Animal Illustration with Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction Animals: Illustrating animals is probably my favorite thing to do. They come in all shapes and sizes. And that are just so many things you can exaggerate and make fun of. I'm Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, these knee, Google, ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands-on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along in case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. First, we will cover some tips that can help you find your own unique illustration style. And then we will jump straight into Adobe Illustrator to work on too cute animal illustrations, Ulama and the swap. We will be using various techniques and features like the Pen Tool, Curvature tool, shade bill they're keeping mosques. Also learn how to apply complex textures and effects to our illustrations. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer, but now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Workflow explained: I have two examples that I'm going to walk you through. One will concentrate on the actual tracing and coloring in Illustrator. The other one will be a little bit more advanced showing how to do shading by also using some textures. And you can decide to follow along and re-create both of these illustrations if you want. However, what would be even better is once you've understood the techniques, you choose an animal that you would like to illustrate, you find some references for it, do your sketch, and then turn it into a vector artwork using Illustrator. You can use Illustrator on the iPad or the desktop version, or maybe a combination of the two. And in case you are completely new to drawing, you can also find a sketch online that you like and turn that into a vector artwork for the vector part of the work, which is the tracing, coloring and the rest, you don't actually need to have drawing skills. It is more art working. The creative part is really coming up with a good sketch and composition. So before we get started and jump into Illustrator, I would like to talk about something very important, and that is how to find your style as an illustrator. 3. Illustration style: Most established artists have a unique style that fans admire that can be easily recognized. If you are planning to become an illustrator or digital artist, you will most likely one the same to define your own art style and to ensure that your ART stands out. In this video, I will demonstrate how to achieve this by analyzing the work of George tongs, a young and talented illustrator, I instantly became a big fan of George's work the first time I saw his portfolio at a b hence review event that we hosted. And since then he became one of the top talent of 2019, selected by Adobe. And his Instagram account is also getting a lot of love and deservedly. So now we already set down once with him and we have that video here on the channel if you want, just check it out. It's in the show, your work playlist, and the link is also in the description below. But this time I'm going to take a closer look at his work, examples of all the different animal illustrations that he's popular and famous for. But the main thing I'm looking for really is the answer to how he found his style. And that is probably the most difficult thing and most complex thing as an artist or as a creative you are challenged with. So here's some of the images that we will be looking at in this review and starting with this process. But we can see the original sketch. So the final work is this one. I'm just going to show you the veil and the squid, this fight between these two animals. And then we can see that the original sketch already is very well establishing the composition. And that's one of the things that I wanted to get to in this video that if you are good at planning your work, most likely you will be able to get to a very well-defined composition in the beginning, even video rough sketch. So if you have a good plan or idea and you commit to it, normally, you will be able to produce more work and also your work will be more recognizable. So having a good plan, having something that you commit to, and usually a solid sketches, something that I normally mentioned that you should always strive for. So let's see what was Georges next step? So from this rough sketch on paper was then taken into a digital format. And in Procreate, he's drawing over it and constructing all these lines. Now you can see that he's very meticulously constructing everything. So it's very geometric and we have lots of sharp angles, straight lines, and these very nicely constructed round corners or a radius around the edges. But from this we get the cleaner result. Here we can see better the outlines, and then we get the base colors and then some textures. And then finally we have all the additional details added here. Now in this case, George not only had the rough sketch really close to the final result, but he even knew the colors that he's going to use. So notice this sketch here saying the veil is going to be green, black background here is he's saying, and then the screen is red. So even the color theme or palate was established in the original concept. Now of course, this is not always the case with this other example. Here I'm going to again show you the sketch and the final result next to each other. We have a lot of different variations of colors. So he was not a 100% sure what color theme you should work with. And we can see his research for the project. So he found so many different color variations that he was thinking of using. And then we can also see him experimenting with these. So I'm just going to show you these three variations. So once you have the outlines, he did very quick sketches, just adding some paint and experimenting with different variations. That exploration is sometimes part of the process for George. But even though he was experimenting with colors, the original sketch was once again really close to the final result. So it shows a very solid plan that he started with. 4. How to find your style: I believe that the two biggest goals and challenges of all creatives, and including illustrators, are to find their unique style, something that is recognizable. So a certain look that is established as their own and to create appealing art design or any kind of work. And this can be very difficult. So first of all, to stand out and be unique in today's world is really difficult. We are constantly bombarded with all kinds of visuals and it is really hard to get people's attention, let alone to have them recognize your work. And also it is very difficult to define what is going to be appealing to your audience. Whether you are trying to reach a broader audience or just a smaller group, is still important to understand what makes your work at peeling. To get answers for these difficult questions, it's best to look at emerging talented artists because they are still exploring different styles. And they are trying to find their voice and their way in the Korea. But also thanks to social media, we can follow really rich of their work, gets more likes and more attention from their followers. We're living in a very connected world and it helps artists to get more exposure, but also to guide them in understanding what works and what their audience is interested in. Of course, it can also be discouraging if you are not getting that many followers and you're not getting likes or comments on the work that you share. But persistence is key, of course, like in everything. In case of George, he has been sharing his work for many years before it got recognized. And now finally he's getting all the followers. But make sure you check out his Instagram account where he's also doing regularly. Draw these in your style challenges. He posts an image of one of his recent work and then select the best art sent to him by his followers. So just as an example, the leper that I've already showed you earlier was recreated by all of these other artists. Just going to show you a few of them. And these are screenshots from his Instagram account. And they are all really similar in terms of colors and composition. But still we can see that the style of each artist is different. That's the cool thing about art, is that everyone is going to create something unique because their style is a combination of all the influences that they had and all the experiences that they had. So one of the answers to the question that how to find your style is that you don't need to look for it because it's already vdu. So everyone has already a style. The challenge is more about refining your style. So just to prove this to you, let's take a look at some of Georgia's earlier work where he's unique signature style is already noticeable, but it's not a 100 per cent crystallized yet. So here he's already doing recognizable and familiar animals in strange poses and exaggerated proportions, vivid, vibrant colors. And of course, he's achieving this By extensively studying animals and their behavior. So just as another example, his understanding of bears in particular comes from all of the studies and the illustrations that he did in the past. So I'm just going to flick through some of these quickly. And you can see there's loads of different styles and explorations here. But essentially, this shows his understanding of the anatomy and behavior of this particular animal. He even gets up close and personal sometimes with these animals. And don't ask me about this photo. This is on his Instagram account. Maybe message him to find out more about this counter. But let me show you a more recent example of a bear illustration by George. And when you look at this, you will notice that the original traits from the previous illustrations are still there, but he's much more confident in using these bold shapes and colors. So we can clearly see an evolution here from the left to the right, from doing simple animal studies to ending up creating these highly stylized, exaggerated, and as simplified illustrations of animals. And to get back to the other question that we asked on how to make your work appealing. I think in his case, the appeal lies in seeing organic, natural curvy shapes, Animals in this stylized constructed geometric forms. So why is this appealing? But first of all, because geometric shapes are just perfect and it's great to look at them. But also somehow George finds to combine these shapes and still make these characters recognizable. Especially in today's world, you need to be able to get people's attention and you want them to look at your work, at least for a couple of seconds. That's already and achievement. And if they are interested, they will probably keep scrolling and keep liking and keep following eventually your work. So hopefully this explanation is going to help you to find your own style. And more importantly, it will inspire you to sit down and do some drawings. If you'd like Georgia and you love drawing animals and you want to get really good at it. Then I have a couple of book recommendations for which the links are in the description below. But we also have a blog post about this topic which goes into much more detail. But I'm going to show you these couple of books that I think are just great and really inspired me to draw animals. So one of them is Chris errors, daily zoo series. This is definitely something to check out, very inspiring. Then there is the brilliant book of Ken halt grants the art of animal drawing. One of the books from terrible with ledge, one of the best artists drawing animals, in my opinion. This one in particular is a brilliant one that's worth checking out. And most recently, the masters of anatomy came out with drawing animals book, which is also great. And Raul Moreno shows brilliant characterizations of animals in it, studying from these artists and others, and also doing as much drawings as possible is what's going to get your results. And that eventually is going to lead to that refined, an established style that you can see with emerging artists like George 5. Illustration start - Sloth: Alright, so this is how I normally start an illustration. I have a sketch that I placed into Illustrator. Now, you can create these sketches in Procreate or you can draw on paper and scan it then. But the reason why you should always start from a sketch is because it helps you to capture the essence of a character and add the expression like here, we have very simple shapes, but it already has some flow and some shape language in place. Having all these curvy round shapes are always good for these cute characters. And the sketch can really help to achieve this, but you might need to do a couple of rounds. So a few sketches, quick ones from which you can choose the best one. So I try not to stop and just do one sketch. I usually do a few of them and each of these usually take around five-minutes. So it's not that much of a commitment, but believe me, having a good expressive sketch is the key for a successful illustration. Or the rest is more like art working in a way because you can learn the techniques. But having a good sketch in the beginning is what's going to be the heart and soul of the whole artwork. So without any further delay, let's get started. You can see I have the colors already prepared here, so I again, I don't want to waste time on collecting them and I also save them into the swatches. Plus one I'm going to do is to show you just very briefly how the end result is going to look like. So here's a bit of a sneak peek of what we are going to achieve. And now that we've seen it, Let's crack on. You can see there will be some differences from the original sketch. And that's fine again, because this is just a guideline. You can always change things around as you go ahead, but we'll go through all of that in more detail. So I'm going to double-click on the sketch layer and turn it into a template which will limit automatically by 50 per cent. And then I'm going to select this additional layer on top on which I'm going to work. Now, the main tool I will be using is the curvature tool. And this is one of the tools in Illustrator that doesn't really get as much love as it deserves. Most people would recommend everyone to use the pen tool. And we know that the pen tool works in a way that you click to create straight lines or click and drag to create curved lines. And that's great for most cases. But if you know that your character or illustration has a lot of round shapes in it, then it's probably worth trying. The curvature tool, which by default draws curves. So let me show you how it works. It's here in the toolbar. And by the way, if you don't see it, you have to go into the Edit toolbar option and you have to make sure you choose from here, the Advanced Toolbar. Because by default it's set to basic and it might not show this tool. So once you see it, you can just select it and you can even assign a custom keyboard shortcut to it if you use it often. Now that I have it selected, I'm going to also make sure I don't have a fill color. So I'll press the question mark or forward slash on the keyboard that removes the currently selected color. Now I can start drawing with it. So when I click, I'm just going to start drawing here. Maybe when I click, it creates the first anchor point. But already it looks slightly different. It's not a square, it's a circle, which already indicates that you're using the curvature tool instead of the pen tool. But as soon as I click next time and start moving my mouse, you can see how immediately it tries to bend the shape and create a curve. So what started off as a straight line now turns into a curve. When I click again, you can see how nicely it will try to follow the shape I'm creating. So this is not a perfect circle. It's a specific curve that I want it to create here. With these few points, I couldn't really closely follow it, but once again, I'm not trying to be exactly the same. We're not trying to be exactly recreate my lines. I just use that as a guideline. So let's continue. I'm going to add another point here and then another point around there, around there. And the belly needs to curve like that. And then come up here. Now at 1, I might need to move these points around a bit more. Put one more point up there and there. So you can see that this point here is a little bit sharp. What you can always do is to double-click on it and that makes sure that both sides are curved up. If you double-click on a point, it turns it back into a sharp corner. Let me show you here on the top as well. So when I do that, you see we can very quickly turn these points into sharp corners. Or when I double-click again on them, we can turn them back into round shapes. Now, this is also very useful, but what's even more useful is that with the same tool. So without changing through any other tools, I'm still using the curvature tool. I can already start moving these points around a bit. And that's what I really love about this tool that I can mold the shape almost like a sculpture. I can move things around and find the best point for each of these anchor points. That with the Pen tool would normally be switching back and forth between the direct selection tool or using shortcuts to move anchor points around, adjust them and just the handles. There's a lot to worry about when you work with the pen tool. By the way, if you switch to the pen tool and notice how immediately all of these points change to anchor points, the usual square anchor points. And if I click on one of them with the direct selection tool, it will show me all the handles. So that's when it gets more complicated. If you are new to Illustrator, I would suggest to stick with the curvature tool because it just makes it much easier to work with. 6. Creating the main shapes - Sloth: Now a cool thing that you can do is if you feel like there's too many anchor points, you can also delete them by just clicking on one and then press Backspace on the keyboard. You can delete it. And here I feel like that might actually help to create a better round belly for our sloth, something like that. And maybe even this other one we can delete and then just move that point a bit further down. So that is quite a nice shape there, here on the top. We can also check if we need two of these points are one will be enough, but I think two points when necessary. There. Of course, the less points you use usually the easier to work with your path. But you don't have to be too stingy like when you're working with the Pen tool, you want to reduce the anchor points and use the least amount you can with the curvature tool. I think it's a little bit easier. You don't have to really force yourself to use a minimum amount, but you can see sometimes less points helps to define the shape better. So that's our main shape already in place. And I'm not going to add colors just yet because I would like to see what I'm doing. Instead I'm going to draw all the rest of the shapes. So let's do the arm. And again, I'm going to start with the curvature tool. Just simply click, come down like so here I'm going to double-click to make sure that this is a coordinate point. And then I click, click and see how it becomes already curves. Yeah, so that's going to work quite nicely. We can always move this further to the left later on to make sure that we have a nice curve that at the end. But for now I'm just going to keep it here. And if you want, you can always close the shape, even when the pen tool, you can just use the pen tool and close up this shape. It's good habit not to leave your parts open in Illustrator, especially if you are planning to sell them on stock sites. So it's a good practice to close them in, even if it's not really necessary from the visibility point of view. But now that we have that in place, we can again switch back to the curvature tool and draw in the arm here in the back or lag. So we are going to draw this like so. Again, we'll create the 1.2nd and then come down probably around here, further down, somewhere around there. Now I'm going to move these points around. The bit, can go up a bit as well. Yeah, That's cute. And then we use the pen tool and just close it off. Of course, you can use the curvature tool for closing it off as well. But I just find it easier to do it this way. And this is actually a shape we can reuse already by using the selection tool alt, click and drag. I'm going to duplicate it and just rotate it slightly and maybe make it slightly smaller. Something like that. And you can see already I am changing slightly the original drawing. I don't actually want these two legs to overlap. I'm going to create a bit more visibility for the lag in the background. But we can always tweak this later. That's why I keep all of these shapes separate. Now moving on, I'm going to use again the curvature tool, and I'm going to zoom a little bit closer just so we can see the face better. Here I'm going to start by holding down the Option or Alt key on the keyboard, because I know that needs to be a corner point. And then I click and click to create the first shape. Again, if I hold down the Alt key here, I can make sure that's also a coordinate point. And then click, hold down the Alt key again. Click on key again, click, again, click and then click. So you can see again, holding down the Alt key or Option key can save you time when you're working with the curvature tool because it helps you to alternate between corner points and round points. And I love the fact that I can always adjust these points later. So you can see, instead of having that point there in the middle, if I move it up here, it actually creates or recreates that shape much better. Also, don't forget that you can use the corner widgets if you switch to the Direct Selection Tool, any corner points will have a coordinate widget on them. And then if you have all of them selected at the same time, you can drag this corner widgets in to create a round corners. And then these are completely non-destructive. So you can make them big or make them small again and go back into sharp corners. The cool thing is that if you add corner radius on these sharp corners and you switch back to the curvature tool. It will still work. It will just have a bit more points on the curve. So I'm just going to undo that because I think having those sharp corners that are actually good. And even though this drawing, I wanted to make it very round and fluffy, I still like to have some sharp corners. And also in this case on the arm, I feel like it would be good to have a sharp corner on the elbow, again, just to have a bit of variety in the shape. So if I zoom in a little bit closer here and use the direct selection tool, I can select this shape. And if I double-click on this point, that already creates that perfect shape I was looking for before. And after. You can see that having that sharp corner dad creates a bit more interests. And these are the things that you will learn and you develop as a style. Whether you prefer to have that variation in shapes and lines, or you prefer to have them more round. It's completely up to you. It's your artistic style that can be defined by even simple things like that. 7. Creating the claws - Sloth: Alright, so let's move on. I'm going to draw the clause now. Again for that, I'm going to use the curvature tool and I will actually draw one, a v form the drawing, something like this. And then at the end that, okay, That's looks quite good. Maybe drag this one up a bit or down. Yeah, that's not too bad. If you drag two points too close to each other. It also automatically merges them, which is quite a neat feature I actually prefer, in this case, I think the pen tool. So at this point I will switch to the pen tool. And with that one, I can select these anchor points and also the handles, and just adjust them a little bit further until I'm happy with the curves. Yeah, something like that. Looks good. Okay. It's always good to have references of the actual animal that you're drawing before you create details like this. So it's good to know that they have actually really long clause. But of course you can exaggerate these things. And for these, because it's a little bit difficult to select them. I'm going to press Shift X, which will turn them into a filled shape. And I will already start using the colors are collected here. So I have the colors for the clause here on the right. And I am going to reduce the same size, assuming a bit closer, Let's see where it was, something around that. It gets a bit smaller. And then Alt click and drag to duplicate. And hold click and drag again. This middle one can be a bit bigger than the rest. And to make sure that we can see them separately, I have another color edit here, so I use a slightly brighter one for the middle ones. And I'm going to select all three, group them together, Command or Control G and then Alt or Option click and drag them here to the back. Something like that. Okay? Now you can always reversed this or reflect it and I think that helps. I'm using the reflect tool always the shortcut for it. And all you have to do is to click and drag to reflect the selected object. So that was a quick and easy We use of the same element. And in general, in Illustrator, you want to work fast and efficiently. So any little time-saver like that can help. Now we can draw the clothes for the other leg here. So I'm going to double-click inside here, select one of them, copy, double-click outside, and then paste. I'm going to use the reflect tool and reflect it around. Let's just zoom a bit closer. Here. We can place it down. Something like that nicely following the shape. Yeah, something like that. And then old click and drag. Using the other color for this. Put it behind command square brackets. You can push details behind. And then the other one, we can make slightly smaller and longer. And then the third one, we again twist around. It gets slightly smaller, Something like that. Okay. So if you feel like it's a bit too far, we can always bring it a bit closer. Like so. Alright, these clothes we won't see because it's hidden. And then we'll have more details for the brunch and also details for the firm. We can actually order the create the details for the firm now. So I'm going to zoom a little bit closer and I want to have a bit of detail here on the head and also on the back. So what I'm going to use for this is again the curvature tool. And what I'll do is I'm going to double-click on this point. Then click and click, Double-click on the top, come down and click twice, double-click again. And then we can click and hold down the Alt key to make sure that is a corner point. Click again. And two of them, I think will be enough, but maybe we can do a third one. So again, click, click, click and click. And then here at the end we can just double-click and click at the end so that we have a little detail which we can always refine. So if I select this and use the curvature tool, if I feel like I need to refine it, I can move these points around. Slightly smaller at the end. I think that looks quite nice. Then we will be able to use that at the bottom as well. We just have to old click and drag, maybe flip it around and maybe make it a bit bigger here. So it's not like a tail, but you can consider the tail as well. It's more like a detail on the back just to make it a bit more fluffy and furry, instead of adding a lot of fair detail, sometimes less is more and you just indicate subtle details like these will already help. So now it's time to end the facial expression and the details on the face. I changed my mind. I'm actually going to create an open eye version for the slot. So if you remember seeing the example, will create more like that, something like that. So let's just start with the mouth. I'm going to keep the layers away. I had them. So I'm going to use again the curvature tool. Click, click and click, as simple as that, and then Shift X to swap the fill color to a stroke color. And I'm going to use a darker color for the stroke. By the way, when you have the field color on top, even though it's empty, in case you want to change the color of your stroke, just press X on the keyboard. You can swap which color is highlighted and then what whatever color you select will be applied to that attribute. So now that we have that in place, I can increase the stroke size maybe to one millimeters, and then I would use a width profile, probably this one for the mouth. Now we can always increase this further if we want to make it thicker. But I think the one millimeter for now we'll work. And then let's draw the nose. Now for the nodes, I'm going to use again the curvature tool just to stick with the theme. I'm going to start drawing here on the left. Here at the bottom I double-click. I want to keep that one sharp. And then just another line here on the top. Again, you can see I'm trying to mix these round shapes with some sharp angles. Again, just to go with that variety that we started there at the bottom. And I'm going to for now just keep it as is. And probably colored this with the dark, same dark color what I used on the mouth. So now that we have these in place, I'm going to draw one of the eyes. 8. Drawing the eyes - Sloth: For the eyes, I'm going to start with a circle. So just use the Ellipse tool and click and drag. I can even hold down the Shift key if I want to make it perfect circle. And then I am going to use a bright color for it for now. And then I am going to add the eyelid for which I'm going to use again, the curvature tool, double-click, double-click, and then click, click and click, Shift X, swap the colors around, remove the stroke. And then with the curvature tool we can refine the shape. Something like that. That looks all right, another circle for the iris. And then we just need a little reflection and other circle which is going to be white fill and no stroke. It's getting there. The only thing I would like to change is to make sure that the colors are slightly different. So this one can be a darker brown, or maybe the eyelid can be less dark than that and just put it all the way on the top. Yes, that's a bit better. But to have a look at the original drawing that I did, you can see if you add a bit of variety in the shapes instead of keeping them completely perfect like this circle, it already gets a bit more interesting. So what I would do in this case is to select this shape and then use the curvature tool, select that point and just push it up or push it slightly to the side. Maybe this point can come down a little bit as well, and you already start to have a bit more irregular shape. The same thing goes here to the top. If we want to push things out of bed or bring things down, we can start molding the shape again. That's the best way. Putting what this actually means, what we are doing here. Eyes are very important part of an illustration on a character because they are the ones that define the look and the expression. So it's very expressive in novae. Look at this. If I start moving things around, like these two details, if I move further to the right or left, it already makes it look like the character is looking in a direction and not staring at us. But again, the eyelids, if I remove the eyelid, it will look very excited and happy with the eyelids on. It looks more sleepy. And that I think works well with the slot character. So for now I'm going to just keep things like as they are, maybe just this reflection point, I will move slightly to the right. I think that looks a bit better. So I'm going to select all of them together, all of these details, Command or Control G and then o for Reflect tool. And actually, let's click in here in the middle, click and drag with the reflect tool, Shift and Alt or option key held down. Maybe in this case just the Option key is enough to make sure while we are creating the reflection where also duplicating. So we want to keep the original there. Adding the order option key while using the reflect tool creates a duplicate. Cool. And that first that I added was the center of symmetry. Okay, let me zoom back and I think we are pretty much ready with all the details necessary for the slot. Now it might not look great so far, but once I add all the colors, you will see how it looks. So let me just start with the slot, the main detail, actually, I'm going to start with the smaller ones. This one will be bright. Then this one here will be the medium brown. And I'm going to keep removing the strokes as well. So you will see me removing the strokes as I go ahead. So the main shape now we can do, and that can be again, this medium brown on the fill color like that. And then these will be darker. So I'm just going to turn them into this darker color, darker brown, and use command Shift or Control Shift square bracket to move them in the background. And then I think these need to be changed in color. I can even use the Eyedropper now. I is the shortcut for that, and that is pretty much it. Now, if I turn off this and I see the sketch there, I don't have a detail for the belly, but normally slots have a brighter detail on their belly similarly to their face. So that would be good to use and also especially to separate the legs in the back from the front. So the body and the legs in the back can be separated much better that way. So what I'm going to do is to use the curvature tool again. And I'm going to start drawing outside and then come down. Draw this shape, something like that. Okay, something like that. I'm going to set it to the brighter color. And here comes a very useful tip if you select these two shapes. So the main shape that we have in the background and the shape we just created by using the Shift key and select both of them and then use the shape builder tool and holding down the Alt or Option key, you can remove the access part. So that way you end up having something like that. Now I'm going to move some details around slightly like this. Hand can come a little bit closer this way. And I can also probably use the curvature tool just to adjust the shape slightly around like that. I think that works. Let's have a look at my original drawing. Yeah, it was quite similar. It's never going to be exactly the same each time I would draw this, it will be slightly different. 9. Shadows, Shape Builder Tool - Sloth: Another useful technique with the same tool, the shape builder tool, I can create shadows. And at this point I'm going to turn off the sketch because it's not really important anymore. And I'm going to use this shape that we created for the hand and duplicate it. Use the darker color, send it behind the other shape, and rotate it around slightly until it gets close to the corner points, something like that. And then select the detail behind it. So Shift-click on the detail behind it. And then using the shape builder tool, we can again get rid of the excess detail, something like that. And then even here on this side, we can select the shape and use the eraser tool and just delete what's not necessary from it. Now, if I want to move the hand or the leg, I'm just going to adjust this a little bit. Just have a better shape like that. I'm going to select these, group them together and I can start move them around by looking at the whole shape. I can include also the shadow in the selection. But if I start moving them around after it was cut into place, it might not work as well, but I think it's actually fine the way it is. I liked the fact that there is a sharp corner here. So just showing it to you. If I move this all the way up there, it creates a continuous shape, but I actually like that slight break in there on the left. Okay, so we have a little shadow there, but I would like to have the same shadow here for the firm. So I'm going to set this up in the place I want it, then. Well, to be honest, in this case, it will be easier if we just draw this in. So in these cases sometimes I would switch to the Outline View Command or Control Y. And then I can just draw with the pen tool in this case, draw from this point here, maybe around from there to there. As simple triangle like this, Command or Control Y to go back, set this up to the shadow color, send it behind. So use the command square bracket to send it behind. And once it finds its place, we can shift, click, select these two shapes. So select that and the shape behind it. I think it is already selected, yes. And then use the shape builder tool and holding down the Alt key or Option key, you can delete the excess detail there. Okay, so that's just a subtle little shading there which helps us to see is not part of the silhouette. It's actually coming out from that plane. Now, the same we could repeat here at the bottom, but I think it looks fine for now. Next thing would be the branch, but that's not as exciting to draw. So I'm going to just cheat a bit and bring it in from the original drawing. And notice that I have created an out-of-bounds effect as well. So we have the little bounding box, the circle, bounding circle. In this case, we have the branch and the hand coming out of it. So that tiny little detail ads also depth, even though we don't have any texture or shading, it still creates a sense of depth. So I think that is working quite well. And one last little detail here for the branch since we brought it in, would be to add a little bit of shading there. This one, I can even use the blob brush tool for this, I'm going to use a darker color probably. I don't know, maybe this color here. I'm just going to paint over these parts here. And actually I will have to use the darker color than that. Or maybe this color will work. Because otherwise if clashes with the lag, the good thing about the blob brush tool is that it extends the details very quickly. So if I just draw or here as well, it just keeps creating one single shape instead of multiple shapes. These clothes can come on top. Just move them up a bit. That shape can come up as well slightly. Okay. We just want to make sure that it feels like it's holding onto that branch. And then this one, again can come on top. And all we have to do at the end is to make sure that this is now only visible on top of the branch. So we can use the shape builder tool and then just chop these bits off like so. So when we zoom back, we can see how that would work. And I think that just adds, again, just a little bit more depth to the illustration. So we could go and refine this further. But if we look at the sketch and the illustration, it looks very similar. And with the background, I think it works really well. Once again, we can compare it to my other drawing which I created. I spent a bit more time on refining the expression and had, but I think it works quite well already. We can always go back and that's the good thing again about the tool that we use, the curvature tool that if we feel like we need to adjust any of these shapes, we can easily do that. We can make the head slightly bigger and we could go on and refine this very quickly and easily if we feel like we need it. 10. Grain Effect - Llama: Here we are in Illustrator and this is the sketch I started with. Now I'm going to show you how I've done it in Procreate. It's a quick time-lapse. Normally what I start through these an idea and then I just mess around. It takes only ten to 15 minutes to create this type of sketches. But it's very important to start with something solid before you come into Illustrator and do all the tracing, which is much more time-consuming. And just so you can see a glimpse of this workflow, here is another time-lapse. This was recorded in Illustrator. I was using predominantly the pen tool. Now this tutorial is focus is the last stage when we are applying the effects. So that's like the detailing part. But once again, let me emphasize without a solid sketch that has a good composition in the beginning, there is no point in struggling in Illustrator because it can waste a lot of time and then you might not enjoy the final result. So practice a lot the sketching phase. But now that you've seen these time-lapse is, Let's jump into Illustrator and let me show you what happens. So I bring that sketch that I created into Illustrator and place it on a separate layer. So I placed in a layer, I said that as a template by double-clicking on it and choosing template from this option that locks the layer and I can work on top of it. And this is how the tracing looks like. And then the other time consuming part is adding textures. But once you know the technique, it actually can be much faster. For this illustration, it took me around half an hour extra to add all of this texture that you can see here in the final result. So now let me zoom a little bit closer so you can see it better what I'm talking about. So this is the doubt, the shading, and this is the shading. And this is a particular type of shading that a lot of illustrators use in Adobe Illustrator, It's called the greenhouse effect, and it can be used in a very subtle way like here. So first let's start using a simple linear or radial gradient with the effect. I'm going to show this on the heels so you can see when I turn off the shading, the heels all have something like a highlight. So as if the sun is shining and then it lights the top of these heels. So I'm going to start with this, maybe pick this heel here. So I'm going to turn off the shading. First thing is that you need to duplicate it. Command or Control C and then Command or Control F to paste in place. I'll paste in front. It's called in Illustrator that will place it, the duplicate directly on top of the previous object. So now that we have that ready, we will also have to add a mask on this. So I'm going to go to the transparency panel and click on Make mask. If any of the panels you don't see that I'm using, just go to the Window menu and you will find it there. So now that I have the mask ready, I'm going to click on Invert Mask. This is also important, and more importantly, I'm going to click on the mask itself. That way you know that you are in the mask is that it's going to say here in the layers panel that you are inside the opacity mask and none of the other objects from the artwork will be visible, only whatever you create inside this particular mask. So now that we are here, we will use the same shortcut again, paste in front command or control F. And we will see that object is certainly there in this mask. Now, what color this is? It doesn't really matter because we are going to change it anyway. But what's more important is that you need to switch back to the original object or the duplicate. And you do that by clicking on this other thumbnails. So it's almost like two different realms. You can work in the objects around and you can work in the mask round. So you remember switching back and forth between them? I wish there was a shortcut to switch between it. That might be one. I just haven't found it yet, but if you know of it, please let me know in the comments section below. So we are back in the object realm. And what I'm going to do is to change the color of this object. Now, for this, normally I would use the color panel and leading the color panel. If you set your color mode to CMYK is normally quite easy to work with these colors. But you can also work with HSB where you have hue saturation and brightness. And sometimes I prefer to use this because I can very easily control it, just a brightness. So we want to make it brighter than the original color because this will be like a highlight instead of a shadow. So it should be brighter, but it can also be a bit more saturated and maybe also attend more warmer because we are simulating the sunshine. So something like that. Now the easiest way to check how it looks before we apply the effect is to simply turn the layer or the object on and off and we can see the difference between it and the original base color. So I'm quite happy with this, but we can always come back and make changes. So I'm just going to keep my color panel handy. And let's go back to the object. So I select it and go back to the mosque. So once again, we switch sides and we are now inside the mask. Now this is where it gets interesting and this is where the actual effect starts. Because we need to add, first of all, a gradient on the field. You can do this with the gradient panel quiet easily. You just simply have to click on the gradient slider. So this is going to add the gradient, but you won't notice much difference at the beginning because we are applying this gradient on the mask and not on the object. Notice here in the opacity mask, it's already visible. Now, the next thing we're going to do is to apply the effect from the Effect menu. We go to texture and then choose grain. It will open up a separate window and then make sure from the grain type, you choose this one. I think it's pronounced stippled or stifle, not sure. But what's more important is you have to also find the right intensity and contrast for the effect that you would like to create. I'm going to increase the intensity a bit just so we can see it better. But luckily, this is a live effect so we can always come back and make changes to it. So let's click on Okay, and we will already start seeing the effect, but at the moment, it's in the wrong direction to change this, simply just press G on the keyboard. That's the gradient annotator or gradient tool with which you can click and drag and define the direction. Now, we want to go from down, up. And you can see already how we're starting to introduce the texture. I'm going to zoom a little bit even closer just so you can see it better. And you don't have to always click and drag to start again, creating the effect like this. Because once you have it roughly in the position that you need, you can also just simply drag these points around. The bottom circle is normally the one that you move the whole gradient around by. The top square is the one with which you can control the distance or the transition between the two points. You can also move the white point up and down. And notice how that's also changing the spread or the transition of the effect. And the little star icon here is also again, the balance between the two sides. So the black and divide. So essentially you are playing around with that gradient on the mask. But since we added the grain effect on it, it creates this cool transition. And don't forget if you feel like these little dots in the grain or too intense, you can always go to the appearance panel and change the values there. But if you're seeing color stop written there, we have to do is to just press Escape. So it goes back one step and then you will see the grain effect inside the field. Click on that, which will bring you back to this menu. Here, we can reduce the intensity, maybe increase the contrast a bit, or reduce it, and then click Okay. And as you can see, this is the change. So this was before, and this is after. So very easy to adjust and customize it. Now of course, there's another thing that you can do if you feel like the color that you chose is not bright enough. All you have to do is to switch rounds, go back to the objects from the transparency panel, and then from there you can adjust those values as well. So we can reduce the saturation or increase it again, play around with the hue and so on and so forth. So that's how quick and easy it was to set it up. And before I forget, there's also one thing that you can change and that is the direction or the type of gradient that you are using. So once again, if we go back to the mask and have that fill color selected where we can see it's a gradient. You can very easily switch it to radio gradient. Now with this one, you will have a different annotators. So when you're using the gradient tool, remember pressing G will get you there. It's going to work slightly differently. You have to click and drag out like this. Now sometimes it might be the wrong way around in these cases, where you have to do is to click on this icon, the reverse gradient. So now you can see it's much easier to control it. We can just grab the center point of the gradient and move it wherever we wanted. Or what I find it easier to do with the radio gradient is to simply click and drag out from the point where I need it. Now, notice that sometimes the grain effect is not visible. I've found it the easiest to show it again is to simply move the white or the black point around a bit or any of these properties on the gradient annotator. So if I again draw it here on the top, you see the grain effect is gone. But once I move this around, it will show once more. 11. Freeform Gradient - Llama: The great thing about this technique is that it's completely non-destructive. And although it feels like it was a long time to set it up, once you start doing it, it gets much faster and easier. So just to prove this to you, I'm going to do it once again on one of the other hills. So first of all, I'm going to switch back to the normal object mode and then try to select that object. So here it is. I'm going to find it. It's actually inside the clipping mask. So that's the object I'm going to copy and paste Command C, command F, change the color, make it darker this time because I'm going to use it for shading. So probably saturation doesn't need to change, just simply the brightness. Something like that. And I am going to add the mask, invert the mask, click on the mask and paste in again the same shape, then click on whichever gradient type I want. Let's say this time I'm going to use the linear gradient again. And then I go to Effect menu. And I don't even have to go through the menus, just simply choose Apply green. That is also a shortcut for the previously used, the fact it's Command Shift E or Control Shift G on PC. And you will see that's already there. So that's how quick and easy it was to recreate this effect on another object. And I can press G on the keyboard and then click and drag to control the spread. Maybe something like this. Be a little bit longer than that. Once again, if I don't see the effect at all, I have to do is to just move these points around a bit. Maybe set it down somewhere around there. So it didn't take long at all to recreate it on another object. And you can see that it would be very quick and easy to apply this to all of these other hills. But instead of showing the same thing over and over again, I'm going to move on and show you how to use the same in grain effect but using it with a free form gradient. So that's a new feature that was introduced recently in Illustrator. And I was really excited to try it out with this effect. So the reason I would switch to this is when I have objects that are more complex. So it's not just a simple ellipse like these hills, but more complex object like the body of the Larmor. So I'm going to switch back to the normal mode, select the llama, and I'm going to copy paste. So just you can see better. I'm going to drag this out here on the side. So that's the shape is definitely more complex than the previous objects that we work with. In these cases, a free form gradient will give us much more control on setting up the effect. Once we have the object duplicated, I am going to click on Make mask, Invert Mask, and then clicking the mask. But this is where the difference comes in. Instead of pasting in, again, the same lama silhouette. I'm going to use the rectangle tool M is the shortcut for that and draw a big rectangle around the area where the llamas body is. So I intentionally go way beyond that and I'm going to change this to a free form gradient. So this rectangle will be set up with a free form gradient on it. Now, you might not notice much difference in the beginning, but we will make changes here. First of all, I'm going to get rid of these Gradients, stops, or pins. So I only have one here and I'm going to set that up to be black for now. Or maybe let's just set it up for white in the beginning. Now, we don't see much difference at the moment because the original objects color is the same. So we have to switch back to the object itself and reduce the color, maybe make it darker. And also, we can make it slightly more saturated, Something like this. Okay, now we can switch back to our gradient and let's see what happens if we change the color stop to black. See already there is a difference when we set it to black because of invert mask, it's going to show all the details of these duplicate object. So the object that is darker is now completely visible, but we don't see the effect yet. So let's see what happens if we add another stop, maybe somewhere around here, and that's set to white. Now we already have a gradient going on here, but it's not yet using the effect that we had before. So all we have to do is simply add the grain effect, go up to Effect menu, apply the grain with the same settings. And wallah, there it is. But the coolest thing now is that I can drag these points around. And instead of using the gradient annotator, I can be very specific where I want the effect to show. So for example, if we want to create a little shading under the head of the Ulama. So if I zoom a little bit closer here, all we have to do is to set the black point up there and then move the white point down until we want, again clear details. And notice how here the gradient is already spreading onto the back of the llama. If I don't want that, I can just add another white point there. But then if I want to have a bit more shading at the bottom on the legs, I can add another gradient point there, switch it to black, and there you go. It's already much better and more interesting. Now you can also increase the spread by dragging these perimeter lines when you're using a free form gradient or reduce them, something like that. But because we created the big rectangle on the illustration, we can also drag this point further out so we can go beyond the silhouette and keep our points there. So that's why I said in the beginning, it's better to do that bigger shape and not use the llamas body because this way, I can be very specific where I want these points. And that can be much more subtle. The fact itself. Now if I still feel like there's too much green seeping into the body, all I have to do is to just block it V that another stop, something like that. And you can put as many pins in the free form gradient as you want. And you can even use gray pins, which will have an effect in-between showing and hiding the green effect. 12. Apply gradient on stroke - Llama : Alright, so here we are in Illustrator and we will crack on continuing with the green effect this time. First of all, I'm going to apply it on this cactus here on the left. The difference will be that instead of using a linear, radial or Freeform Gradient, I'm going to use it on a stroke. And this is particularly useful if you have an object where you would like to emphasize the outline or the silhouette video, our shading. So what we will do is first of all, double-click on the cactus because this is a group. That way I can isolate it and I can work a little bit easily without messing up anything else in the background. Notice here in the layers panel we have three objects, the one in the middle and the two on the side. Now I'm going to start with the one in the middle. So just like before, the first step is to duplicate it. Command C, command F or Control C, Control F. That's the shortcut for paste in front. So just so you can see once again, there's two objects now, and the one on top will set to whatever color we want the shading to be. For this, I'm using the color panel, reducing brightness, increasing saturation a bit, and maybe making the color slightly warmer or cooler in this case, I think that might look better. Let's do something like this. Once again, I can test how it's going to look. Yeah, I think that will work quite nicely for shading. Make sure you keep the objects selected. And then we go to the transparency panel and click on Make mask, Invert Mask. And also select the mask itself from this thumbnail and paste the object again inside here, Control or Command F. Now instead of working with the Fill, this time we will work with the stroke. And the quickest way to swap the stroke and the fill colors is to use the shortcut Shift X. Notice what happens here. I'm switching the existing color onto the stroke. So Shift X once again goes back and forth. And I'm doing this inside the mosque. It's important, so it's not on the object. We're working inside the mask. And you can always tell that by looking at the layers panel. And if it says opacity mask, and it only shows that particular object that you're working with. That means you are not affecting the object. You are working inside its mask. So now that we have the stroke setup, we need to find our gradient panel and click on linear gradient. And once that's added, because we are on a stroke, we can choose these additional options. And what we need is the apply gradient across stroke. That's probably the best way to work with it now because the stroke at the moment is very tiny, it's only 1. We don't really see much difference, but as soon as I start increasing the value, by the way, if you hold down the Shift key and click on these arrows, you can increase this value much faster, so it jumps up ten points at a time. I'm going to set it around 20 points is good. This already makes the effect more visible, but currently we don't have the grain effect on it. So what we need to do is to go up to the Effect menu. And from the texture category, we need to choose Grain, which will bring us to this menu. And from last time, I mentioned this already, but I'll just go into repeat. Make sure you choose this grain type, stapled, then intensity and contrast set to whatever values you prefer. Click Okay, and it will be saved as a live effect so we can always come back and make changes to it. So this is how it looks without the green, and this is how it looks with the grain. Let me zoom a little bit closer so you can see better once again, before and after. Now here are the things that you can make changes to. First of all, you can continue to increase the size of this and you can go to as high as you want. But what you can also do is to control the gradient. So if you want more of the shading, just simply drag the black point further in like so. And as you can see, it's already going to increase the intensity. You can also control the balance between the white and the black points, which will also make a difference. And if it's still not strong enough and it's not to your liking, don't forget, you can also change the color of your shading by going back to the object from the transparency panel and there, make sure you select the fill color. So just simply press X this time not shift X, press X to swap between which attribute is selected. And then here we can reduce the brightness. There may be increased the saturation, maybe also go towards more warmer tones or cooler tones, something like that. I think this looks quite good already. I feel like if we go back to the mask itself, may be the point size can be reduced a bit to 2025. Yeah, I quite like this, but to make it simpler and be able to reuse the same settings on the other two branches of the cactus. All we have to do is to save this stroke setup as a graphic style, which we can do from this panel here. So while the object is selected, and more importantly, the opacity mask is selected, we click on New Graphic Style. There you go. It's already added for us. So now what we need to do is to switch back to the normal mode. So get out of the mask, select the other branch of the cactus, and then repeat the same steps as before. I'm going to show you again just so we practiced together. So command C, command F, That's a quick copy and paste in front, change the color to something slightly darker. We could have used a swatch for this, but I'm just going to amend it here in the color panel. Then make mask, Invert Mask, click on the mask, paste in front again Command F or Control F. And then once we have that ready, we just have to swap the colors from field to stroke, shift X, select the stroke and then choose or so linear gradient and the gradient across stroke option. And now we can just apply our graphic style. So the last part of the technique is faster now because we don't have to set up that and that's probably the most time-consuming one. So that's why it's good to save it as a graphic style. You can see how quick that was. Let's just do this once more on the other branch. So I switch back, select that left branch, and then I'm going to copy paste. Go to the field color, make it darker. Once again slightly different. Make Mask, select mask, Invert Mask, paste, and then swap the colors, select the stroke, linear across and graphic style. Boom, done. So. Of course, it takes some practice to get to the speed, but you can see once you know what you're doing, you can be very quick and effective applying these effects. 13. Using Gradient Mesh - Llama: And I kept the most interesting way of using the grain effect for last, because now we will learn how to use it with a gradient mesh, which gives you the most intricate control that you can get in Illustrator. So for this, I'm going to leave the opacity mask of the cactus and also leave the isolation mode by double-clicking outside. I'm going to scroll up and focus on the cute as part of the illustration, the head of this Lama. So I'm going to click on this object. First of all, I'm just going to drag it to the side so you can see that's the object we are going to work with. And it's important because depending on the outline of an object, the gradient mesh will behave differently. If you have a very complex shape, it might not work best. But for the type of complexity that you can see here is going to still work fine. Normally, the more anchor points you have on an outline, the more difficult it is for Illustrator to create a nice mesh with the gradient mesh feature. But you will see exactly what I mean once we get started. So now that we have our objects selected, it actually starts very similarly to the previous techniques, and you guessed it, we have to duplicate it. Command C, command F or Control C, Control F. Then you guys did again, we have to change the color to something, whatever we want to use this grain effect for. In this case, we want to use it again for shading. So I'm just going to go back to the HSB values and I will reduce the brightness, increase the saturation a bit, and maybe also the Hue adjust slightly. Something like that I think is going to work for the shading. Then we will create the mask, invert the mask, select the mask and paste in the same object in there. Now here's an important step that's different from the previous methods. Here we have to make sure that the mask is set to black field. So make sure you click on black here in the color options. So without this, you won't really see much happening. But once you have this setup, you can apply the gradient mesh. So we can go to the Object menu and choose create gradient mesh. Once that's selected, we will see it coming up already. And it's a really nice mesh that's created here on this fairly simple outline. But notice that I have options here. And the most important one is to change the appearance from flat to center. Now, flat is just simply going to use the same color on all the mesh points that you had as your basic or base field color. While the two center means that it's going to create a ready, almost like a three-dimensional shape by using brighter colors in the center and darker colors on the outline. So that's really cool, but we can also increase and decrease the rows and columns. And notice how adding more rows is going to create a more complex mesh. And the same thing happens with columns. You can use the up and down arrows here, by the way, to quickly see the difference. So you can control this very easily. But the good thing is that you can also add mesh lines later on which I'm going to show you how to do. So for now, all we have to do is to set it up like this. I'm going to click on, Okay, now comes our good old friend, the grain effect. So we go to the Effect menu and since we already used it, I'm just simply going to use apply green. So it's going to use the same exact settings as before. And although it seems like a bit more complex way to set it up, it's actually not that complex at all because you can see we are already at the point where we can adjust the green effect. So we can now select these mesh points using the direct selection tool. Shortcut is a way that you can move these points around. And notice that as I'm moving the points around, am effecting the spread of the gradient or the grain. In this case, what you can do is to change the color for each of these mesh points. And notice that the color on the edges are going to be black, while this transitional mesh points will be gray, and the one in the middle is going to be white. So that's how it's creates the defect in the middle. It's completely empty, while wherever there's black or gray is going to start showing the grain. If I select this other point up here, and instead of using gray, I said this to white. See immediately it's creates a different effect. I can again select this point and either just drag it around or I can also set this to white. Then we have a similar effect to using the previous technique, where we have the shading around the outline of the cactus. But what's different here is that we have much more intricate control and I can have a different effect moving under the eyes, for example. Then further up here, if I want these points to come further out, I can do that very easily. And I can move these points exactly on the eyes, maybe something like that. And also instead of using gray here, I can set them to black, which increases the intensity of the effect only on those specific areas. Now, if you run out of mesh points and you need more control, you have to do is to press U on the keyboard, which gets you to the mesh tool. And with that, you can click anywhere on the outline. Now, if you click on an existing line, like in this case, I click in the middle where there was already a vertical line. This is only going to give me additional points here on the side. But I'm going to undo this. So you can see what's difference. If I click in a completely empty area, it's also going to create an additional vertical line, not just a horizontal line. This way I'm adding a lot more points to control. So I'm going to do the same thing here on the left side. Now, I can select this point maybe here, and set that to white or so, select this point, set that to white. And then I can move these points around and be even more specific where I want these points to be. So let's take a look without this effect on the head. So if I come back to the object from the transparency panel, we can find our object here in the layers panel. By the way, whenever you have something selected and you have loads of things in the layers panel, you can just click on this little locate objects which will jump to the selected object. Really useful technique. So now I can see without the effect and the effect. So there you go. This was the most complex setup with the grain effect technique, but still, once you know how to use it, it's not that difficult at all. So if you learn all of these four different ways of using the grain effect, you will have all the methods you need depending on the shape of the object and also depending on whether you would like to have a highlight or shading applied to it. So once again, just to see what we achieved here is the illustration without any of these grain effect. And here it is with the full shading applied on all the objects. 14. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.