break up maybe some of these individual parts and drag them around and work with the positioning of everything. But this is just to give you an idea of how I work with texture and add it to my illustrations. Yeah guys, there you have it. The only other thing that I would do in this illustration is maybe just go through my entire illustration and make sure that every major element was grouped and on its own layer. I'd probably put the hands and the feet on their own separate layer. You'd have to work through the hierarchy of your different pieces, then whenever you're ready, all you have to do is go to file, and then export, and then save for web, is what I usually do because most of my stuff goes out to the web. Now I usually save it as Pink 24 because that's a lossless file type that can manage tons of colors. Then I just hit Save. I'll usually just save it out to my desktop or my documents folder, whatever I have going on for that particular project. Anyways guys, I really hope you enjoyed this class and that you really have a fuller understanding of Illustrator now. Just realize all the potential that you can have with creating awesome characters and just amazing graphics. This is such a powerful program. Even though it can be a little tricky to start out with, you'll see that it's so powerful in the long run if you go deeper with it. But other than that, yea, this is my workflow and how I go about designing characters. Just I hope you enjoyed this class and I look forward to more classes coming. But yes that's pretty much it for the final stage of polishing and adding all the detail and texture. 10. Thanks!: All right guys, I wanted to say thanks again for taking this class. Also, don't forget to post your final project in the project area, and if you have any questions do ask in the discussion area so I can help you out. If you want to connect with me and just stay notified, be sure to go to my Skillshare page, it's just skillshare.com/Corey and then you can hit that little notification bell there so you get notifications anytime I post a class. All right guys, that's it. Thanks again.