Illustrative Gig Posters: From Concept to Creation

1. Creating Illustrative Gig Posters: Hi, My name is Jessica Smith, and I'm a graphic designer from Florida living in Chicago. I have a corporate gig, but I like to stay balanced by doing some alternative design work on that would be show posters. I'm going to teach you guys my process for designing posters from concept to brainstorming and then to the final product in Illustrator. Before I even knew what a computer was I was drawing. So I have an illustrative background. But then in college I got into digital illustration silkscreen and more formal poster making. I've also been obsessed with music for my whole life and going to shows and making show flyers just for myself, for fun. So that helps to have that background to actually like music. I feel like design and music kind of just go together, show posters, air important for the band because they helped promote the show in the band and they get people out. And if you have a really great design show poster, people are going to see it and they're gonna want to go to that show. And also they're gonna want you to design more show posters so you get more money and more . So. This class is targeted towards students that are into illustration and that have maybe a little bit of background and illustrator some color theory and typography. But if you are a beginner, don't be shy. Some of my concepts will probably help you. And hopefully my processes and my experiences will help you guys out to find out how you can get into designing show posters and get over that brainstorming home concept ing by incorporating simple drawings and your poster, we're going Teoh, take them into illustrator, make them more dynamic. So they stand out from the gig posters that you see on all of those walls in the shops and bars. 2. Find a Local Gig and Get Started: So your assignment for this class is to find a local gig and illustrate a poster for it. We are going to go from brainstorming Teoh concept ing simple sketches, and then we're gonna bring it into illustrator and get the final digital file. Our focus is going to be on repetition to make things a little bit more interesting. And we're going to do that by using patterns and colors. And I'm gonna go more in depth and illustrator and we're going to use the Pathfinder tool. We're gonna do some warping is the warp tool and will mask some stuff, so let's do it. 3. How to Get Some Gigs: So in this video, I'm going to share my experience in how to get work. I'm super shy and awkward, so hopefully it will be a little bit easier for you guys to get out there and talk to promoters. For me, it took a little time. But once you do it, you'll be happy you do it. So just get out there and talk to people. I've gone to a lot of shows at this point in my life since I was, like, 13 and since my mom would just, like, drop me off and pick me up awkwardly, Um, and at that time I would just design things for fun that would never be seen by anybody. But I feel like this is really great practice, So if you don't have the confidence, you have to ask a promoter and you want to just practice. Just do things for fun, and it will totally help you develop your style and be more confident. When I started to make posters more frequently and when my career started to snowball, I was bumming around venues in Orlando and I was noticing that a lot of the posters were horribly designed So I took it upon myself to seek out those promoters that we're putting up those posters. And I was like, Hey, guys, your posters air horrible. I feel like I could make them way better. Give me a shot and they were like, Yeah, that's fine. Promoters always need help, So don't be scared to get out there and talk to them and say, Hey, I can help. You will usually be like, Yes, I will totally take the help. And if you're still not confident, be like pay me and beer or high fives and they'll be like, Okay, cool. I did that and I proved myself. And then I decided to charge money for it, which you should. You don't ever undersell yourself. Once you have a confidence, and once you know that you're good, always charge and charge a fair price because you're worth it on and people will pay. So now that hopefully you're empowered and you have the confidence to get out there, let's design some cool stuff 4. Brainstorming, Concepting and Sketching: this video is about inspiration and concept ing. The first step to concept ING is researching the band, and the first step to researching the ban is still listening to them. It's super important because your visual aesthetic isa representation of their musical aesthetic. Another step that super easy is to find out what has happened previously in the poster design World Show posters have been around for a long time, so it's really easy to find out what it's been done in the past. A quick Internet search will help. I usually go to dribble Pinterest and gig posters. It's really important that you find your style and a quick search will help you find some inspiration and some really great illustrators and artists and help you kind of hone in on what you like, aesthetically. So let's concept. So you've listened to the band and you paid attention to some lyrics or you've researched some previous album covers. I like to pay attention to the lyrics and words and do word association because you can get some really great subject matter from that, and it's kind of easy, Um, and then you just kind of rely on execution my assignment is actually an anniversary show for a promoter. There's gonna be four bands on the bill and they range from punk garage doo wop vintage. So really across the board. Cool cats. This is the info I have. It's really important to get all the info at first just so you can lay it out correctly. So my main headline is gonna be fifth anniversary for North Korea. North Korea is the promoter. Um, headlining Ban is Shannon and the clams opening bands. Golden Pelicans, Wet Nurse guy Blakeslee. Dumber bunnies date January 23rd and location is back. Booth. So rather than the headline being a band as the main attraction, it's gonna be the promoter name because it's a celebration for them. Um, there will be a headlining band, and so we will make that text a little bit bigger. But it's not the main attraction in this case, but for you guys, If you want to choose a non anniversary show and have a headlining band, that's gonna be the main attraction. You're gonna make that a little bit bigger than everything else. My concept is gonna be based off of something celebratory referencing an anniversary, it's gonna have a promoter reference, and it's gonna have sort of a punk vibe. Um, so a little bit more gritty, lowbrow. And my posters tend to have the same style and feel you guys have your own stylistic feel, and you want to make sure that you incorporate that into all of your posters. So even if somebody sees a poster and doesn't know the band, they could recognize your style and recognize your art. And then that's how you get more work. So it's really important. So how am I going to represent these things in a poster? What I like to do is I like to open up a notebook and get a blank page and pencil and do word association, and I start jotting down words that have to do with my theme, which is celebration anniversary punk. Um, promoter. So let's do that. All right, so I have a blank page, um, almost blank. Somebody was kind enough to write down the criteria for me, and now I'm gonna do some word association. I also want to keep in mind that, um, repetition is gonna come into play on. That's gonna be through pattern and color. So just keep these in the back your head. You could probably eso make anything a repeated pattern and put some cool color on it. So it's not super important, but something to think about. So I'm going to do word association for promoter first. Um, What makes me think of a promoter? Tickets? Um, wrist bands. Maybe that could be cool for repetition. Um, hand stamps, long lines. Probably not something you want to make Light of punk is schools, obviously, Um, safety pins? I don't know. Probably not. That's propose. Er's. Um Okay, moving out of celebration. Confetti celebration and anniversary kind of go together so we can do both. Word association. The candles. Cake. That's a good one. Balloons could be cool for repetition. Gift's, um, you can take this as far as you want. I'm gonna stop because I feel like I have some pretty cool stuff here. Um, Well, actually, I'm not gonna stop beers. Cool. I just thought of that. That's a cool one. So, yeah, you can go as long as you want. I'm gonna stop because I think that I have some cool concepts that I'm gonna take and run with. I'm gonna choose three, but you can choose as many as you want. Um, if you're just starting out, I recommend just choosing one subject, and we'll deal with execution. How to make that really cool. Since there's so many elements, I'm gonna choose one for promoter, one for celebration and one for maybe being punk rock being punk rock is beer is pretty punk rock. So that's gonna be my punk. I'm gonna have some hand stamps involved in my imagery, and then I'm gonna choose some cake. And this whole time, I'm kind of thinking about how I can make these play into repetition with some patterns and some color. All right, so now it's time to start sketching. I like to go in with a plan. So I like to have all the information in front of me that I need for the poster. And, um, I have that. So that's cool. Here it iss we have the promoter the fifth anniversary get headlining band. We have opening bands, date and location. So what I know is I'm gonna have to group this information together. I want to keep all the bands together and date and location. I like to keep together as well. And this will help me when I start to do a layout. I like tow wire, frame my layouts real quick. Um, so I've already kind of done that. You don't have to stick to a grid, but I like Teoh Stick Teoh Just really clean design. So here you can see that I have my three elements that have chosen. It's there's beer, cake and a wristband hand. Um, like I said, you can go wild with layout, but I just like to go in with a plan. And as you see, I also group like here I have all of the, uh the band's even the headlining band. This is gonna be where, um the promoter is and then date, but you could switch it up as much you want, get creative. So now we're gonna actually sketch those three elements that I chose the subject matter that's gonna be like the main focus of our the illustration of our poster. Um and they're gonna be really simple sketches like super simple. They don't have to be really beautiful. You don't have to spend a lot of time on it like Seriously, Like the beer can just be like Like, that's your beer. This'll is gonna be your beer can, um, and band. That's your drawing. So somebody is actually nice enough to draw all this stuff for me already? They did a way better job, but so I got my beer. I have my cake, and I have my zombie hand that has a bunch of wrist bands on it. Um, you, like I said, probably have maybe one or less than three subjects. It's up to you. What, you want to dio it? Just keep it really simple. If you have more than one, because we're going to the execution is gonna happen. And we're gonna make it a little bit more interesting with those tools I told you about. With Pathfinder, with warp and with some repetition 5. Making your Sketches into Vector Art: Now we have to take those sketches and get them into illustrator. You can scan it or you can take a photo of it with your phone. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be high resolution or anything because we're gonna be tracing it with the pen tool in Illustrator. I like to start out on illustrator and use vectors for my illustrations vectors. A really cool because you can blow them up as big as you want, and they never lose their qualities. So it's a good start Eventually. Later, you can pool your artwork into photo shop and adds some texture to make it a raster image. But it's always a good idea to start an illustrator. So we have my beer cake and my zombie handle scanned in I'm going to Open Illustrator and you can click this new button on the home screen or go to file New and our document. I like to keep a print because I know it's gonna be printed. It'll keep the color seem like a which will help for color choice letters. Find this document is gonna be for tracing. We're gonna have to documents by the end of this one is this one. And the other one is gonna just be our final document, where the dimensions they're going to be correct. We're gonna layout off are the Oliver poster with text instead. So, as you see, I have three illustrations, but one art board I want to more art boards. I'm gonna go to this icon down here. Our boards. If you can't find any of these icons that I'm gonna mention, like over here goto window, it tells you if you don't want to hover over each of them and wait for a little dialogue, come up, tells you what you're looking for and something will pop up. Um, whatever your portal. Highlight it. So back to art boards. Let's duplicate this thing by going up. Teoh the top, right? Drop down. Just gonna duplicate it. That dimension is fine. Do you have a choice? Cool. Now we have three. I'm just gonna drag and drop my sketches in here and arrange them like so Doesn't have to be perfect. Um, OK, now I'm gonna want to reduce the opacity. Um, so there, later and I'm going. Teoh, lock these down and we want to do this because we don't want things moving around when we're trying to trace this. It's if you accidentally clicking, it moves around kind of annoying. So that's why we're gonna lock it. And we don't want to get distracted by the lines that air sketched. We want to pay attention. The lines that were drawing. That's why we're gonna reduce the capacity. First things first is opacity. Select all of them. I'm gonna go over here to the transparency panel capacity slider. Just bring it down to wherever you're comfortable with. Let's find for me. So now it's time to lock it down. Um, I'm gonna go to the layers panel over here. As you see, there's one layer. So far, all these elements are on that layer. So what I'm gonna do is lock it, um, next to his eyeball guy right here you click and the lot comes up means it's locked. That means you can't do anything on this layer. Um, but we do need a layer. You can do stuff. So we need to add new layer by clicking on this create new layer I got over here and now we have a layer will be conduced Who'll? Okay, so now we're gonna dive into the pencil. I'm gonna go kind of fast. There are other tutorials on school share that go more in depth with the pencil. Um, I kind of want to breeze through this as fast as possible, taking it to the good stuff, but you'll see how fast I go. Um, I have an aesthetic that's kind of like cut out aesthetic like a not cardboard but construction paper aesthetic so that it's like scissors come in and like, there's jagged edges and all that stuff, and that's fine with me. So I kinda just open here for you guys with the pencil. But as you can see, there's a fill. It was white or here, hopefully you see it and there's a black outline I don't want to fill. I want just the stroke, the outline. And I don't want a black either. I kind of want to make it like an obnoxious color so it could be black because you really sure opacity, it's up to you. Whatever call you with that? But anyway, so let's get rid of this film. Gonna click over here, make sure the Phils selected bring that front and then Damn, that's gone. That I like to choose an obnoxious colors because it stands out to me of the fill or of the stroke. Um, so let's go pink. All right, let's dive back in here. Um, I like to start out with a point that doesn't have a busy a curve or doesn't need one. Busia curve means like it's there's a curve. I don't even often pronouncing that right. But I want to go with it. Um, so for my busy a curve, I'm gonna click hold my my mouse button down, and then move it and drag. And, um, this anchor point creates gets handlebars. Which of these guys over the things that are moving This is your anchor point. These are handlebars, so I mean it quickly. Um, just gonna trace this. And like I said, there's gonna be a mixture of jagged edges and curve. So, for example, if I want a jagged edge, but there's a busy a curve over here. I don't need that to go away. So what I'm gonna do is, um just click. You hover over and your little anchor editor shows up. I'm just gonna click it. And now I have a little jagged edge over here. Um all right, so I'm not really quickly. Sometimes I like to see how quick I can't go, even though that's probably not good media. Okay, so going from a busy occur, if I don't, I want just a regular pen tool click. So I just click and release. Um, if you are having trouble, I recommend just looking up a tutorial that goes a little bit more in depth with the pen tool. These curves here good for practicing, busy occurred. No. Still eats that handled all right there. Um and yeah, it's kind of sloppy, but it works. Okay, so sometimes I like to go back in, Um, and a just a little bit. You can add anchor points to places where you think you kind of missed. Or sometimes I like to go in and make things look even more jagged and weird. And I add anchor points in so I can move them around to make them look kind of crazy. Um, and then I go to my direct select tool over here, the white arrow, and that's when you can move your anchor points around and adjust things accordingly. Like I said, have things were looking and kind of distorted because that's amazing. Cool. Okay, so simple is that you trace the zombie hand. I don't really know how I'm gonna separate some of these objects like these little fingers . How I'm gonna handle that? I don't know, but I do know I need to trace going back to the pencil here. I don't know. I need to trace it. I don't want to retrace these curves, though. I'm lazy. I'm on a deadline. And why do I need to retrace those when I already traced him? But I do know that I need to separate these fingers from this palm. So what I'm going to Dio is gonna go outside this box here. Don't be afraid to, like, go outside of boundaries. Um and I'm just gonna trace these fingers, like so however you want to do it. If you want to spend more time on it, that probably be good. But let's go. Let's do a dirty and totally skipped out on these curves. And I'll tell you why in the next tutorial, um, we're gonna use a tool that helps you out with that. And another example of, um, why you don't really have to pay attention Sometimes, Teoh butting up your objects like, don't you don't have Teoh zoom in and get real close and try to get like this line. But it up to this because we're gonna play with arrangement of objects so quickly just tracing all the elements in the zombie hand and we're gonna come back later. I'm gonna show you why it's OK to be super quick about things and kind of just pay attention to the lines as lines and not objects. Um, I guess having in the back of your head like what you're going to dio kind of. But don't retrace lines because that's that's not necessary. So they're getting an example of, um, really simple tracing that I dio and somebody was nice enough to come in and trace all male Jack's, uh, more examples of just overlapping that I'm not really paying attention like bunting up, um, lines because we're gonna layer some stuff and we're gonna pay attention to the arrangement front and back of objects. So, like I said, quick, easy, dirty. It's gonna get great though, in the next tutorial. So, yeah, now we have all of our elements. The beer. I'm gonna show you guys how toe type out beer, and then I'm gonna fit it into the beer can next video. All right, So now you have some great elements, Teoh. A cool, illustrative poster. What we're gonna do next video is take those elements to the next level, using some tools to make things more interesting. 6. Lets Clean it Up and Add Some Color: in this video, let's get jazzy and more complex with our simple illustrations using some tools and colors , I'm gonna teach you about a couple tools that I revisit for all of my posters. It just makes things a little bit more interesting and the really easy to use. Eso We're gonna pay attention to Pathfinder tool. We're gonna do some warping and some asking. So what we're going to do is play with Old Zombie and over here, and as you see, this shape is our problem shape. We're going to use the Pathfinder tool over here to clean it up a little bit. There's a lot of options in this Pathfinder tool. We're just going to stick with this inter sectoral right here. It's the 3rd 1 from the left. Because, as you can see, there's two shapes that we want to deal with and just to make it a little bit more obvious , you guys, I'm gonna do something. Okay? Yeah. So we will keep the shape and we want to keep the intersection between the shape and the ship who were gonna get rid of all this stuff. Right? So what we want to dio is create a new shape using the intersection, and Pathfinder makes that possible. So make sure both of your objects were selected, and then just click up on right there and then Vienna. You have the fingers, but what you'll notice is we lost our main zombie hand. So I always forget to do this. You just gonna make sure that this is you have two versions of it are two different copies of it. We want a copy and paste it on top of itself. Just so it's in the exact same position. And how I do that is ideo command Copy and command F. I'm on a Mac, by the way, Um, so you can also select it and go to edit, copy and edit Paste in front. So now we have to, and we're going to redo the Pathfinder tool. And Pam, we have our shape. I'm gonna do it to this beer can real quick, too. All right. So we didn't have to re draw any lines of the Arctic drill. Um, we got that shape down. Now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna choose the color scheme. I always have any. My head, the kind of color scheme I'm looking for. I'm doing the punk ish doo wop ish, um, poster. Or so I'm gonna choose some colors that are kitschy and fun. And it's also an anniversary, and there's cake involved. So I shows these colors. Um, I feel like cake always calls for pink. And why also pink is pretty poem. Great. I don't know any way, Um, zombies are blue and they have green whose So I chose, um, turquoise and green. And then she was little accent color. What you want to take under consideration is if are you going to screen print this poster, or is it possible that could get screen printed? If so, limit your colors to, like maybe four tops or, I don't know, maybe five. You want to make your screen printer work a little harder, but I digitally print mine so I have a little more freedom as faras. My guess tonal range goes, and what I mean by that is I still stick to a couple colors. As you can see, I have four main Hughes, but I like to give my poster little dimension, and I, um, gonna choose a couple versions of this turquoise maybe like one extra. You know, we're gonna go lighter, keeping in mind that a zombie hand it's I'm gonna make a turquoise because it's a zombie. But the fingers need to stand out a little bit more. So I want a lighter version of that turquoise. Um, so I'm gonna open up my color picker here. I just double clicked on this, Phil. Um, and I'm gonna work with HSB its hue, saturation and brightness. I like to work in that option because it's just a little bit easier to see and to choose colors. Right now, I have my brightness chosen, and I just use a slider toe eyeball it a little bit is a little before and after. I like that combination. I feel like that's Yeah. Okay. I like this. Um, I like these Teoh butted up against each other. They look nice. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose that, and I do it for each of these colors. Just so I have options, you know? So it just creates more dimension. If you have a set color scheme with use, just want to create, like some background foreground. Have some things, pop off the page a little bit more making pop. However, everyone likes to say that, Um, yeah, so now I've already have the swatches in my Swatch panel, but there it's really easy to get it in there, and it's really easy accessible when you're illustrating, you just want to be able to click on these things you haven't saved, and it's super easy. Um, so you just select whatever object has that color you want to obtain and you drag and drop with that color into that panel or the Swatch panel, and now it's there for your access. Okay, So back to zombie hand. So, like I said, make that turquoise. I had it in my head that I wanted it to be turquoise, so I wanted to. And this, Like I said, we're gonna make it pop off the page a little bit more, So it's a lighter shade. No, you'll notice it just happened. Is that I lost me fingernails. Um, I know they're there. It's just that the fingers air in front of the fingernails. So we're gonna play with arrangement now. I want to send the fingers back a little bit. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to object a range and we don't want to send to back because that'll put them in back of the main hand. And that's not what we want. We just want to send him back a little bit so you can click send back a bunch of times. There's really cool key command here that I like to use command bracket within opening to the right, um, so I can adjust play without a little bit on and they reappear. And then everything is happy. So I like to keep away from I like to think about background to, um, sometimes a white background for posters. Okay, I like to flood the colors. I like to make it. There's like the white space is cool, but I like to set a mood with my background, especially for this one, its kitschy and weird and fun. So I'm gonna choose a good light blue background. It's light, so that means there could be some contrast still, um, but this means now that I'm playing with my objects, I need to know what that background is because I want some white up elements on my illustrations and white. I'm not gonna be able to see it. It white on Wait. So I actually made a new layer. We do this quickly just cause it's kind of a minor detail. Okay, So what happened? All right, so I unlocked outlier in. Cool. So what I was thinking is I want some white elements is a nice touch and see how easy that is to just click on that color swatch. It makes everything really convenient. All right, so this is the part where he just, like, play around with colors and choose your favorite color combinations and get rid of I got rid of the stroke because my aesthetic is like Like I said, keep saying like, cardboard e construction paper, cut out type with no borders. Um, And there you go, zombie hand. So you're gonna do the same thing. You're gonna use your colors here, um, in the arrange tool to get a nice feel, um, to get a nice base line for the next step, which is gonna be to bring these into the layout. Look, some somebody was so nicely shows colors for all of my objects, but anyway, so we're gonna take these elements. Now, we're gonna take him up a notch, and we're gonna use some other tools to take them even further and make them a little bit more complex. So, yeah, next video, we're gonna get jazzy. So now you're illustrations. Look super cool. We're gonna move them over to a second document where we're gonna lay out the poster as a whole. 7. Adding Dimension with Pattern and Repetition: All right. So now we have our basic shapes made, and we chose them really cool colors to go into our poster this step. I swear we're gonna make things super jazzy and Zazi on. It's gonna get interesting. And we're gonna use the mask tool and also the warp tool to do that. And we're gonna use pattern. But I'm not going to use the pattern tool. I'm going to just make me own pattern, the pattern tools just to uniform. And the theme of this poster is kind of like down and dirty nitty gritty. Um, so I'm just gonna use the paint brush tool, and, um, as you can see him zooming into Mr Cake, we're going to pay attention to this guy for a little bit. And what I'm thinking is, I want to make a pattern in one of these cake layers. So I want to make some swirlies or some Levi's or something like that. So I'm gonna just take my paint brush tool and down and dirty makes him we've, doesn't he? Perfect. In fact, if it's not perfect, it's way better. Uh, I'm gonna command C command f copy paste in front and then use my down arrow. Um, Teoh duplicate that. I'm sure there's and several options you can use. All right, so I have a little pattern here, and I want to make sure, um that I'm just gonna copy a piece. This layer that the cake layer layer. I wanna make sure that my pattern covers the whole ground of this. He also wanted pink. So good thing we have a swatch received, right? Um all right. So use a couple more or spread it, all of it. And I want to make things look a little in perfect to you, because that's our theme. Uh, perfections boring. All right, I'm also gonna go back to this direct selection tool that we used earlier and just further and make things a little messy. And this is my personal aesthetic for this poster in particular you can not like. You can ignore this part, this advice if you want, But I feel like if you are going for that kind of cardboard or construction paper, cut out theme, keep it loose and make it more interesting. Okay, So cool. I have my pattern made and I have the shape that I want it to be contained in now. I'm going to mask this pattern so we can only see the pattern inside this shape here. So that's what it's gonna look like minus all this stuff. We're gonna put it right. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select the shape that we want to contain her pattern in, and we're gonna use the arrange to again object, arrange, bring different. And then I'm gonna select all of these shapes and paths that are involved in this process. And then I'm going to go to object clipping mask. Make easy is that we have this crazy little fun pattern. And, um so it's pretty easy to edit. Um, if you come up here, I'm not gonna get to and this, but you can still edit the paths that are involved. It didn't go away. Um, but it just looks cool. And it's now contained in a group. It's like a Pathfinder group. So let's see how that looks. What? Amina put her in front here. Um, he's may arrange tool, actually gonna copy it and select the layer that I We are the object that I wanted to go directly in front of and command F three paced in front. Cool. That looks looks awesome. So I'm actually going to do that for some of these wrist bands over here. I'm not gonna do it now, but it's just a little really cool process that you just add interest to different elements of your illustration. So now I'm going Teoh teach you how to a war pretext over this beer can hear. We haven't really paid too much attention to it. We're gonna get some love. What we're gonna do is we're going to go right into that the type tool. We could just trace it like I showed you before how we've been tracing everything. We could have traced the hand lettered beer type that I had earlier in the sketch. But then I won't be able to show you guys how to warp text over into shape. So we're just gonna type it. And I've actually already chosen my fallen that I want to use for the whole poster. Um, here it's called Mixed Breed and I purchased it to use for North Korea posters because I do North Korea posters frequently. And so I've developed a little style, and it fits within the style. It's very hand painted stallion feel, which works perfectly right? So now I have beer typed. What I want to do with it is I want it to fit within this little label right here. It's like a diagonal label, and I wanted to look like it's wrapping around the beer. So there's several things that we can dio to make that happen all using envelope distort. I know what he's saying, Warp. It's actually technically enveloped the store and warp is one of the options that we can use. I don't know if we're gonna use it, but we try it. So what we do is we have our beer selected. Um, I think I want it to be me, Green or white. Doesn't matter. We'll figure it out later. So you're gonna go up Teoh object in, developed a story and let's try to make it with work. Okay, so we're lucky because the option that I was gonna try out came came up in the dialogue box . But as you see here, there's a drop down menu in style, and there's a lot of different options that you can play with and none of them kind of fit . What I'm going for, though, like the closest one is not that one is Arch, but it still doesn't have the diagonal feel. Eso I'm gonna cancel. We're gonna try something else. Alright? So back to square one. Let's try something else under the envelope. Distort. Let's, um let's make with the top object, because we know what shape we want this to fit into its this shape right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the shape and I'm gonna bring it to the front. Um, we're gonna make it the quote unquote top object of being in front of the beer. So I'm gonna use command, see, and then command left, have to keep it in place, and then that's copy and paste in front. And then we're going to do the arrange object, arrange, or like we did before you some hot keys. Actually. Bring this two front. It's announce in front. And now we lost our beer text, but it's hilarious. Was behind it. So in order to see it, I'm just gonna click this right here, and the fill becomes a stroke it still selected. I mean, a shift. Click the beer to select that as well. You go back to object. Envelope distort. Now we're gonna actually click on the make with top object option. There's a cool hockey for that too. But all right, so that looks really weird. Teoh, um it might work for some situations, but in our situation that it doesn't work. So back to square one. But there's one more option, so there's still hope We are gonna select the beer again, go back to object back to envelope the story on Then we're gonna make it with a mesh. And that means we're gonna have our own mesh. If you remember when we made it with warp, they kind of gave you a MASH to work with. You could choose this option and then edit the mesh that they give you. It's like this little grid better. I'm not gonna do that. Um, so back to develop story make with mash. I want to keep it really simple. I feel like we can. We don't need a bunch of rows and columns to work with. The less anchor points we have, the easier it's gonna be, so I'm actually gonna have one rule in one column. And that means it's just gonna be a square with four anchor points and a couple, um, handlers, as you see here. See you together for anchor points. So you also see I'm in direct select. We're just gonna click on the anchor points to move them around. Um, and then also quickly handlebars. And look how easy that is. Perfect for our situation here. Um, beautiful. And so we found a solution. We didn't get there initially, but we have so many options. As far as I developed, a sort goes, there's gotta be something out there that will work. All of those other options have their uses, but I like to keep it really simple and kind of work things into my own shape. A simple as possible using mesh. And a lot of times I only have, like, one column, one row and just work with it and they go, there's your beer can. It looks beautiful. So narrow we're gonna dio next video is we're gonna take all these really cool elements. Are these yet these objects that we've created and we're gonna put them into a layout, and we'll probably have to tweak, um, but so will visit text and layout and kind of the wire frame that we sketched in the next video. 8. Adding the Content and Laying It All Out: Now we're gonna lay out our poster. We have our illustrations all nice and traced, and they look great. We have all of the information that we need from the client. It's time to make that second document. I was talking about an illustrator, and that's gonna be our final document. So just do file new. The profile is gonna be print again. Just make sure it seemed like a we're going to do tabloid. Um, I always have, um created tabloid. It's like standard 11 by 17. That's what, like, I see all over the bars and shop windows. It's pretty standard. So you're probably gonna also create a tabloid. I have high hopes for my promoter printing a full bleed, but it usually never happens. But just in case, I'm gonna set this document up in case your promoter wants to do full bleed, which means the image is actually gonna go over the edge on and there's gonna be a trim. They're gonna trim it down, and you're not gonna have any white border anything so standard 0.1 to 5. And as long as this little link is clicked, it's gonna go down the line in top on left right is gonna be consistent. As you can see, there's the believe mark on, and we're just gonna go ahead and copy and paste are illustrations in the layout. Cool. So, as you can see, this kind of falls off because the backgrounds wait. So we gotta make sure, um, we're putting that background in, and what I'm gonna do is see, there's two layers here, can already have a set up. We're gonna, um Let's put it on this layer. We're gonna put that background layer in. And remember, it's that light blue that I have here just in a draw square all the way up to the bleed just in case and then going back to the layers panel, we're gonna lock it. Um, right now these guys are in back of it, we're gonna rearrange the layers. Just drag this layer down, and you'll have all of your illustrations visible. So was in a place season here. Um, I'm thinking about those layouts. I drew the wire frames and I'm gonna have the headline up here, and I'm gonna have all the other information down here. Sandwiched are like the grid usually. So I like balance and grid things. Sometimes I like to go wild and put some diagonals in, but we're just going to keep it simple. Now. Try to just sandwich the illustrations with the content. Look, there is Somebody went in and typed it for me. How nice. Um, I usually copy and paste from emails. So if anything spelled incorrectly, it's not my fault. Also, just double check all the spellings. Look stuff up because it's really embarrassing when you get back a poster and it's spelled wrong and it's already been printed. It's awful. I hate it. So, yeah, just make sure things were spelled correctly. Um, so here I have. Like I was saying, I want to do the headline up top, which is a pretty standard. You don't have to. You can have all the information below. That's nice, too, On. But like I said, there's no rules. You guys can do whatever you want it posters, air, fun. See, that doesn't look like that. But I want balance and I want Teoh draw attention to this fifth anniversary. North Korea. Um, headline. So it's like packing a suitcase of content is you can see I have there's a headliner, and that's a little bit bigger than the opening acts. Um, it's just hierarchy of content, I guess. Of importantly, what's important? Make that bigger, more boulder or stand out. Um, obviously, beer is really important in this poster anyway, so we have also This is pretty important information. Teoh. If it's kind of nicely here in this little area, I like to put my dates and tags. It's just a thing I have ever put in a little tag just to draw attention to it. And they get something fun and stick ary and just a little different. It's like drawing attention to it. It's not like making false, bigger anything we've got s Oh, there we go. OK, also, black isn't part of my color scheme, so that's just a placeholder. I'm thinking and probably gonna choose the darkest color, though for contrast. And my darkest color is this turquoise. So I'm gonna go ahead and make make content Turquoise. You know, it looks nice. As you can see, the balance is a little bit off. But remember when we were talking about repetition like we call the space, um also is small. It s so there's some space weaken. Um and I I just wanna have fun with this, and I have this idea in my head before I started. I'm gonna make all of these things like super long and weird because I like, uh, repeated patterns. And I just think it It'll be interesting and unique. So let's play with making this a wizard stick, right? It's called those things that you drink the beer and you stock them and put duct tape on them. That happens. That shows, right, anyway. So in order to stop the beer, though, we're used to change up colors because now it just looks like a really long, tall, tall, tall boy. Uh, let's just make sure it feels selected. Switch up the colors a little bit. So oh, in a group when you want Teoh do this direct select. It's my favorite tool, since it's in a group of you just use the regular selectable, the whole groups getting it selected. So, in order to keep in your group, I just used your ex select and that selects different elements. So remember, really put the beer fall in a mesh well, in order to change that color. We have to go up here and violent mesh. See how this is selected? That selecting mesh. We want the element inside of the mesh to get selected. So we're gonna click this edit contents button. Um, and then way can make that. So I'm not gonna go through all of this, but maybe because it's easy. So playing with a range and just repetition. And look, that was so, um, get that guy and like you simply with color. Um, you can even put patterns in there to switch it up a little bit. Looks awesome. Um, again, I'm gonna unwrap this because we're gonna copy in peace, please. Okay. Copy, control. Come in, control F. We're gonna look so object arrange. I'm just send this all over to the back since there's nothing stopping us from doing that on. And same thing Copy placed in front object. Arrange send you back. I think you too many layers. Okay, so yeah. See, I'm just adjusting things in my layout to make really balance. And now I'm not too old. Saw me and over here what I'm gonna do is I want to make this army hand like really, really tall. So back to my favorite. But in direct select just drag. I'm gonna click and drag. It's gonna select all of these anchor points, see how they're red. And then if I come up here, see how these air white he's on inspected, the red ones are selected so you can select anchor points in more than one object at the same time. It's really simple any and it saves a lot of time. So right now I'm just pressing me down arrow to make it longer look so weird and great and beautiful. And then all I'm doing copy and paste well, for some in a group in a minute. Play with that repetitions and we have copy and paste. All these were guys. Well, couple Alex, just go in there and tweak it. Use my favorite tool, the direct select, Make it a little funky. Also, we recommend going back and using the Pathfinder tool and creating a lot of these, um weird, uh, patterns in the shape you can use the pattern tool. You look it up and use that to I like making my own weird patterns sometimes will go in and just like me. Really Off stripes. What school? But I'm just not even using busy acres. Just like you look happy. So you have a pretty cool poster now, um, I'd say you're pretty much after you spend time tweaking and you pretty much there. Um, look, somebody was nice enough to finish this poster for me. So look at all these cool patterns that I need, um, and beer cans and stuff. Okay. Even there's even a variation of beer can, but it's still pretty much just a repeated patterns and repeated elements. That makes this poster kind of interesting. And I didn't use pattern Tool or anything like that. I just kind of created these little things and the move around and copy and paste and played with color. And you just get a really great sort of cut out handmade result before we say that, though, what I like to dio is I like toe. I just select everything, and I'm make sure that my type is outlined because if you send something to a printer, they don't have the fun. It could go wonky. Even if I'm gonna export. This is like a pdf anyway, but just to be safe. I like to create outlines or type create Allen's and look, it outlines a liver. That's great. Cool. And then what? We're gonna dio IHS, we are going to pat ourselves on the back. First of all, and next video gonna just talk about exporting and finishing touches on your poster. 9. Final Touches and Exporting Your Files: So now you're design is done and it looks great, and you're super proud of it. You want to make sure that it's presented correctly. I provide two different files to my promoter unless they request something else. Ah, the one is gonna be for print, and the other one is gonna be a digital more digital friendly. Because if the promoters doing the right thing, they're gonna want to promote it through social media. And the last thing you want is a C N y que or print image presented on social media were until streeter usually my posters. I bring them into photo shop so they end up being rest arised images, so it's a little bit different. It's easier now because we're using completely vectors. So, like I said before vectors, you could blow up a big as you want Teoh and they don't lose their quality. So because of this, I'm going to save it as a Pdf because it retains, um, it's editing capabilities and all of that. So starting with the press file, I'm gonna save the press quality. Pdf Go up to file. It's really easy. See that? No, what I usually do is, they name it. Um I'm obvious with my naming. Your promoter doesn't know the difference between seem like A and RGB. So what I usually do is they make it obvious in the name and then I explain it like, Hey, this files for print Don't upload this to social Media, because if the last thing you want is, um are seeing like a file on like Facebook because then it gets like, crazy colors and they get neon and you'll be disappointed in the outcome. So now you name it, just come down to format right here. It's in a right now to make it a pdf see, and we have a bleed for General were in the over here on the left, were in the general settings. I keep all of these defaults selected. It's good you condone on Jack preserve editing capabilities or keep it checked it. It's not gonna have too much effect on the size, but what I do like Teoh choose is the settings for bleed. Since we have a bleed, you might not need it. Your promoter probably won't print it with a bleed, but just in case, come to marks and bleeds. I make sure that true marks are chapped because then it will have a little cut marks for a printer and use document lead settings. Which means the files gonna export with those bleed settings. You just save a P s. So now we're gonna safer. RGB for RGB. We're gonna save in RGB for wet. So what I'm gonna do is go to file. We're going to change document color mode. It's in C N Y que. Right now, since that's what we ate, set it up as you change it to RGB. Um And then we're going to go back to file and we're gonna save for Web right here. Here's our options. I'm gonna keep it a j peg you. It's flat color so you can choose P and G. But I'm gonna go ahead and keep it a J peg and just keep all the default settings and come to image size. It automatically makes it, um, it's just 72 d p. I. I might have a little bigger with the size, just in case. I know there's a lot of monitors out there that are like high resolution, so maybe he wants to put this on like a TV screen, somewhere promoting in a bar. I know sometimes he does that, so I want to make it a little bit bigger than what it is now. So I'm going to get at least 1200 pixels wide and just see that. And, like I said, be super obvious in your naming. Um, just because promoters don't really know anything about image, I mean, they might, but they might not. So just in case and there you have it, then you just send these bad boys off with a lovely email and good job. 10. Final Thoughts: So if you're done, you have a beautiful illustrated poster. You exported all your files. Your promoter is really happy. And now you probably have some future work. So good luck in getting yourself out there for this tutorial would be really cool. If you could show us what you got. Post all of your posters, Put it in some context. Let us know how you did. And any feedback would be great. Also next tutorial. I'm gonna talk about how to add texture to a poster. So if you like this tutorial, tell your friends, watch it and I'll make another one. Teoh, get you guys Teoh, Step it up even more and adds some texture for some more dimension to some illustrate of posters.