Create with Blends and Brushes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Get Creative with Brushes and Blends Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create with Blends and Brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach us a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're getting creative with blends and brushes. I'm going to show you how to make brushes that don't distort when they're used along a curved path. Brushes with an unusual way to color them and bending blended shapes along a path, again, without distortion. The techniques that you're going to learn in this class are appropriate for all versions of Illustrator and they're going to help you understand some of the possibilities for using brushes and blends and transformations for interesting effects. As you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class and learning from it, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look out and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started getting creative with blends and brushes in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Create a Basic Bunting Brush: To get started with our work on these brushes in Illustrator, you'll just need a new document. So mine's going to be a 1,000 pixels by a 1,000 pixels, RGB color mode. Of course, if you were working in an earlier version of Illustrator, this is what your dialogue would look like. So click "Create Document". Now I want to create a sort of bunting brush because I want to show you some of the problems and what we're going to try and solve in this class. So we're going to start with the polygon tool. I'm just going to click here and create just a three-sided figure. So it's the three sides that we're concerned about here, not necessarily the radius. So I'm just going to size this up and so it's a bit more like a triangle that we might see as bunting. I'm going to rotate it holding the Shift key as I do so it's rotated a 180 degrees. While I'm here, I'm going to fill the shape with black and I'm going to remove the stroke. So all we have is a single black filled shape. Now, if we make this as a pattern brush right now, the path that it's along is going to go right through the middle of the bunting. It would be better and we would have more control if it went through the top. The way to do that is to add something up here that is the same height as this, so that you force the combined midpoint to be along here rather than through the middle of the bunting. So we're going to do that with a rectangle. I'm going to select the Rectangle tool. I'm going to make this a no fill, no stroke rectangle. I'm going to look out here for the little indicator that's going to tell me I'm in the middle top of this shape, and I'm going to click and drag to start drawing my rectangle at this point. I'll hold down the Alt key on a PC, that would be the Option key on a Mac, so that the midpoint of this shape becomes the point that I actually started drawing. So that allows me to just finesse this shape so it's going right over the triangle, and it reaches all the way down to the bottom part of the triangle. I'll let go of the left mouse button, and then let go of my Alt or Option key. Now, I'm going to the last palette here, and I'm just going to open up the last palette. I need to move this no fill, no stroke rectangle behind the triangle. This will then become the bounding box for my brush. So I've got everything ready now to make my pattern brush. So I'll click on the Brushes palette. If you don't see it, choose Window and then Brushes. I'm going to open up the panel here, choose New Brush, and this will be a pattern brush, and I'll click "OK". Now, we don't need the corner tiles because we're just going to be drawing this along a line. So that's good for anybody using an earlier version of Illustrator that does not have corner tiles available. We want the Colorization method to be Tints so that we're able to re-color this brush, and I'm just going to click "OK". I'll press "Control 0" on the PC, command 0 on the Mac, to zoom back out. Going to the Pencil tool, I'm just going to double-click on the tool to see what settings I have set. Well, I want this to be in the sort of smooth end, so whatever your dialogue offers in the way of options, look for something that's pretty smooth and just click "OK". Now, I can just draw out a line on which I can apply my brush. So I've got my line. I can't see it because it's a no fill, no stroke line, but I can select it and then I can see it. Now, if I click on the Pattern brush, I'm going to apply the brush to this line. The problems are going to be immediately apparent. You can see that the triangles here that make up our bunting are triangles where the line bends. The problem is that when you apply a pattern brush to a bending line, the pattern gets distorted, it gets pulled because of the bend in the line. Now, if you want that effect, that's great. That's exactly how you achieve that effect. But if you want your bunting to be lots of little triangles instead of blown out things and a little bit sucked in over here, you need to do something a bit different. In the next video, I'm going to show you a technique that is going to open up a whole range of different options to you in Illustrator. One of the things that's going to do is to solve this bending problem when we create brushes like this bunting brush. 3. Pt 2 Regular Shaped Bunting: So that we can have this pace of bunting available to us just as a reference later on, let's just drag it out of the way, and in the last pallet here, let's lock it down and turn it off. I'm going to keep this pace of bunting because I'm actually going to use it in a minute for a slightly different purpose than we used to previously. Right now we're going to solve the problem of the bending bunting, and we're going to do it this way. I'm going to click on the line segment tool, and I'm just going to click once in the document. I want a line that is at zero degrees, so I'm just going to type zero here, and I'm going to make the length, for example, something like 50 pixels, and I'll click okay. Now my line doesn't have any stroke right now, so I'm going to click on the stroke here and I'm going to apply a black stroke to that line. I have a single line here. I'm going to take that line and make a pattern brush out of it. I'm going through the brush's palette. I'm going to click new brush, and I'm going to make this a pattern brush and click okay. I don't want or need the corner tile, I can just turn that off. At this stage, I can just click Okay. Now let's go and again, create a line. I'm going to draw a line here that we're going to apply this new brush to. I'm going to select over the line and click here on my new brush. Right now I've got a line that has a brush along it which is just a series of smaller lines. I'm going to select over this and I'm going to expand it with object expand appearance. In the last pallet, you'll see that this gives me a whole series of groups. I'm going to, with it still selected, choose object Ungroup, and then again, because I want to get it to the stage where I just have a series of paths. If we have a look at this line now, let's just zoom into it, and what we've got here is a whole series of really small paths, little lines. Let's zoom back out and now let's go and make our bunting brush. Now we're going to make it out of this pace here. But last time we created it as a pattern brush. This time we're going to create it as an art brush. I'm going to click here on new brush and I'm going to click Art Brush and click Okay. We're going to paint it along the line of the brush. What we need to do, is to change its direction. The direction has to be left to right. Just click Okay. Now let's select our line of lines. Our curved line that's made up of lots of little lines, and let's go and apply our art brush to it. I'm just going to click once on the art brush. You can see now that we've got a similar problem to the problem we had before. We've come a different way, but we've just ended up pretty much the same place as we were. We've got a bunting brush where everything is distorting. It's distorting because the line is bending. But we have lots of little lines; if we could make each of these little lines a straight line, we would have regular triangles. I'm going to select over all of these lines. What we've got here is a series of small lines, each of which has a brush applied to it. It's the lines that we're focusing on here. We're going to choose Object, Path, Simplify. Here we're going to click preview on, so we can see what's happening. We want straight line, so we'll click on straight lines. For the angle threshold, we want it to be 180 degrees. What we're saying to Illustrator is we want every single one of these lines to be perfectly straight; so 180 degrees, we'll do that, I'll click Okay. Now we have a series of small lines, each of which is straight, the inner sort of curve, but the individual lines that make up the curve are all straight lines. Because they're all straight lines, the art brushes that are applied to them are all going to be triangles. If we needed to do something about, for example, this end one, we could just select the line and just rotate it a little bit and just move it back up into position. To avoid the distortion in a pattern brush, what we've done is we've used the pattern brush concept just to get the series of lines in a bend, and then we've broken out those two individual lines and applied an art brush to them. If the lines are straight, then the art brush when it's applied to each of these lines, is not going to be distorted. If we bring back the line that we had originally, which I've got locked down and invisible over here, you'll see the difference in the result. This line is distorted and all the triangles are potentially different shapes. Here we've got a series of smaller lines. In this case, our triangle shapes are pure triangles. 4. Pt 3 From Bunting to Stars: Now, in the previous video, we created this bunting brush, but this could be done with any shape at all. Just going to drag out a really small star here, and I'm going to fill the star with a orange color. I'm going to take the star and I'm going to make an art brush out of it. Now, if I want it to hang across the bottom of the line, I'm of course going to have to make a rectangle above it that's going to ensure that the star hangs off at its point. I'm going to select here on the Rectangle tool, I'm going to deselect my star, and I'm going to start drawing at this anchor point. I'll hold down the Alt or Option key as I draw so that I can just size this rectangle over the top of my star. If I want a little bit of space between each of the stars, then I can add a little bit of space around the star at this point, and I'm going to do so. So I'm going to make this rectangle just a little bit wider than the star is. I'll let go the left mouse button, let go the Alt or option key, and with it still selected, let's just make that a no fill no stroke rectangle. To make a brush out of this, this no fill, no stroke rectangle needs to be behind the star. Let's just go and see where it is. It's up here, the stars next down. I'm just going to reverse the order of them in the palette here in the last palette. I'll group them so that they're going to travel as a pair, and so they're going to be a bit neater in layers palette, and let's go and make an art brush out of this. Now, this brush has to paint exactly the same way as our bunting disk. So it has to paint along the line. It does need to be scaled proportionately. I'm going to select scale proportionately here and click okay. Now, I'm going to select over this line and let's go out and apply our star brush to it. Well, you can see I didn't get all the paces of the line because the star brush was not applied. But now here we have a series of stars and they're all regular stars. If we made this star as a pattern brush and applied it to a line like this, the star would be distorted along the line. But here we have a path of nice regular stars. This kind of approach is going to work for any shapes that you want to use as brushes. 5. Pt 4 Multi colored brushes: At this stage, I want to show you an interesting way of coloring the kind of brushes that we're creating here. I'm going to choose "File New" and we're going to again create a 1000 by 1000 pixel document. I'm working in the RGB color mode. I'll click "Create". I'm going to create a line to start off with. I'm going to click the "Line segment tool". I'm going to turn off the fill and for the stroke, I'm going to apply a color. So I'm just going to apply this blue color right now. I'll click once in the document. My line is going to be 50 pixels long, zero as my angles. So it's going to draw in a horizontal direction and I'll click "OK." Let's zoom in so we can see this a little bit closer. With the Selection tool, I'm going to select over this line, I'm going to drag a duplicate of it away and I am going to recolor this line at different color. I'm going to drag another copy and re-color that. Then I'll drag a fourth line away and color that. So I have four short lines, each exactly the same length, and they're all different colors. I want them to be butted up against each other. So I'm going to select either all of the lines and I'm going to the Alignment panel. I'm going to click here and click "Show Options". I'm going to set Align tool to be aligned to key object. That just re-selects one of these lines as being the key object. Now with this Aligned to key object option, what you generally do, is you select over the objects that you want to align and then you just click on one of them. It doesn't matter in this case which one we click on. But you can see it gets a darker blue border around it. It's going to be the key objects. All the other objects are going to move. It's not going to move. Because I want these butted up against each other, I'm just going to set the distance value to zero and I'm going to click here on horizontal distributes space. That distributes these four lines, so that there's zero space in between them. In other words, all four are butted up against each other. We're going to create these as our pattern brush. With the line selected, I'll go to the brushes panel, click the "Flyout menu", click "New Brush" and this is going to be a pattern brush. I'll click "OK". Again we don't want the corner tiles so we can turn those off. We just want this to be our pattern brush, so we're just going to click "OK". I'll press "Control" or "Command Zero" to zoom back out. Now I'm going back to the previous lesson because I want to borrow this up brush so we don't spend time recreating something that we've already created. I'm going to copy this brush with Edit copy. Going back into this document, I'll just choose "Edit paste". That makes this available in this document, so I can make my art brush from it. With it's selected, I'm going to click here and choose "New Brush". This is going to be an art brush. I'll click "OK". Exactly the same as we did before, we're going to make sure that this paints in this direction so we can use it as our bunting and I'm going to click on "Scale Proportionately". I'll click "OK". You don't need this any longer, so I'm just going to delete it. What we've got, is we've got this four color line, if you like, created the pattern brush and we've got a sort of bunting shape created as an art brush. So let's see how we're going to put all of this together. Am going back to my Pencil Tool and I'm just going to draw out one of my undulating lines. I'll select over the line and I'm going to apply out four color pattern brush to it. When we zoom in, you'll see the pattern brush applied to this bendy line. This is going to zoom out again. We're going to do what we did before. I'm going to select over this line. I'm going to expand it with Object Expand Appearance. Then I'll choose "Object Ungroup" until that is no longer an option. So now I have a series of lines, each one of them is colored differently. So I've got a blue line and then a red line and the green line and then an orange line. Pretty much the same thing as I had in the other example, except all these lines for black. Now they're different colors. So I'm going to select over all of these lines and let's go and apply our art brush to them. The art brush hasn't changed colors because I didn't set the coloring correctly. Let's just double-click on it and let's go and set the Colorization Method to Tints. When we do that, you'll see that each of these triangular brushes, these art brushes are taking on the color of the underlying line. So we can create multicolored effects using this sort of line process with individual lines, with brushes applied to them by just creating different color lines as we create the initial pattern brush. Just going to click "OK" and yes, I do want to apply this to the strokes. Of course we still have the same problem as we had earlier in that some of these triangles don't look like triangles. Well, this is just exactly the same lines as we had previously. They've just got lots of anchor points in them. We want them just to have two. So there'll be straight lines. To do this, we'll choose "Object", "Path", "Simplify". Exactly the same settings will turn Preview on. We'll select "Straight Lines" and we'll select 180 degrees. That makes each of these individually colored lines as straight line because they're now straight lines when the art brushes applied to them, there's no distortion. So this multicolor brush effect can be extended to all sorts of things. We could extend it to our little stars. Let's go and get a star brush. I'm going to copy it into this document here. But before I make it into a brush, I want to make the orange star pure black. So I'm going to target it, I'm in isolation mode here, going to target its fill and I'm going to make sure it's black. Because if it's black, it can be recolored. Let's get out of isolation mode. I'm going to select over the star and it's no fill, no strike rectangle and let's go and make an art brush from it. So "New Brush", "Art Brush", click "OK". I need to make sure it paints across here, and I need to set its Colorization Method to Tints, and I want to scale it proportionately. I'll click "OK". Now we have a star as an art brush. We can replace our triangles with a star. So we have individual colored stars along our line. So it can be bunting, it can be stars, it can be any shape that you want. But if you start with multicolor lines this time, then the shapes that you use as your art brush are going to take on the color of the line segment that they're attached to. 6. Pt 5 Blends along a line: Now it's time to have a look at a similar concept to what we've been looking at so far, but looking at shapes that actually change size as they go along a line. I'm going to start with the polygon tool, I'm just going to select that click once in the document, and just create a three-sided figure. Now I'm going to give it a fill, but no stroke. I'm going to enlarge it quite a bit, and I want the bottom of this shape to sort of suck in a bit, but at the moment the shape only has three anchor points at each of the vertices here. Well, with the shapes selected, if I choose object, and then path, I can click here on "Add Anchor Points", and that adds anchor points on each of the sides, so there's one in the middle of each side now of this triangle. Now I can go to the direct selection tool, and click on this anchor point. I'm going to turn it into an anchor point with smooth lines, and I'm just going to drag inwards, and that'll give the shape, the curve that I'm interested in achieving. At this stage, I'm going to size it appropriately, and move it to the bottom of the document. Now I'm going to alter, or option drag a duplicate away, and this one I'm going to size really small. I'm going to make sure that they are perfectly aligned, so I'm going to the alignment panel. I'm going to make sure that here it does not say align to art board. Align to selection is a really good option at this point, and I want to center this to a cell, click here horizontal aligned center. Now this is a starting point for a blend, but before I make my blend, I'm just going to tack a duplicate of this shape away, so I don't have to recreate it in a minute. I'm going to select over both of these shapes, and I'm going to click here on the "Blend Tool". I'll click to target this shape, and then click again to target this shape, and I get a blend. If I double-click the blend tool, I get to see the blend options, so if your blend doesn't look like this, you can open up this dialog. I'm going to choose specified steps, and I'm going to add a few more steps to my blend, and click "Okay". Now this point, there are a few things about the blend that I don't like that I would really like to be better. I'm really not happy that they overlap here, but don't overlap at this end, but if I did like my blend, let's look, and see what our options are for doing things with it, and I'm just going to select it, and make a duplicate because I want to do some different things with the second copy, so let's have a look at the first copy. Well, with blends, it's possible to replace the spine. If you don't like the spine, this line that the blend is attached to, you can draw your own. I'm going through the pencil tool here, and I'm just going to draw a line for my blend. This is the line I'm going to apply my blend to. I'm going to select over my blend, and the line, and then choose object, blend, replace, spine. What that does is it makes the blend go along the spine that I've created. It just doesn't do it in a particularly attractive way. I would really like the points of these shapes to go along the line, and they are not doing that. Well, there are a few options. One of the things that you can do is to select your blend, and go to the layers pallet. Just going to open up the last pallet here, and I'm going to the blend that I actually have selected here, and you'll see that it has a path, and the two shapes. Well, if I just tag one of the shapes, I can actually rotate it, so I can start sending it along the direction of the path. This one here can be selected, and its orientation can be changed slightly too. You do have some ability to change the direction of shapes along a spine by simply going into the blend, and just adjusting the direction that they point in. But there's something else that you may not know about blends, and that is that the spine that they come with can be adjusted as well. With this one selected, the one that we've done nothing to, let's look, and see what it has. Well, it has a path which is the line that it's placed along, and of course it has its start, and in shapes, so we can go to the path that's actually inside this blend, and we can adjust it, so I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm going to click on this point here, and it's possible to click to convert it to smooth points, and when you do that, it gets a set of handles. You can also drag it around. You can reshape the actual line that the blend is on. You don't actually have to create a separate spine. As we did before, we're able to bend the shapes along the spine. This time we're just using the spine that came with the blend, and here I can identify individual shapes at the beginning, and the end of the spine, or the beginning, and end of the blend, and I can adjust their rotation as well. It's just that the effect of I'm achieving this way is really not as satisfactory as I would like it to be, so let's take our shape with us. Let's create a new document, and let's look at a way that we can use the techniques that we learned in the last few videos of using dashed lines to create a more sophisticated blended set of shapes along a line. 7. Pt 6 Better Bending Blends: Now I've gone ahead and created yet another one of my 1,000 pixel by 1,000 pixel documents. I bought my shape over from the previous example. This time we're going to look at ways that we can get a more satisfactory blend of shapes. I'm going to take this shape down about here, and I'll make a duplicate of it just in case I need it. With this selected, I'm going to make my blend a different way to using a blend tool. I'm going to use the distort and transform tool. I'll choose Effect, distort and transform, and then transform. I'm going to turn preview on so I can see what I'm doing. I want to move these up the document which is in a negative direction vertically. I'm just going to start moving it up in a minus direction. If you happen to be using illustrator CS4, you'd be using a positive vertical direction because of where the origin is in CS4, but CS5 enlighted it's a negative direction. Now I also want to scale my shape down. I'm going to type 90 percent and 90 percent for the horizontal and vertical. The shape's going to get smaller the further it goes up the document. Now let's make some extra copies. You can see already that the placement of the shapes over the top of each other is a little bit more satisfactory perhaps, than the way that you'll get it if you tried to blend these two shapes, if you took the larger shape and the smaller shape and did a blend. Sometimes the transform effect just gives you a nicer result. I'm just going to click "OK". Now at this point, again, I'm going to take a duplicate of this away just in case I need it later on. It's a transform effect applied to a single shape. Everything is attached in the appearance panel to the shapes. You'll see that we have this path selected. This is the transform effect that's doing the transformation. You can turn it on and off because they're not a series of shapes right now, they're just a transform effect. Given that, what I want to do is to actually make these a set of shapes. I'm going to select the one shape that has the transform effect applied to it and choose object Expand Appearance. That's going to expand it in the last palette to a series of shapes which are inside groups. We're going to burst them out, object ungroup, and then object ungroup again. Now we just have the series of paths. Let's make this into an art brush. I'm going to select all of those paths, I can group them, should I wish to do so, just to keep things neat. Now we're going to make an art brush from them. I'll choose new brush, art brush, click "OK". I want it to paint from the bottom up. I'm going to click here on this direction option, it will paint from the bottom up. I want it to be able to vary three colors, so I'll choose tints, and I'll stretch it to fit the stroke length, so I'll click "OK". Now let's see how this art brush we'll paint when we put it along a path. Again, I'm going to the pencil tool and again, I'm just going to draw a line that I can apply my art brush too. I'll select my line and select my brush. Now this gives me a really nice effect. This is a really nice sweeping shape that goes from large to small. Creating this as an art brush is a really nice result. But some people might be looking at this and going, "I really like the sweeping bend, but I'm not happy that my shapes are distorting as they go because an art brush will distort. Well, we already know the solution to the problem, because we know how to make sweeping lines of objects that don't distort. What we're going to do is harness the knowledge that we have of using a transform tool, with the knowledge we built up in the last few brushes videos, and we're going to put the two together to get a final result. We're going to look at that in the next video. 8. Pt 7 Bend a Blend without Distortion: We're now ready to take the knowledge that we've built up over the last few videos and to create an overlapping pattern of decreasing size shapes. But one that is not subject to the distortion that we say in this one that we created using an art brush. I'm just going to borrow this shape so I don't have to recreate it. I'm going to copy it and add it to a brand new document, again, the same size document and the same color mode as we've been working on. I'll choose Edit and then Paste. I'm going to take that to one side for now and we can start by creating a series of lines that are decreasing in size. I'm going to click on the line segment tool. I'm going to create a line that is this time 60 pixels in length and I'm going to use 90 as my rotation. It's an upright line and I'll click Okay. This is line I'm going to apply a black stroke to it. I'm just going to move it down to the bottom of the screen here. With the line selected, we're going to go ahead and do a distort and transform effect. We'll try and preview on. I'm going to start moving in a negative vertical direction, of course, if you're using Illustrator CS4, then you're going to have to go in a positive direction because of the way that program sets the origin. I'm going to increase the number of copies here and then I'm going to start reducing their size. I'm going to set them to 90 percent. That means that each line is 90 percent of the length of the one before. At this stage, I'm just going to click Okay. Now it's reasonably easy for me to see here the overlaps and I don't think I've got quite enough of an overlap, so I'm actually going to extend the length of that line to about 85. I'm holding the Shift key as I do that so it's extended in a perfectly vertical direction. I think the overlaps are going to be a little bit better this time because this shape is going to need some overlap for the point on each successive shape to be over the arch at the bottom of the shape. I'm going now and select this shape and I'm going to expand it with object expand appearance. In the layers panel, that's going to give me a series of groups. With it's still selected, I'm going to choose object, Ungroup and continue to do that until Ungroup is no longer an option. I now have a series of lines, each one of which is a little bit shorter than the one before. I'm going to select over these lines and this is going to be my art brush. I'll choose New brush, I'll choose Art brush and click Okay. Now I wanted to paint from the bottom up so I'll select this option here and I'll click Okay. Now I have an art brush that I can apply to a line. I'm going to create my flowing line. I'm going to use the pencil tool, you could use any tool you like. Here's my flowing line, I'm going to select it and I'm going to apply my art brush to it. That's first this line here. Now we have a line that is made up of decreasing size, small lines, we just have to break them out of here. I'll choose object expand appearance, and again, I get a group, and this time it just has a series of paths in it. The next thing we have to do is to make this into an art brush so that we can put it along this line. With it selected, I'm going to select the New brush tool and choose Art brush and click Okay. Now I want it to paint from the bottom up so I'm going to reverse its direction. I do want to scale up proportionally, so it'll get smaller as the lines get smaller. Now if I want to be able to recolor it, I'm going to set the color mode to tints and I'll click Okay. Now I'm going to select this group of lines here. Just make sure that I've got them all selected, which I do have, and I'm going to apply art brush to them. Now I've got my sweeping line at this point. What I do have also though is the distortion, and that's to be expected because each of these little lines is actually a curved line. To remove this distortion, what we have to do is go and select all these lines again and simplify them. I'll choose Object Path, Simplify. Again, I'm going to click on Preview. I'm going to set them to straight lines and I'm going to set the angle threshold to 180. You can see that there's now a series of straight lines. Because they're straight lines, the shape here, when it's applied as an art brush, is not going to be distorted. I'll click Okay. Here is our sweeping line with our shapes, but without any distortion. Now it's very easy at this stage to change out what art brush you're using. If for example you wanted to use stars, you could do so. I'm going click on the star tool here and I'm just going to drag out a star. I'm actually going to fill this with the color I want it to be. I'll fill it with a sort of orange color and I'm going put a sort of dark red stroke on it. That'll make it easier for us to see the overlaps in a minute. With this shape selected, I'm going to make it an art brush because all we need is an art brush to apply to these lines and we're off and running. I'll create an art brush, click Okay. I want to scale it proportionally, but I don't want to colorize it this time because it already has color built into it. Now I also wanted to paint that weigh up the lines, so the line is going through the middle of the star like this. I'll click Okay. I'm going to go ahead and select a group of lines and I'm going to apply the star brush to it. Here we have a sweeping set of stars and you'll see that the point on the stars is running along the line and there is no distortion in the stars. Every single one of these stars is an exact re-size of the one before, but not distorted in any way. 9. Pt 8 Blend and Bend in Color: We're now at the stage where the last thing we need to be able to do is to create the decreasing size object effect on a multi-color line. Now there are few things to concern ourselves with creating this multi-color line option. I'm going to show you some of the math involved and some of the gotchas for creating something that is a multi-color line, so that we can create multi-colored shapes on it. Going to borrow this shape again, choose Edit, Copy, go to a New document. Click Create, and I'm just going to paste this in. I'm going to create this as an art brush now that I'm here, so I'm going to click New Brush, Art brush, click okay. I'll change the direction at painting, it needs to be scaled proportionately. For this one I am going to use a colorization method, because I want it to re-color according to the color of the line that's placed on, and scale proportionately, I want it to get smaller and as the lines get smaller, so I'll click okay. Don't need this anymore, so I'm just going to tuck it out of the way. Now there are few things that are really crucial to getting these lines right. I'm just going to explain to you what I'm doing as I'm going along. I can start with a line segment tool, and I'm going to make a line that is 50 pixels long. I'm going to color it in the first of my colors, which is going to be blue. I'm going to zoom in so I can see this area of my art board and I'm going to drag a duplicate of this line away. I'm going to recolor it and I'm going to size it down to 97 percent of the size of the previous line. That's going to get it a bit smaller as it goes up, and we're going to resize all of these lines as we go. I'm going to all drag on this line. I'll make it a different color again, and it's going to be 97 percent of the size of the previous line. Then one more, we're just going to do four, because the math has been calculated on that basis, 97 percent. Now, let's go to the last pallete and let's just say what we've got and I'm just going to explain to you why what we've got right now isn't going to work. I'm just going to draw a circle here and I'm just going to fill it with a color green just want to show you what the problem is going to be, or one of the problems is going to be. Let's just do a really quick transformation on this. Just going to do four copies and I'm just going move them vertically the way that we're going. You'll see that the shape that we're creating the transformation based on, is at the front and the other shapes are tucked behind it. We're going to need to make sure that as a pattern that our blue shape, which is going to be the first shape is at the very top, and then the orange is behind it and then in green and then the red. So that when we do the repeat transformation, the blue is going to be tucked behind the red. The ordering of these lines in the last pallete is really, really critical. I'm going to remove this set of objects which we only use for demonstration purposes, and I'm going to select these four lines. Now I'm not selecting the actual lines, I'm just selecting the line objects in the layers palette by click the Fly-out menu, I can click Reverse order. That means that the blue one here is at the top, and then the orange and the green and then the red, so they're all in order. Going to select either all of them, I'm going to my align panel, I'm going to choose Show Options. At this stage, I'm going to select Align to Key Object and I want to put some negative spacing in here. I'm going to choose minus 4 pixels, just at this stage. Doesn't have to stay that way, but that's going to be my starting point. I'm just going to click here to align them so that they are now overlapping. Now the next point at which disaster is going to strike, if it's going to strike at all, is in emitting this step. It is crucial that you group these objects. I'm going to choose Object Group. I'll show you a bit later on how you can tell if you haven't grouped your objects, what you're going to say, and you'll know that that's been the problem. I've got my objects grouped, now I can go and do my transformation. Effects, Distort and transform, Transform, Tone preview, on. I want four copies this time, and I've calculated, did these calculations in Excel, that the scale has to be 88 percent. That will ensure that the next blue line that comes in over here is just a bit smaller than this last red one. I'm going to start using my negative value here, and let's just move these up. You can say that these groups of objects are successively getting smaller, but so too are the objects within the group. Everything's looking just fine here, not worried about the spacing that's going to be fixed up in a minute, I'll just click okay. Now at this point with this shape selected, I'm going to burst it out by choosing, Object Expand Appearance. This is the point at which if you haven't grouped those objects, the layers pallet is going to start to show these colors organized together, so all the blues are going to be together, all the oranges are going to be together, all the greens are going to be together and that is just not going to work. You'll have to unwind everything and go back and group those objects, but I've got exactly what I expected to have, which is a series of groups, each of which has the four colors in them. Let's choose, object and group and then object and group. What I'm looking for here again in the layers palette is alternating colors. If the colors are all together, you can't go ahead because it's not going to work. With all of these lines now selected, I'm going back to the Align Panel. I'm going to Align to Key Object, making sure that the first line here is my key object. I'm going to set this to about minus 12 because I think that's going to give me a good overlap. I'll click here on Vertical distribute space. Now this is going to become my art brush, so, let's go and find the brushes here. Well, I can just reset everything and I'm going to create this as a New art brush. I wanted to paint along the line. I don't need to make any other changes, I'll just click okay. Now I'm going to tuck this series of decreasing length aligns away, just in case I need to create a different art brush if the spacing is not correct. I'm going to go to my Pencil tool and draw my sweeping line. I'll select over my line with the selection tool, I'm going to apply my multicolored series of lines to it. I'll choose, Object Expand Appearance, and then Object Group, so that I end up in my layers palette with a series of individual lines, while I've still got groups, now I've got paths here, so everything's right. Now we can go and apply our brush to it. I click here and we have a series of shapes and the shapes are getting smaller and the overlaps are correct. Each one of these shapes is placed on top of the next shape. If we think the spacing's not sufficient, then we can go back to the set of lines. Going back to the Align Panel, again, show options, I'm going to align to Key Object, and this time I'm going to move this down to maybe minus 15 pixels. I'm again going to make an art brush from this, I'm going to choose New Brush, Art Brush, and just make sure that it's going to paint in the correct direction. Let's remove this set of objects, and let's redraw our line. I'll select either the line and apply my new brush to it. The newest brush's always going to be the last one in the palette. Now I'll choose Object Expand Appearance, and then I'm going to Ungroup this into the individual objects, so I can now reapply my art brush. This time I have a better overlapping sequence because they're overlapping From the first shape forward. Now the only thing that I need to concern myself about, is that of course the shapes are still distorting, so we need to go and make our lines straight. I'm going to select either all of these shapes here, choose Object path, simplify, and again, we're going to choose straight lines and a 180 degree angle threshold click okay. Now all these individual lines are straight lines, so they shape, the art brushes applied to these lines is not going to be distorted in any way. There's how you can create multicolored decreasing size shapes, along a line with no distortion in Illustrator. 10. Pt 9 Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the effects that you've seen in this class. You may choose to make a bunting brush that has no distortion in it. A little bit more difficult would be to create the multi-color bunting brush that has no distortion. Of course, you don't have to use triangles for bunting. You could do that using stars or any other shape of your choice. You may also choose to create a series of decreasing size elements along an interesting line form. You can choose to remove the distortions or the shapes are all must and even by creating that line of lines itself. If you're feeling really confident, give the last brush or try and create multicolored decreasing size lines so that your shapes are going to be multicolored and also free from distortion. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned things about Illustrator that you were unaware of before. As you're watching this class, you will have seen a prompt which asks you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, give it a thumbs up and write in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations are helpful to other students because it lets them see that this is a class that they might learn from and enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of GRAPHIC design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 11. Bonus How to make the percentage calculations: This is an add on video to explain how I got the percentages that I used in the multi-color diminishing line brush. In that particular brush, we had four lines; there was a blue, an orange, a green, and a red. These lines were calculated, their length was calculated using a percentage, and then the next set of lines were calculated using a transformer effects, so we have to calculate two percentage values here. I'm just going to start with the line colors here, and my initial blue line was going to be 50 pixels in length. What I want to just as arbitrary value, just something that I could work with, was I said to myself, okay, if I want the blue line the next time I have this blue line, for it to be 44 pixels in length, and I need to calculate how I'm going to get these line lengths so that 44 is the next line length. What was happening was that I was multiplying the blue value by a percentage to get the orange. For now I'm just going to type in 90 percent. I'm just going to put in a value that I can use in my calculations, I know it's wrong, but that's going to be easy to fix in a minute. What I did was I typed in here equal 50 and I'm going to multiply it by 90 percent. A multiplication sign, click on this cell, and because this cell can't change as I copy the formula across, I'm going to need to fix it. I click inside the cell and press the F4 function key, or I could just type $C$3. The value is in C3, I don't want it to change, that's how you fix it in Excel. I'm just going to press Enter, and then I'm going to copy this across. Obviously 90 percent is not a big enough percentage because I'm not getting to 44 here. The value is reducing too quickly. I could come in here and try 91 percent and keep trying different values until I can get the blue to 44. But there's another way and that's using a Goal Seek Function. I'm going to the Data tab to What-If Analysis, I'm going to Goal Seek. What I want to do is I want to set this cell, so I'm just going to go and click in this cell. I want to set it to 44, and I want to change this cell to get there. I'm going to click here, click this cell, and click Enter. I'm asking Excel to go and set that this cell here to 44 by somehow changing this cell, because these are all formulas, Excel's going to do all the work for me. It's worked out that it's 97 percent, and because I want that 97 percent to be sticky, I'm just going to click "OK". Here's where I got the initial 97 percent. You need to multiply the length of the blue line by 97 percent to get the length of the orange line, then the orange line by 97 percent to get the ideal length for the green line and so on. That will get me to the second blue line being about 44 pixels in length. But these four are created as a group and then this one has to be created as a transformation. To get from one blue to the next blue, I need a different percent, and all I'm going to do is to divide this number by this number. I'll type equal, here's the blue value divided by the first blue value, and you can see that it's near enough to 88 percent. That's why when we use Distort and Transform, we're going to reduce the line length by 88 percent, but we use 97 percent for the decrease in values across the initial group of lines. Now you could do exactly the same calculations with more than four line colors. All you need to do is just to follow this basic structure of creating a small worksheet to make the calculations for you. Then you can just go and plug these calculations in as and when you need them.