Learn to Draw Digitally II : Flower Arrangements

1. Introduction: Welcome to my new class, learning to draw digitally, flower arrangements. This is an Illustrator 102 class. It's a follow-up to our learning to draw digitally, create Q characters using basic shapes which was more of a basic learn Illustrator 101. In this class, we're going to learn how to create flowers. These flowers are going to be starting with basic shapes, like we did in the first class but we're going to delve more into some of illustrators more sophisticated tools, and we're going to learn how to create leaves, we're going to talk a little bit about texts, and then in the end we're going to create a project that it's sure going to please. It's going to be a calendar. I'm going to show you step-by-step after we create our flowers and all our foliage, and how to arrange these flowers and how to create this beautiful calendar. I'm going to give you the basic steps and then you're going to take off and create your own project where you can create a 12 month calendar or just a month by month calendar as you wish. So please join me. 2. Color Sourcing: In this first lesson, we're going to start with color sourcing. I usually have my go-to place, which is my Pinterest board. I have one titled color. In here in my spare time I scour Pinterest and I start collecting anything that catches my eye as far as color patterns and color swatches go. So I just pretty much source there. When I do start off embarking on a project, I have the colors available to me. This is my color board on Pinterest. I know I'm going to draw flowers, so I'm going to start looking for a color palette that would work well together for the flowers that I have in mind. As you can see, I do have a broad array of color swatches that I've compiled throughout the years. You can easily do this yourself. Just create a color board and in your spare time, you can just gather as many color swatches as you'd like. Pinterest is doing a fun thing now that it has recommendations for you. It knows what you commonly pin and then when you login to Pinterest, it'll start showing it on your homepage. Now whenever I login, because I guess I pin way too many colors, I do get a lot of these suggestions that come up at once. So I actually like this one. It has nice bright colors and some muted colors. I'm just going to take it and drag it to my board. Now in Illustrator, I've already begun with an 8.5 by 11 art board. We can always change the size later depending on the size of the project that you'd like. But for now I'm just going to work on a 8.5 by 11 page. So I like this color palette for the flowers. I do know that I'm going to have some foliage, so I'm going to go back and see if I can source one that would work well with these colors. I actually like this one right here right next to it. I'm going to take that one as well. It won't let you drag it from here you have to always open and drag as you can just see as I tried to do and it just didn't work, it just copies the link. These are two good color palettes for me to work on. Now I'm going to go and create my color swatches so I can have them in my palette. I'm just going to drag out a few squares. They don't have to be perfect. They could be all different shapes and sizes. It could be circles. It really doesn't matter. It's just I want to be able to use my eyedropper and grab these colors into these palettes. Let's just do a few of these. Then I take the first one. Go down here to my color picker, my eye dropper tool, and I'm going to select the first one and I'm going to repeat that with all the subsequent ones until I've made a sample of every single color on these palettes. It is a little bit of a time-consuming job, but in the end it saves you so much time to have this already planned out once you start drawing. I like to draw in the intended colors of my palettes. I don't like to have to change the colors afterwards, although I hardly ever stick to anything. I usually start off with the palette and then I tweak it to my own tastes as I go. I'm going to make a few more copies because I think I like some of these hues that are in here that aren't necessarily represented in these colors here. So I think I like that one. I think I like this darker green, this light green. Let's see if I can find a darker green in here. Well, that's too dark. Maybe that green will work. Maybe that one's better. This one we won't need. We're going to select them all. We're going to go here to the swatches palette. If it's not open in your swatches palette, you can go into Windows, scroll down to swatches. When you find it, you can just click it and it'll activate your swatches palette. With all the colors selected, I'm going to go here to this folder, new color group, and I'm going to click that. Selected artwork is already selected here. I'm going to name this flowers. That's going to be the name of my color group. Click Ok and now it shows up here. I don't have any use for these colors. I'm going to delete them. I don't have any use for these grays, I'm going to delete those. I'm actually only going to keep the white and the black, so I'm going to select this. It be nice if I unselect that. Select this and holding down control. That's not working. There we go. Holding down shift, it'll select the first all the way through the very last one and then I can drag that into the trash can as well. So I want to work with a cleaner palette and these are the colors that I want to concentrate on. Now that I have my color swatches all set up, I can begin drawing. 3. Flowers part 1: Now, we're ready to begin to draw our flowers. We're going to select these color palettes, we won't need these anymore so we can work on a clean surface. I'm going to zoom in just so we can see our board here, clearer. I'm going to begin with some pretty simple flowers that start off with some basic shapes. We're going to go here and pick up the "Ellipse" tool. I'm going to select this pink from our colors palette, and I'm just going to drag freehand without holding Shift, because I want to form some kind of an oval for the petal. If you want a perfect circle, you'd have to hold down the Shift key, and that will give you a perfect ellipse. For purposes of what we're doing, we're going to just click and drag the "Ellipse" tool to the size of the petal that we want. Now, here we have it. I'm going to, now, go here into this direct selection tool, and as you can see, I'm going to zoom in here so you can see a little better. It automatically lights up in this blue tone. These anchor points set are, are part of what makes up the shape. If I select one of these anchor tools, you'll see it gives me these handlebars all across our anchor points. If, for instance, I click on this bottom one, I get these handlebars here and I can select one of the handlebars so I can begin to shape my ellipse into something different. I can drag it in any way, shape or form I want. I can make it wider. I could perhaps make this shape up here a bit more of a petal-like, and then fix this here. There's really no right or wrong. Petals are not perfect in nature. You can select whichever way you want these anchor points. Use your handlebars and shape them in whatever way, shape, or form you want. For now, I'm going to just leave this one like this for now, just so I can show you. Every now and then, you'll wind up with something like that. Were you not really happy with, you can go back to the Direct selection tool and try to fix that. You can also just click on it, go to your Pencil tool, and just draw over it, and that will fix it as well. There's also a Smooth tool. If you go here to the Pencil tool and you go to one of the other options, there's a Smooth tool. You can rub the Smooth tool over these anchor points, and it will round it all out for you as well. That works well for what I want to do now. Let me just zoom out a bit. I'm going to select it, and I'm going to hold down the Option key and drag, and that's going to give me a copy of it. Now, I'm going to go to Object, Transform, Rotate. I'm going to rotate. A 90 degree angle will bring it just the half turn. I'm going to hit "command D" so we can transform it again another 90 degrees, and that brings it to a full turn. That's exactly what I wanted. Now, I'm going to select them both, I'm going to hold down Option again, and click, and drag it, and that's going to give me another copy. I'm going to go to Object, Transform, Rotate, and now the 90 degrees is sufficient so now I'm going to drag it in place. I want more petals on this flower so I'm going to select them both again, "Option" click. That brings it to here, drag that out of the way, Object, Transform, Rotate. Now, I'm only going to do a quarter of a turn so you can put 25 as your angle. That works well for me. Let's actually delete that and try that over again, because I think 25 was not enough of a turn. I think we need 45 for our turn. I'm going to hold down Option, make a copy again. Object, Transform, Rotate, and we need 45 on the angle. There we go. I'm going to put this into place, and that's perfect. I'm going to need another copy that's going to go right across here so that's going to be an easier one. We're going to do Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in front, and then Object, Transform, Reflect. That's going to reflect at a 90 degree angle so we're going to click "Okay." Perfect. Now we have all the petals for our flower. I like to work very clean. There's a lot of anchor points and a lot of things going on here so I'm going to actually unite through my Pathfinder tool. If your pathfinder and your transform, and align tools are not open, you can go, just like when the Swatches panel wasn't open, you can go to Windows and you can find it here, and it's called Transform. That'll bring us to this menu. We're going to select the first one, which is "Unite," and that now gives us a cleaner work surface. I'm going to go back to the Ellipse tool, and I'm just going to drag out, holding Shift, a perfect ellipse for the center. I'm going to give that a different color. There we go. Now, we have a flower. If I want to give the flower a stem, I can go to this rounded rectangle tool, I can click and drag. Object, Arrange, Send to the back and that gives me a perfect stem. Now, for the leaf, I can freehand that. You can also start off with the basic shape like we did with these petals and manipulate it with the anchor points. But for the purposes of teaching you just a different method, we're going to go here to the Pencil tool, and we're going to just draw freehand with our mouse. If you follow just the right way, you can get it exactly the way you want it. That may take a little bit of practice, but it really is not impossible. Its quite easy to do and it's actually a quicker way to work. As you can see, that's a pretty leaf. Just going to move it there to the side. Now we have our first flower. We can do a couple of things to add a little bit more detail. We can select the petals, and now we're going to go to Object, Transform, Scale. Sorry, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in front. That's going to be right here, another copy of it. Actually, going to send that to the back. Well, it can actually stay there. What I want to show you is, if you go here to the Stroke palate and you select "Dashed Line," it will give you a dashed line all around the edges here in whatever color we select. Right now, it's pink with this green fill. I'm just going to have it as pink with a black fill, because I want you to be able to see it. Now, you'll see that it's at one point. I'm going to actually make that a little thicker just because I want you to be able to see how this is working. We can do a Cap, Rounded, and here you can select the spacing between the dashes and the gaps, that we can do three points, three points, three points, and that gives you a more coarse outline. If we select it again, we can do Object, Transform, Scale, and we can scale it a bit, let's say, at 96. Now, you get the idea of what we're trying to do here. Let's bring the circle to the front, and you can do a dashed line for that as well. Make that a little thicker. It's just something different to add up, some detail if you'd like. It is truly a matter of preference, there's no right or wrong here, but that is one way to draw a flower. Now, we're going to go on to another type of flower. If we select the "Ellipse" tool again, we're going to drag. I don't want this Dashed Line anymore so we can unselect that. I don't want a Stroke either. Let's say this flower is in this yellow. I'm going to do is, Object, Transform, Rotate. We're going to rotate it at 25 degree angle and we're going to hit "Copy," and that's going to leave our original ellipse without altering. It's just going to make a copy at a 25 degree angle of a new petal. There you go. Now you see the one on top of the other, and right now, it looks like it's not going to amount to anything. But what we're going to do is repeat that process, and the short cut for it is command D. Now, we have a third petal, and if you just keep holding down command and pressing "D", it will continue to give you more petals and you can stop whenever you want. Perfect. That's a very nice flower. We can unite that. You can give that flower also a pretty center, [inaudible] position. Let's give that a nice color. There you have it. We can Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in the back, Object, Transform, Scale that piece in the back to, let's say, 110 and give that another color, and now we have a flower with a little bit of dimension. Now, we're going to try one that doesn't have as many petals. Let's say, we select this "Ellipse" tool again. Object, Transform, Rotate. We're going to rotate it at a 25 degree angle. We can actually now change it to a 40 degree angle, let's say. I forgot to hit "Copy." Object, Transform, Rotate, its to be 40 degree and hit "Copy." Now holding down command, we're going to hit "D." That actually gives us a similar flower. This was actually an extra petal that I didn't need. That's a similar flower, but it's not as many petals as we had in this one. This one looks a little bit like a linzer tarts, more of a puffy flower. This one does not have that, it just has petals. In our next lesson, we're going to explore a few more flowers so we can continue our project. 4. Flowers part 2: Now we're going to continue with our flowers. In this last one that we were working on, it's just basically the same as this one. We can group that one, transform, unite once again, and select an "Ellipse tool" for the center. I'm going to give that a different color, doesn't really matter what color, because we're going to do something different with this one. We're going to select both shapes, and we're going to minus the front, so that gives us a cutout flower. So that's a different type of flower you can use. Then we're going to try this other one. You really want to come up with flowers that are going to be your main flowers, and then you want a couple of filler flowers just because you're going to have spaces in your project that you're going to have voids in, and that you just want to have just a little something to fill it up, but you don't want it to be the hero of your story. This is going to be one of those flowers, we're going to make it in a really bright color. Although, this is our colors palette here, I'm just going to make this one a little brighter, meaning just a little darker like that. This one is just an ellipse for now, and then we're going to free hand with the pencil tool, some leaves onto it. It's just a simple shape, nothing too fancy. I'm not really want to draw too much attention to it. We're going to select it, edit, copy, edit, paste in front, and then object, transform, reflect, and that gives us a copy, a mirrored copy of it. That's good there, just going to send through it a little bit. There you have it. That's a good flower that we can use as a filler. We could also do a different type of flower. Let's do the Ellipse tool again. Let's pick this beige, and we're going to go here to our drawing modes. Right now we're working in draw normal, we're going to go into draw inside, and that's going to restrict all our drawing to this shape. I'm going to select the yellow. You can actually click off, because I want to deselect it. I'm going to now select the yellow, and then I'm going to select the "Ellipse", and I'm going to drag it somewhere around here, because what I want to do is create a half circle over that ellipse, that looks good to me. Now, I have to get out of that drawing mode and go back to draw normal. Now with [inaudible] , we're back to normal. Now, you just can't edit this unless you go into your appearance palette, into your layers palette and you select it. It will not let you change the colors of this, it will identify it as just one shape. For purposes of what we're doing here, we don't want to get too fussy into that, it's not one of our hero flowers. We're just going to leave it as is. We're going to draw some leaves for that one too. This one had a double leaf, so maybe this one can have a triple leaf. Let's do something like this for it. Let's give that a pretty color, maybe that one can have that color for now. Colors are not set in stone, we can always go back and tweak the colors as we want. I usually, start off with a color palette for inspiration, and then I veer off into something totally different. As I'm working, I just tailor it to my taste. There is no right or wrong, you can just do it whatever way you want, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So in the end, it's what makes you feel comfortable, it's the colors that's speak to you, it's the shape that speak to you, and it's your project in the end. So whatever way you put your signature on it is the right way, it doesn't matter really how you do it. For this flower, I think that looks pretty good, we can leave it like that. There's a little wonky thing going on here, and that's fine with me. I'm not looking for perfection, I'm looking for beauty in whatever way, shape, or form I decide to create it. Now, I'm going to use the pencil tool again, and I'm just going to give it a little bit of a stem, nothing too fancy, just a regular stem. As you can see, that's a very light-colored stem, I'm going to zoom in, so you can see. I'm going to change the weight on that to something just a little thicker, and to me, this doesn't look very natural, see it ends in a cutoff, squared off in there. You can go into your strokes palette, and you'll find it either through here, through your strokes, you can change the weight, or you can go into this variable width profile and you can change the width profile to something else. Now, you can see it gave it a variable width, which makes it more hand-drawn looking. We can do something like that, and that actually works pretty well, looks like we did it with a pen, with some calligraphy pen. That one works for me, we can leave that one as is. Lets group it, so we don't lose them, and move that aside. Now, we're going to draw another flat flower, which is really fun flower, and I think that maybe, our hero flower for this project. I'm going to start off with the Ellipse tool again. I'm going to give this the hot pink color, and now I'm going to, let's see, I'll use the direct selection tool. Now just tweak this just a little bit on the signs here, just to give it a bit more of a point, because I'm going to do something totally unique with this one. If you go here into your palette, you're going to see that there is illustrator defaults to this width tool. Within the width tool, there are other tools that you can use, there's the warp, the twirl, the pucker, the bloat, the scallop, the crystallize, and the wrinkle tool. All of them will give you a very unique shape. Let's say for example, if I use the pucker tool, and I go here, it's just warps your shape into something completely different, but what I really want to use is this wrinkle tool. If you select it, you can hover right over anywhere on your shape here, and just hold the mouse down, and what you see is going to happen, let me click away so you can see, is that it starts to give it a jagged edge, and that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for this non-uniform jagged edge to it. If you click and drag, it gives you more longer points. Sometimes, you can stay in one spot just hover over it, and you can see, I'll zoom in so you can see better. If you just hover over it, it's just going to have them moving like that, and that works for me. What I really like about this, is that it gives you the Ikat walk. Ikat is very popular pattern. It's used in textiles, and in patterns, and it's just pretty much everywhere. Ikat gives you non-uniform pink bled look, and that's what I'm looking for in this flower. That works for me, this one looks pretty good. I'm going to Option-click, and make a copy of that, zoom in, Option-click, and then I'm going to rotate it, object, transform, rotate. Actually, I need it at a 90 degree angle. There we go. I'm going to bring these together. We can always align them just to make sure that they are perfectly aligned. Option-click these two again, and now we're going to rotate them. Let's make that a 90 degree angle, and put these into place. Line them up as best we can, and perfect. So you can see where this is a totally unique flower. It just has a Ikat look. It has these feathered edges, and it's just perfect. We are going to unite that, and that is our shape. Now, I'm going to select ellipse for the center, and I'm going to make that in this green here, and we're going to go right back to that wrinkle tool, and we're going to do the same thing to the center here. Just for purposes of uniformity, you don't want something looking totally clean against something that has all these character, because then it just will not look realistic. So that looks good to me. What I'm going to do now is select this shape again. I'm going to do edit, copy, edit, paste in the back, and then I'm going to object, transform, scale. Let's scale that at about 110 and see how that works, and I give it a different color here, and that's a totally cool flower. This yellow may be a bit too much for what we're looking for right now, so we can leave it at that, that's fine. So this may become my hero flower for my project. As you can see, although I have an artboard here, I veered off, just so I can create all my elements that I'm done, I'm going to go and put together on here. It doesn't matter if you start drawing your elements out here, doesn't really matter where you draw them. I prefer to draw them out here, because then I can drag into my project, the elements that I am going to use. Sometimes, I end up drawing a bunch of different elements out here and only some of it makes it into my project. So this is the way that I work. You may find a way that works better for you, but for purposes of what we're doing, this is just the easiest way because we may or may not. We're just right now doodling digitally. We may or may not wind up using all these shapes. We may or may not wind up using all these flowers. We may say, you know what? I don't like the clean, look of that one, it doesn't really go with this one, and in the end, we're just going to pick and choose what we want. You can work whatever way is most comfortable for you. This is the method that works for me. In the next lesson, we're going to start covering leaves. 5. Leaves: So now we're going to begin working on our leaves. We're just going to do a couple of sets of leaves, so we'll have some dimension and foliage behind all these flowers. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this Pencil tool. Let me select a color, there we go. I'm just going to draw just a thin leaf like that. So twin leaves. If you have a hard time drawing two at once, you can just draw one and then Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, Objects, Reflect and that'll give you the two, but I'll do that one more time so you can see. You're literally just dragging with the mouse like that. It's not a perfect science, it's just so we have them and so they don't look uniform. Go ahead and draw four of those. Let's do one more here, there we go. Now, we're going to take the Pencil tool and we're just going to draw a bit of a line there. Actually, I don't like that line. I'm going to draw a line a bit more straight in the middle and then turn. I'm going to give that stroke color, the same color as we had in our leaves. This needs to be just a little thicker stroke. Perfect. Now, we can start moving these to where it'll align with the center. Sometimes you have to rotate, sometimes just by moving them it'll work. It all depends on how you want it to look. For instance, this one may have to be rotated a little bit just so it can align better. I'm going to take this and I'm going to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, and I'm going to actually reflect it. Object, Transform, Reflect. Because what I'm going to do is, I want to just have a second group coming out right here. I'm actually going to get rid of that one, and I'm going to delete that part there, that line and I'm going to make my own line that unites. Perfect. That's a pretty good-looking set of leaves. I'm going to draw some veins in the leaves just to give them a bit more dimension. They don't have to be an exact color of what's there already. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm just going to draw a line. That's way too thick. Let's make that in a one-point. A strong line here. This one can have a few veins going out that way. Same goes for here. We're just going to do that to all our leaves. Oops, let's click off. If you try to draw while it's still selected, it tries to alter the shape that you have. That's why that was happening to me there. I'm just going to do that to each one of them so we can add some dimension. This will just bring our little leaves to life. Colors aren't written in stone, we can always go back and change them if we don't like this color, if it's too much contrast or whatever you think works best. Almost done. I'm obviously rushing through this, but you can take your time and make that into perfect veins. I'm just trying to rush through it so I can just give you the gist of what this is supposed to look like without having you sit there and just stare at me doing this for ever. Those are good looking leaves. Let's ungroup them. We'll set those aside. Then we're going to do just another leaf just to add dimension. Let's do a leaf there. I don't like the shape of that one. Let's do a traditional leaf. We want to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in front. We are going to reflect it. This little guy is going to be in this color there. We're going to draw a stem for this too. Let's click off, and then we're just going to draw a third leaf here. That's just so it'll give a contrast to our other leaves, and we can actually make these into a bit of a darker green. I didn't want that green. Let's go back to here and just give it a darker green. Perfect. This here needs to be a little thicker and it needs to be the same green. We want this to be uniform. Now, we can make it thicker. That's pretty good. We'll do the same thing here. We'll draw some veins on our leaves, make that lighter. That's very thick. Now we have to go. There we go. Oops, that one went a little too far. Let's group that. Perfect. Now we have a few elements that we can work with. When we start adding everything to our project, we can see, well, maybe we want yet another flower or we want yet a different type of leaf, or we need a leaf that curves in a different direction for fill, and at that point you can always just go ahead and draw another one. But for purposes of what we're doing today, this is just enough elements for now and then we can always play it [inaudible]. In the next video, we're going to begin our flower arrangement. 6. Assembly: Now, we're going to begin our assembly. Now, the project that I chose to work on is going to be a one page, eight and a half by 11 calendar page. It's going to be one in a series of pages that I'm going to develop that I can use monthly for my caps tool. I'm holding down shift because I want a perfect ellipse. Just going to move that up just a little bit. I don't want this to be just ellipse the way it is now. I'm going to select my color, and I'm going to give it just a little bit more of a toby color there. I'm going to go now into Brushes. I'm going to go to Open Brush Library, Artistic. Then I'm going to go into this paintbrush. Adobe Illustrator is already preloaded with some pretty nifty brushes. You can find a lot of free brushes online as well. I like these artistic brushes. They just give a dry brush feel and it just adds some dimension. That one's a little bit too much. I'm looking for something that just has just enough flair, not too overpowering. I don't want it to be like a super-duper thick line. Just to have enough character in it. What I'm going to do is, I don't want this to be closed circle the way it is now. I'm going to go here where my Eraser tool is, I'm going to go into my Scissors tool, and I'm going to click where I want it to cut off. I want to cut off there, and I want it cut off there. Now, if I click off, this now is a separate piece. I'm going to select it and hit "Delete." Now, I have an open-end ellipse. I'm going start placing my flowers onto it. I really love this flower. It's going to be my hero flower. I'm just going to scale it down by holding Shift. I make sure I hold Shift as I drag the end to corners just so I don't distort the shape of it. You make sure that it's also grouped so I don't ungroup it and make a mess of it. Now, you can see it's behind this circle that we made so I'm going to send the circle to the back, Object, Arrange, Send to the Back. Now, my flower is in the front. I'm just going to rotate it a bit just to give the flower a bit more of a flare. I'm going to make it a little smaller as well. I know I want a flower there. I'm going to hold down Option. I want a flower here. You can zoom in. I want another flower right about here, and I want a flower here at the end. I'm going to rotate some of these, just so they don't look like they were copied and pasted, just the same way we just copied and pasted it. Just like that. Now, we're going to begin by adding some of our foliage. This is obviously, so very large, so we're going to make this a little smaller. Let's put this little guy behind this flower, and bring this flower to the front. We're going to select it, hit Option, and click on it so we can make a copy of it. Maybe move this guy over here. Bring this flower to the front. While we're at it, we might as well bring all the flowers to the front, because the same thing is going to continue to happen. Let's rotate this one a little bit, because we want the leaves to follow the circle of this wreath because that's really what we're trying to create here. Let's make another copy here and put that one there. Let's copy another one and maybe put it here. It's okay to scale. You don't have to have the same exact size leaves. We can scale them down. This is our wreath. We can do with it as we please. Feel free to scale them down or to add more if you want. There's no right or wrong here. Maybe I want to add just another bunch of leaves here. Let's try to maybe rotate that one a little bit. Because I know for my calendar, I want the name of a month to go right here in the center. Then I want my calendar days and dates to be down here. I'm just going to work around it bearing that in mind so I don't cover up anything that I don't want to cover up. I like how that looks already. I think this little guy needs to be just scaled-down just a bit. There we go. Now, let's bring this other leaf. He needs to just be a little bit smaller. Let's see. He needs to just be just a little bit smaller. Here we go. Still smaller, I think. Now, we can start layering some of these, so this guy can go here. Now, as I do that I realized that these leaves are very similar in color, so this is what we're going to do. We're going to select one of these and ungroup it, and select a single leaf. You can see here there is the color. We're going to do Select, Same, Fill Color. That's going to actually select anything that has that fill color, but as you can see, let me zoom out, we used that color here in this stem and in these leaves. We're going to hold down Option and Shift and click on everything that we don't want to change the color of. This way it de-selects that, and now, I only have the leaves that I want to change selected. I, actually, want a brighter green, just something a bit softer. Perfect. Now, you can see this leaf has a bit more of a dimension on it when it comes to layering it. I'm going to now click it, add it somewhere else perhaps. It can go here. We ended up not keeping it here. But to be honest with you, I don't really even like it there. So I'm going to move it back here maybe. That looks better to me. There we go. But we don't want it to be in the same direction as that one, so let's just move this one around just a tad. Let's select it again. Option click, let's move this little guy down here. Option click, let's move this guy all the way over here. I did it again. There we go. Now, we have two copies, so one for here and one for here. This one may or may not interfere with the calendar that we're going to put down here. But we can always tweak that at the end. Now, we are going to add some of these other elements. This little guy right here, I can tell already that this color is not going to be the color that I want. I'm going to probably make that into this darker green, and the same thing goes for this guy. No fill. Let's group that. We're going to start placing this one somewhere here. We want to make it very small because that's not our hero flower, the rose is. I'm not sure if that's a tulip or what that is, but that's going to be our hero there. Option click, make a copy of that, put this little guy somewhere in here. This was not grouped. Now, it is grouped. Not sure when I did that. Let's put this little guy here. Maybe we have to reflect it. Zoom in so you, guys can see a little better. The stem is going in the direction that we want it there. Perfect. Let's do another one here. I just keep doing the same thing. Option click. This is what happens when you work too fast. It's just you do little things like that, then it becomes time-consuming. No. We want this little guy over here. It really doesn't play well with the leaves, so let's move this guy in here. We need one more over here, so let's rotate him and put him here. Could probably go out a little even further there. That's starting to look pretty good. Now we're going to take this little one and we're going to make this guy really tiny just because he's such a purple color that we don't want this to overwhelm our color palette, so I'm going to start to fill voids with him or her. We're going to put one here and I think it needs to be even smaller than that. There we go. Then we're going to Option-click another one, probably somewhere around here. Option-click another guy somewhere here. Same thing keeps happening. Option-click, there we go. Let's maybe Option-click another one over here. That, just as you can see, is just going to give it a purple color without really distorting anything that we have going on as far as shapes and colors, is just to give it a little bit more dimension than what we had. I think we need one right here. The original guy we had here did not Option-click again, so there we go. I think that looks pretty good. There is something missing here, but what we're going to do is we're going to make a copy of some of these flowers. Let's Option-click, let's make this guy a little smaller. Lets actually move it out of the art board so we can see. What I'm going do is make a simple flower. Let's Object, ungroup it. Let's take off the shadow portion of it in the back, and we're going to make this into this nice blue. Object, Group. See how that works. That blue doesn't work too well, but you can always fix that. Then Option-click, let's put one here. That just makes your eye go and wander around here without still not taking away from these flowers. Now, I don't particularly like the way these flowers are all the same color. Remember that they're grouped because that's how we form them in order for us to not lose any of their elements. Let's say I just want to change this pink here without really having to ungroup it and then grouping it again, I'm going to double-click it, and that brings us into a different layer. Now I'm going to select it and I'm just going toggle over and make it a bit more of an orange. To get out of this mode, I'm just going to click this arrow. See? I'm going to do the same thing with this one. Going to select this. I want to maybe make this brighter pink, like how that looks, but maybe the back here now needs to maybe be like this yellow. That works better. This guy maybe needs to be an even a stronger orange. Maybe that orange. Now I like how that looks. Perfect. Let's just change the back color of this one because I just think it needs to be something different. You can play along with this as much as you want. There is no right or wrong, there's no science to it really, it's just whatever attracts your attention and moves your eye around. After you complete it, you may say, "Oh, I really don't like the way that one looks and let me move this around." I think I'm going to leave these blue flowers the way they are. I'm missing an element here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one of these leaf shapes and I'm going to copy it and paste it over here and bring this leaf to the front. That filled that area there without really getting too nutty. I still need something that can fill over here, so maybe this guy can do double duty and come over here. Let's see how that looks. Let's bring this guy to the front, maybe make him a little smaller. Yeah, that will work. It's just to fill our areas here the best that we can. I'm going to do the same thing here. I think this here is in need of something different, so I'm just going to move that there. Our flowers still on the front. It's a bit of tedious work, but you'll see it's like flower flower you're just going to put it all together and in the end it will work out. It always works out. It doesn't matter how much you layer it, you may like something simpler than I do, you may only want a handful of flowers, and that's pretty much it. I think that looks good for now, we can always tweak it a little later once we add our words and our calendar in there, and we may want to add different elements along the line. For now, I think that's good, it's a good starting point. In the next lesson we're going to tackle our text. 7. Text: Now we're going to go ahead and add our text. The first thing we're going to do is, I'm going to type out the name of the month that I'm going to be working on. This month is actually going to be August. I'm just going to drag in while holding Shift so I can make it a little larger so I can now play around with what font I want. I went ahead and I had downloaded a free font that I really liked from dafont.com, called Darleston. Darleston. I think that one's a pretty font, it just has nice curves and it's a very feminine and it goes well with the flowers. I'm going to just make it a little bigger, and I'm going to just turn it slightly so I can fit it right in this space that we have here. I'm going to hold the corner and drag a bit more just so I can fill a little bit more of the space. I like the way it goes in between those two leaves, but as you can see here with these leaves it's not working out so well. I'm actually going to Ungroup this and get rid of some of these leaves here. As you can see, this is a very large box that this is working off of and it doesn't quite let me work with anything that's behind that box. I know we've already committed to this font I'm not going to veer from it. What I'm going to do is going to type, Create Outlines, and that has now made it a non editable text. But if I want to click on anything below it here now it actually allows me to. So I'm going to just delete, and zoom in a bit so I can see what I'm doing because we did put so many little lines here. Let's just get rid of this. Yeah that works better. I actually like the way that looks. I think for a little bit of dimension, I'm going to go to Edit, Copy. Edit, Paste in Font. The font copy, I want to make it this beige. Now I'm just going to use my arrow keys to move it over a little bit, just so I can give it a little bit more of dimension there. I actually think I want this beige I want it to be a little bit more in the top. There we go. If I move it more I'll see more of the black. Perfect. Now, I just need to add my actual calendar below. I went to a website called timeanddate.com, and if you click on calendar, it'll bring you to this whole calendar. It does something really neat. It actually lets you copy everything on here, just below the month. I'm going to go to Edit, Copy. Then here I'm going to go to Edit, Paste. It pasted it perfectly the way I wanted it. Now what I'm going to do here, is I'm going to change this font a little bit. I'm just going to try to go with something that's not as rounded as that one. I actually like this one. This Myanmar one. As far as color, I think I want to use this same top color that's here. That may be a little too light, so I may have to go a little darker on that. I don't want it to be an overwhelming color. That looks pretty good to me. Perfect. Now I can see that I just have a little bit of a void here that I want to fill. So I'm going to select these leaves again, I'm going to option quick, I'm going to turn this around and I'm actually going to reflect them to see if they could just take a different angle on that to fill this corner here. I'm going to need them substantially smaller because I want them to go behind this blue flower here. Yeah, and that filled that area there. I'm also going to use a few more of these just to have a little pops of color here and there. I actually want another one of these just right here and that one over there, how about another little guy here. Another little guy right over here. Okay. I actually love the way that looks. That's it for the month of August. I'm just going to show you a couple of tricks that you can use to try to create some of the other months. You can leave the elements exactly the same way they are and just change the color if you want. You can also add different things. Let's say for October you can draw a little pumpkins and put them throughout, leaving the same year-old flowers as your heroes, just so you don't veer too much far off of the look and feel of the calendar. There's just a million different things you can add for the December month, you can add some holly leaves to the existing leaves and you can add some berries throughout or you can just stay within the same flowers and the same foliage, the same exact thing, and just change out the colors if you want. What I'm going to do now is show you a neat little trick. I'm going to select everything, and I'm actually going to just leave the date as is. But I'm going to show you a neat trick if you go here into Color Guide and you see this bottom, it looks like a rainbow of colors. It's called Editor or Apply Colors. You're going to click on that. Then here you'll see the colors that are represented in the actual drawing. I'm going to click on that, so it brings that up and look what it's done. It's found variations of the colors that I've used and it's created its own. I'm going to go down to here, to this button called randomly change color order, I can do this all day long. I can click on it. It's just going to change these colors in any way that it wants to, as long as it stays within that color group. You can also go here to this color picker and you can select from your color guides anything else. I have some user-defined ones. I have used fruits. Here's one called sweets. If I select that, it now went into that color palette. I can then from there continue to change it randomly. It's staying within the same hue of the colors that I used within the same saturation and brightness. Here I can randomly change the saturation and brightness as well. See what happened there. It changed to a much brighter color and then I can continue searching for colors. That's just something to consider. If it's something that you want to do, you can go ahead and go and play with that. Now that we've completed our project, I want you to go ahead and develop your own calendar. You can start with one month. You can tackle all 12 months. Once you have the basis of it put together, it's just a matter of changing out the name of the month and the date and just playing around with your colors. If you don't really want to draw any new elements to it, you don't have to. Then you can print it out either in five by seven or in an 8.5 by 11 or 8 by 10, you can frame it. You can actually go on some of the print on demand sites and print a spiral bound calendar. There's many sites, CafePress, there's Zazzle where you can upload your own artwork and you can print it, or it just simply print it at home on a printer or take it to a office supply store and print it there on some really nice card stock and just hang it up. I'll be proud of your artwork. Make sure you follow along the class and make sure that you post to the class your project when it's complete. I'd love to see what you've done, what your take on this class was and thanks for joining me.