Adobe Illustrator: Design with Gradients

1. Trailer: Hey guys, it's Hayden. Today I'm going to show you how to create colorful, bold illustrations using gradients. For many years I've been developing a workflow for Adobe Illustrator in which I take very simple illustrations and apply lots of gradients and different effects to make them pop. In fact, the very first class I made here on Skillshare was trying to achieve this very thing. But several years and 11 other classes have passed since that first one, and I've had a lot of time to really hone the style and bring it to a new level. I've even had the chance to art direct in entire mobile game with this style. While we're going to be covering every step of the process from sketch to the final, special attention will be given to selecting colors and working with gradients, and setting up your Illustrator document in a way that it's really easy for you to making big changes quickly. As an added bonus, I'm going to be working on an actual piece of in-game artwork for the demonstration. If you're looking for a way to breathe new life into your flat illustrations or maybe you're just interested in what it's like creating artwork for a game then this is the class for you. I hope to see you there. 2. Sketching Spaceships: To kick things off this video, I'd like to just go over a couple of things about the class while you watch this little recording of me drawing my design. First of all, on the note of drawing, I think it's very helpful that you, even though you're going to be going into illustrator and it's easy to move shapes around and vectors, there's a lot of freedom to play around with them, it makes a really big difference if you make a drawing first, even if it's something small like thumbnail in the corner of a page. There's two main reasons for this. One, no matter how fast you are at moving things around in illustrator, there's a lot more freedom for experimentation and for just speed in traditional drawing as opposed to moving around vector shapes. Also, there's a lot of rigidness to the software because it's all vectors and hard lines. You might not come up with the same designs, drawing that you would inside of illustrator. The second main reason is that we want to focus on one step at a time, especially when we're doing something new. In this class, even though there's several different steps that maybe you can clump together, like maybe you could come up with your ship design while you're experimenting with colors. I'm going to be separating everything out so that we can give 100 percent of our focus to each step at a time. While this may be slower at first, I find that this is a great way to make the process easier and to produce better work. You the student, have an option for how you want to do this class. You can either use the art style and the process for any illustration you'd like, or you can follow me in creating spaceship. Why I've I encouraged you to create a spaceship? Is because I'm actually basing this design off a bunch of them that I've already created for a game called Aluna. The style we're doing in this class is one that I set up for this game and here I'm actually making a real asset we're going to put into it. If you create your own spaceship and you follow this template I've created of putting the top in the green bar, the middle and the blue bar and the bottom in the red bar, at the end of the class, you can mix and match pieces of your own ship with ones that exists in the game. I think that could be a lot of fun. Of course, all that being said, this style can work with any illustration. Feel free to create what you wish. You'd notice here on the body of the ship, I'm actually overlapping a lot of objects and this is going to give us a lot of room to really push the depth of things when we get to the gradient phase of our illustration. It might be a good idea in your own design to include some overlapping elements and it'll give you a lot of room to experiment with what we're learning. Because I anticipate people asking, I am using a HUION KAMVAS GT-221 as a drawing tablet, but that doesn't mean you have to go and get one. There are so many great options out there. I find the HUION brand is good and affordable. If you want to use the same brush I'm using in Photoshop, I've included it in the resources section, but it really shouldn't matter too much which brush you use for your sketching. Now, as you've probably noticed in this video, I'm not going too much into how to actually draw and that's because that's an entire subject on its own. If you are interested in improving your drawing skills, I do have a couple classes that cover that. Chief among them is "Teach yourself to draw anything." You'll notice as I'm drawing here that I'm mostly just drawing on one side. That's because all of these spaceships are symmetrical and it can be a lot easier for me to just take half of it and reflect it along the guide that I put in the middle. Something that I include in a lot of the ship designs and we'll be going over later in the class, are things like lights and gems and really glowing elements. I'm including some of those in my ship and I encourage you to do the same. Just to break any illusion that I'm coming up with this super clean spaceship designed right off the top my head, you should know that I have another drawing on my other monitor that I'm referencing a rough draft before this one. This is also my second time filming this section. I've drawn this ship more than once. If you're stuck for ideas for your own ship or you want to get a sense of how some of the other ones look, I've included a bunch of samples in the resources section. Once you have a drawing that you're happy with that there's enough information there that's going to guide you through building an illustrator, we can move on to the next lesson. 3. Setting Up Illustrator: Before we get into the actual design, I just want to show you how my illustrator is setup and introduce you to the Spaceship Template that I've made for those of you that are creating a Spaceship. If you're not doing a ship, feel for you to create a document and whatever size you'd like but we're going to be working at a 1000 by 1000 pixels. Very quickly I just want to go through the different panels I have opened. I have the Pathfinder, Color, and then I have Swatches. You'll see that I've actually removed all the defaults swatches except for black and white. I find this just to be a very clean way to work and we'll just be adding in the swatches that we need and nothing else. I have stroke, I have gradient, appearance and then layers. These are the only panels I'll be using throughout the entire class. If you want to bring those up on your illustrator, that'll make things simple. For the layers, I have, one for the template for the ship, and I've sectioned out three bars, one for the bottom of the ship, one for the middle, and one for the top. You'll see because it's a live path is going to be easy for you to make sure it's cropped where it needs to be. I have a layer for the design. That's where we'll be mostly working as well as one for Sketch and something called the Value Check. This will make a lot more sense when we get to the later stages of our design. But really what this is used for is laying on top of our artwork to get a grayscale version of it. That'll let us know that we have good contrast in our work. It's like an insurance policy where at any point throughout our art, we can see whether something is looking good or not because if it looks good as grayscale then as colors, it should work too. For those of you who are using my template and you want to create a layer like this, all it is, is a big black ship and the opacity is set to hue or color blending mode. That's all you need. With the sketch layer selected, I am going to place mine into the art board. I'll just place by drawing, align it so it's where I need it to be. I'm going to drop the opacity down to about 30. To make sure that I'm not messing with it, I'm just going to lock it in place. I also just want to point out in the design area layer, I've added a guide right down the center. As seen in the next video, this is going to be very helpful actually throughout the whole class in creating our shapes and making sure it's symmetrical on both sides. Finally, go up to View and make sure that Snap to pixel is turned off. Just Click it and I can show you that mine is indeed turned off. This forces our paths to align to our pixel grid and I find that this messes up our accuracy, especially when we're changing the size of shapes, it can really distort things. It's best to keep it off. Because it's a good habit to get into, we'll end off this video by saving our file. I'm just going to call mine Spaceship demo, but once you're all setup, we can move on to actually designing our ships in the next video. 4. Building Shapes: I'm just really going to start building out these shapes. Let me try and go slower than I normally would. Actually I use a lot of hot keys and things like that and I go quite quickly, so I'm going to try and slow myself down a bit and explain what I'm doing. To start, let's corners that shape. They are going to be aligned to the center a lot. We can see that it's already like that, but that's really helpful, and I'm making sure that with my template parts that need to be lined up right against here, so that one we're mixing and matching different ship parts. It crops correctly. This is the outline view using a lot to ensure things are lined up. A lot of these pieces I'm going to build on one side. I will change the color so I can tell. As far as colors go, I am just picking any old color and not worry about them at all. Now it's all about legibility, just me being able to see the difference between the shapes. This is one of the first techniques that I'm going to be using a lot. I'm mirroring an image and then joining it. I'll be using reflect, and then I'll be clicking on my middle guide so that I can reflect things along it and click anywhere on here and then I hold Alt and Shift, and I mirror it right alongside. We can see again. In this case, it didn't go right up against each other. That's my fault. I just want to make sure that they are in fact nice and snug. Then I'm going to use the Unite option and Pathfinder, and now this is all just one separate shape. This is going to be a process for a lot of this is building something on one side and then do it again on the other. This top part, I'm going to use a circle I think to create it. That's going to be that part there. Again, I want to make sure it's lined out. Then I'm actually going to use offset path to create this second piece right here. Let's try it out. Let's see 20 pixels, that's bang on. Maybe like 21 or so, but that's pretty accurate. Let's just make these different colors so we can tell. Then I'm cropping it around there. I'm using a lot of shapes to intersect with other ones or keep these different colors so you can tell when I'm doing. But right now I have this green shape with the box here on top of the green shape, I'm going to hold Shift to select them both, and then I'm going to use the intersect option. That's going to give me a shape that looks like this and that's exactly what I want with that. Then I'm just going to use the Direct Selection tool, the white arrow. Both these go round them like I have in my drawing and later on this one a bit too. Then I'm going to do a similar thing. I have this shape and the circle, do it again, and so now this is how I want it. We just turn off the template in the sketch to see what it's looking like. I want this to be a bit around are up here. Now I have my drawing, but you're also welcome to continue to play with it. I might make these less around it so they match above. Cool. Turn the stuff back on. We'll have just join piece. All the shapes at the very minimum, at this are the maximum, and they can be on this line here, and that's what we're doing for this design. This is like where, how the other shape pieces fit into one another. I'm just going to create that there. My lines are all lined up. Then we have this glowing bar across the middle. The way I'm going to do that is make a path. Let's switch it so we have a stroke. We'll make it the color that we can see. Use the Stroke window. I'm going to run the caps and I'll make it nice and big. I do not want it too big, but maybe 12 seems good. I like that. I'm going to make sure again this is in the center and I'm going to outline the stroke, so now the stroke becomes a shape. Down here we have the same thing. I'm actually just going to bring that down here. I can see that's a bit smaller than my initial drawing, but that's fine. This can change. Now I'm going to follow this line on what these lined up, and I'm just going to build half. Then use the reflect technique again to, select those then unite them so you can see how it gets a bit quicker once you've done it a couple times. Even though we have your drawing, we can continue to tweak the shapes. For instance, I'm already feeling like I might want this to be a bit wider than it is. Let's just grab a similar tower like that, maybe. Yeah, I think I'm liking that side so I'm going to duplicate that up here. Just to, cut it for a second. Paste in place. Make sure my lines here are okay. Now I need this, just to crop at the top, so I can either move this piece up, which works pretty well or I can, I think I'll just stick to that. Okay. Let's get our sketch back. Now, let's make these wings. I'm going to make one of the wings. Okay? I'm going to move it backwards to slot it in, here we go. Let's make it a different color, just as easy to see. Then, again, I'm just going to duplicate it to the other side. Next step is this shape here. I think this is one of the things that's going to be a good demonstration because I'm actually just going to make a big rectangle here. Then I'm going to grab just this side and round it to how I want it. Okay, change the color, I will send it to the back. Then for this piece here, I'm going to just create a right angled stroke. Switch it to a stroke. Let's try and see what is 20 points. Twenty is pretty close, let's beef that up a bit. Put around that, let me just change the color here, something like that.Let's just run these plans using different colors for legibility. I'm going to push that back. I like how it looks, which I think I do. Once again, I'm going to outline the stroke. That's shape. This will be a panel. We have a little line here. I'm going to leave that for now. Take a detail I will come back to, same with these little text, I'm just going to leave those. I'll take this, press O for reflect, click somewhere along the guide and reflect it over there. For the wing down here I'm just going to duplicate this to look how I like it and then I'm going to create a shape on top of it, to mask it out. I'm grabbing the shape from both these shapes, intersecting it. Let's change the color, sent it back and reflect it once again. I am going to build this little wing design. I might hide it for now but, this shape here, I can copy, then paste in-front. I now have a duplicate on top. Then using that duplicate and this other shape, I will intersect, and I'll get that. A bunch of little quick tricks you can do to get shapes that you are after. Let's just make this a different color, there we go. Then I'm going to cut out that middle. We get something that looks like that. I'll move it back, ungroup that and then I'm going to move it over again, now we have a little design there. Similar thing for this one, but I'm actually just going to hold Alt and drag this down. Now I have one shape here. I'm going to press control C to copy, control F to paste in place. I now have a second copy. With that duplicate and the one on top, I'm going to press Minus Front. I might have had them arranged incorrectly, I see. This needs to be overlapping the piece I want to get it how I want. Now at this piece, and then I'm going to just trim it like I did at the bottom. Wider, let's make it nice and legible, and that works. Let's see what else I want to create at this point. Do you want this, like a bar? It's going to be like display, metallic charging bar, so I'm going to ensure that's right in the middle. Then I'm going to round it a little bit. Let's round these corners. That's the bit. Then I'm going to offset the path, let's see. Now we want a negative up here, so let's try negative 10, negative 12. It matches the same thickness as this bar here, it's helpful to keep consistent widths so let's do that, and we will subtract. We just have this kind of shape. Then, I'm just going to create. This would be our little panel, here. But we don't want it in the middle here. Now that we have these, I'm just going to create a shape that, and subtract it. I'm actually going to copy it. That led to this first minus front. I can now just paste and place again with control F and then minus front the edges. That's how we have our little shape here. I'm just going to do a quick check to make sure our parts are lined up correctly and they all look good. To make this diamond here, I'm actually just going to do an offset path again. If I did it negative 20, let's keep bringing it down, we're there. You see this is already made this whole shape that I need just pretty handy, so let's just leave it there. Then I can just grab this. Let's grab this down. I want to cut off a bit from each side here. I'm actually just going to have the shape here that I want to use where I wanted to cut, so I'll move to the side. I have two of them so first I can cut that one and then I'll move this to front then cut that one as well. Now I mostly have the shape that I wanted. But I need this little part here so I'm actually going to take and copy this part here and I'm going to use reflect to move it down. I want to crop that one, and then this might be a bit hard to follow actually. You know what? I'll just ungroup these to get ride of that and that together and there we have that. Then I want this little diamond in the middle. This little diamond in the middle. I don't want to line up with this. We'll do our best jobs just to an offset path of it. Let's try negative 12. We've seen the reason that a lot. Let's seems pretty good. Let's just over 13 I don't think we're right on you, but I think we're pretty close. It's pretty close together. So 12 million data perfectly, but that's okay. I want to follow this design down here. I'm actually just going to, we are following this. What's that there and then I have this right along. I don't think that's right in the middle, no. Yes. Sometimes here. Step to points on so we should be fine. Sometimes if snapped to points on it won't a fix to your grids, which can get annoying. I do want this. I'm going to treat the shape that I think soviets works better. You can see how when you've done this enough, you can get the shapes, how you want them to look. I think it's also worth mentioning how that were not adhering absolutely exactly to our design and our charge drawing or making little tweaks here, which is totally fine. Wanted to do some of the details up here. I'm going to create this here and then duplicate this shape. Then here's minus front, sorry rather that's the intersect. Then I'm going to offset path to expand the shape must also mentioned somewhere in here that there is reason. That's important is offset path instead of just duplicating a ship, making it larger and won't scale correctly. If you do it the other way, there we go it's pointing is also path. Actually rewind. I'm going use intersect here. If I use and divide. We divide this, is it gives me all these shapes as separate ones. I can take this little piece and I can put it down here to something that I wanted. Let's just find a nice place for it. Next time I just terminated with it to something like that. That's any little motif. Put this over here. Then we want to, and that over there. Then a little arrow here too I think, something like that, this is work and I'm going to get bigger. Just doesn't. That's fine. I think am just going to subtract this soviets. As a whole, we can sketch. Let's just make the last little look here. There are a couple of things that we can maybe build later. In fact, I'm actually going to use Control 3 to hide some things; just because it'll make it easier. If we hide some of these details for the next stage, I'm going to turn out that. Those are the basic shapes for our ship design. 5. Choosing Colors: What I'm going to do is in swatches and we're going to create some global swatches, and these are very important. We really want to make sure that we make "Global" is selected, because this means that when we change the swatch, it'll reflect in our design and this one give us a lot of freedom, a lot of room to change things on the go, especially when we've built out our ship further and we're going to be building up a design in a way that even at the very end, we can still make big changes to the colors, which is, I find really, really nice. We're just going to start off with a couple colors. I'm going to start with a green color scheme. I like to use HSB, I find it a lot easier to control the brightness, saturation, and the hue separately. Well, let's make it green, maybe for the panels and the lights and stuff I'll use primarily a light yellow, and then maybe a teal green, darker blue. Let's start with those and then we can add some as we go. I'm also going to want to get a shout out to my class on working with colors. We're going to start supplying the swatches. We'll start applying the swatches to our ship. Here we actually start using the value check. This is going to show me what the ship looks like in black and white. We can see here that there's a good amount of contrast, we can tell the difference between some of the shapes, but I can see that I feel like there could be even darker or maybe be higher contrast. I'm going to click into my global swatch from the screen and I'm just going to make it darker. Let's preview on and see how is that updating. This is a really big part of why we're building this closed swatches, so we have this excellent freedom. I'm just going to start playing with some different colors here, leaving more to the teal blue and then join the yellow, green color too if I want [inaudible] Well, we can use gradients of something later on to make a difference because right now these bleed into each other, same with the shapes because it's the same swatch. We can use gradients and shadows and lighting to differentiate those better, which is something we will do, but I think we're also going to maybe add in an extra swatch. Yeah, I think so. I think we'll add in a fourth swatch. You need another one that's maybe not as dark as this fella, somewhere between these two, and can do later. I feel like that's what this should be. There's a lot of experimentation, but it's worth mentioning that it gives you a lot of room to just play around, some things to be touched. It's pretty good. Now, it's a lot easier to tell some of these. Obviously part of this [inaudible] still planned in a bit here, but that's going to be a really easy problem to solve. We have a color scheme that we think's looking pretty nice. One thing that we can do is we can, let's duplicate this layer, so I'll just call this "Design 2," and we're going to create a second color scheme. I encourage you to do lots of this because at this stage in the design on this lot of exploration, it's really easy to try everything out. I just also find it quite fun to make new color schemes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select these and then I'm going to duplicate the swatches. Let's actually put this in a new folder and to this other folder too. Right now that look the same, but if we select everything here, and go to "Edit, " "Edit Colors," "Recolor Artwork," we can choose Color Group 1, that's the second one, oops, I don't know what are they. We can tell that to go to there. What we're telling it is take the existing swatches and change them into these ones in our new color group. What that's going to do for us, it's just pretty much set up in a new set of global swatches. Now, I can let's say, start playing around with it and then like a purple or something. Start playing with different colors. You can start playing around with these, but my initial color scheme is still here. Let's see where you take this one. I do like using the purple. This ship doesn't send some alien vibes to me so I'm [inaudible] that. You go with the purple and then green for the lights. Then this green here can be more of a white color to make purple. I'm actually ignoring these patterns for now. I'm liking this actually. Now, we don't have to, again, we can continue to change its colors as we go. What we're really doing is trying to do something you can like, doesn't have to be perfect. I'm telling myself right now because we are using global swatches, we can continue to tweak this. I can actually drop this swatch, let's set three right now. Let's try yellow. I like the green. Green is quite nice. Now, we can jump between our different designs and see what we like. In terms of colors, I'm preferring this one. I see you can see the details better here because we left them in, but I think this might be what I go forward with. Once you have a good sense of, actually it's just like that up there. Once you have a very limited color scheme that you quite like, we can move onto building it out with gradients in the next video. 6. Designing With Gradients: I think the first thing that I want to do here is actually create two new swatches. We're actually going to create some gradient swatches. I have my creating window here, and I want to have a block swatch on either side, but one of them is at 0 opacity. This will show up people what that looks like. That's pretty much how it's created. I want to create this as a swatch because we'll be using it a lot. I want to create another version of it where it's white. So from a 100 opacity white to 0 opacity white. That looks like that. Again we want to create that as a swatch. This will just be helpful to launch it and we can begin. I'm going to start with this guy here. Something I'll be doing a lot is using offset path. I'm using negative eight because that's what I use on all shapes for this element, but I'm going to be using offset path to create a smaller version of this shape and for the fill, I'm going to use that swatch that we created here, but I'm going to fill. I'm going to select overlay and that's going to give us this nice purply color, and so the gradient is going to want to come up from here and we're going to do the same thing with all these purple shapes. Just kind of rinse and repeat. We can copy that. As we've been doing we'll pull back up a guide. As we were doing with the shape building, we can mirror this over there and once it's there, layer some bit off. Put that down there and then to grab that one and sometimes it's easier to go into the outline view and smooth stop. One thing I want to do is I want these shapes behind here, but I want to use the same color. This is one of the reasons I'm using the appearance patent panel and maybe this is the first time that I can explain it in the tutorial, but rather than duplicate a shape on top itself, I'm going to add an additional fill and this fill we're going to set to black. Now it's a black fill on top of the blue fill and of this fill, the opacity is going to be overlay. It's important not to set this. This changes the entire shape, but this sets just the one fill I've selected. It's still the same color, but it's now a bit darker layer on top and this is really handy in case we play around with this color. It's still going to work no matter what I change it to. Sometimes we use a lot of black and white overlay layers, it's because it gives us freedom to continue to tweak some shapes. I think I might drop that down a bit because I'm going to introduce some other things to make these two separate. If I were to open up the value checker right now, we can see that there's not a big difference here. If you look at the difference between these two shapes. There's not a whole lot of contrast there, so we're going to want to introduce some other things to pump it up. One thing that's going to help is we're going to create this edge effect on this shape here too. I'm going to grab this and we do some offset path and for this gradient I actually want do something a bit different. I want it to look like this is a bit cylindrical. I'm going to add some shadow. So in my gradient panel here. I'm going to add another swatch at the 50 percent location. It's right in the middle of my gradient and then I want on the left and the right the opacity to be 100, in the middle I want it to be 0. I remove the fill. I've created this gradient that goes like this. I want that to go on top, not just this shape on top of these little panels too. I'm going to take those and put them behind. Usually I just keep pressing send backwards. There's that one and there's that one. I don't think this section in the middle is enough. Some what I can do is move location of these back. I'm thinking I'm going put that around 30 percent, maybe this one around 70 percent. Now there's a bigger gap between the two. Let's see actually, what does it look like without that? I might swap this,oops, for our gradient. So I might just make it go down like that, oops. Let's try that for now. Again, we're going to be tweaking things a lot, so stick to that. Okay. I want to get the same rounded effect to the shape here. So I'm going to path offset path make it an eight, and then I'm just going to add dropper in this gradient here. I think right now it's behind a bunch of stuff so I'm going to move it to the front, and I will see. Making. Just playing around with the color here. Again, this is one of the beauties of art gradient setup, is that we can continue to tweak things at every point. So we'll put a bit more blue color. All right. Sure, that's good for now. Actually I want this same sort of rounded effect here. So I'm just going to add another swatch or another fill to this middle piece, and then I'll copy that rounded gradient, and you can see that we got it right there. Okay. Actually we're going to add it to this glowing light. So I'm actually going to add that in there as well. So another fill, and then there. But I think for this because the overlay isn't going to make a huge difference. I can add white to it, but it's, I think this is where we might actually add another swatch because overlay does change the colors a bit, which is nice. But sometimes if you want, for instance, I think a green transitioning to yellow would look really nice here. I'm going to make another swatch. So make sure it's global as before. I'm going to pick a yellow but still a bit on the green side, so I know they transition into each other really well. Something worth mentioning that if you have a color on the hue slider you really want when you're trying to transition from one color to the next. It really makes a difference when they're close together. You can try and go from like a yellow to a blue. You're going to get some gross desaturated colors in between and it won't look too nice, so it's green and yellow work really well together. Along with any two colors that sit adjacent on the color wheel. So I'm going to switch this to normal. What I'm going to do actually that's different here is these two colors on the side. I will make zero opacity. Then the middle is where it will be 100. Now I'm just going to swap all of these for my new yellow swash. We'll see how that looks. So I think that looks pretty good. I want to pump up the saturation on that yellow, I can do that. And I can do the same with the green. These really strong colors. Perfect. Now what we can do is we can just take this whole piece and duplicate it down there. Oops, I didn't realize I had this on, here we go. Next up, I think I'm actually going to just round these whole edges here a bit like that. Okay. I want this one in particular. I want this layer and this layer to really stand out like they're overlapping. So I'm going to offset path. I'm actually just going to use a white gradient set it to overlay. Now we have a lace rose coming from the top. That looks nice. I think this shape actually I'm just going to set to a black then overlay.There we go. So now again, if I continue to tweak this, it's still going to work well because it's all working with overlay layers. Okay. So next step is, I'll do the same down here. Launching path, offset path. I'm just going to add dropper with this white gradient. Then I'm going to make it come to the top like that. Then this one, again I'm going to make it black. Set it to overlay. Okay. That's a bit too much there. Let me ungroup this but I'm going to add a white overlay gradient just to replicate that lighting at the top. Notice how for some of these pieces I don't add an offset path because this is already quite small, so I think it's really good just to keep it to the big pieces or else things can get messy. You can always try things out to see how they look, and then change it afterwards, and get rid of the offset path afterwards. Let's just give it a little bit of lighting there. This one here, I'm going to cheat a little bit and then do the offset path because it's just going to give me a thin strip in the middle if I do it. I'm actually just going to move it. Must be duplicating it like this and then I'm going to keep this. Pretty much I'm just making a shape that looks like this. Then I'm going to come down like that. You can see yellow for now just because it's not contrasting very well. Who knew the yellow will be the base and green will go on top. Let's just set that for now and we'll introduce the green just like we did there. I've got my guide, then reflect it, move it upwards. Trying to do my best not to go too too fast. This is a detail I think we'll deal with in the next lesson. I want to show that this is behind our white layer, so it's getting the effect of it. I'll show you this in detail when we get to it. It's something you want to pay attention to. Maybe just a little bit brighter. Here because it's a circle, I'm actually going to Offset Path, I'm going to use the Gradient but I'm going to make it a circle, just like that. Overlay. If I don't think it's strong enough, I can always just duplicate it and get a second one going. That's something I might actually do in a couple of spots. I want 40 and 60, so I'm just doing some little tweaks. Forty, 60, I prefer that. I think we're going to have some contrast issues around here, so I'm actually just going to add another element. I'm just going to trace this line here, but I'm going to turn it into a path. I'll bump it up to, let's try 10 around the caps and joints, maybe 12 is better. Yeah, 12 matches this, so it's a consistent line weight. Then I'm just going to outline the stroke, and I'm going to apply the same white gradient to this. Just like that. Let me just tweak the colors a bit, I like it more like that. I think that might be it for this video. Just double-checking. Again, as always you can keep playing with the colors until you get something that you like. I think this is good. In the next video I will jump into some details. 7. Details and Glows: We're going to add in some details, we're going to add in some hard shadows, and we're going to add up till it glows. Let's just keep going. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring back those elements that I hid before. All these effects, so all these details and I'm going to add them in. Let's see, I think these panels here, I want them to more or less like this, the similar color but let's keep like a white overlay. That's pretty nice. But I'm going to chop it down 50 percent see how that looks a bit better. I'll give this the same treatment white overlay 50 percent. These are going to be purple and I can move them back, so they are underneath, there we go. I'll go and actually add a couple more oval shape here. This gets into a bit of what we're doing next. Which is I'm to start adding in a bit of details. Okay. This one was a black overlay, so I'll do the same thing. I just thought that would be a nice touch and right, so we will look into the hard shadows. I think that's pretty important. So anytime there's something overlapping, another thing we can add in a hard shadow to make it feel more it's there. For example I can create a shape like this. Yeah, we're getting a little shape that sits there and it will sit right there, and we'll give that an overlay of lets try 50 percent. Just having that there gives a better separation. I can the same thing here and I'm going to add since it same shape add it here. Overlay, I get 40 percent able to 50 and right there. We've got a bit an issue here, this is not lined up and it should be carried in the middle. Okay. That happens. All right. Next up I'm going to add it to here. I think for this I'm actually going to do at the offset paths try 12 maybe eight. Okay. As for this one so that is again pretty dark and this is going to light things up a bit. Just leave this in detail, this one I'll show you hold on to that. Okay. I always darken things. The same thing down here, set path, can we shape copy, paste in front like that, you'll get over there, maybe this can be a bit higher, so let 60 percent. With these two, lets put this in 60 as well. Okay. Now we want to create shadow here. For this, I'm actually going to do something like this. All right, because this one is further, then this will cast a bigger shadow. You see how I needed to go into a different view to select it. If you come back to our sketch, I had I think a little line here I want to have that in. I'm going to create a shape like this so that is this watch, and we're going to pump up the stroke 10 or so in around the edges and outline it, duplicate the shape. I can crop it and then I'm going to make it lights overlay. That's nice, put two-stroke then something like that, I think works pretty well and I want to make sure it's tucked in to where it should be. There you go. Excellent. I'd like to add this little bolts into. Overlay at 50 percent. I'll be able the same, how about 10. Okay. Unless just going to paper this to the design where I'll move this one to the other side. However, this thing is going to have to get way at the back. Okay. Let's add a couple more, we'll add them on to the white. So now I'm going to make it black. It looks a little bit more lets give it an 80. We'll put them over here as well and maybe down here as well. [inaudible] and next up, I'm going to add in now a bit more these lines that I made here, so add one down here. That one is Overlay at 50 percent [inaudible] with it, add another one. I think for these bars, in center and let's just see. We have then something like that and then [inaudible] let's try that. That goes to green and, more and here too. Who wants to figure this one? Could it be -8 pixel? I'm just going to cheat a little bit this shape, some green. A little of that, it looks good. Now we just get some glows. No, I haven't done here. To the crystal, I am going to add a fill like this from the top to the bottom and then offset it, and not so much. I try 8 let's and this one. I think I'm going to get to yellow, something like that. I'm good. We have a crystal there, and maybe yellow. [inaudible] is outer glow, "Normal", 100 and I'm actually going to pick my "Swatch" so that my glow and let's pick the green. My glow would actually change as I change this swatch, it's pretty cool Then the other same glow to all these elements here. Hold on, let's start with these two. If the glow gets added to the wrong part of your layer, things can mess up. That's what's happening. This will close there and the glow, I see, change, stylize "Outer Glow" same one. I think instead of adding it here, because the template crops right there about half a glow, it's not going to look nice. So what I need to do is, I just want glow around the edges and so I'm actually just going to apply it in a gradient to this shape here to imitate the glow so that the green is as if it was glowing. There we go. Then also in this case here, if I add a glow, I don't know if I want this to be a bit different here. So I'm actually just kind of make a shape like this and close behind everything and add a glow like that. This is to a final sweep of our values. If it's looking good here, we know it's looking good everywhere else. This is still a bit too close for comfort for me, but let's just see what happens if I add at the bottom. It's better. That's all I need to do actually. It helped a bit, I think, to solve the [inaudible]. There we ego. So that should be our finished ship. In the next video, I want to show how you can swap colors around as well as I want to demo the ships swapping with other pieces, but I think as far as the design goes, I think we're done. 8. Wrapping Up: Now we have our finished design and let's say that we shipped it off to a client or we just sat on it for a day, and came back and hear the client says, "Hey, we already have a purple ship, what's the deal?" What's great about the way that we've created this is how we only have these five colors here that are deciding everything about our design. Because of that, all we need to do is that we want to make it a different color, we just start to play with it. Oh look, the red actually looks quite nice. But I don't know how I feel about the green anymore. So let's swap the green or we can add more red. Let's try something else. Let's do a pink or no, better yet, the yellow will be green, and the green be a light blue or darker blue let's try that. Assuming it's just use greens then. Okay. Hey, that orange needs to change too. A blue could become nice. In sunlight, that's cool. Okay. Then let's change this to something like that. Just like that, we've completely changed our ship. Now, we're going to need to go through and touch up a couple areas like, I don't know how we feel about these clouds, for instance. But overall, very easy to keep all of the lighting and details that we created because we used overlays and it gives us the whole different sample of what the ship could look like. If like me, you build a spaceship, another fun little bonus about this class is that, we can now mix and match the ship parts with all the other ships that I've made for this game. So if you open up the MixMatcher, which you can find in the Resources section, and under your design here, just place your ship. We can set it up so that you can try with different parts. So all you need to do is group the top part altogether into one piece, group the whole middle section together into one piece, and then finally the bottom. What you'll see in the layers panel is that we have three groups here for the different sections, and if we look at all these other ships that we have here, they also are broken down in this way. I hope it's going to get rid of the locks, I think. There we go. Now, I can take my design and I can just try it out with some different ships. So that in the middle, up with the top of this ship on, or sorry the bottom, I suppose. It says nozzle, but it's wrong. The top on there. I'll try the bottom of this B ship. Maybe I'll take my bottom and put the middle of this one on. So really you can just mix and match with all of these pieces. Yeah, have fun. Feel free to share any of your creations in the class project.