Transcripts
1. Welcome | Class Project: [MUSIC] I am Tracey Capone. I'm an illustrator,
photographer, and designer, and welcome to my class all about creating
beautiful textures and florals right on your iPad
using Affinity Designer. In this class, you'll
learn how to use designers powerful vector and raster tools to create beautiful texture flowers
and leaves like these. What you'll learn
in this class will provide you the
building blocks you'll need to go on to create even
more complex illustrations. First, I'll take you on a comprehensive tour through
designers user interface, show you the difference between
each of the workspaces, as well as explain the tools
and studios within each one. After that we'll take a look at the built-in shapes and
the rectangle tool, as well as the pen
and pencil tools, and I'll show you how to
use all of these to create organic-looking flower
and leaf shapes. Next, I'll show you how to add additional dimension to your
flat illustrations by using a combination of vector and raster-based tools to add beautiful texture
to your designs. We'll also explore
the asset studio, where I'll show you how you can easily save complete objects for use in future illustrations
or surface patterns. I'll show you how you can use the nature elements
assets pack that I'm providing as a free
download for this class. Now, if you're already familiar with designers
interface and want to jump right into
creating, feel free to. I'll set the class up for
everyone from beginner to intermediate so you can easily
skip ahead if you'd like. The project for this class
will be to create two sets of flowers and leaves using the tools that you'll
learn about in the class. The shapes in the
rectangle tool, as well as the pen
and pencil tool. You'll complete these flower
shapes by adding texture and whatever format
you'd like to add it using texture image files, vector or raster brushes. Finally, you will create a full textural bouquet
illustration using a combination of all the methods that you've learned
in the class. For the class, you're going
to need a compatible iPad, an Apple Pencil,
or other stylists, or if you prefer, you can
even draw with your finger. I can't wait to see
what you create using the methods you
learn in this class, so let's get started.
2. Downloads & Resources: Before we get started,
I want to show you how to download the
resource guide, brush and assets pack that
I've included with the class. I want to know you're
going to need to access the download link
through the projects and resources section on
the Skillshare website and not through the app. You'll find a link at
the top of that section. When you click on it,
you're going to need a password to access
the downloads, and I'll put that up
on the screen now. Once you've entered the password and access the three downloads, you'll find three files, the resource guide, the
nature elements assets pack, and the textural
florals brush pack. Go ahead and download these
either to your iPad or to an accessible Cloud
file as you'll need to open these on your
iPad to import them. The resource guide
includes information about Affinity Designer as well as
links to Serif's website, in case you haven't already
downloaded the app. It also includes a
comprehensive breakdown of the difference between
vectors and rasters, so that you have a better
understanding of how they work and can best decide what's
right for your design. Now, while Designer comes
with a large number of really great vector and raster brushes which I'm
going to use in this class, I've also included a list
of my go-to brush makers, in case you want to further
build your collection. Designer does not come with built-in textures to use for
the texture image files, so I've included this list
of my go-to texture makers, because when it comes to
adding elements like these, they can really make
or break your design. You need to make sure that
you're using high-quality, high resolution
images to include, otherwise, you could run
into quality issues. Included with the download is a set of nature elements assets, as well as a brush pack
to help you further enhance the middle
sections of your flowers. I'm going to be using all
of these in the class, but first, let's go
ahead and import them. Once you've downloaded
the two files, either onto your iPad
or to a Cloud file, you're ready to import
them into Designer. Let's go ahead and start
with the assets pack. Select your Assets Studio, which looks like nine squares
in a block formation, and my screen is set up
for left-handed person, so yours may be on
the other side. Select the hamburger
menu at the top of the studio and tap
on import category. This is going to take
you to your files. Locate the file that you saved, tap on it, and it's going to add it into your Assets Studio. Finally, let's go ahead
and import the brush pack. This time you're
going to want to make sure that you're in
the designer persona, which is this first
icon right here. You'll select the brush studio, which is just under
the color dot here, it looks like a
brush with a little swoosh formation under it. Once you're in the studio again, go to the hamburger
menu at the top, select Import Brushes, locate the file that
you saved and tap, and it will import the brushes
into your brush studio. We're all set to get started. If you have any issues
with downloading the files or importing
them, please let me know. In the next section,
we're going to begin taking a look at
designer's gallery, and user interface, so let's get started.
3. Gallery | Creating a New Document: In this section we're
going to take a look at designers gallery screen, as well as get started with
creating a new document. Now the gallery is the homepage. This is where you will create a new document access help, change your preference
settings as well as organize
existing documents. The very first time
you open this, it's going to be relatively empty with the
exception of a link to some video tutorials as well
as sample illustration. But at the top right
you'll see a plus sign, question mark, and a cog. I'm going to skip the plus sign for
right now that's where you'll access the
new document menu. The question mark takes
you to the help area. On the left you'll see written help which is
broken down into sections, so you can more easily
find everything. On the right you can
access a collection of video tutorials as well as the user support forums
for on Sarah's website. There's a number of
ways of accessing help directly inside the app. A cog takes you to System Preferences and it's broken down in two traditional preference
categories at the top. I haven't changed very
many of my settings, I'm going to show you the
ones that I have changed, as well as some additional
ones you can decide for yourself if there's
any additional changes you want to make. In the general preferences, I make sure that my Undo
limit is relatively low. Designer takes a snapshot
of every movement you make within a document for
undo and redo purposes. The larger this number, the more taxing it is on the application and the slower everything
is going to move. I keep mine anywhere
between 110 and 130 and haven't found
a need to change that. In the interface preferences, you can change your
background gray level here with this slider. The further you go to the left, the darker your screening, the further right, the lighter. Now I am left-handed, while this is off by default, I have made sure that
left-handed mode is on. All this does is
flip your screen opposite of one another, the tools are exactly the same. If you prefer to tap a button rather than use two-finger,
three- finger tap, you can turn on Show undo
and redo buttons here, but by default it is off. I haven't made any changes
to my color preferences. If you have particular needs, you can take a look
at the menu here and see if there's anything
that you need to change. In the Tools Preferences
I make sure that allow canvas rotation
in all tools, as well as touch for
gestures only is on. Canvas rotation allows
you to use two fingers to rotate your canvas rather than
rotating the entire iPad. I keep this on overall
for the application, but on a document basis, there is a way of locking
it and I'll show you how to do that when we get
into the workspace. Touch for gestures only, because I don't draw
with my finger. What I was finding
is when I was using my finger rather as a modifier, I was accidentally
moving objects. I make sure that this is
on so that doesn't happen. Again if you are someone
who draws with your finger, you're going to want to
make sure that this is on. If you're using an Apple pencil, in the pencil preferences, you can change your pressure
settings as well as make some basic changes to how the pencil interacts
with the application. Your font preferences
will show you fonts that you've imported
into the application. Then finally, the
shortcut preferences will provide you with a list of keyboard shortcuts if you use either a bluetooth
or a smart keyboard. Let's go ahead and
create a new document. Now I'm going to
go ahead and hit the plus sign here and it's going to give me a
number of options. I'm going to skip the first
option here for one moment. You can create new
from a clipboard. You can create from a
template that you've saved. You can also Open or
Import from the Cloud, as well as import
photos from your iPad. This final option allows
you to create what's called a project and it's
basically a folder. I'm going to take you back
to my gallery screen. These top four documents
are out on their own, but in the bottom here I have projects set
up which again are just folders and I use those
to organize my documents. For example, I have one set up for my Skillshare
class documents. Now within the folder, I can reorder my documents, I can tap on this
hamburger menu and get a number of options
such as renaming it, saving it, moving
out of the project. Then the projects themselves
also have a menu. Now, there's
something inside it, but the only thing that
you can do is rename it. If this were empty, it would also give me
the option to close it. Lets go ahead back in here
and go to New Document. Now this is where
you can manually key in the information
for your document. I prefer the most part, ignore the left side. The only time I use this is if I've created
presets and you can do that by tapping on this
hamburger menu and then you'll find the presets
under this drop-down. But for the most part, you can key your information
in on the right side here. Now, the one thing that you
do want to keep in mind when you're creating your document
is if you plan to print it, because while this is a vector program and has
raster elements to it, you need to create your original document and the largest size
you plan to print. That's to avoid any
pixelation or muddy textures. When you're creating
that, just keep in mind what your plans are for,
what you're creating. Let's say I want to create
a 16 by 20 inch document. In pixels I'm going to
go ahead and type that in as 4,800 by 6,000. Then I'm going to
choose my DPI here. There's a list of
preset ones as well as way of keying in your own if you have a
particular need. I'm going to tap 300.Now,
you can change your orientation and it will automatically change the
numbers at the top here. But let's just stick with
a portrait orientation. If you prefer to work with
the transparent background, you can remove the background
by tapping on this. I personally prefer to
work with a background, but that's really up to you. Then finally, if you want
to work with art boards, you can create that here, then there's ways that you
can adjust the art board and add additional ones once
you get into the workspace. I'm not going to use one here, I'm just going to tap, "Okay". It's going to create
my new document and take me into
the user interface. In the next few sections, I'm going to take
you on a tour of Designer's interface and
take you into each of the persona's that provide you
with the tools that you need to create your own
illustration. I'll see you there.
4. The Designer Persona: In this section, we're
going to take a closer look at the tools under
the designer persona. I mentioned in the last section
the designer persona is the default persona we'll
find the vector-based tools. Now, if you're coming from
another vector program, you're likely familiar with
the tools in this one. What's probably less
familiar is the layout. In designer for iPad,
there are tools on one side and what are called
studios on the other. Again, my screen is flipped
for a left-handed person. The tools allow you to create, move, resize, and
reshape objects, as well as perform
edits to those objects, and the studio side gives you
advanced functionality to perform additional appearance
edits to those objects. The two don't necessarily
work in conjunction with one another with a
few notable exceptions. For example, if I
select the ''Vector Brush Tool'' I'll go to the brush studio to select what type of
brush I want to use. Similarly, there's a text tool that also has a
corresponding tech studio, but for the most part they work independently of one another. Let's take a look at the
individual tools themselves, starting with the arrow
which is the move tool. The move tool allows
you to select, move, re-size, as well as
rotate your objects. We're going to use
the rotate function, especially when it
comes to creating flowers in an upcoming section. I'll turn the labels on here. The node tool, point transform tool, and corner tool allow you
to make edits to the line, shapes, curves, and paths
that make up your objects. The pencil tool,
vector brush tool, and pen tool are
used to free-form create those objects as well as perform additional
edits to them. The fill tool and transparency tool are used to add gradients to the objects, whether it's a transparent
gradient, color gradient, or you can even add texture
to a group of layers and I'll show you how to do
that in an upcoming section. The rectangle tool,
which I'll tap and tap again will provide you with
a list of built-in shapes, and when we get into
creating leaves and flowers, I'm going to show you
how to do that two ways. One of those ways will be
using these built-in shapes. I mentioned the
text tool already. We're actually not going to
use any texts in this class, but this is how you would
add it to your design. Then finally, there's
an eyedropper tool. This allows you to
sample color to use in your existing document or
save for future documents. There's actually two ways
to use the eyedropper, the one down here and the
one in the color studio, we'll get to in a little bit. I typically use this one over in the studio
rather than this, but it's really up to you,
whatever is more comfortable. Let's take a look at the
bottom of the screen. This is the contextual menu, and if I tap through the tools, you'll see that menu change. This just provides you with additional options specific
to the selected tool. Just keep an eye
out, some of them actually have carrots here where there's additional
options that are hidden. This primarily works with the tool side and not as
much the studio side, but there are some exceptions that I'll show you
when we get there. Moving to the studio side, starting with the color studio, I'm not going to focus
a lot of attention on this studio in
this class as I have created a specific
class dedicated to the color studio where I'll
show you how to sample color, as well as create
your own palettes. But this is where you'll
select the color for the fill and strokes
for your objects, and you can do that using
the eyedropper tool, a color wheel, sliders,
as well as swatches. Again, we'll go into greater
detail on that in a bit. The stroke studio
allows you to make changes to the appearance
of an existing strokes. So if I add a black
stroke to this pink box, I can use the stroke studio to change the width
of that stroke, I can change it to dashes, and change the
pattern of that dash. I can change the
handles here to change the pressure settings on the stroke to give
it a bit of a warp. Then there's additional
settings under this carrot that you can
make changes to as well. The brush studio, again, is where you're going
to select the type of brush you use with
the brush studio. But additionally, you can make changes to
the appearance of a selected stroke simply by selecting and tapping
on the brush. I have that same
stroke selected here. I'm going to tap this
acrylic stroke brush, and you can see that it
changed the appearance of that stroke to match
that of the brush. The layer studio is where layers are house and organized, so you can group layers
and ungroup them. You can reorder layers
by tapping and dragging. You can also clip
layers rather and we'll be using that
a lot when we add texture to our objects. You can delete layers, add blank layer or mask, and you can also go into
the layer options of a selected layer simply by
tapping these three dots. Here you can make a change
to the name of the layer, the opacity, as well
as the blend mode. The appearance studio provides you with detailed information about the stroke and fill that
make up a selected object. In this case I have this orange box selected
and it's telling me there's no stroke
and an orange fill. If I tap the pink box, it's telling me I have
a 30 point black stroke and a pink fill. We're not going to use this
studio at all in this class, but there's some
really interesting design elements that you can add using the higher
functionality of the studio, so I recommend checking out serifs website for
additional information. The asset studio is by far my favorite thing
about designer. This allows you to save objects, whether they're
single layer objects or a multiple layer objects that you can use in
your existing document as well as future ones. I use this a lot for surface pattern design as
well as when I'm creating an illustration that I
just need a little bit of fill for and I don't want to
have to start from scratch. All you do is tap
and insert and it will insert your object
exactly as you saved it. In this case, since I
save this as a group, I can go into these
individual elements and make changes
to them if I want. Now, I mentioned in the resource section that
I provided you with a link to a set of nature element assets and this
is where you'll find them. In an upcoming section, I'm going to show you not
only how to use them to add color and texture and
create your own designs, but I'll also show
you how to save your own assets as
well as organize them. The stock studio allows you
to directly access Unsplash, Pixabay, and other sites
to find reference photos. Now, if you are used
to having to leave an app to go to Pinterest
or a web browser, you no longer have to do that. All you have to do
is type in a search. I'm going to go ahead
and do car again here, and it'll pull up
the stock images for that particular search. If I select this VW bug here
and tap and then release, it pulls it in as a separate
layer in my document. I can re-size this and
have it off to the side, I can sample colors from it, I can use it as a
reference image. You can also add it to
an art board if you're using artboards instead
of a single Canvas. Now, because this is a separate layer when
I'm done with it, I can either turn it off
or delete it completely. We're not going to use the
symbols studio in this class. I use this a lot for
surface pattern design. What this allows you to do
is add an element known as a symbol and duplicate
it across your design. When you make changes to
one of those symbols, it'll make the exact
same change to the rest of the symbols
that you've placed. Again, this is really handy for something like surface
pattern design, where you're adding a duplicate of the same thing and don't want to have to go into each one to make a
particular edit. The layer effects studio
allows you to add non-destructive layer
effects to your objects. For example, if I
select the orange box, I'm not going to go
through all of these. We'll select Gaussian Blur. I can drag across the Canvas and add a blur and
change the level of blur. I can also do that down here
at the contextual menu. If you remember, I
mentioned earlier that this menu typically works
mainly with the tools. This is one of those exceptions. These are non-destructive
layer elements, which means I can go
into them at anytime, I can turn it off, I can change the amount, I can even add additional
layer effects if I want. Similarly, the
adjustment studio adds non-destructive adjustment
layers to your design. This primarily works with the raster elements
under the pixel persona, where you can add a
black and white layer, you can add a curves layer to
make changes and contrast, there's a whole list here of
things that you can do to make appearance changes
to an existing design. Again, they are
non-destructive so they can be changed or removed at any time. Again, the tech studio works in conjunction with
the text tool. This allows you to
make additional edits to any texts that you
put in your Canvas. Then the transform studio, we're going to be using a
great deal in this class. This allows you to reorder your layers instead of
going to the layer panel. You can flip and rotate
using any of these buttons, you can change the dimensions
of an object either by scrubbing or tapping on the number and keying
in a specific number, you can change the position
by doing the same thing, either scrubbing or tapping
and keying in a number, you can also change the
rotation of an object and simply either scrub or tap and change the
number back to zero to get it back to right. You can also align objects
if you have two or more on your Canvas that
you want to align horizontally or vertically, you can do that here. The navigator studio allows you to zoom in and out
on your Canvas. You can also lock
your Canvas here. If you remember when we
discussed the settings, I talked about keeping
the Canvas rotation for all documents on so that you can go ahead and rotate your Canvas rather than having
to rotate the entire iPad. There are times where I find that inconvenient and
I need to turn it off, so you would lock
it here and now I can still zoom in and out, but I can no longer rotate it. Now, if you do have
this unlocked and you rotate your Canvas and you
want to get it back to zero, just tap on this number, type in zero, and it's going to
write your Canvas. Then finally, there's
the history studio. There's a number of
ways that you can access the snapshots
in the history. You can either scrub up
and down using the slider, you can tap and hold on
the clock and again, scrub up and down
with your pencil, or you can tap into a
particular snapshot. This is driven by
the number that you select in settings,
which if you recall, we mentioned keeping that
number rather low will help your application
run much more smoothly. This is the designer persona. In the next section,
I'm going to take you into the color
studio, where again, I'll show you how to sample
colors from reference images, as well as create your
own color palettes to use in your documents.
I'll see you there.
5. The Color Studio: In this section,
we're going to take a closer look at the Color
Studio and designer. I mentioned in the last
section that you can use the Color Studio to sample
colors from reference images, as well as create and save
your own swatch pallets for use in the existing document or save for future documents. Before we get into that
though, let's take a closer look at
the studio itself. Every vector object
that you create consists of a stroke and a fill, whether they're visible or not. For example, this rectangle currently has an orange
fill and a white stroke. The stroke and the
fill represented by the two icons at the top
left of the Color Studio. The fill is on the left and the stroke is on the right and you can select between the
two simply by tapping. Whichever one is on top is the one that you're
going to change. Now there are a number
of ways that you can select colors for your
stroke and the fill. But before we get to that, let's take a look
at what you can do with the icons themselves. If I were to select
this blue circle and wanted to swap colors between
the stroke and the fill. I would simply swipe across the two icons and I can swap
the colors back and forth. Let's say I wanted to remove
the blue fill completely, so that I'm left just
with the white stroke. I would select my blue
fill because again, whichever ones on top is the
one that you're going to change and I'll just swipe up. I can do the same
thing with a stroke by selecting the stroke
and swiping up, and that same change
can be made to either simply by using this
quick swatch at the bottom. As far as selecting color for
your stroke and the fill, there are a number of ways
that you can do that, starting with the color wheel. If I wanted this blue
fill to be purple, I would select my fill and I would tap into
the purple area of the color wheel and
just start dragging my sliders around until I
find the color that I want. Now if you have exact
values you want to can, you can also use the sliders, which can be accessed by
using these arrows or by tapping in the middle until
you have the full list. Additionally, you
can use swatches. Now, on this main
screen you're going to see a set of quick colors, including the null that applies to every single document
across the application. Below that you'll see a
list of recent colors, swatches for the document
they're currently in. There's also a list of preset palettes
that are already in designer which you can access
by tapping on swatches. Again, you can use the
arrows to go back and forth. You can change it to the exact values rather
than just the dots, or you can tap in the middle and it will give you the full list. Now in addition to
the built-in pallets you can create and use
your own palettes. There are two ways to do that. If you tap the hamburger
menu at the top, it's going to give
you two options. One is to add an
application palette, the other is to add
document palette. If you add an
application palette, you can use that color palette no matter what
document you're in. For example, I add a
list of go-to colors. Every time I create
a color that I find myself using a lot and
I want to save it, I will save it to this
go-to colors palette, which is set as an
application palate, which means I can use
it in any document. Let's go ahead and create a document palette just
for this one though. I'm going to go to my hamburger
menu and it's going to ask me whether I want
an application palette or a document palette. I'll go ahead and
tap document palette and it'll set up an
unnamed palette. Now to change the
name, I'm going to go to the hamburger menu again, tap rename and let's
call this Color Studio. Now I can begin
adding my colors. I'm going to use my
eyedropper tool to do that. I'll sample the
colors throughout this document and they'll
start getting added here. Let's use the
eyedropper and drag. I want to sample
this gray first. When I released my pencil, the icon next to
the eye dropper is going to change to the
color I just sampled. To add a color to your palate, you need to change the fill
to whatever color is here. To do that, you simply tap and it will change the
fill to that color. Now I'm going to my
hamburger menu again, and select, add current fill to palette and it will
show up there. Again, let's go ahead and drag down until I select this orange. It's going to change the
orange to that selection. I'll tap until my
fill is orange. Go to my hamburger menu and hit add current fill to palette and you can keep
doing this for all of the colors in your document. Finally, let's take a
look at how you can sample colors from
a reference image, either for use in your
existing document or to save as a swatch
palette for future documents. The first thing I'm
going to do is find a stock photograph to use
for the reference photo. I'm going to go to
my stock studio. Let's say, I'm going to create an illustration of a watermelon. I'm going to type in watermelon. Then select my photograph. I like this particular
one because of the variety of colors
I'm going to tap and hold and release
and it's going to add it to my document
as a separate layer. Now I'm not worried about
the exact size of this. I just want it
large enough that I can get a wide variety
of color from it. I'm going to drag out
and then de-select. I also want to make
sure I lock that layer, so I don't accidentally
move it around. I'm just going to go into
the layer studio and tap on the lock next to the
watermelon image. Now we're ready to
start sampling. We'll go to our Color
Studio and swatches. Now you need to determine, do you want to use this
just for this document or do you want to make it available for future
documents as well? In this particular case, let's just select a
document specific palette. I'll go to the hamburger menu, tab on add document palette and now I can go ahead and
rename it if I'd like, by tapping on the
hamburger menu again, selecting rename palette, and we'll type in watermelon. Now when you're selecting
colors from a raster image, you're going to see a lot of variation in the various pixels. What I'll typically try and
do a select from highlights, mid tones and darks, and I'll try to select two from each one
if it's available. Let's start with the darks. I'm going to go ahead
and drag over here to this really dark red. I'm going to release and
it's going to change that dot to that color. Now remember the swatches and the pallets are
based on the fill, so I need to make sure
the fill is selected. I'm going to tap
the dot and it will change the fill to that color. Now I can go back to
my hamburger menu. Select, add current, fill to palette, and
now it's in my palette. Let's go ahead and find another dark that's
just slightly lighter. I'm going to tap, go to my
hamburger menu and select, add current fill to palette. I'll just keep doing this
until I feel like I have enough are a variety of
colors that I can work with. Again, I typically
select from the darks, mid tones and highlights and
in this case I'm going to make sure I'm selecting
from the rind as well, so let's just keep
on selecting here. In this case, the range is so thin
that to get the greens, I just need to zoom in. You can always do
that if it's helpful. I'm just going to
go ahead and get this final lighter green here. I think that gives me
enough to work with to create my watermelon
illustration. That's how you
sample colors from a reference image to
create swatch pallets. In the next section,
I'm going to take you through the pixel
persona and show you the tools that you
can use to add some really
interesting texture to your designs. I'll
see you there.
6. The Pixel Persona: In this section,
we're going to take a closer look at
the Pixel Persona. Now I'm not going to
focus any attention on these studios
because while there are some studios in the
Designer Persona that aren't found
on the pixel side, those that do remain
are exactly the same. We're just going to focus
on the tools themselves. I mentioned previously that
the Pixel Persona is where the raster-based
tools are housed. You'll use those tools to add raster texture to
your vector objects. You can also access a number of selection tools
that allow you to select specific sections
of your designs for edits. Now something I haven't
previously mentioned is that the two personas work
independently of one another. While you can go into your
Designer Persona and create flat vector art and not use the Pixel Persona to
add any raster texture, conversely, you can
use the Pixel Persona exclusively to create raster-based paintings
from scratch. It's totally up to you. If you're coming from a raster-based
illustration program, you're likely very familiar
with the tools in this one. Let's go ahead and take
a look at those tools. The arrow is the move tool, just like in the
Designer Persona and it works exactly the same. You can select, move, resize, and rotate your objects. You're going to use
the Paintbrush Tool to apply the raster texture to your objects and
select the type of brush that you want to
use in the brush studio. Just like on the designer side, there are a number of baked in brushes that come
with the application. I've also included a list of my go-to brush designers
in the resources guide. I'll use a number
of these brushes throughout the class so
you can see how they work. There's also an Erase
Brush Tool that allows you to erase away
portions of an object. A Pixel Tool that
allows you to create those fun 1980s
type illustrations. We're not going to use
that in this class, but it's actually fun to use. There's a Smudge Brush Tool, a Flood Fill Tool that allows you to flood a selection
with color, with a tap. Then finally,
there's a number of selection tools as well as a refined selection tool that allows you to modify
your selections. Just like in the
Designer Persona, there's also an Eyedropper
Tool that allows you to sample color so that you can add it to a swatch or use it
in your design. Now one thing that
the Pixel Persona does have that the
designer doesn't, is that when you go to
your Paintbrush Tool, if you tap to the right here, you're going to see
that there's a symmetry and mirror tool. You can use that to create
Radio or Mandala type designs. That's the pixel persona. In the next section, we're going to start creating some designs and I'm
going to show you how to create leaves using the
built-in shape tools. I'll see you there.
7. The Shape Tools: In this class, I'm going
to show you how to create leaves and flowers; two ways. One, we'll be using
the built-in shapes in the rectangle tool. The other we'll be using the free form pen
and pencil tool, all of which can be found
in the designer persona. In this section,
we're going to focus our attention on
the rectangle tool. So I'm going to tap
to select it and tap a second time to pull
up the list of shapes. I'm now going to run line
by line through the shapes. I'm going to focus on a few of the shapes we're going
to use in this class. But what I'm showing
you in this section applies to all the shapes. I'm going to go ahead
and drag out a rectangle and a crescent, both of these we're going
to end up using stems. Then finally I'm
going to go ahead and drag out an ellipse. When you use the rectangle
tool to create a shape, that's exactly what
you're getting. It's a shape, not a curve. What that means is
that I can't use my node tools to make any
further edits to these shapes. In fact, if I select my node
tool and tap on the ellipse, there are no nodes
because they don't exist. It's actually giving me
the bounding box for the move tool so I can make
it bigger and smaller, wider and more narrow. Depending on the
shape that I select, I may also get these red dots that I can use
to make some minor edits. But for the most part, I'm limited as to what I can do. We're now looking for realism
with these illustrations, but we do want that
organic quality that you see in nature. I need to be able to add some texture and dimension
and a little bit of work to these shapes
because right now as they are, they're not really cutting it. To be able to use my node pools, I need to convert these
shapes to curves. Let's go ahead and select this crescent tool and
start with that line. There's two ways that you
convert this to a curve with it selected in
the contextual menu, I can tap to curves. If you don't see it there, you can also go
to your Edit menu and tap Convert to curves. Now, it'll take me
to my node tool and give me four
nodes to work with. That means I can drag these out, I can move these, I can use these handles
to make further changes. I can also drag on the
parts themselves between the two nodes to make
additional changes. I can do all sorts of edits to that original crescent shape
to get it to where I want. Let's take a look at the
individual nodes themselves. The top and the bottom of this pointed crescent are
made up of sharp nodes. You can tell they're sharp
because they're square. The middle, because there's a slight bend for this crescent, has two smooth nodes on them. You can tell they're smooth
because they're circles. Now, if I wanted to
use those two nodes to pull a little bit more of a bend the way you would
see in some stems, I could do that by
selecting my node tool and dragging across the
two middle nodes until they're both selected. I know they're selected
because they are blue. Now, because these are
already smooth nodes, when I start to drag, I already get that nice bend
and I can move it up and down and I can go back and forth to place it where I want; put it about there. Now, as is this looks
a little bit like a pink green bean
instead of a stem, but that's okay because we
can make additional changes. If I were to go up to
this node at the top, I could drag in to make it
a little bit more narrow. I like the bottom, the
width that it's at, but I'm going to tap on this right node and
just drag in and down a little bit just to make the middle a little
bit more narrow. I've gone from a
basic crescent shape to a shape that I could
see using as a stem. Let's go ahead and get rid of this and take a look
at the rectangle tool. Again, this is a shape,
it's not a curve. The first thing I need
to do is convert it. I'm going to go ahead
and with it selected tap to curves and now it takes me into my node
tool and gives me four sharp nodes to work with. But because there's no bend in this the way there
was with the crescent, I don't have any nodes in the
middle but I can add them. I'm going to go ahead and
with my node tool selected, tap on one side and tap
on the path on the other. They don't have to be
exactly lined up but they should be in proximity
to one another. Now I can go ahead and select these two nodes but
before I bend them. Because if I were to
bend them right now because they're sharp nodes, it would be very
angular and I want that nice curve the way
we had with the crescent. First, I need to convert these from sharp nodes to smooth. They're still selected. I'm going to go to head
to my contextual menu at the bottom and tap Smooth. Now they've converted from square sharp nodes to
round smooth nodes, which means when
I start to bend, it's a nice curve. I'm going to go
right about there. Now, if I wanted to
perhaps bevel the bottom, I could select one of the nodes and just
drag out and down. Let's say at the top. I wanted it to be more pointed. I can either take this
node and drag it over, or I could select that node, go to my contextual menu at
the bottom, and tap Delete. It makes it a
really sharp point. Again, we've taken that from a basic rectangle to another shape that we
could use as a stem. Finally, let's take a
look at the ellipse. I'm going to convert
it to curves. It gives me four smooth nodes because this is a
perfectly rounded object. Let's say I wanted this
to be a pointed petal. I wanted it pointed to
the top and the bottom. With my node tool selected, I could drag across the two
nodes until they're both selected and go to my Contextual menu at the
bottom and tap Sharp. Now I have a nice point at
the top and the bottom, but it's still a basic shape and doesn't look so
much like a petal. But I can use these
two smooth nodes on the side to make some
further changes. If I tap on this one
and start dragging up and out with that handle, and then select this
one and perhaps drag in and down or move
this in a little bit, I could go ahead and make
that nice bell shape. That now, if I were
to rotate this around the circle would
make a really nice flower. That's the basics of the Rectangle tool that we'll be using when we're creating our
leaves and flowers later. In the next section, I'm going to show you
how to use the pen and pencil tool to free-form create objects similar to
these. I'll see you there.
8. The Pen & Pencil Tools: In this section, we're going
to do a closer look at the pencil and pen tools
in the designer persona. Now these two tools will allow you to create shapes that have a more organic feel than the built-in shapes coming
out as the rectangle tool. Let's start with the Pen tool. I'm going to go ahead
and select a stroke. I'm going to leave my
fill empty for right now. I'll go ahead to the contextual
menu at the bottom here. I'm going to key
in 15 points for my width just to get myself a nice thick line to work with. Now, when I start tapping
around on the screen, it begins to lay down
a number of nodes and paths wherever I tap to
begin forming a shape. If I tap the original
node that I created, that closes my shape out. Now, if I wanted to make
further edits to this, the benefit of working with
vectors is that I can use my node tools to
further manipulate the nodes and the path that I've already laid down to do that. I'm going to ahead and
select my Node tool. I'm going to start dragging these around where I want them. I can also delete nodes
that I don't need. I can get a different
shape than I started with. Now additionally,
if I wanted to, I could create bends
in these paths, either by dragging
the line itself or by dragging the
handles that create them. I could also change the type
of node that's in place. Right now the selected
node is a sharp node. If I tap smooth in
a contextual menu, I get a completely
different fill. I could add a fill
if I wanted to. I could use the Stroke
Studio to change the width and the
pressure settings. I could also use my Corner tool to select the corner in a
corner type at the bottom. When I drag down, it helps me create
another shape. That's a few things
that you can do straight out of the
box with the Pen tool. Let's take a look at
a couple of others. I'm going to delete this shape. Again, we're going to
start with a stroke, I'm going to leave
my fill empty. Select my Pen tool, and I'll tap and tap again. Now before I release am
I'm going to drag down, and it's going to
create a nice curve. It also gives me
these two handles that help direct the curve. Now, if I wanted to
get close this shape out with a straight
line, I can do that. But in order to do that, I need to let the handle
that's currently under my pencil know which
direction I want to go. If I will simply
release and tap, it's going to close
that shape out with a curve rather than
a straight line. Let's start that again. I'm going to tap, tap,
and I'm going to drag. Now, I'm going to
use my finger as a modifier key and hold it down. I'm going to drag my handle
up and release so that the handle is facing
the direction I want to go and when I tap, it completes the shape
with a nice straight line. Now it's actually not
perfectly straight. If I zoom in here and
select the node tool, you can see that the
handle is slightly up from the main line.
That's not a problem. With me snapping on, I can simply drag
the handle down, and it will snap into place and form a
perfectly straight line. Additionally, with
the Node tool select, I could use this handle
at the top here to change the position or the depth
of the original curve. I could also drag down
with my path or with these handles to create a curve in the bottom
if I wanted to. I could add a fill just
like I did previously. I could also change the width
and the pressure settings. There's a number of
ways that you can use the Pen tool to create
and edit shapes. I give you a little bit of
an advantage, in my opinion, overusing a raster where
you're relying on shape tools, erasers, undo and redo. I'm going to go ahead and
delete this and show you one more thing before we
get into the Pencil tool. Again, I have a stroke selected. I'll select my Pen tool, and I'm going to change
my mode to smart mode. If you're coming from
illustration program that has a separate curvature pen, this program does not have that, but the smart mode in the Pen
tool works very similarly. I just want to make sure
that my pressure settings look okay here, so you can easily see this. When I start tapping
around on the screen, it's going to pay attention
to where I'm placing my nodes and give me the best
curve for that placement. If I were to go ahead
and tap and finish this, the program is
determining that this is the best type of curve for
where I place my nodes. That's fine. I can still go into my Node tool and I can
move things around. I can use the handles
to drag up or in. I could also change
the type of node. This one is currently
a smart node. I can change it to sharp, and here you can start
seeing that we can form something like a puddle. We're going to end up using this later when we start
creating some of our free-form flowers we'll use the smart mode and the
pen tool to do that. I want to delete
that and show you one more thing before we
move on to the Pencil tool. Once again in the pen tool, if you select line, and you started tapping around, let me just make sure I have
a stroke selected here. There we go. You can create lines on your Canvas that
are perfectly straight, but they're not contiguous. If you have a need for a
perfectly straight line, you could easily form those. You can also use
your Node tool to then join nodes by dragging
up and tapping Join. Now I have two lines
that have formed one. That's your Pen tool and the
basics on how to use it. Let's move on to
the Pencil tool, and I'll show you how
to use that to create some really great free
form leaf shapes. The Pencil tool is
one of my go-to tools for free form creating
leaves and flowers, and we'll use it a great deal
in the upcoming sections. But for now, let's take a look
at the basics of the tool. I'm going to select
my Pencil tool, and we can use either just a stroke or
a fill only or both. I'm going to show you both ways. Let's start with a stroke. I selected that. I've selected a
15-point width here. You can do that either here in the stroke studio or down
in the contextual menu. Now, I'm going to
I start drawing, you can see it works
just like a pencil. Now this is a
vector, so it's made up of nodes and paths, which means I can go
into my Node tool and I can start moving
these around if I want. I can use my handles to
further drag things. I can delete nodes
that I no longer need. I can also convert my nodes
from smooth to sharp rather. Just like with the Pen tool, I could add a fill
to this or change the pressure or width settings
and the Stroke Studio. Let's go ahead and
get rid of that. Now, if you're like me, and you have a difficult time in drawing a nice smooth line, one of the benefits of using
the Pencil tool is there are built-in stabilizers
which you can access in the contextual menu by
tapping on that carrot. There's three options,
No stabilizer, Rope stabilizer, and
Window stabilizer. The Rope stabilizer and Window stabilizer work
pretty much the same. The difference is
just the tool itself. Let me go ahead and start
with No stabilizer first. If I turn that off, and I just start drawing, you can see that I have a
rather imperfect curve here, and it keeps it even
though I remove my pencil. There's little
imperfections throughout. Now, let's go ahead and get
rid of that and go back in, and I'm going to turn
on Rope stabilizer. Let me zoom in here, so you can see how this works. As I'm dragging across. Let me go ahead and make this a little bit bigger,
so you can see it. There's a rope
pulling my stroke, which is helping to stabilize that stroke as I move along. I'll zoom back out. Now, if I do this, and I create that same loop, I get a much smoother
line and curve here. Again, the Window stabilizer
works very much the same. The only difference is how that rope that I showed
you actually works. I definitely recommend just playing around with
the settings on this, whether it's the
length of the rope or the type of
stabilizer you use because they do work slightly
differently depending on the size of the
rope that you use. Let's go ahead and take a
look at the fill option. I'm going to swap that
just by swiping across. I'm going to tap on use fill. Now when I start drawing out, you can see I can
create this leaf. Now, it looks like
it's completed. If you just look at the shape, it looks like it's a full shape. But if I zoom in, you can see that the initial node and the final node don't
have a connection. There's no blue line
connecting them. There's two ways that
I can crack this. I can select my
node tool and I can drag one node to the other, but that also adjust my shape. If you want your shape
to remain as is, you could also with
the Node tool select or simply tap Close, and it will automatically
bridge it with whatever line works best. Now my shape is remained
exactly as I drew it, but I have a complete
shape to work with. Now one final thing
I want to show you with this is the Sculpt Tool. I'm going to turn that on. If you want to either cut
away or add to this shape, and I'm not talking about adding another object on top
and then combining the two, I can actually add
to this shape. I'm going to show you
the takeaway first. Let's say I'm creating
a Monstera leaf and I want those little cutouts. I could just simply
start with the blue line drawing down and then
draw my pencil up, and you can make
these little cutouts. Now this can be an
extremely frustrating tool. I definitely recommend
practicing with this and the more you practice
the easier it gets. But I can guarantee
you that I use the undo and redo buttons
a lot with this one. You can also add, I can just draw
out and then broke the line between these two nodes and bumped everything out, and I can just keep
going with that. I just keep adding to
the initial shape. That is the pencil
tool in a nutshell. In the next section, we're going to be just start
creating our leaf shapes. I'm going to show you
how to do that using the built-in shape tool,
so I'll see you there.
9. Saving and Exporting Documents: Well, we haven't touched on the Export Persona
in this class. I do want to show you how
you can easily save and export your documents
using a documents menu. There's two options in here, save a copy and export. Save a copy is going
to allow you to save a designer formatted copy of your original illustration to whatever file or
folder you select. Now it's important that you
toggle on "Save History" to make sure that you save all of the layers and history
of your document, otherwise it's a flat file. You also want to
make sure that you do this before you fully close out your document and the gallery otherwise you're
going to lose it completely. I'll go ahead and I'm
going to change the name. Then I'll just tap "Save"
and it's going to take me to my folders so that I can select where I want
it to save to. The next option is
using the Export. This is going to
allow me to export a file in any of
these formats to a folder or if I
want I can also use the "Share" button down here to save it to my camera roll, share it to Instagram, text it to somebody or email it, whatever I want to do. I'm not going to focus
any attention on those. Let's just go ahead
and focus on how you can save it as a file. I don't change anything here, I want the quality to be 100 percent and
this is going to be set up the original size
that I set the document up. Now, typically I'll
save as a TIFF file. In this case I'm going
to keep it as a JPEG. I'll just go ahead
and change the name. I'll go ahead and hit
"Okay" once it gives me this size here. Again, it's going to
take me to my folders. I'll hit "Save". Now I have a JPEG formatted file
saved to my folders.
10. Preparing Your Canvas: It's the moment of truth. Over the next few sections, we're going to be
creating leaves and flowers with beautiful
organic textures. I'm going to show you
how to do that two ways. The first will be using the built-in shapes
and the shape tool. The other will be using the freeform pen
and pencil tools, all of which can be found
in the designer persona. Now first things first, let's go ahead and set up a Canvas. I'm going to tap
on the plus sign and then select "New Document". Now, remember whenever you're introducing
raster elements, you need to size accordingly. In this case, because
we're adding texture, we are going to be
using raster elements. So think ahead to your
final output and create your original document at the largest size that
you plan to print. Otherwise, you're potentially
going to run into muddy textures and pixelation. I'm going to go ahead with
an 11 by 14 Canvas at 300 DPI and that should
suit my needs perfectly. I'm going to go ahead and
key in 3300 pixels by 4200 pixels at 300 DPI. I'm going to keep my orientation,
portrait orientation. I don't need a
transparent background and I don't need artboard. I'm going to click "Okay" and it's going to
create my new document. Now before I move forward, I always add a background layer. I do this for two reasons. One, the white. It's a little
taxing on the eyes, but the bigger reason
is that I always use my background as part
of my overall design. In fact, a lot of the times, I actually add texture to it. Now sometimes I'll go dark
and sometimes I go light. I definitely recommend playing around with it because
you should start adding textures and changing the colors of your leaves and flowers, as well as the blend
modes that you're using. You're going to see a wide
variety of end results. So play around with it until you find something you really like. In this case, I'm just
going to go ahead and choose an off-white color. So I've changed my fill
to an off-white color. I don't need a stroke, so I'm going to select
that and turn it off. I'm going to make sure
that my snapping is on at the bottom so you can see the blue circle
around the magnet. I'm going to select
my rectangle tool. May drag up from the bottom corner to the
opposite top corner, and because my snapping is on, it's going to snap that
rectangle into all four corners. So now I have my
background layer. Now before I move forward,
I want to make sure this is locked so that as I
start adding elements, I don't accidentally
move it around. So I'll go into my layer studio, and on that layer, just tap the lock and
now it's in place. In the next section, I'm going to show
you how to create leaves using the shape tools. So I will see you there.
11. Creating Leaves with the Shape Tool: Now that I have my
Canvas in place, it's time to start
creating some leaves using the built-in shapes and
the rectangle tool. I'm going to start with my stem, but before I do that, I want to select my color. I'll go to my color studio, and I have some greens
down here that I typically use for my leaves in my
recent color swatches. You can select your
color however you would like using the
eyedropper tool, the color wheel or sliders, or if you have a swatch palette, you can set that up as well. I'm going to go ahead and
select this green color here. I typically only use a fill and not both a fill and a stroke there are some
exceptions to that, and I will point
those exceptions out throughout the
rest of the class. Unlike the green color itself, but I find it a little too
light so I could go back into my color studio and use the
sliders to change that. Or I can simply tap and hold on the icon for the color
studio and just drag down. That's another way
that you can easily change the light and dark value of the
color that you've selected simply using
your pencil or stylus. Now that I have my
color selected, I'm going to go ahead
and create the stem. Let's take a look at the
shapes so available. We'll select the
rectangle tool and then tap again to pull
up the full list. Now in the section about
the rectangle tool, I used a crescent
and a rectangle, I think this time I'm
going to use a trapezoid, let's just drag out a trapezoid. Now as is, again, this is a pretty plain shape, it could be used as a stem depending on the aesthetic
you're going for, but what we're looking
to do is pull in more of that organic shape
that you see in nature, and this just
wouldn't work for us. We need curves to work
with, in other words, we need nodes and pads
to manipulate but we can't do that right now because this isn't a curve,
it's a shape. Remember the first
thing you want to do is convert it to a curve, by either tapping two curves
down here at the bottom, or selecting it in
the, edit menu. Now when we go to the node tool, we have nodes that
we can work with. I could drag these paths out to create the bend
that I want for the stem, but I want it to be
more uniform than that. What I'm going to do is
with my node tool selected, I'm going to tap and add nodes
on either side of my shape here then I'm going to drag across and select both of them. Now remember if you start out
dragging too sharp nodes, you're going to get
an angular bend. What I want is
that smooth curve, so I'm going to tap, smooth at the bottom here to convert those nodes
and now when I bend, it gives me that
nice smooth curve. I'm going to leave
it about there. I also wanted to go ahead and make my top a
little more narrow, so I'll just drag this over. I'm going to bevel my
bottom by selecting this left node and
just dragging down. Now what started out as
a basic trapezoid has a much more organic feel that could work very
well for our stem, but now we need the leaves. Let's go ahead and take a look at a few of the shapes that we can use in the rectangle
tool to create our leaves. There are a couple of options
here in the rectangle tool, the most obvious
would be the tear. If I drag that out, it could be a leaf but to
me that's pretty boring, and two on the nose it
looks just like I went in and drag the shape out and I can manipulate it with my node tool. I think it would take a little bit too
much time to get it exactly where I want
this particular shape, so I'm going to delete that. My go-to actually tends to be the ellipse which looking at it, yes, is a very boring shape. Again, I can go ahead and use my node tools to make
changes to this, to make it much
more like a leaf. The first thing I wanted
to do is tap two curves, and now when I select
my, node tool, I get these four rounded, smooth nodes to work with. I want my top and
bottom to be pointed, and you can do whatever you
would like with your leaf. I'm going to make the top
and bottom of mine pointed, so I'm going to drag across
with my node tool selected to select these two nodes and you know they're selected
because they're blue. I'm going to go to the bottom here and I'm going to tap sharp. Now I have a sharp top and
a sharp bottom but again, it's still a little too on-point until obvious for a leaf shape, I want to warp this
a little bit more. I'm going to use these
two smooth nodes on the side to make
further changes. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to drag this handle up, I want to drag this
node in a little bit, and then the handle out some. Now I have a nice wavy shape that gives it a little
bit more of a leaf feel. Now, don't get to hung up on the exact shape because
this is a curve, which means I can always go
back in and make a change to it using my node tool
once I have it in place, so if I see it's
not working just so I can go ahead
and added it easily. I'm going to work with
this here right now. I'm going to go ahead and use
my move tool and select it. With about center on, I'm actually going to make
this a little bit smaller. I'm going to rotate
it a little bit, and I'm going to add
it to my stem here. Now we have the beginning
of our leaf shape, but we need to add leaves
all the way around, and there are a couple of
ways that we can do that, so let's take a look at those. Now that we have our first
leaf and our stem in place, there are a couple of
ways that we can add additional leaves all
the way around the stem. The first is that
when you go into the rectangle tool
and continue to drag out shapes such as
the ellipse or others, and use our move and
node tools to then make individual changes
to those leaves and place them where we want. The other option is to duplicate the original leaf all the way around, and when we're done, go back in and again using
the move and the node tools, make individual edits
to each of the leaves. Time-wise both are the same, I'm going to show you the
second option though, so that I can show you easy ways of duplicating an object. The first thing we want to
do is with our move tool, select that initial leaf. The easiest way to duplicate
this is to go to the, edit menu and tap, duplicate. Now, in our layers
to you will see we have two of the
same exact curve, one is sitting on
top of the other. I can just drag this down, I can rotate it and tuck
it against the stem here. I'm not going to focus
any attention on the size or shape at this point, my focus is first
going to be getting the leaves around
the entire stem. The other way that you
can duplicate is using your two fingers
as a modifier and your pencil with the objects selected tap and drag
at the same time. Again, tap and drag
at the same time. Now with this last duplicates still selected,
don't de-select it, the third option
is I could go into my edit menu and I
can tap, duplicate. Not only does it duplicate it, but it moves it
the exact distance that I move the other one. I can continue that
all the way down until I have the amount of
leaves in place that I want. The easiest way to get
these six leaves now to the other side is to go ahead
and drag and select them. As long as I have all of the leaves in this
blue bounding box, it's going to slap them. Because part of this leaf and part of the stem are
outside of it when I released, they don't get
selected and that's fine we don't want
them selected. I'm going to go ahead
into my edit menu and I'm going to tap, duplicate. Now I have the same six leaves duplicated and sitting
on top of the original. I'll go to my transform menu
and I want to mirror them. I'll flip to a horizontal flip, and then I'm just going to
drag those duplicates over. Now this is a jumbled mess, but that's okay
we're going to use our move tool now to move the leaves roughly into place so that we can start making
individual edits. Before I begin making
any edits to my leaves, I like to just get an idea of the amount of space that
I'm working with on a stem, and I roughly place my leaf
shapes using my move tool. I don't aim for perfection for two reasons nature is not perfect, she's
perfectly imperfect. I'm not looking to have leaves
lined up with one another, actually try and stagger them. The other reason I don't aim for perfection is
because inevitably I'm going to end up moving
them a little bit more as I'm changing
the shape of them. Again, I'm just
trying to get an idea of how much room I'm
working with here, and it just makes
it easier when I start making those changes to the shapes to have
them organized better. We'll just go ahead and
keep dragging these out. Now that those are in place, I'm going to use
a combination of my move and node tools to make changes to my individual leaves so that they look unique
from one another. Typically start at the
top with this and I actually like how
these two leaves are playing off of one another, but I want this one to
be a little bit bigger. I have my move tool selected
and about center selected, this just makes it so
that everything is evenly distributed when I drag. I'm just going to make it longer and maybe a little bit wider. I'm just going to start
following this down, I can go ahead and
flip shapes so that the wave pattern is
a little bit different, I make this a little wider, maybe a little longer. I could also use my node tool to drag the handles to
get a different shape. I just follow this
process all the way around until I'm happy with where things are placed and then I'll take a
look at it overall. Let me just go ahead
and work my way around this and finish this up. Once I'm done, I'll
just typically take a step back and take a look at my overall shape and see if there's any individual ones
that I wanted to change. For example, this one here was actually a little bit
too close to the stem, so I'm just going to rotate
it a little bit so it's not quite so blended
with the stem. I might rotate this one a little bit more and maybe
make it a little longer. I like that overall
shape at this point we are good to go as far
as adding texture, but we need to
group them first to make it a little bit
easier to do so. Let's take a look at the
two ways that you can group these layers to prepare
them for the texture. Now that our leaves are in place and we have shaped them
the way we want them, we're at the point where we
can begin adding texture. Before we do that,
we want to organize our layers to make that
an easier process. There's a couple of approaches
that you can take here, and the approach that
you decide on will ultimately determine how
the texture is added. I've dedicated an entire
section just to adding texture, so we're just going to
focus on grouping here. The first approach is that I can take all of these
layers that make up my leaf and I can group
them together in a folder. One of the ways that
I can select all of this is with my move tool, I'm going to drag
across my entire leaf, and now all of these
layers are selected. I can go ahead and
tap on my group icon, I can tap again to un-group it. You can also simply pinch
to create a group as well. That's the first approach. The second approach
is to take all of these individual
curve layers and combine them to
create one curve. When you're adding your texture, you're adding it to one
piece rather than multiple. Let me show you a
different way that you can select your entire leaf here. When you're in your
layers studio, you can tap on the first layer that
you want to select and two-finger tap on
the last one and it will select all the
layers in-between. Now what we want to do is
add these together to create that one shape and
we're going to do that by using a boolean operation. If you recall when we went
through the user interface, I mentioned that you can find
these under the edit menu. These are geometric operations
that you can perform on a shape that you've created
to create another object. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to tap, add because again, we're adding all of our
layers together. Now if you look at
your layer studio, you'll see you have one curve
layer rather than multiple. I can move this around, I can use the node tool and
I can make minor changes. Now the only thing
that I can't do with this at this point
is use my move tool to tap into new digital
leaves and move them around. If you take the time upfront to place your leaves
where you want them, that shouldn't be an issue. These are the two
approaches to grouping your layers to get them
ready for the texture. In the next section, we're going to take a look at the free form pen and
pencil tool and use them to create leaf shapes similar to these.
I'll see you there.
12. Creating Leaves with Pen and Pencil Tools: In the last section, we used the shape tools
to create our leaves. In this section,
we're going to focus our attention on a
combination of the pen and pencil tools to freeform
create our leaf shapes. Now I am going to
start with my stem just like I did in the last one. But instead of using a fill, I am going to use a stroke. I have my green
color selected here. I am going to select My
Pen tool to make my stem and I'm going to tap
in about 16 points. Now that's just a starting
point so that I can see where I am laying my
stroke down on the canvas. I'll likely change it
because we're going to add some imperfections to the stem to give it an organic
feel and to see them, it needs to be a lot wider. I'll just go ahead
and I'm going to tap and tap again and drag. Now, I am not loving exactly
how this is bending, but that's okay because this is a vector which
means I can go into my node tool and I can drag things around until
it's where I want it. So I can use this handle to
change the depth of the band. I can move my nodes
around where I want them. I like that just about there. But right now, this is too thin. Again to see the
imperfections we want to create to make it less
static and more organic, we need to make it a
little bit thicker. I am going to go to my
Stroke Studio and I am going to make the width about 60. Now we have a nice line
to work with here. But again, it's boring just like the shaped tools were right
out of the rectangle tool. I want to give this some
waviness and imperfection. I am going to use my handles here in the Stroke
Studio to change the pressure settings of this stroke exactly
how I want them. The two points on
either end represent the two points on either
end of the stroke. If I drag this down, you can see the top of my stem, they're getting more narrow. I am going to leave the bottom, the thickness that it's at. But I actually want
to tap and add a handle here and just drag in, so that it start
thinning out about there. Now I can go ahead. I am going to add some
more handles and I am going to drag up and down. If I go ahead and deselect this, you can see that it has that nice waviness that you
might see in a real stem. I am going to stop with that. At this point, we're
ready to go ahead and start adding
our leaf shapes. Just like with the shape tools, there's a number
of ways that I can add leaves to this shape. Now one of the things I don't do is create one leaf and then duplicate around because when you're freeform drawing a leaf, it's a lot quicker to do that, than duplicate one leaf and make the changes
with the node tool. I am going to select
my pencil tool and I want to use a fill
instead of a stroke. I already have my fill selected, I just swap them out. I am going to make sure that my use fill is on here in the bottom in the
contextual menu. Then I'll just go ahead and
start drawing my leaf shapes. You can see that I can get
nice waviness that I want without having to use my
node poles to get it. I'm just going to go
ahead and I am going to keep drawing my shapes out here. I am going to try
and vary the length and width and the
waviness as I go around. We have our leaf shapes. I sped this video
up, but hopefully, you saw that I actually use the "Undo" and "Redo"
and "Restarted". I thought about editing that
out and beginning again, but I wanted to leave
that in for a reason. The beautiful thing about using these digital tools is that you have things like "Undo" and "Redo" available to you and
digital erasers and masks and things like that because
everybody has to use them. Nobody creates a perfect
shape right out of the gate. I look at it the way I
look at my photography. I can go out and take
a thousand shots and only like 20 of them, and it's the same way here, I can draw a thousand
leaves and have to "Undo" and
"Redo" 900 of them. Don't get so frustrated
when you can't create this, especially if you're
new to the tool. Just keep practicing
and keep progressing. You're going to find it becomes a lot more second
nature as you do that. Our leaves are in place
and we're ready to go ahead and turn this
into one large curve. Before I do that though, I want to make sure that
my stroke in the middle that's making up the
stem is actually a fill. That's not only going to prepare
it for the add function, but also for texture. I'm going to go ahead and I'm
going to select that curve. I'll go to my "Edit" menu
and tap "Expand Stroke". Now when I tap on it
and use the node tool, it's no longer a
single line stroke, it's actually a fill and my
nodes are surrounding it. Now we're all set to go ahead and do the add function on this. I'll go ahead and select
all of my layers, go to "Edit", tap "Add",
and we're all set. I like how my leaf
shape is looking here. I am actually going
to call this done. I've already combined it into one large curve by
selecting all of the individual curve
layers and then doing an add function under the
geometry and the "Edit" menu. I am going to go ahead and top this off to the side for
right now and turn it off. Before we move to
the next section, I want to show you
one additional way that you can use a pen and pencil tools to create a
different type of shape. This is going to have
more stems in it. You can use the building
blocks from this to create things like
branches on trees. Because really they're
created the same way. They're just a
larger, wider size. I've gone ahead and I've
selected my "Brown Stroke". My pressure is
back to normal and I did that by tapping and
hitting "Reset Pressure". I'll go ahead and start
with a nice thick stroke. I don't have to worry about
it being thin, so I'll tap. Sorry, first electric pen tool, tap, tap again and I'm
going to drag out. Now I am actually going to raise this up a little bit more. I'm going to set my
pressure settings now because I want all of the offshoots from this
stemmed have the same feel. So I am going to make
the top or narrow. I am going to narrow at
the bottom just slightly. I am just going to
do the same thing I did with the last stem. I'm going to just add some
handles and drag up and down to give it some
of that waviness. Now we have a nice start
as far as our branch, but I actually want to make
this a little bit thicker. So just drag up the slider here. Now, I am going to make
sure I de-select this because if I keep going
with my pen tool, it's going to complete a
shape and I don't want that. I actually want to do
offshoots of this. So I am going to close my
studio here to zoom in. Now with my pen tool and
with this de-selected, I'm just going to start tapping and dragging out branches. I want these to be a
little bit smaller, so I will go ahead and just
reduce the size of that. You can just make sure
you de-select each time. I'm going to create
these little offshoots. You can change the
size and you can do this on the backend or
you can do it as you go. I tend to like to
do it as I go just so that I can see where I
might need something else. Again just make sure you de-select and drag out and
make that a little bit larger. Now that I have my
stem pieces in place, I am just going to
take a look and make sure I don't have any overhang. For example, I don't have
anything hanging past this. Or if there's anything
I want to change the size like these to
look a little bit too similar to one another
so I am going to select this one and maybe change the pressure settings
slightly just to have it be a little bit more unique than the other one. Now you can see because I did that and I made the
bottom a little wider, it actually extended it
beyond the stem here. I'll just take my node tool and I'm just going
to drag that up. Before I go ahead and create
one large piece out of this, I just want to make sure
everything is where I want it. I am liking how this looks, so I am just going to go ahead
and the first thing that you want to do before you create one large curve out of this is to
expand the strokes. The way we did with
the last time where we had to go up to "Edit menu", you can actually go
ahead and select all of these way to tap on the first one and
two-finger tap on the last, go to your "Edit menu"
and tap "Expand Stroke". Now that's created fills
rather than strokes. I had the benefit of
being able to use the Stroke Studio to create
the field that I wanted. Now I am going to convert it to a fill so that I can add the texture and
I can combine them. Again, I am going to go ahead
and select all of these. I'll go to my edit
menu and tap "Add". Now I have one large
curve piece to work with. Because this is a fill, I can also add texture
to this down the road. Let's go ahead and start
creating our leaf shapes. I'm going to go ahead
and do that with this. Let's see. I think
we're going to use this nice light
green color here. I am going to make this a
fill because I actually want to use my pencil tool on fill. I've selected use fill here. I'm just going to start
drawing out leaf shapes. They don't have to be perfect
because they're leaves, you're not going to get
perfection from leaves. Just you can always go in and you can make
changes if you want. Or again, you can go ahead and delete them
and start again. They went the wrong
direction with that one so I'm
going to go here. I'm just going to
go ahead and draw all the way around until I have all the leaf shapes that
I want on this stem. I like how these
are looking and you can see that you can
use your pen and pencil tools not just to create
straight lines or curves, but you can also go
ahead and creating type of leaf shape
that you want. One of the reasons that
I lean more heavily on these free hand tools
and the shape tools, is because I can get it
where I want a little bit quicker than I can use in
my node tools on the shape. But I wanted to show you both ways because
really it's up to you, whichever works best for you. Now, before I move on to the next section where we're going to start adding texture. I want to do something with these multiple curve
layers with these leaves. I'm going to just go ahead
and do a Boolean add operation on this so that I have one curve
layer to work with. I could have just as
easily grouped it, but I actually want to be
able to add my texture uniformly across one layer
rather than multiple. Again, in the next section,
we're going to start adding texture to the leaves that we've been creating so
I'll see you there.
13. Adding Texture to Single Layers: One of the benefits of
using designer is that you have the best of both
worlds in one app. I could create this
flat illustration using the vector tools
and designer persona. If I wanted to add additional
depth and dimension, I can do that by using the raster tools and
the pixel persona. Now the way that you add
the texture depends on how you group the
elements in your object. I broken the texture
sections into two sections. The first is going
to focus on how you can add texture to
a single curve. In other words, we've
taken a number of individual curves and
combine them into one. The next section
is going to show you how you can add texture to individual curve layers that are simply
grouped together. Now before we get started, I'm actually adding the texture. I want to remind
you that anytime you pull in raster elements, you need to make sure that you size your original document accordingly and size up to the largest size
you plan to print, so you don't run to
any inequality issues. But beyond that,
you also want to make sure that any of
the tools that you use, whether it's texture
files or brushes, are also high-quality
and higher resolution, whether it's ones that
you create or purchase. I've included a list of
my go-to brush makers and texture makers in
the resource guide in case you want to
take a look at those. Now the first step I usually
take to add texture to a single curve is to add
a texture image file. I'm going to go to my document menu and
tap "Place Image". It's going to give me the
option of either importing from the Cloud or importing
from my iPad. But since my texture
files are rather large, I keep them on the Cloud. I'm just going to go
ahead and select one of these textures from this
collection that I have here. I like this one in particular. It's going to go ahead
and tell me that you can drag to place your image. You want to make sure
that you drag large. If you need to size
down, that's okay. But you don't want
to place your image small and size up
because once again, you could run into
quality issues. I am going to drag this down, now that I've placed it, I'm going to drag
it down slightly just to make it a little
bit more manageable. But right now, this texture
file is sitting on top of the leaf and I
can't see where it falls within the shape itself. I need to clip this and I'm
going to do that by dragging the layer until the blue line shows up in the middle of the
layer that I'm clipping to. Make sure that you keep your
pencil to the right because moving it to the left is a
completely different function. I'm going to go
ahead and move it there and I'm going to release. Now my texture is
within the leaf itself and I can better
see where I'm placing it. When it comes to
these texture files I find the earlier the better. The reason for that is
when you start using blend mode and working
with particular colors, these little imperfections
come through in such a way that it really
turns to look very much like the
imperfect imperfection that you see on an
actual leaf or a flower. Like this grittiness and I like this light and dark and
these little spots. I tend to use those over
the softer textures. This is a little too much, so I'm going to go
ahead and change the blend mode and since
this is on layer still, I can go ahead into
the layer options. I can either drop the
opacity or if I want, I can start flipping
through the blend modes. You can tap through
or if you happen to use a texture a
lot and you know what blend mode works best. You can also tap
and just select. For this one, I know that
either soft light or hard light works best,
possibly even overlay. I'm going to go with hard light, but this is a little too much, so I'm going to go ahead
and drop the opacity. Now I have added the first layer of texture
using a texture image file. The next step will
typically take is using my vector brush to add a
little bit more detail. When it comes to adding
texture to your illustrations, you don't have to rely
solely on raster tools, whether it's brushes
or image files. You can also use
your vector brushes. The benefit of doing that
is that you don't have to worry about size and quality
because they are vectors. I'm going to go ahead and
select my vector brush. I have this off-white color selected and I'm going to
go into my brushes here. I actually liked this
set by Frankentoon. I'm going to select
this mud speckles. I want to make sure
that my brush is rather large in this case. I'm just going to swipe. Now, this looks a
little chaotic. We have a lot of stuff on
the outside of the leaf. But just like with
the texture file, we're going to clip this. I'm going to group these two
and clip them as a group. I'm selecting both layers, not just to stop
here for one second, whenever you use a vector brush, the beauty is just like when
you're creating shapes, you get a separate layer, which means you can
go in and you can use your node tool to
move things around. You can use your move tool
to size and move things. You have a nice separate
layer to work with. Again, I'm going to group
these two together. I'm going to go ahead and
clip this by dragging down. Once I release everything
is within the leaf. Now, this is a
little too intense. Again, I'm going to go ahead
and change my blend mode. I'm going to change it
for the overall group. Because these are
separate layers. You can go into each
individual one if you want. But in the interest of time, I'm going to do this as a group. Go to the layer options. Now again, you can click through until you find
one that you like. I like this color one, but I think I want some of that creamy color to come through. I happen to know that
soft light works really nicely for this one, so I've just tapped
and I'm going to go ahead and just drag down
the opacity a little bit. It's now added some of that nice little spottiness
that the brush head in it. But it's a little
bit more subtle. That's the second method
that you can use to add texture to
your illustration. Then next is employing
raster elements by pulling in your paintbrush
tool from your pixel persona. One of the final ways
that I add texture is using the paintbrush tool
and the pixel persona. I've gone ahead and selected my pixel persona and
the paintbrush tool. I actually want to add a little bit of
color with this one. I've selected this teal color. Now, just like with the vectors, there's a number of
built-in brushes. I'm actually going to use one of my favorite texture brushes
by Frankentoon here though. I have gone ahead and
I've selected my brush, I'm going to drag
up a little bit to make this a
little bit bigger. I'm going to select the curve that I'm adding too
because when I do that, it automatically clips
the layer to that curve. I don't have to drag it down. I'm just going to go
ahead and I'm going to add some color here and there. I'm going to be
using a blend mode. Even though it looks a little
bit too much right now, we're going to be blending
it in a little bit. I like that. Now let's go ahead and change
the blend mode here. The difference
between working with a vector brush and working
with a paintbrush tool is it unlike with the vector
brush where you get a different layer
with each stroke, no matter how many
times you pick up your pencil and
lay it back down, you're using the
paintbrush tool, it's all on one layer. If you do want to use different blend modes for
each of your strokes, make sure you're adding a
new pixel layer each time. In this case, I'm using the
same blend mode and opacity, so I just kept it on one layer. I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to
change this I think to color because I actually know that works really
well with this. You could also just flip through until you find
one that you like. I'm just going to drop
the opacity a little bit. Now we've gone ahead
and added texture, three different ways
to this illustration. We used an image file. We've used the
vector brush tool, and we've also used
the paintbrush tool and the pixel persona. You can use one or all of these. It's totally up to you and the look you're
trying to achieve. In the next section, we're
going to take a look at how we can add texture to a group of individual layers using these same methods.
I'll see you there.
14. Adding Texture to Groups of Layers: In this section, we're going to take a look at how we can add texture to a group of individual layers rather
than one large curve. This is the leaf shape that we created in the
shape tool section. I just changed the
color so that you can more easily see the texture. This is the one where we left
the individual leaf layers separate so that we
can access them at a future date and we just
group them together. That means we have to approach
the texture definitely. With the last leaf the first step that
we took was pulling in a texture image file using
the place image function. But we can't do that
here because you can't clip showing
overall group. Instead we're going
to go ahead and use the fill tool to
add an image file. Now, I want to keep the color of the leaf and just add
the texture on top. I'm going to go ahead and
I'm going to duplicate the group and I'm going to add my fill to this group layer rather than the bottom one. I'll go ahead and select my
fill tool and I'll drag up. You'll see in gradient form, but this isn't the type
of gradient we want. We're actually going to
go to the contextual menu and we'll select "Bitmap." That will allow me to pull an
image file in as the fill. I'm going to go ahead and
select this one right here. Now, you can get some
really interesting results right out of the gate
with the fill tool, but this isn't the
look we're going for. We actually want it to
have that nice, subtle, organic texture that we
had with the other ones. I'm going to use these
handles to drag this around until it's
placed where I want it. Again, I like how
it has that nice, gritty texture and there's some dark and light areas here. I'm going to go head back
to the group and I'm going to change the blend mode
of the group overall. I'll select the "Layer
Options" and I'm going to just go ahead
and select "Soft Light" because I
know that that works best with this
particular texture. You could scroll back and forth until you find one
that you really like. I actually think I like
hard light better. We'll go with that
and we'll drop the opacity a little bit. Now, we have that nice texture here and we have some
dark and light values, and we were able to add the
texture to the leaf overall. Now, what about
adding texture using the vector brush tool or the Paintbrush tool
on the Pixel persona? We can do that. Let's go ahead and
take a look at how. If you want to add
additional texture to a group of
individual layers using either the Paintbrush
tool in the Pixel persona or the Vector Brush
tool you can do that. But again you can't clip
to the overall group, which means we need to focus our attention on the
individual leaf layers. In other words, if
I go ahead and I select my Vector
Brush tool and I select that same brush
that I used previously, I'm going to make this
a little bit larger, and I swipe down it looks just like it did
with that last leaf. But if I go ahead and
group these and try and clip them it
doesn't do anything. It just adds it to
the overall group and I still have this
mess on the outside. I need to focus my attention
on each individual leaf. I'll go ahead and select
a leaf and I'll swipe. I can go ahead and clip it that leaf and now
change the blend mode. I'll just drop
that down a little bit and I would just
work my way around. Now, this is why it becomes time-consuming and
you also have to give it a little bit more thought
because you don't want to have anything look
like it's placed. You want it to look organic, which means you
really need to think ahead as to where you're putting your texture because
you can't simply swipe across the entire shape. The same goes for
the Pixel persona and using the Paintbrush tool. I'll go ahead and select
that same blue color and that other one
that we used before, and I'm going to select
this top leaf again. If you select an individual
layer and you start using the pixel brush it's
going to automatically clip that pixel
layer to that one. Now, let me go ahead
and zoom in here. I'm going to start
painting in the blue. You can see it's already
clipped here and I could go in and I can change
the blend mode. Let's try something like color
and I'll drop the opacity. But again, I need to work
my way around this leaf. I'm going to go ahead
and do that now. I'm going to work my way around the leaf using a combination of both the Vector Brush tool
and the Paintbrush tool. I'm going to stop there. I added some texture using
both the Paintbrush tool in the Pixel persona and the Vector Brush and I
like how this looks, but it took a lot of work to get it to this point
where I could have achieved very similar results
simply by using one color. Now, it's really up to you
how you want to approach it. You may find that you have
a need to use a group of layers rather than
an individual curve. Like I mentioned previously, when it comes to the
flowers I do tend to use grouping a lot rather
than combining everything. It's just a matter of your needs and how you
want to approach it. But just keep in
mind that when you use this particular method it's going to take more time and a little bit more
thought up front. In the next section
we're going to take a look at how we
can begin creating floral shapes using
the built-in shapes in the rectangle tool.
I'll see you there.
15. Simple Flowers from Shapes: Over the next two sections, I'm going to show you
how to create a range of flowers from simple
to more complex, using the built-in shapes
in the rectangle tool. What you'll learn in these
two sections will provide you with the building
blocks to go on to create even more complex florals as well as other illustrations.
Let's get started. Let's take a look at how we
can use the Ellipse tool to create simple floral
shapes like this. I'm going to go ahead
and select my fill. Again, I typically don't work with a stroke just to fill. Select this peach color
and I'll make sure that my ellipse shape is selected
in my rectangle tool. I'll just drag out a nice
long, narrow ellipse. This is my starting
point for my petals. Again, it's a shape not
a curve so I need to convert it so that I
can use my node tools. Now when I select the node tool, I have these nice smooth
nodes to work with. I want the top and the
bottom to be pointed though, so I'm going to go ahead and
drag across and select them and tap "Sharp" in
the contextual menu. Now this is a good
starting point, but it's rather generic. I'm going to make
some additional edits to the appearance. But first, I want to create my entire flower shape first. I'll select this petal
with my move tool. I want to make sure that my
transform origin point is on. It's the little bulls-eye
in the contextual menu. And what that does is tell
designer what you want, where you want to rotate from. Right now that little bull's eye is in the middle of the shape, so if I start rotating it, it rotates around the
center of itself. I actually want it to rotate around the bottom of the petal. With my snapping on, I'm going to drag that down
and the snapping is going to guide it as well as
snap it into place. Now when I rotate it, it's rotating around the
bottom of the petal. I'm ready to start
duplicating this. So with it selected,
I'll go into my "Edit" menu and
tap "Duplicate". I want to begin rotating my
petals at 45-degree angles. I can guide that by starting to drag and then
tapping my finger down, holding it, and it's going
to snap in 15 degree angles. Now I'm at 45. If I continue to hit
"Duplicate" with this selected, not only will it duplicate it, but it's going to continue to rotate it at 45-degree angles. Let's go ahead and do that. I have my entire
flower shape here. Again, I don't need to work
with the individual layer, so I'm just going to
go ahead and select them and I'm going to create one large curve
by tapping "Add". Now I have one
piece to work with. It's looking a little
one-dimensional though. I actually want there to be
multiple levels of petals. I'm going to duplicate
this in place again and just rotate
this out just slightly. Now in order for there to be
some depth between the two, I'm going to go ahead into the
bottom curve and just drag down from the icon for the color studio just to change the dark and light
value of that. I'm not going to
change it a lot. I just want it to be
enough that you can see the difference between
the two layers. Now this is looking a little bit perfect, and I don't want that. You want to play into nature's
perfect imperfections. So I'll go ahead and
select my "Node" tool and I'm just going to start dragging out in various
areas with my node tool. We have some nice differences
between the petals. There's a nice depth and dimension between
the two layers. I think I'm going to
call this done and now move on to the middle
of the flower. I'll just go ahead and select
my "Ellipse" shape again. This is one of those
instances where I use both a fill and a stroke. I'm going to select
this yellow for my fill and I think
white for my stroke. Now when I start dragging out a circle and if I
hold my finger down, we'll get a perfect one. You can see that this stroke is rather large and that's okay. In this case, we're going
to change it in one moment, drop it into the
middle of the flower. Now I want to change
the appearance of this stroke to match
one of my brushes. In particular, I want to select the brush that's
the stamen brush that I provided
in the downloads. When I tap that, it's going to change
the appearance to the dot formation that's
in the brush itself. Now I can go into
my stroke studio. I can make this larger. I can also change my alignment to get some different looks. I actually liked this particular one because
I like when it's a little bit on the inside
and a little on the outside, but it's totally up to you. I think I'm going to make
the middle just a little bit smaller. I think that's done. So that's how we can create
a nice simple flower shape using a combination of the ellipse shape in
the rectangle tool, as well as a specialty brush. I'm going to move on
and show you how to use a combination of a triangle and a crescent shape to create another
flower formation. I created this flower
shape that can be used two directions with a combination of the triangle shape and
the crescent shape. Let's go ahead and
select our fill. I think I'm going to go
ahead and just keep that yellow that we used and
I'll turn my stroke off. I want to select
my triangle shape and I'll just drag
out a triangle. Now again, I want
to convert this to a curve and then I
want to flip it. So I'll go into my
Transform studio and do a vertical flip. Select my Move tool. I make sure that my
transplant origin point is at the bottom of my petals so
I'll just drag that down. I'm going to make
this a little bit smaller just to give
ourselves some room to work. I always make sure that my
About Center is on so that when I do size up and down, it does it evenly. Now we're ready to
start duplicating this. Now, I don't actually
want to duplicate this in perfect angles, I'm going to start
by duplicating that shape and I'm just going to drag out to where I want it. Now because I don't
want it to continue in that same width I'm going to de-select and I'll select again, hit "Duplicate", and I'll just drag this out to
where I want it. Again. I'll de-select and select again and hit "Duplicate". I'll drag that to about there. Let's make this a
little bit smaller. I also want to make
it one large curve. So again, I'll select all
the layers and do an add. I'll just make this a
little bit smaller. Now I want to duplicate
this shape in place so that we have that same depth we
had with the last flower. So I'll duplicate it in place. Now, I'm going to drag
my transform point down to the tip of the triangle just to
keep them aligned. I'll just rotate out, make it a little bit smaller. I don't want this perfect, I
don't want it right there. I want it a little
bit overlapping and I'm going to go
ahead and deselect. Now when I do that again, it doesn't have any
depth and I want that. So I'm going to change
the light value of the bottom curve and drag
down from my color studio. I think I'll make the top
one a little bit lighter. Now I have a nice
contrast between the two. But again, these piles
are a little too perfect, so I'm going to go
into my Node tool and I just want to
make some changes. I think that looks
good like that. You can make whatever
changes you want. I have a tendency
of always going back in and making
additional changes, but in the interest of time,
I'm going to call this done. I'm just going to
make it a little bit more narrow though. Now I want to select
my crescent shape and select a nice
green for my fill. So I'll drag out a crescent. This is where I'm
going to use one of those red transform nodes here. This is still a shape, but I just want to drag this up, then I'll go ahead
and convert it. Because once you convert it, those little red dots are gone, you can't use them anymore. I'm just going to start rotating this and dragging it
in with my Move tool. I just try and size it to
about where I want it. Sometimes you can't get it perfectly aligned
and that's okay. If you want to leave it
like that or you can select your Node tool and just
drag in to where you want. I might also make this
a little bit imperfect. I'll just back out and
see how I like it. That's how you can use a combination of
the triangle tool, triangle shape rather,
and the crescent shape to create a flower that can
be used in two directions. Facing up, it can look like a flower that's
almost closed and facing down it can look like a flower that's fully
open and facing the sun. One of the things that
I like about doing these illustrations
with the flowers is that I can give a node to my favorite flowers
without them being exact. You can go for
realism if you want. These tools will get you there. But in this case, I like
to have a little bit of whimsy and fun with my flowers. I've created this
chamomile flower using a combination of the
trapezoid and ellipse shape, as well as my specialty brush. Let's go ahead and take a look
at how we can create this. I'll start by creating the
petals with the trapezoid. I'm going to select this
nice off-white color for my fill and select my trapezoid. Just going to drag down. Again, I need to convert this to curves that I can
use in Node tool. I've tapped "Curves", I'll select my Node
tool and I want the path between these two nodes
to be bent in a little bit. I'm just going to drag up, I'm going to drag
these two nodes in towards each other and if you hold your finger down
while you do it, it'll keep it straight. I might bend the paths
out here as well. I have a nice start to
my chamomile flower. I'm going to make
this a little bit smaller so we have room to work. I'm going to make sure that
my transform origin point is at the top here, so that we rotate around the
middle and drag this down. Now I can start duplicating. I'm going to duplicate
at 30 degree angles, so I'll duplicate it, and start dragging
and hold my finger down and snap to 30 degrees. Now I'll just continue this around to create
the full flower. I have my entire
flower shape there. Again, I don't need to work
with the individual curves, so I'm going to create one
large shape out of this. The easiest way to do this
because it's so large, is to go into my
"Layers" studio, select the first curve and then two-finger tap on the last. I'll go ahead and do
an add operation. Now I have one
large curve to work with and I'm ready
to add the middle. I'll go ahead and
select my "Ellipse". I think I'll select
this orange color. Make sure that you de-select your shape before you
change the color. I'm going to select
this red for my stroke. Will start dragging out. Again hold your finger down to get a perfect circle if you want to place this in the
middle of the flower. I'm going to change my stroke
again to the stamen brush, and I'll drag it out
to the largest width. But in this case, I actually want
that on the inside. I'll go to my
"Advanced Settings" and I'm going to tap this middle one so that the dot
formation is on the inside. Now if you wanted to,
you could go back in with your node tool and just change some of these
petals just to make them look not quite so perfect. I think I'm going to stop there, so I like how this looks. Again, it's a very
simple flower shape, but we created it using multiple shapes as well
as a specialty brush. In the next video, I'm going to show you
how to start creating some more complex flower shapes, again using the shape tool
so I'll see you there.
16. Complex Flowers From Shapes: In this second look
at how you can use the built-in shapes and the Rectangle tool to
create your florals, I'm going to approach the more complex floral
shapes like these, and show you how you can use a combination of shapes as well as some specialty brushes
to create these flowers. Let's get started.
Let's start by creating this dahlia-type shape. We're going to use a combination
of the ellipse shape and the duplicate and
rotate function to create this more
complex flower. I'll select my ellipse
and drag out an ellipse. Let me get it a little
bit wider here. I'm going to convert
this to a curve, but I'm not going to
change the nodes at all when I drag my
transform-origin point down. I want my initial set of petals
to be very dense because the dahlia flower is very
dense in its arrangement. I'll go ahead and
do a duplicate and I'm just going to
rotate 15 degrees. I'm going to continue
this all the way around. I have my full set of
petals here and I've gone ahead and I
have dragged up, selected it, and
did an Add function to create one large curve. Now I'm going to start
duplicating this, rotating it, and
sizing in as I go. Because the duplicate function remembers all the
steps that I took, it will continue that
for me as I go along. Now, one thing I want to note, I changed the darkness
and lightness values of the various levels as
I'm going through this. Because there's so many
layers and it's so dense, I find it easier to
change it as I go along than waiting
until the very end. I'll go ahead and select
this and hit "Duplicate". Now, I want to rotate
this to the middle here. It's about seven and a half, and I'm going to go ahead
and hit "Duplicate". I'm keeping that the
same size right now, the back two petal sets, and keeping it large. I'm going to rotate this again, but I'm not going
to do it quite so perfectly and I'm just
going to size in. Now, I want to change the level here and I'll go ahead and keep hitting Duplicate
with that selected. I'm going to grab my ellipse again and I'm going to
choose that yellow color for my fill and I'm going to choose
off-white for my stroke. Now, I'll drag out my circle, and I'm going to
move it into place. Let me get a little bit smaller. I want to change the
stroke to my brush again, so I'll choose my stamen brush. Now, in this case, I actually like that it's in
the middle again, like it was with one of the
last flowers we've created. That's how you can create
a dahlia-type flower using a combination of the ellipse shape as well as the duplicate function
in the Edit menu. Let's go ahead and take
a look at another one. We're going to create
this gerbera daisy flower with a process similar to
what we use for the dahlia, but we're going to shift it a little bit so that we can get this more ragged feel that
the daisy typically has. I'm going to go
ahead and I'm also going to select not
only a fill but a slight stroke just to give a little bit more definition
between my petals. I select my ellipse
and drag out a nice narrow oval and convert
it to curves and I want to make sure that my transform-origin point
is at the bottom here. We're going to start
duplicating this around, but we're going to
do it in a much more randomly than we did
with the dahlia. I'll go ahead and
duplicate this. I'm going to rotate it. I'll let it do its thing again, but I'm going to drag it out. I'm just going to continue to
repeat that around and move it randomly until I work
my way all the way around. Now, I don't want to create one large curve out of
this because if I do, it's going to convert
the entire thing to this off-white color and I'm
going to lose my stroke. I'm going to go ahead and going to select the whole thing, go to my layer studio and
I'm going to group that. Now I'm going to
duplicate the group. But unlike with the dahlia where we rotated and kept
going inwards, we're going to randomly size down and up as we
duplicate inward. Now, I kept this middle section a little bit empty for a reason. Most gerbera daisies
have another set of smaller petals around
the middle shapes. Let's go ahead and
grab our ellipse. I'm going to create my
middle section with a mix of this weed color for my fill
and this brown for my stroke. I'll drag out my circle. I don't need it to be
too big because again, I want those petals
around the middle. I'm going to put this in place. I want to make my stroke much larger and I want to
select the stamen brush. We're all set with our middle. Now, I want to create
that small petal. Now, I'll select my
ellipse again and drag out a small oval here. I'll go ahead and drag my
transform point to the bottom. We'll move it into place
over the middle section. I want to actually center it. Now, I'm going to size
down a little bit. Eventually, this is going
to be behind the center. But for right now
I want it on top just so I can see
what I'm doing. I'm going to go ahead
and duplicate this. I'm going to go in and
I'm going to start taking some of these out. I really just wanted
to get this shape in place just to see
where I wanted it. I'll just take
some of these out, and now I'm going to go
through and I'm going to change the size of some of them. I think that's
actually good enough. I'm going to group these. I'll select the first one, two-finger tap on the last
one in the layer studio because this is sitting
on so much other stuff. It's a lot easier to use
my layer studio instead, and I'm going to drag
this below the ellipse. I might just shift it slightly. I'm going to go ahead
and duplicate this. I'm going to rotate it and I'm going to make it
a little bit smaller. That just gives it
another group of petals that I'm going to make
a different color. There's our gerbera daisy. Again, once we start
adding texture to this, there's going to be a lot
more definition to it. But this was created using
a series of ellipses, as well as our specialty brush, and a process of using the duplicate function
while randomly spacing both the
actual pedal and incising up and down as
we move our way inward. Finally, let's take a
look at how we can create these abstract-type
poppy flowers using a combination
of the Crescent tool, Ellipse tool, as well as the Pencil tool to do these little cutouts to
give it that rugged feel. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to use these various shades
of blue as my fill. Again, I like to have fun with the colors
of these flowers. They don't have to be perfect, they don't have to be realistic. You can make them
whatever color you want, especially when you
get into the realm of abstract like we are here. I'm going to start with this
lighter blue and I'll select my crescent shape and
just drag out a crescent. I'm going to rotate it
and convert it to curves. Now, I want to use
my Node tool to just give it a little bit of
that wave that you might see in a poppy flower. I'll just drag this
node out a little bit. Now, I'm going to
select my Pencil tool and make sure that sculpt is on. Now just a disclaimer
about this process. I mentioned it when
we went through the Pen and Pencil tools. It can be very
frustrating and it takes some practice to
get used to doing it. I recommend doing it
slowly and carefully. You're going to start from
the top and just draw down and up and
release carefully. Inevitably, you will have to undo and redo at least once, and I guarantee I'll
have to do it here. But again, just practice
and it becomes really handy to do cutouts in
different floral shapes. I'll just start drawing down
and just carefully draw up. You can see that it's breaking the path and creating these
little cutout shapes. I'm going to vary
the size as well as the distance until I make
my way all the way around. If you do have to undo
and redo, honestly, it was a miracle I
didn't have to there. Sometimes it helps just
to go to a different spot and try again because there's
just particular spots, especially where
there's some curves or we might have some trouble. But again, just keep practicing. I'm going to go ahead and
create another crescent. I'll move this out of the way. I'm going to use this
darker color now. I'm not going to create
the wave on this one. I actually want it to be
very much like a crescent. We're going to use
these to build up both an open flower shape
as well as a closed one. Once again, I'll go
ahead and select my Pencil tool and make
sure it's on sculpt, and I'll just work my
way across the flower. As you saw, I had to do undo and redo a few
times on that one. I'm going to drop the lightness
of this a little bit more and I'll move this one
out of the way and we'll go ahead and
create one more. I'm going to choose this
mid-range color here. Now, we're going to actually duplicate two of
these so that we can create our one
large open shape. I'm just going to
start rotating these around and just changing
the size and just building up on one another
till we get a nice open shape. Let's go ahead and
add our center. I'm going to select yellow
and black for my stroke. Let's drag out a circle. Once again, I want
to go ahead and choose my stamen brush, and I want it on both
the inside and outside, but I'm going to drag it up
so it's its largest size. There we have our
first completed piece. Let's go ahead and use a few of these same layers to
create the closed piece. I'm going to select
some of these and just drag out some duplicates. I think I want that
really small piece. Let's go ahead and drag across this large piece and group
it so we can move it easily. Now I'm just going
to go ahead and I'm going to rotate these
pieces together, and I want them to
have a layer with one another just to give them that closed flower type of feel. I actually like how
that one looks. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to select my ellipse tool with
the same colors, but I'm not going to
drag a full circle. I actually want it to
be a little bit more narrow because I don't really
want anything hanging out. I'm actually going to
change the color to white because I do want
to show you what you can do if you do need to place it where some pieces
are hanging out. Let's go ahead and change
that to the stamen brush, make it as large as possible, and then drop it behind. I'm just going to
go ahead and drag this in where I want it. Now, you can see some of this hanging out
and I don't want that. I just want it to be
in this space here. What you can do is go into your Pixel persona and
grab your Eraser tool, select the layer and just start erasing away the spots
that you don't want. It's going to add a mask to that particular shape and just
mask away the extra there. In the next section, we're going to start
adding texture to some of our floral creations
so that you can see how we can build up and create even more depth and dimension in our florals.
I'll see you there.
17. Flowers with the Pen & Pencil Tools: In this section I'm going
to show you how to create flowers like these using the freehand pen
and pencil tool and a designer persona.
Let's get started. Let's go ahead and
create this flower shape using a combination of the pencil tool and
the ellipse shape. I'm going to go into my color studio and select this lighter
color for my fill. Again, no stroke. I'll select my pencil tool and I want to make sure
you use photos on. I'll just start drawing
out my petal shape. Again, when you use
the pencil tool, even if it looks
close the shape isn't yet but I'm going to close this once I create both petals. Once again I'll select my pencil tool and I'm
going to draw it from the bottom here and
do my second petal. Now I want to go ahead
and close both of these. With my move tool
I'll select both, change to my node tool
and just tap Close. While I have them
both selected I'm going to create one large piece, so I'll go into my
Edit and do an add. I just want to take a look at the bottom because
sometimes they will meet up or you'll get
this whole jagging marks. I'm going to select
this with my node tool. In this case I'm going to drag the handle so it's straight. I'm going to delete these nodes that are causing this problem. I'm going to make
sure this one is smooth and delete the other. Now we have a nice
pointed bottom, it's aligned and we have our first front
petals to work with. Let's go ahead and
create our back petal. I'm going to select
my pencil tool and I want to select this
darker salmon color. I'm just going to start drawing out and it doesn't
have to line up, in fact it probably shouldn't. I actually want to start
that again because I want it to dip down a little
bit more than I did. I get almost like a heart shape. I'm going to go ahead and close it and then drag it
below the other curve. Let's take a step back. Now, I want these to meet
up a little bit more. I'm going to drag this
node over and with snapping on it it's
going to line up there. But I have a little bit of
spot here just peeking out. I'm going to hold my
finger down as I drag this handle so it only drags on handle and then
I can just tuck it in. I don't necessarily need
all of it meeting up, I just want to move it
over just a little bit. Okay, I like how that looks. I might pull this
up just slightly, maybe add a node. Now, let's go ahead
and create our middle. I'm going to select
the ellipse tool. I'll select this brown color
for the fill and black for the stroke and I'll
just draw out my shape. I'll tap to curves and I'm going to change this
stroke to that stamen brush. I think I'm going to lighten
up the middle a little bit. I'll rotate this into place and tuck it between the
two curve layers so that it's in
the middle there. Now, because of the size
of this there shouldn't be any issues with any
stroke hanging out. But just to be on
the safe side I'm going to change this to
white just to be sure. I don't see anything there. The only thing I
might do is just select the whole
thing and I'm going to make it a little bit more narrow and maybe
a little shorter. I like how that's looking. Let's move on to creating a chrysanthemum
using the pen tool. Here we're going to
use the pen tool to create a series of strokes that we're going to then group and turn into this
nice shaggy chrysanthemum. I'll go ahead and select
my primary color. I think I'm going to start with this off-white color as my fill. Again, I don't need a stroke. I'm going to select my
pen tool on pen mode. I'm just going to
start tapping and dragging so I get
a slight curve. But I want to de-select
and start from the same point and just start tapping and dragging in various sizes and
various distances. I want to change course and I'll make sure you do the select because I didn't there, it actually completed
the circle. I'm just going to
ahead and de-select. I'm going to change course here and go the other direction. I'll just keep doing this until the whole thing is completed. I like how it's looking.
I'm going to go ahead and select
the whole thing. I want to make sure
that the bottom is completely in alignment because
I did move some of them. I'm going to select my transform studio and go
into the alignment and just do a line vertically at the bottom and it didn't move so it looks
like it actually was okay. If you start from
that point each time there shouldn't
be an issue. Now I'm going to
go ahead and I'm actually going to select
the whole thing and make it a little bit more narrow
and rotate it slightly. I'm going to change
the bounds so that the handle moves with
that shift that I did. Now we're going to create an entire round
shape out of this. I'll go ahead and
I'll duplicate it. When you move my transform node down to the bottom here and
just start rotating out. Again, I'm going to let it do its thing and duplicate
all the way around. We have our first shape here. I'm now going to make one
large curve out of this. I actually want to just
create a group out of it. I've selected all the curve
layers and I'll tap Group. Now we're going to start
duplicating this group. Let me just make it a
little bit smaller first. Duplicate the group. Rotate it slightly
and no random, I'm going to do
relatively randomly so that it doesn't look fake, It looks a little bit
more like nature. I'm going to change
my fill as I go. I have the group selected
which means I can go ahead and tap and change my fill. I'm trying to drop the
lightness a little bit. I'm going to let it
duplicate itself again. I'm going to increase
the lightness. I'm going to rotate and I'm going to drag it
in just slightly. I'm going to let it do it again and again, just drag down. Now I'll do it one more time. I'm going to decrease
it a lot more this time and change the
lightness value. We have our main flower shape, I'm just going to go ahead and just drag it
in this slightly. I'm going to group
the whole thing. Now I want to create
my center shapes. I'll select my ellipse tool. I'll go in and get a fill. I'm going to pick this nice, I will use green color and a black stroke and I'll
just drag out a circle. Change my stroke to the stamen brush and I think I'll make this
a little bit smaller. Now what we'll end
up doing when we add texture is just
adding texture to each of the group layers so that we have a little
bit more dimension. But the reason I was changing my light and dark values was to give it a good
start with that. There's our chrysanthemum
I'm using the pen for. Let's go ahead and create one more shape using
the pencil tool. Let's go ahead and create this final shape using
our pencil tool. The first thing I want to
do is turn on my guide. Sometimes when I'm
creating flowers like that I find the
guides very helpful. I'm going to go into
my document menu, tap Guides and turn them on. Now I had already
created one for another piece so it's
already out there. If you don't see
one when you tap Show Guides you can just add horizontal and add vertically. You can use your move tool to drag them where
you want them. This is all set, I'll
go ahead and select my pencil tool and I
want to select a color. I'm going to start
with this yellow fill and no stroke and I'm
just going to start drawing up some petals and I want four all
the way around. I have my four shapes
and I'm going to turn my guides off just so
they don't get in the way. Now I want these to be close so I'm going to go ahead
and select all four, go to my node tool
and tap Close. Now my shapes are all set. I'm going to start
dragging these together a little bit
more and rotating them because I'm going to create one large piece but I want
it to be a little less like a cross and more like say an
iris or something like that. We'll also make some of
these a little bit more narrow and just rotate them a little bit so it's
not quite so perfect. I like how that's looking. Sometimes you just need to
turn your snapping off. I'm going to go ahead
and select this and I'm going to create one large curve by doing an add operation. Now I want to duplicate this again and I'm going
to drag out but I'm going to drag away so that
my petals aren't all the same next to one another and I'm not going to
be perfect about this. I don't want it so perfect
that it looks evenly spaced. I actually want it off like this and go to my
bottom layer and drop the lightness value just slightly to give it a
little bit more dimension. If you wanted to you could
also make an additional shape and make a smaller piece but I think we're fine with this. I'll go ahead and
choose my ellipse tool and select this chestnut
color for the fill. I think probably
black for the stroke. I'll go ahead and
drag out my shape, change my stroke and I think I might shift some of
these petals just slightly. In the next section
we're going to start adding texture to some of the flowers that
we've created so that you can see how
you can very easily add additional dimension to
your floral creations the same way that we
did with the leaves, adding some raster
and vector elements. I'll see you there.
18. Adding Texture to Flowers: In this section, we're going
to begin adding texture to the flowers we
created in the last two. Just like with the leaves, the way that you add
texture to these flowers is determined by whether you've grouped a number of
individual layers, or you've combined the layers
to create one large curve. Let's get started. I'm
going to start with this simple flower
and while it's grouped for convenience
so that I can easily move it around
or turn off layers, ultimately, it is three
separate individual curves that I can easily add
texture to individually. I'm going to start with this
light petal at the top. I'm going to start the same
way I did with my leaves. I'm going to place a
texture image file. I'm going to choose a lighter
texture because I want to play into the dark and
light value differences between the two layers. Again, I'll just drag large. You can always size down, but you want to size up first. I'm going to drag this in a
little bit and move it over. Now I'm going to clip
it to that first curve. I'll drag down and clip. I'm going to change the blend
mode of this to soft light. I'm not looking for
anything obvious. I want it to be rather subtle. In fact, I think I'm
going to go ahead and change the opacity
just slightly. Now, I'm going to
go ahead and choose something for my back one, and I'm going to choose a
little bit darker texture to pull out some of
that difference there. I'll go ahead and
choose this one here. I'm going to drag
down and clip it. Then I can go ahead and drag
in so I can see where I'm going. I like how that is splay. How there's this subtle
organic messiness here. I'll go ahead and change
the blend mode of this. I'm going to try overlay and softly just to see
how both look. I think I like overlay
and I'm going to drop the opacity just slightly. Now I have my first set of
texture on both of my petals. I want to play into the
difference between the two a little bit more by adding
some more texture to the top. I'm going to stick to
my vector brushes and we're going to use some of
the built-in brushes here. I'll select my
vector brush tool. I'm going to go ahead and use a nice off white
color for my brush. I'm going to use one of the
built-in gouache brushes, specifically this gouache for, when you do short strokes, you can really see the variation in how the brush lays down. Just draw it up a
little bit larger. I'm going to start drawing in, in various directions just
like we did with the leaves. It's going to look
chaotic at first. But we're going to clip this
and change the blend mode. I'll go back into my
layer studio and again, when you're working
with a vector brush, you get separate layers each
time you lay down a stroke. I'm going to select the
first one and two-finger tap on the last so that
I can group them. I'll go ahead and clip
them to that top curve. This is a little too bright. I'm going to go
ahead and knock back the brightness just by
changing the blend mode. I'm again going to
go with soft light. I like how that's looking, but I want to drop the opacity just slightly, I like how that looks. We have some nice variation
and texture between the top and bottom level as well as a difference in
the dark and light values. I'm going to add a little
bit more subtle texture to this using my vector brush. I'll go ahead and select
my inking brushes, specifically my
fountain pen ink. I am going to make the
brush a little bit smaller. I have this off-white color selected and I'll just
start drawing lines up. I have my lines in place. The first thing I want to
do is write my Canvas. I'll go to my navigator studio
and under canvas rotation, I'm going to tap
and type in zero. That's going to bring my
Canvas upgrade again, it's important to make sure
that you do that throughout. I need to clip these curves
to this top layer of leaves. I'll select my top curve and then two-finger tap to select
the bottom. Group them. Now I can clip the whole
group to this curve. It's a little too obvious again, I want it to be more subtle, so I'm going to go ahead
in and I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light and just
drop the opacity a bit. I really just want
subtle lines here. I don't want them to
stand out too much. Now I could take this
a step further and I could go into
my pixel persona, grab my paintbrush
tool and perhaps add some subtle shading throughout or some variation of color. I like how this is looking. It's a relatively simple flower, so I want to keep the
texture symbol overall, but it's really up to you. Let's go ahead and take a
look at another flower. In this exercise, we're going to add texture to a flower that's made up of a number of
groups of individual layers. When we created the
chrysanthemum flower, we use the pen tool to create all of these individuals curves, to go into each
individual one and add texture to it would be
very time-consuming. Instead we're going
to focus on adding texture to the groups that
make up the whole flower. Now the first thing I want
to do is make sure that these curves are no
longer just strokes, but they're fills because you can't add texture to a stroke. I'll just go ahead and I'll
select the four groups. Go into my Edit menu
and tap Expand Stroke. The appearance doesn't change, but the type of curve
you're working with does. They've now been expanded. We're working with fills
rather than strokes, which means we're ready
to add our texture. I'm not going to add
texture to every layer. I find that sometimes when I
leave certain elements flat, it adds an additional
layer of dimension. I'm going to start and add
texture to the bottom, but I want to keep
the color the same. I just want to add texture
on top so I'll duplicate it first and with it selected, I'll grab my fill tool
and just drag up. Now I have the gradient, but it's not the type
of fill that I want. I want to select Bitmap. I want you to choose a
lighter texture file. I like how this looks, but it's not quite the look
we're going for. I'm going to just drag it
out a little bit to give myself a little bit
more than graininess. I'm going to change the blend
mode of the overall group. I'll go ahead and I'm
going to tap through. I already know I'm going
to like soft light, so I'm just going to
go ahead up to that. You could try different ones
if you want to tap through. Hard light is nice, but it's a little bit too much. Just going to knock it back a little bit with
some soft light, so we still have that color, but there's some nice
texture in there as well. I'm done with that
one and I'm going to go ahead and de-select it. Let's move on to the next group. I'm going to leave this
one flat and I'm going to go up to the next
one in the lineup. Again, I'll go ahead
and duplicate it. I'm going to grab my fill
tool and swipe across it, add the gradient, and I'm going to
change this to Bitmap. I want to choose a little
bit darker one this time, but not too dark. I'll go ahead with this. Again not quite the
look I'm going for. I do like it and you can get some really interesting
results just leaving it as is, but we're going to go ahead
and change the blend mode. You could also get some
interesting results just using the blend modes themselves and add a little bit of color or something like that. I think we're probably
going to end up somewhere in linear
burn or darker color. I like darker color.
I'm just going to knock it back a little bit. Let me try linear burn here. We're going to do
that one instead. I like how we have the texture, but it's a little bit darker. Again, we're giving it a
little bit more dimension. Now I want to choose
this last group and again duplicate it. With it selected, I'll
just drag it across. I'm going to select Bitmap. I want to go even darker
with the texture because I really want that middle
section to stand out. I'll just go ahead and
drag up and then just change the blend mode until
I get something I like. I actually like that brown. I like how it plays into the neutral zone
of the rest of it. I like how the
overall flowers look. The only thing I
might do at the end here is add some texture
and I'm going to go into my pixel [inaudible]
and grab my paintbrush tool. I'm going to grab a
nice grainy brush and off-white color, I think. I'm just going to start adding some texture around
the edges here. Again, it's not clipped, so it's ending up on the outside as well.
But that's okay. I want to leave the center
a little bit darker. I'll go back in and I'll
grab that pixel and I'll clip it to the ellipse. I might just change
the blend mode just to see some of the options. Will probably end up again in the soft light or
hard light area. I think I like hard way but I'll just drop it
down a little bit. There's our overall
chrysanthemum flower where we've added texture to individual groups rather than individual layers. Let's take a look
at one more flower. Finally, let's add
some texture to this simple flower we created
using the pencil tool. Because it is so simple, I don't want to add too much texture, but I do want to focus on
the difference between light and dark of
these two layers, as well as the fact that
it's a curved flower. I'm going to play into that. The first thing I'm
going to do is place a texture image file
on that top layer. I want to pick something light. I'll go ahead and drag this up. I want this dark part here to be at the
bottom of the flower. I'll go ahead and clip it. Then I'll change the blend mode. I'm going to choose the
soft white because I know that works best with
this particular texture. The next thing I want
to do here is to add a little bit more texture
using a vector brush. Specifically, I want to use
one of the acrylic brushes. In the acrylics section, I've added two designer. I'm going to go ahead and
choose this glazing brush. When I add texture with
this really large, it just adds a
nice cottony feel, so I'll go ahead and swipe up. I'll swipe up this direction, and I'll go ahead and group
them together and clip it. Then once you start changing
the blend mode of this, it blends in really nicely and adds a nice
textural quality. I actually like overlay here, but I'm going to
drop the opacity. I like how that pulled
in a little bit of that yellowish feel from
the off-white color I used, but kept that peachy pink. I'll go ahead and add a texture image file
now to the back. I want to pick a little
bit of darker one. Again, I'll go
ahead and drag up, now clip itself to the wrong
layer, but that's okay. We're just going to grab
it and drag it down. I'll go ahead and once again
change the blend mode. I like soft light in this case. Now the difference is subtle,
but it's still there. You still have the impression
that it's a closed flower. I'm going to go ahead
and add a little bit of texture to the middle
section here again, using the place image. I want something in
the Brown family with some grittiness because
it's dull and flat. I'm going to go ahead
and pick this one. I'll just go ahead and swipe up. I like this section
here in particular. I'm just going to change
the blend mode again to either overlay or soft light. I think I like overlay the best. One final thing that
I want to do is just add a little bit of
light to the side here, I'm going to grab the
paintbrush tool again. I have my off-white
color selected and then going to go and grab
this things, gritty brush. I want to go ahead
and start adding some light texture to the very side here and a
little bit at the top. Now, it's already
clipped itself because I selected this layer
to begin with. But I do want to change
the blend mode to screen and that'll
allow not only the texture come through but the lightness will stay as well. I just want to add a little
bit of dark to here. I'm going to choose
this dark pink color. Now because this was a screen blend mode
and I actually wanted to use a different
blend mode here I need to add a pixel layer, so I'll go ahead and
hit this plus sign. It added the pixel layer. Now I can just start
adding my texture here. Again, I don't want to do
too much, just a little bit. I'll change the blend mode to multiply and drop the opacity. I like how this
flower is looking. In the next section, we're going to go
ahead and take a look at the assets section. I'll show you not
only how you can save your own objects to use in the existing document
you're in but for the future, but also introduce
you to this nature elements download that I
provided you with and show you how to use the
elements to create your own floral arrangements.
I'll see you there.
19. The Assets Studio : One of my favorite things about designer is the Asset Studio. It allows me to save
objects I create, whether they're
single layer objects or made up of multiple layers, for use in future documents. I use this a lot
when I'm creating surface patterns or I'm creating
an illustration where I just need a little bit of
fill and don't want to start from scratch creating
a whole new flower. If I see single layer objects, I can stack multiple assets on top of one another to
create a new design. If I save multiple layer
objects like this one, it will insert it
exactly how I saved it, layers and all, so I can go
in and make edits if I want. Let's take a look at
the Asset Studio. It's broken down into
categories and subcategories, and you will always need
at least one subcategory to begin adding assets. In this case, I have
a category setup for my flower shapes, and it's broken down into
multiple sub-categories. I have this flower that I created and I love
it and how it looks, so I want to keep
it for future use. The first thing I want to
do is make sure that all of the elements that make up this flower are grouped together. You can save as
individual layers, but it's going to save it as individual elements in
your Assets Studio. If you want to save it as it is, make sure that you group
those layers first. Now I've made sure this
is grouped together and I'm going to go
ahead and select it. I'll go into my Asset Studio and I'm going to select which
subcategory I want it in. I'm going to place it
in this flower heads, and I'll tap on the menu for this subcategory and then select "Add Asset
from Selection". Now, it's added
to my group here, and if I want to add it back in, I can simply tap, hit "Insert", and it's placed
it in my document again. Again, it's broken down into the original layers
that I created it with. Let's take a look
at how you create your own Asset
categories to save to. The first thing you
want to do is go to the Hamburger menu at the top of the Asset Studio and
select "Add Category". You can rename this by going
back into that same menu, selecting "Rename Category", and I'll go ahead and name
this skillshare class. Again, you're always
going to need at least one subcategory before you can begin adding
to this particular category. I'll go back into that same
menu tap "Add Subcategory", and I'll go into the menu for that subcategory to rename it. I'll just change
this to florals. I'm all set to start adding. Once again, I would
go ahead and I would select my object. I'll go into the menu for
the subcategory I want to add to and then tap "Add
Asset to Subcategory". If you need to
delete a category, you can go into that top menu, and again, you can go
ahead and delete it. You also can import from here as well as
export from here. As part of the downloads
for this class, I provided a nature
elements assets pack, which is a group of single
layer floral and leaf shapes that you can use to
create your own designs. Let's take a look
at how these work. I'm going to recreate
the flower shape that we started with. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to select the flower shape
and tap "Insert." Let me first go ahead
and turn this one off. I will head into
my Asset Studio, I want to select this
is a shape here. I'll tap on it, hit "Insert," and now
it's in my document. Again starts out as a
single layer with no color, but you can go ahead
and add color to it. I'm going to select this
darker fill since I know this is going to
be my bottom petal, and I'm going to go back to my Asset Studio and add a
second of that same one. You could also just duplicate
the first one in place, it's really up to you. I'm going go ahead and add a lighter color to
this second layer, and I'm going to make it
smaller and rotate it slightly. I'll just go ahead
and center these, and I'm ready to add my texture. I'll go ahead and grab
a texture image file. I'm going to pick
some nice light ones. I'll drag across, and I'm going to clip
this to the first layer, change my blend
mode to soft light, and I'll just drop
the opacity slightly. Now I'm going to go back in and selecting another one
from my bottom layer, I'm going to choose a
slightly darker one. Remember to drag large, you can always size down, but you want to
make sure that you start out at a larger size. I'll go ahead and clip this to my bottom and change
that to soft light. I'm all set with my
texture on the two petals. If you wanted to, you
could go further and add lines to the
petals, it's up to you. I'm going to go ahead and
add my middle section. There's three
flower metals here, I'm going to start
with this solid one. It's created using one
of the brushes from the texture flower brush pack that I provided as a download. You can change it to whichever
one you want in the pack. First, I'm going to
go ahead and change the color of my
fill and my stroke, but I'll go ahead
and make that black. I think I'm going to choose
this coffee beans stamen. I'll make this a
little bit smaller and move it to the middle, and I'll just increase the stroke size just to make the stamen a
little bit larger. Now I can go in and I
can add texture to this. I think what I'm going to do
is I'll add another one of these flower middle just to add to the middle section here. I'm going to select this
one and hit "Insert." I'm going to keep
the brush that's selected for this
particular stroke, but I'm going to go ahead
and change the colors again. I'm just going to make
this a little bit smaller. I'm also going to change the alignment of the stroke
so that it's in the center. That's how you can take
single layers from an Asset Studio
and build them up, add texture and color to them to create a
whole new design. In the next section,
we're going to put everything
together and create a beautiful textured bouquet using everything
that we learned in the class. I'll see you there.
20. Putting it All Together: In this final section, we're going to take
some of the flowers and leaves that we've created and put them together in a texture floral bouquet. Now, it's up to you
how do you want to place them together. You can make a
traditional bouquet that's just tied together or you can place them in a
bowl or cup or if you want, you can even make a
flat light bouquet. It's totally up to you. I think I'm going to make a nice little
cup to put them in. So I'll start with
my pencil tool and I'll go ahead and select
this red color, I think. I'll make sure my fill is
on and my stroke is off. I'm just going to go ahead
and draw out a little bowl and I like to make it slightly imperfect as if it's pottery. Let me go ahead and add
some texture to this first. I'll clip that and
change the blend mode. I'll stick with overlay there. I want to add a little
bit more to this so I'm going to go back
to my pencil tool, I'm going to turn off both
my fill and my stroke, and I'm going to go
ahead and just draw a little circle,
swirl formation here. I'm going to go
into my brushes and specifically into the engraving
brushes that are built into Designer and
I'm going to select one of my engraving brushes
and make it rather large. I like how it gives it that nice little
engraved pottery feel. I'll just go back in and I
want to make sure that this is clipped to this curve so
nothing's on the outside, I'll change the blend mode to soft light and let's
drop the opacity slightly. This is something
where you can play around with the color and the different blend modes and you'll get different feels, but I like how this one looks so I'll go ahead
and call that done. I'm going to go ahead and
start adding my flowers now. Actually, the first
thing I'm going to do is add some leaves to the pot, so I'm going to go
ahead and insert one of the leaves that I saved. I want this behind the pot and I actually
want two of them, so I'll go ahead and flip this. I may add more later, but I'm going to just
start with two for now. I'll go ahead and group
these and drop them below the pot and I accidentally clipped
it there, which is fine. I'm going to do this
two finger tap to undo and I'll re-drag. Now everything is
behind the pot. I'm going to go ahead and just start placing flower heads. I usually do my
stems after the flat once I've placed the
flowers where I want them. I'm going to go in
and I'm going to grab those two poppy
flowers that we had, made a drag this up
to the top though. I'm just going to
make them smaller. This one up here and this one, I'm going to make a little
bit smaller and rotate it and place it over here. I don't try and be
perfect about this because it looks more natural when you just place things and you can
always move them around. I'm going to go ahead
and take a look at my Asset Studio and add a
couple of flowers from there. I liked this little salmon
flower that we created. I'm going to go ahead and
dry it smaller though, and I actually want a couple
of them in various spots and I want them to have
different orientations. I think I'll drag
one over here too. I think we need
some white flowers, so I'll go ahead and
add this one as well. You can vary the sizes, maybe even vary the
shapes if you want to drag in a little bit
because not all flowers are perfectly round and I just like to give it
a little variety. Maybe we'll just go ahead
and add one more here, I'm going to add this yellow flower and just drop the size a little bit and put
this one up here. I want to lay it on
top of the poppy. If you wanted to talk
things behind other things, you can just drag the layer. If I wanted this behind the
poppy, you can do that. I actually want that above
and I think I'm going to move the poppy flower
over just slightly. I think I'm going to
stick with this for now. I'm going to start adding some stems just to fill this in. I'll go into my pen tool and I'm going to make sure I de-select so that when
I change the color, I don't accidentally change
the color of the flower, and I'm going to make
that green my stroke. I'm just going to go
ahead and I'm going to tap down and drag. Now this is much
larger than we need, so I'll just go ahead
and change the size. I'm also going to tuck
it behind the head of the flower and I also
want to make sure it's behind the bowl. I'm going to use
the stroke studio to make some changes to it
so it's not so perfect. I might even make this
a different color just to make it a little bit different from the
leaf formations there, just make it a
little bit lighter. I'm just going to go
ahead and I'm going to keep adding stems to this, I can also use the
ones that are in my nature elements assets pack, but I just wanted to
go ahead and add this, change the color, and I can add texture
to that if I want. So I'll just go ahead and
fill this in and then we'll start moving things around just to get them in
the perfect spot. I like how my
flowers are placed, I'm actually not going
to add any more. I added some additional
leaves and I left some flat. Sometimes I like to have a little pop of color
without texture and something that you wouldn't necessarily expect just
to add as a filler. The last thing I'm
going to do is add a texture to my background and then add a unifying texture
across the entire thing. I'm going to go ahead
in and I'll select a image file from my
black background. When it comes to the black ones, they like to use a black
and white type texture. I accidentally hit one
there while I was talking. Let's start that again. I like it to be screenish and ghost-like when it comes to black and you'll
see why in a second. I'm going to go
ahead and drag that up and I'll place it, and I want to drag
that down so that it's on top of my
black rectangle there. I like how this gives it a
little bit of light almost, coming from the one
side and I'll just tap through until I find
the blend mode I like. I typically end up towards glow because it just gives
a little bit of subtle light there so that's
good for my background. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to lay a unifying texture
on the top now. I'll go back and, in this case, I don't want one of my
black and white ones. I'm going to choose a lighter color to
the one that I have, this Antique White, and I'll just go ahead
and rotate this. It doesn't really
matter if it's perfect, I really just want the texture. Again, I want to place a large
first and then size down. I'll just place it so that it's got that nice
amount right there. Now I want to change
the blend mode. That is, I don't want
to move it down, I want it on top of
everything because I want it to add a little bit
of texture to everything. I'll go ahead and change
my blend mode again. I wanted to
ultimately be subtle, so I'll end up
dropping the opacity, but I want to start high
and then work my way down. You can usually add a lighter
color, it's a nice one. I'm just going to drop
the opacity there. It gives us a little bit
of subtle texture here, as well as what's coming up
from the bottom and it's over the entire thing so it
unifies everything. It's up to you whether
you want to add that, that tends to be one of
my finishing touches, but I'm going to go ahead
and call this done. Thank you so much for being
a part of this class. I hope you're going to use the methods you learned here to go on to create many
beautiful illustrations. My biggest piece of
advice when creating these botanicals is to
have fun with them. The flowers are all yours to create so you can
use abstract shapes, fun colors or go for
complete realism. It's totally up to you. If you have any questions about the class or about
Designer in general, please feel free to reach
out to me either on the class discussion
board or with the contact info in
the resource guide. Please feel free to
share your creations on the class project board as I'd love to see what you've created.
Tracey Capone, Illustrator, Photographer & Designer
