Transcripts
1. Learn How to Make a String or Scribble Text Effect in Adobe Illustrator: Hi, I'm Anne breaker and I'm a graphic designer
and illustrator, but I also loved to teach, you might know me from my
graphic design YouTube channel, where I teach short
little tutorials about Adobe
Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign from my
Facebook groups where I helped graphic
designers troubleshoot any problems that might come up. Today in this class, I'm going to teach you
how to make a scribble or string texts effect
in Adobe Illustrator. This class is for beginners. You don't need to know
the software at all. I'll walk you through
everything you need to know step-by-step. And if you're a seasoned
Illustrator user, I can almost
guarantee you you'll learn something in this class. Alright, let's get started.
2. Downloading Exercise Files and Installing the Font: First off, you'll
want to download the exercise files so
you can follow along. This is a different class, but I just wanted
to show you where they are on the Skillshare site. You've got your video here and under here you'll see four tabs. The exercise files will be
under projects and resources, and then just scroll
down and there'll be right over here under resources, the ones for this class
will be in a zip folder. And once you've downloaded them, you'll see them come into
your downloads folder. If you're on a Mac, you
can find that quickly on your finder by hitting
Option Command L. If you're on a PC
and I'll probably be over here somewhere
in your favorites. And to open a zip file, all you have to do is on a Mac, double-click it,
and it'll create a little folder that has
files inside on a PC. All you need to
do is right-click the file and then choose
extract or Extract all. And that will give
you a similar result, another folder with
some files inside, now in the exercise files, so you've got three
different things. I've got a finished version of what you'll be
creating today. That way you can check your work or if you can't
figure something out, you can see how I did it. You'll also see a
keyboard shortcuts teach sheet that you can
print out so that you can follow along easily with the keyboard shortcuts
because I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. But of course, I'll also
tell you where to find everything in your
tools and menus. The third thing is the font
you'll need for this class. This font is okay for both
personal and commercial use if you want to use it outside this class and to install it, all you have to do
is double-click it. I'm going to do
that now on a Mac, you'll get a screen like
this and then choose Install Font on a PC, I believe it's similar. If that's not working for you, just right-click it
and choose install. If you want to try to
use a different font, that is totally fine. I would choose a font that has a really thick and chunky
letters like this font. Otherwise is a string inside
won't look quite right. Or if it's too thin, it
might not show up at all.
3. Setting Up Your Document in Illustrator: Alright, so now we're ready
to jump into Illustrator. So I've opened up
Illustrator and I'm going to come over here
to create a new document. I'm gonna come over here and
change my points to pixels. And then I went to make
my width 650 by 350. This will give us a
nice wide Canvas. I don't need any bleed, and I want my color
mode to be RGB color. Now this is giving
us a little warning because normally when
you choose letter, it will automatically assume that you're doing
this for print. And if you're wanting
to print this out, CMYK is probably the way to go, but I will say that
most home printers are okay using RGB color. We've got all our specs in
and we're ready to create, I'm gonna hit Command
Z or Control Zero to fit this art
board on my screen.
4. Creating a Word and Building an Appearance: And next we'll just go
ahead and type our words. So I'll hit T on my keyboard. That'll really to my type tool, which is right over here. And I'll just click
once on my screen. If you click and drag, you'll probably have a little box and you don't want that. So just undo with Command Z or Control Z and try to click
once without dragging. I'm just going to type string. Now I'm going to change tools. I'll choose my selection
tool right up here. Now I'll come over to
my Character window. You can find this under window, type and character right here. And I'm going to choose the
font that we just installed. Here it is, chunk five. Click on that. Now I'm
gonna make this bigger. There are two ways to do that. You can get right
on a corner and just hold shift and drag it. But I wanted to be the
same for all of us. So I'm gonna come over here in the character panel
and just put in 130. The reason I'm doing that
is because I want us all to have the same
type of effect. The effects really do depend
on how big your type is. We've got our string word
and I'm just going to click and center
this in the space. Now we can start building
an appearance on this word. So I'm gonna come up here
to Window appearance. Now there are two sections
inside appearance, type and characters
in right now, if we double-click
type, nothing happens, but if we double-click
characters, we can see there are black fill on the word is down
here in characters, and that is actually
something we don't want. We need to get
that out of there. I'm going to click on it and
then choose the trash can. Now, I'll click on the
word type and I'll go ahead and add a new fill That's right over here
under the Flyout. That basically gives us
the exact same lick. The fill is just in type
instead of characters, and it really is
important to do that. Now I don't actually
want it to be black, so I'm going to change
my fill to a light blue. I'll come over here to my color
and I'll double-click it. Now I'll pull this
slider down to the light-blue
right about there. And then I'm liking this
blue color right up here. And I'll say, Okay, now my text is filled with blue. Now if this doesn't
work for you, make sure you have this type selected with your selection
tool before you do this, okay, next we want to add a fill right
underneath this one. I'm gonna click over
here in the blank area and just drag this
down to duplicated, which is that little
square of the plus on it. Now I'll click on that
one we just created. And I want to make
this a darker blue. I'm going to double-click here. And I'll move my blew up. I'm going to get just a more, slightly darker but
more saturated blue. This looks good.
We'll say, Okay, now this is sitting exactly
behind the light blue. We're not able to
see it right now. So let's offset it. I'll come up here to
Effect Path, Offset Path. And I'll get this dialog box. And this will make it look like there's an outline around it. So you might be wondering, why didn't we just add a stroke
instead of another field? It's offset and it's a
little hard to explain. But if we use a fill instead, it'll be easier to
make our depth effect, which will add Next. Now this is a little bit thick, this part is highlighted, so I'm using my
down and up arrow key to increase or
decrease the pixel amount. I'm liking seven. So we'll say, okay, I'm not liking the sharp
corners that are on here. Let's get back in here. I'll toggle that little
carrot down next to Phil. And I'll click on
offset paths and I'll change my joins to round. I think this looks much nicer. The next step is to
make that depth effect. I'm going to duplicate
this fill by clicking on the blank area and dragging
onto the little square. Now we'll click on that lower one this time and we're going to transform this lower fill
for our debts effect. I'll make sure that
I'm clicked on this and then I'll come
up here to effect, distort and transform
and transform. And now we have a lot
of different options. First, I want to make
sure that preview is checked and I'm going to
change my copies to 20. There'll actually be 20
different copies behind there. Now will come up to scale. I'm gonna highlight the
a 100% and then just use my down arrows to see what
happens when I do this. Okay, that looks
a little message. I'm liking the 99%. And then I'll do the
same with vertical. You can, of course,
awesome move the sliders. But for me this is an
easier way to do it. I'm really liking this
effect where it looks like it's going back
to the center point. Now we can also
change the angle, but it gives us some
really weird effects because of the 20 copies. I'm gonna put this back as 0. There's also this little
thing down here where we can change where the
effect is coming from. So if I click on the upper left, you can see what happens. I'll just click on all these to find the one that
I liked the most. I really like it. That bottom middle one. Yeah, I think I'll go
with the bottom middle. And we'll say, okay, we've got everything
pretty much done except for the string
effect itself. Okay, so to do this, I'm going to duplicate this
top fill in the same way. And now I've got two
light-blue fills sitting right on
top of each other. I'm going to make this fill. I think I'll just make it white, so I'll come up here to my
color and choose white. You can get to your color are pretty quickly by hitting F6, that I'll toggle it off
and on or you can come up here to Window Color
and it's right here. Okay, so we have a white fill on top of our light blue fill. And now I'm gonna come up here
and add a scribble effect. I'll go to Effect, Stylize and scribble right here. That'll bring up
this dialog box. Let's see if we can modify this to look a little more clean. I'm gonna put my angle. I'm just gonna do
it at a 45 degrees. Okay, so the path overlap, this means it's going to
push outside the boundaries. Let's do a negative number here. I'm gonna use my down
arrows to adjust this. And I'm liking that negative
five for the variation. The smaller it gets, the better it looks to me. So I think I'll
put this at about 0.5 for the stroke width. Right now it's
looking too thick. So I think I'll put
this at about 1.5. If you accidentally hit
Enter or Return or escape, just click right
on that scribble, they're bringing back
your dialog box. Let's change the curviness.
That looks good. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit, so I'm hitting Z on my
keyboard and then I'll just zoom in to see
what we've got. This looks pretty good. I'll get back on my
scribbled by just clicking that if we increase this a lot, I'm holding Shift and then using my arrow keys you can
see what happens. Signs thinking 19 or
20 for the curviness. The variation, I'm not seeing a lot of difference
with the variation. Maybe a little bit. I think I'll put
this at about five. Let's see what changes
with this spacing. We can make it a really loose scribble or a really
tight scribble. I think right here
at five looks nice. Then for variation, I think it needs a
little more than 0, but less than one, maybe 0.25. And then we'll say, okay, I'm going to zoom
out with Command minus or Control minus. And this is looking
really great. I am going to make one change. I'm going to click
on the lower Phil. I think I'm just gonna
make this a little darker. So I've clicked on that and then I'll come over
here and double-click. And I'm just going to bring this to a little darker navy there. Okay, that looks good. This kind of adds some depth. I might also make
my upper fill a little brighter like this. This is looking nice.
5. Creating a Graphic Style and Applying to Other Objects: Now that we have our
appearance built, I want to show you a few things
that you can do from this 0.1 is you can make
a graphic style. To get your graphic styles. You'll want to go to
Window graphic styles. If your appearance is here
in this little group, you can just click
on the word and just drag it out so
it looks like mine. The cool thing about appearances
is you can save them to your graphic styles and then use them on lots of
different things. To do that we want to get
right on this little box. Click and drag over
here to graphic styles. And you can see it right here. Now I can draw
some other shapes. I can hit M to get on my rectangle tool,
which is over here. And just draw a rectangle and then click on
that graphic style. If we zoom in, you can see that it has all the same features
as this one. You're probably wondering
where that drop shadow is, but if you rotate
this by hitting R on your keyboard to
get to your Rotate tool. And then just clicking
and dragging, you'll start to see the
depth come into play. So let's hit L on our keyboard to get
to the Ellipse Tool. And I'll just draw an ellipse. Maybe we will make
a doughnut shape. So I'll copy this
command C or control C, paste in front with
Command F or Control F, and then get right
on that corner. Hold shift and option to re-size from the center
or Shift and Alt on a PC. By the way, if you're not
seeing that bounding box, that'll be under View, Show Bounding Box right here. We have two shapes. One right on top of the other. I'll get on my selection tool. I'm going to select
them both like this. Then I'll come down
here to my Pathfinder, which is also under window. And I'm going to use this second one which
is minus front, and that'll just
punch out that hole. We have a doughnut shape. Then I can apply my graphic
styles so that you can get some really interesting
things going on with your graphic style.
6. Resizing Text or Objects with Effects: Now, if you want to
resize your shapes, hit S on your keyboard to go to the scale tool and then
hit Enter or Return. This will bring up the
scale dialog box and you need to have Scale Strokes
and Effects checks. And scale corners also wouldn't hurt when you have this
turned on, we'll say, okay, and then you resize this, like this, everything
resizes together. But if this is turned
off and then you resize, that effect is going to stay the same size even when
you resize it smaller. So that is something to
know when you're resizing, make sure your scale is set
to scale strokes and effects.
7. Modifying Text or Objects After Appearance is Applied: Another interesting thing we can do is to make a copy of this. I'm going to hold
Option or Alt and then just click and
drag to make a copy. Now I'm going to
kind of arc this. I'll go to Effect Warp. And arc right here. Here are our warp options. We've got arc selected here. I'm going to decrease that bend to about 26 and we'll say, Okay, now it looks really wide. So I'm gonna get right on
this part of this box hold Option and just
squeeze it a little bit so it looks better
when you do this, it will actually add that
effect to your appearance. If you wanted to, you could
click that and drag it down into your graphic
style and apply this to different things. Like if we did that, we would get that effect. Okay, I'm gonna move this
one off the art board. Now you can even combine
shapes with your text. I'll just do that real quick
to show you what I mean. I went to hold Option or Alt and drag
a copy right down here. The reason I do that
is because it's always good to keep
your actual font, the chunk five in your
graphic somewhere. It can be off to the
side or whatever. But if you ever need
to change that, It's good to know what font that was because we're
going to be outlining this font and making it so that it can't be edited
from that point. I'm gonna come up here
to type create outlines. Now if we hit Command
Y or Control Y, you can see the difference. The live type looks like this. We can still type here, but the outlined font
looks like this. We can't type, It's just all
made of paths and points. Now, I'll hit Command Y
or Control Y to get back. I went to extend this lower part of my
G down a little bit. So I'm gonna hit
Command Y or Control Y. To do that, I'll hit a on my keyboard to get to my
direct selection tool. I'm just going to
draw a box around those two points and then hold shift and grab the
other two points. So the ones you selected
should all be blue. The rest up here will be white. And I'll click right
on that point. And I'm just going to pull
this down a little bit. I'm holding Shift, so it
just goes straight down. Okay, I'm gonna hit Command
Y or Control Y to get back. Next, I'm gonna hit M on my keyboard to get to
my rectangle tool. And I'm just going to make a rectangle that
goes all the way over here and is about the same width
as that part on the G. Okay, and it has no fill
and no stroke for me. So I'm gonna go ahead and
use that graphic style, which will give
me the same Look. I'm using my spacebar to
move around a little bit, which will toggle
to the hand tool. Okay, so now we want these two pieces to
kind of join together. To do that, I'm gonna
zoom in with my Z tool, this one right over here. Then I'll hit Command
Y or Control Y. To get to this view, I'll use my a tool, the direct selection tool, click and drag this down. And I want to make sure that
my rectangle is sitting right along the GI
where it connects. This is looking pretty good. I'll hit Command Y or
Control Y to get back. Now I'll select the two
with my selection tool. I'm gonna come down
here to the Pathfinder and choose Unite. Pathfinder is under Window in
case you're not seeing it. So I'll click that and that actually cause kind
of a weird effect. It looks like these two
pieces are not connected, so we need to make illustrators
see them as one piece. Select everything will hit
Command H or Control H, and that is creating
a compound path. So the way to get to
it in your menu as object compound path, and make. Okay, I'm going to
zoom in a little bit, move my appearance
out of the way. And then I'm just going to
smooth this up a little bit. So I'll select it with
my selection tool. I'll get on my
smooth tool which is shift S and it's
underneath your pencil. It'll be right over here. And then just kind
of go along the edge here and smooth this
part out a little bit. This is looking a little weird. So I'm gonna select that with my direct selection tool
and just move it up. Then with my selection tool, I'm going to select
just this point here, which is a corner point. And when I select that, you'll see this little
white corner widget with a little dot inside. Click and pull that, and that'll round that corner. So that kind of gives
us an interesting look. There are definitely tens of
fun things you can do with your appearance and then manipulating the texts to
give you a different look. I'm going to move some
of these pieces off of here with my selection tool. And now I want to
add a background. So I'm gonna hit
M on my keyboard. And I'm willing to just start outside the art board
a little bit and draw a rectangle the size of the art board, a
little bit bigger. Then I went to send
this to back with object arrange and send to back. Now I want this to
be the light blue, so I'll click on my word and then I'll click on the
fill and appearance, which will bring it over here. Then we can add this
to our swatches by just clicking and dragging
it into the swatches. Swatches are also under window. And then right down here. Now click on my background and I'm going to make
it that light blue.
8. Exporting Your Design: Now let's say we want to share this online or to make a
project for this class. The artboard is where
the image cuts off. It's totally okay to
have things overhanging. In fact, I encourage you to have a little bit of
overhang like this. That way you're sure to cover the whole art board and
you won't have like a little tiny white line at the top where you didn't get
it all the way to the edge. So to do this, we'll go to File, Export and Export for Screens. You can see it right here. If you've got art boards checked and we'll say this
on our desktop. I'm just going to make one JPEG, but we can also choose what
kind of format we want here. Then I'll export art board. When we do that, we'll
get a little folder with a one x on it and this
art board inside. And then on a Mac we can preview
this with the space bar. Now if that isn't big enough, you can come back to
Illustrator, go to File, Export and Export for Screens, and then make it to
x if you wanted to, this will make it twice as big. We export that art board. We'll get a little 2X2 folder. And then this one is
quite a lot larger. Of course it's twice the size.
9. Create Your Project: All right, Now it's
time for your project. I'd like you to create
a word with some of the settings that we
used in this class. Of course, it's totally okay to change things and get
creative with it. For example, you can use different colors or
a different font, or even just change
some of the things so it has a completely
different look. I can't wait to see
what you create.
10. What's Next and Reviews: Thank you so much
for taking my class. If you're ready to dive
deeper into Illustrator, I actually have a few beginner courses that
will get you from knowing nothing
about the software to a seasoned pro in no time. So please take a look at
those if you get a chance. All right, I hope you've enjoyed this class as much as I have. You get a chance,
please leave a review. They help other students to see the class and they
helped me to know what to improve for next time or if I'm just doing a good job. All right. I'll see you in the
next class. Thank you.
Anne Larkina, Graphic Designer, Adobe Max Speaker
