Transcripts
1. It's in the Frame introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class: It's in the Frame, Using Shapes, Fills, Strokes, and Color in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today's course, It's in the Frame, I've designed for a cute text frame that looks simple but which packs a lot of learning. You'll learn to make the shape, embellish it with multiple strokes and fills including a scarp edge and dotted lines. You'll see how to use graphic styles, how to find color schemes online, and how to create a series of text lines and a flower. You'll also learn a fun technique for recoloring your design. I'm sure you'll love the resulting image and that you'll add new techniques to your Illustrator skill set.
2. It's in the Frame part 1 Create the Shape: To create our illustration, I'll choose File and then New. I'm choosing a letter size document in landscape orientation, and RGB color mode, and I'll click "Okay". The shape that we're going to create is going to be easy for us to create if we do it from a pace of type, because you see the curly bracket shape is a perfect shape for the edges of the shape that we want to make. I'm going to click on the Type Tool and I'm just going to increase my font size to about 400 points to start off with. Then I'm going to click, and I'm going to type a curly bracket. I'm just going to move it a little bit further down into position so we can see it clearly, and I'm going to select it with the text tool. Now I'm going to my font list and I'm going to hover over the current font and just hovering there, I'm going to start pressing the down arrow key, because I'm looking for a good character to use for the side of my shape. I'm looking for an interesting curve and ideally this part of the character should come to a point, although that's not totally required. Many of these characters are just not going to work at all, and some of them will. This one would be pretty good, and so too with this. But I've got one that I've got my heart set on, so I'm just going to go down and find it. It's Palace Script MT. I'm actually giving you a link where you can download that font if you want to use that. I'm going to choose that, but I don't think my character is big enough, so I'm going to make it 450 points before I finish. Now let's move it back approximately in the position it's going to take up in our illustration. Right now this is a text character, so we need to turn it into outlines with anchor points and handles. To do this, I'll choose Type and then Create Outlines. Now we have all the handles and anchors around this shape. It's no longer a type character, it's just a regular Illustrator shape. Let's just go and have a look at the top part of this shape, and I'm going to use the direct selection tool. I'm going to click on this anchor point here. It's the one at the beginning of this inside part of the shape. When I click on it and press the Delete key, I'm going to break the character at that point. I'm also going to flip this so that I have a stroke and no fill, and you can see that the line has been broken here. Let's zoom out with Control zero. Let's zoom back in over the bottom part of the shape. Let's do the same thing at the bottom. I want this inner anchor point here. Select it with the direct selection tool, press the Delete key to break the shape at that point. Control zero to go back out to the full document size. Now I'm going to the selection tool. It's critical that you use the selection tool at this point and that you click on the inner line. We want to just keep clicking until you get it and not the other line. You'll do that if you go into isolation mode. If you click on it enough times, you'll finally end up having just the inner line selected. With it selected, just press Delete. Now we've got just the outer line. I'm going to select the direct selection tool and select over two points here, which were separated from each other just a little bit. I want them to be over the top of each other, and to do that I'm going to choose Object, Path, Average. I'm going to select Both, then I'll click "Okay". Now we have a pointy end here. Now I'm in isolation mode, so I'm going to press the Escape key to just get back into the regular Illustrator editor mode. We have the first side to our four-sided shape and we just need to use it now to create the other three sides. I'll select it with the selection tool and choose Object, Transform, Reflect. I have preview enabled here and I want to reflect it over the vertical, so I'm making sure that it's reflected the opposite way to the way it was a few seconds ago which it is, and I'll click "Copy". Now I can move the second shape away from the first. I'm just going to use the smart guides to line it up, and there it is. It's lined up nicely. Now select over both shapes, and I'll choose Object, Transform, Rotate. Again, I want preview turned on and this time I want to rotate around 90 degrees. You can see it's now rotated around 90 degrees, and I'll click "Copy". Now we have all four sides of our shape, it's just that everything is not lining up particularly well, but we can solve that by just bringing in the sides. I'm bringing in the top and bottom so that they line up with the sides. Then I'm going to bring the sides in so they line up perfectly. You can see it's now all aligned and we're ready to join these pieces together. Now in an ideal world, this would work. I'll click on the selection tool. I'll select over all four of these shapes and I'll choose Object, Path, and then Join. Well, I've encountered all sorts of problems trying to join this set of paths together and I've found that basically the join option is really unreliable. Because even if I can get it to be not grayed out, it doesn't work anyway on this particular shape. But there is a much easier solution. Select over all of these shapes and then go to the Shape Builder tool. It shares a toolbar position here with the Live Paint Bucket and the Live Paint Selection tool, and it's just a whole lot smarter tools than the join tool. With the shape builder selected, we're just going to hover over this shape and you can see that it gets a grid over it. That's telling us that the shape builder sees this as a potential as being a single shape. We're just going to click in the middle of the shape. Now when we go back out with the selection tool, we'll find that we've got a single shape. We can prove that here in the Layers pallet. We've got a group here that has just a single path in it. Here is the path that is the single shape that we have in our illustration. I seem to have a couple of little leftover bits of type there, so I'm just going to drag them into the trash can as they no longer required. Now we have the shape that we're ready to use to create the rest of our illustration with.
3. It's in the Frame part 2 Decorate the Shape: Before we start coloring the shape that we have, let's go and look in a way that we can find some handy color schemes to use. I'm choosing Window, and then Color Themes, and this opens up a dialogue, and at the very foot of this dialogue is an option to launch the Adobe Color website. I'm going to click here and it opens my browser at the Adobe Color website. Here if I click on "Explore'', I can go and explore color schemes to see if there's something that I may want to use. Now I'm thinking some sort of pastel colors would be good here. I'm going to type in "Pastel" as a search term and press ''Enter''. An Adobe Color is coming back with a whole heap of pastel color schemes, something here might be something that I want to use. If I see something that I particularly like, I can click its thumbnail here, that's the Appreciate icon. When I appreciate it, I then make it available in a few minutes inside Illustrator. I'm just going to go and get another one. I think this one's cool too, so I'm going to click on it. When I first came to use Adobe Color I needed to sign in with my Adobe ID and that links it back to my Illustrator and also to Photoshop. When I go back to Illustrator, all I need to do is to click the "Sync" button here. Illustrator will then go and look at Adobe Color and say, "Okay, what additional color schemes has she favorited, " and we'll just add them to the list and he is one of them, the other one will be there somewhere. Now if I want to use this entire color scheme, I'm going to select it here in the list. I'm going to click the ''Dropdown list'' here and choose Add To Swatches. In fact, the one I actually do want to use is called Pistachio, here it is. I'm going to add it as well. Then I can close down Color Themes, and here in my color swatches are the color themes that I had selected online favorited, brought into Adobe Illustrator and now I've decided that I want these as swatches in this particular illustration. I think that you'll really like Adobe color and its integration with Illustrator. It's getting better every time they upgrade Illustrator. Now let's select a shape and fill it with one of these green colors. I think this green color here will be fine. Then we're going to add a stroke to it. Now the current stroke is black, but since we want to do a whole lot of things with this stroke, we're going to click on the ''Appearance panel''. I'm just going to drag it out here where we can see it because this object is going to have a hole lot of different strokes and fills applied to it. We're going to start with a brown strokes. I'm just going to click here, and I'm going to click on the brown that I brought in with the color scheme and I'm going to make the stroke just a little bit thicker, probably around two points. Inside that I want a white dotted stroke. I'm going to add another stroke to this object, I'll click ''Add New Stroke''. I'm going to set it to be white. Now, right now the new white strike is immediately underneath the brown stroke and we're not seeing it because it's the exact same size, but we want it to be polka dots as well as inside the shape. Well, the first thing to do is to move it inside the shape, and we do that by choosing Effect, Path, Offset Path. This allows us to offset the path for this stroke away from the very edge of the shape. By default, it's set to 10 points outside the shape, and since this is why we can't even see it, but if I click in the ''Offset'' and stop bringing it down to a negative value, we're going to start seeing it inside the shape and there you can see the white line coming in. We're going to make this polka dots. I'm just looking at a pretty good position for it, probably around minus seven points, and I'll click ''Okay'', and to make a polka dots, we're going to click on the word ''Stroke'' here. We're going to make the caps round, we're going to set up dash line. We're going to do zero as a dash and then we're going to tap across here and make our gap something like 12 points and that gives us a very fine dotted line. The gap is way too big. I'm just going to bring it down a little bit. In fact, it's down here now to something like eight points, and I think the white needs to be up a little bit too. You can just eyeball your dots and see if they look all right, I'm pretty happy with those now. I'm just going to click away from that. Now you can say that we have two strikes already on this shape and I want to add another stroke. I'm going to click here on ''Add New Stroke". This is the new strike that I've just added. You can see that it's white and at the moment it's dashed. I'm just going to click on the ''Stroke'' option here, and I'm going to turn off dashed. It's now a single line and you can see just here that it's sitting underneath that brown line. Well, we don't want it to be there, we want it to be inside everything. We need to offset it as well. I'm going to make sure that I have just this stroke selected. I don't want to offset more than just this one. I'm going to click it and choose Effect and then Path, and then Offset Path. I'm going to click on ''Preview'', and now I'm going to bring it in. I'm going to decrease this value until I get it into position. Now, it's a little bit thicker than I want, but that's fine. I can live with that right now, let's just click ''Okay'' and I'm going to make sure that I thin it down a little bit. I'm going to select it and just make it a two point line instead of a three point line. That's looking pretty good now. Now at this point what I want to do is change the colors. I want to change the inside of this shape now to a slightly different green, one I brought in with the palette. This time I want to add a different fill. I'm going to click here on ''Add New Fill'' and this adds a new fill to my shape. But of course it's going right on top of the other fills and the other strokes. Well, the reason for this is we need to bring it in a little bit, but first let's change its color. I'm just going to click on here to make it a sort of bluey green color, and now again with this fill selected, let's offset it. Effect, Path, Offset Path, click on ''Preview'' and let's start bringing this in. We're going to bring it in so it's just inside the last white stroke that we added, and I'll click ''Okay''. This shape now has three strikes and two fills. Before we progress, I want to add another color to add color scheme. I'm just going to click here on the ''Color Scheme'' and I'm just going to drag this color, this brown color, onto the new icon and that just adds it in a second time. I'm going to bring it down into here, double-click on it to open up the swatch options. I'm doing this in HSB mode because that makes it very easy for me to just choose a darker version of the current brown color and click on ''Preview'' so you can see it. You can see I'm working with a darker version of this brown and I'll click ''Okay''. Let's go back to our shape here. As a final option, I want to add a scalloped edge to it. I'm going to add that using a new stroke. Now, I seem to have lost the stroke color for this outside lines. I'm just going to put that back in place. I'm going to click ''Add New Stroke'' and here's the stroke that I'm working on and you can see that this one is the second to top one. I want it to appear behind the brown. I'm happy that I'm working on this one. I'm going to make it a darker brown I saw. The brown that I've just created it as and I need it to be a little bit wider because I need to actually be able to see it. Now I need to turn it into a little scalloped edge. Well, I do that by clicking on the stroke option and making it a dotted line. I'm going to click on ''Dashed'', I'm going to click on the rounded top, and you can see here that it is a sort line, but the gap is too big. I'm just going to start decreasing the gap. I want to do that until I've got a nice little scalloped edge. I'm going to work at a combination of gap and the actual point size. I have a six-point line with a six-point gap, and that's a pretty good result for me. I'm just going to click away from the shape and see it. While this strike is still not quite where I want it to be, you can see that it's a row of dots. If we want just a scalloped edge, then we're going to have to move it below the outside edge as well. Let's select over the shape and let's take this stroke and let's drag it all the way down to under the first fill and now it looks like a scalloped edge. Let's just zoom into the edge of our shape and just see what we've got. Here we've got one fill, we've got a stroke line, we've got the main fill, we've got a set of dotted lines, we've got an outside stroke here and then a stroke behind everything else that is dots, because we've pushed it behind everything else, it looks like a scalloped edge. That's the design that we're going to use here. I'm ready now to just size it down a little bit. I'm going to hold the "Shift key as I size my shape down a little bit and just position it. Well, let's position it in the middle of the artboard. I'm going to select over it and then from the Window Align options I'm going to select Show Options. I need to align this to the artboard. I'm going to click ''Artboard'' and I'm going to center it and center it. Now it's right in the middle of the artboard. Now that we've finished our curly brace shape, we're ready to go ahead and finish our illustration.
4. It's in the Frame part 3 Add the Ribbon: The ribbon behind the shape is created using a rectangle. I'm just going to click on the Rectangle tool. I'm going to draw a rectangle here. I'm going to click on it with the Selection tool and I'm going to align it too to the artboard so it's nice and centered. I also need to move it behind my main shape. I'm going to the Layers panel, you can see here is the rectangle, and here is the path containing our shape. I'm just going to drag the rectangle below the path, and that just reorders the two. Now we need to get all of these strokes that we applied to this curly bracket shape onto the shape below. Now the last thing we want to do is to have to go and recreate those because we took all the trouble of creating them in the first place. Well, we can solve the problem with graphic styles. I'll click ''Window'' and then "Graphic Styles". What we'll do is we'll pick up this curly bracket shape, we're just going to drag from the middle and drop it into the Styles palette. I'll click and drag. What we're doing here is not actually moving it into the Styles palette, but saying to Illustrator, however this shape looks, we want you to save that so that we can use it in a minute on another shape. Well, the shape we want to use it on is this one here. I'll select that shape and I'm just going to click on the Graphic Style. That applies all of those same styles to that shape. It's a nice quick way of copying styles. Now for this particular shape, I don't want the edges here. If I try and bring it in, I'm just going to continue to move the edges into my illustration. I can actually cut those edges off. The easiest way to, if you like, cut them off, is to create a clipping mask. I'm going to go here to the Rectangle tool, and I'm just going to click and drag a rectangle the size of the art board over the entire shape. Now this has a stroke on it, so we're going to remove the stroke from it, and it also has a fill. Now, I'm going to use this thing for two things. This rectangle is going to be used not only as a clipping path, but I also want another copy of it as a background. I'm going to start by creating the background. I'm not really liking that yellow much at all, but let's just go with it for now. I have one filled rectangle, the size of the artboard, and it's up here at the very top. I want to duplicate it, so I'm going to drag it onto the new icon here to create a duplicate of it, and I'm going to move one of them to the very back. This one is going to become my background. Now for now I can lock it down and I can turn it off. This is the one I'm most interested in, this rectangle at the top, because I'm going to use it as a clipping path for this object here. I've selected the object that is the size of the artboard, and the rectangle that I want to clip, and I'll choose Object, Clipping Mask, Make. That just clips the rectangle to the size of the artboard. It's also rearranged my layers, but we already know that that's a really easy solution to come to. I'm going back over to my Layers palette, I'm just going to grab this clipping group and put it behind. Now let's bring back our extremely overdone yellow background, and we can unlock this shape and select it. I think for the background, in fact, we're going to use a variation of one of the other colors in our color palette. Let's just go to the brown here, and then let's double-click on it here. Let's come up with a much lighter version of it. I think that's still too pinky. Let's just go here. I think that's a little bit better. Having done that, let's drag this color into our Swatches palette. If we don't want this one any longer, we can just trash it. It's like this is a better representation of what our Swatches palette looks like. Next up, we want to create a shadow effect, and the way we can do this is to take this shape and duplicate it. I'm going to the Layers panel and an easy way of duplicating a shape is to just drag its path onto the new path icon. Now I've got two shapes identical to each other on top of each other. I want to create a shadow, so I want to target the one below. I just want to fill it with the default color, so I'm just going to press letter ''D''. That's going to fill it with a black stroke and a white fill, and I'm just going to start moving it. I'm just pressing the Arrow keys to move it out and down, so that it creates a shadow effect. Now, I don't want this fill and stroke, but I just did want to see the back shape behind the front shapes, so I could see if I've got the offset that I want. I do right now have that. What I'm going to do is remove the stroke from this shape, I'm going to target the fill. I'm going to fill it with the exact same green color as I used for the original shape. Let's just go and give it this green fill. As I still have it selected, I'm going to the Appearance panel which appears to have disappeared from the side of my screen. I'm just going to choose Window, Appearance, and what I want to do is I want to make it darker where it applies as a shadow. I'm going to take its opacity drop-down here. I'm going to blend it using multiply blend mode, and then click away from my document. Let's just put my Appearance panel back into position. But look what happens when we change its blend mode to multiply. I'm just going to zoom in to this area of the illustration. You can see here that the green is changing color and it changes color because it's acting as a shadow effect on the colors below. The shadow is picking up the color of the objects that it's placed on top of. It just gives us a slightly more interesting shadow effect.
5. It's in the Frame part 4 Text lines and a flower: The next thing to create on a shape or the writing lines. I'm going to click on the Line Segment Tool here, and I'm going to hold the Shift key down as I draw out a line. Now, it's not in quite the right position, so I'm just going to line it up here. I can actually align it to the artboard by clicking "Horizontal Align Center". Now let's go and get a color for it. Since it is a single line, we're just going to be able to apply a stroke to it. I'm going to stroke it with the brown color that we've been using for the outside edge of this shape. I'm going to increase the stroke weight to around three points for now. Now we want this to be a dotted line, so we just need to adjust the stroke to make it a dotted line. We've done that before so it's the same process. Click on "Stroke", make rounded caps, click on "Dashed Line" and here we've got the last setting we use which is zero point dash and a six-point gap. Well, I don't think that this is big enough, so I'm going to make the dots bigger and I'm going to make the gap a bit bigger. I'm going to click away from the shape. I think my line could actually be a little wider, so I'm just going to hold down the Alt key as I drag out a slightly longer line. Now that's looking pretty good there. What I need to do is to make this single line into a series of lines. We're going to use a different tool to do that. We're going to choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. This is a tool I really like. It's extremely powerful. Let's click on "Preview", and let's say we want an extra five lines over and above the lines that we have here. I've set up, previewed on five copies and now what I need to do is just to move this line down. I'm just going to adjust the vertical to space those lines out. Now I think I need a few more lines, so I can just adjust this, let's say seven lines and then let's just increase the vertical a little bit. When you're happy, just click "Okay". Now everything is just still one line. So we can move this line down and the whole series of lines is going to be adjusted with it. some is a very powerful tool here. It's going to re-adjust the alignment and just make sure it is centered on the art board here. Now we could expand that if we wanted to do something with these individual lines, but for now, we're just really no need to expand it. Finally, we need to deal with a flower that goes in down here. For the flower I'm going to take the ellipse tool. I'm just going to drag out an ellipse and I'm going to fill it with the darker green color that we've been using here. I'm going to grab the direct selection tool, then grab the point here and just turn it into a corner. I'm going to drag it out a little bit, and maybe just shorten this and a little bit. Now this is the petal of my flower so with it selected, I'm actually going to use that exact same tool again, the distort and transform effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. It will do things like rotations as well as making things move. I'm going to click on "Preview", so I can see what I'm doing. I want a five petaled flower, which means I need four copies of this original shape. I want to rotate it around this point here. Of these nine little boxes here, the one I want to use is the middle at the top that will mark this as the rotation point. Now I need to rotate these around the number of degrees that will give me five petals. If I don't want to do the math myself, I can type 360 divided by 5, and Illustrator will do the math for me. There is the shape that we wanted. It's a perfect five petaled flower, so click "Okay". Now this is all a single shape. If we were to change the size of this leaf or this petal for example, then the whole flower is going to reform. You can see that you can size the flower and it's just a single leaf. Let's go and add a center to it. I'm just going to drag out a small center. I'm going to move it into position. I'm going to select the center of the flower and then Shift-click on the petal because that's all this flower is and choose "Object Group". Now, these two are grouped together so they'll travel together. I can just move them down and into position. If the flower is too big, I just need to again re-size my petal. I'm just going to make sure that it's aligned to the center of our illustration.
6. It's in the Frame part 5 Add text and recolor: Now our illustration is pretty much complete and all you want to do now is to just make any minor changes to the document. For example, if you still not happy with the background as I'm not happy with the background. This is going to go to the last palette, make sure I have the background selected and I'm going to see if I can do something with this color because I'm really still not liking it at all. I'm going to add that color to my color swatch. I'm just going to go and grab it and bring it into my color swatch. Now, that is the document finished, and so you'll go ahead and save it as an Illustrator document with File Save. Now if you want to know how to get the text into the document, you'll just go to the Text Tool and click on a line here. You're going to have to re-size the ticks because last time we used it, it was really big. I was going to try 30 points and see how that's looking. Try probably more like about 40 points would be good. You'll go and find a font that you like. Now, I have chosen a font that's called Coventry Garden. So I'm just going to go and get Coventry Garden. Let's just type on this one. Okay, So this is the typing that I used for the main illustration of this particular shape. I'm just going to move the type into position, so it's over the first set of lines. But when we've got so many lines and such a little block of type, it would be nicer if we were to use every second row of dots. Well, we can do that by clicking on the character option for the font. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the leading, which is going to push the type down. So it's not changing the type size, it's just changing it's position. I'm just going to push it until it appears roughly where I want it to appear. Let's just send other type as well. Then we'll just move it back into position. Now if you're having trouble selecting and moving the text, what you can do is you can go and lock down everything else in the illustration so that the only thing that you can select is the text just makes it a little bit easier to move it into position. We can also use the alignment tool to align it to the center since it's centered within its textbox. Come back here now and just unlock everything. Now I think the text is black and I'm not really liking black for my text. So I'm just going to my swatches panel and let's go and make it this dark brown that we've been using in the illustration. Now we can save the illustration with File Save, and we're done for now. But, there is another technique that I'd really like to show you, which is a lot of fun, particularly with something that's colored attractively like this. I'm going to go into the last pallet and I'm going to select all layers in this document. Then I'm going up to the Swatches palette. I'm going to click here on Create New Color Group and click ''Okay''. That creates a color group of all the colors that are used in this particular document. Now I'm going to click here on Edit or Apply Color Group. This opens up this dialogue. What we're most interested in all the fun part of this is the Edit Options and then click on ''Edit''. I've got my things linked here. You want to make sure that this raids unlink harmony colors because that means that they're linked right now and start dragging around on these colors. What happens is when you drag around is that the relationship with the colors is maintaining its stability, but the colors themselves are changing. So you can instantly recolor this illustration by just dragging around on this set of sliders. You can also drag out and in. If you drag out, you're going to get more saturated colors. If you drag more towards the center, you're going to get more pastel colors. But any one of these sliders can be dragged out or in. The nice thing about this is because we use such a nice palette that we grabbed from Adobe Color. The relationship between the colors in the original pallet was so nice that all of these colors that were able to pick in this color scheme creator here are just perfect. Everything is looking really, really good. If you want to be a little bit more flexible, well you can unlink these colors. You could go and get any color from the color scheme and walk it to a different area. You could actually bring in some greens into a sort design if you wanted to. There's so much fun and so much flexibility to be had in this color creator here that I think you're going to really, really enjoy it. I'd encourage you for your project. Maybe submit a couple of illustrations, one with the original colors and one with a new set of colors that you've created using this color creator here. Now, when you find a color combination that you like, click here on New Color Group. That just creates it as a new color group for your illustration and click ''Okay'' Now it's wise whenever you're working with color schemes like this is to save every iteration of the document. Just choose File Save As, and create this as a different color scheme version of your document. Then you can go back in and play with the color scheme generator. You just want to make sure that you have your color scheme selected here before you go back into Edit or Apply Color Group and make changes to your document. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
