Design an Authentic Victorian Monogram ~ in Adobe Illustrator

1. Class Introduction: Who doesn't love a royal wedding or an opulent period. With the popularity of recent royal weddings and lush period dramas, we've been experiencing a radical swing in online wedding invitation design trends. Moving from it, this to this, I couldn't be happier. Hi, I'm Alma, a wedding invitations shop owner, operator from 2008 to 2017, as I've continued to consult with brides now as a wedding invitation designer, one of the most recent trends my brides are requesting is one version or other of the Victorian monogram style. In this class, you will learn how to create your own authentic Victorian monogram, even if you have no artistic abilities whatsoever. We will be working in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator can be a daunting app to master. Believe me, I know you'll be introduced to tips and techniques that will have you moving around. Illustrator like a seasoned pro, even if you have little or no previous experience of your own, this class is perfect for anyone looking to break out of the, but I have no talent box. Whether you're a graphic designer with some familiarity with Adobe Illustrator, or even if you have 0 art or graphic design experience, and you're just ready to challenge the box. By the end of this class, you will have created a one-of-a-kind, authentic Victorian monogram and have the toolset and confidence to be able to offer one-of-a-kind monogram designs to your clients as well. So what are you waiting for? Let's go make something beautiful. 2. Why Adobe Illustrator?: Hey, welcome to my class, design and authentic Victorian monogram in Adobe Illustrator. The inspiration for this class came from one of my brides who recently requested that I designed her wedding invitation around an authentic style Victorian monogram. Now, if you've ever seen my class design wedding invitations, that cell, you'll know that I do not profess to be an artist and graphic design is not my background. I came into what, an invitation design, VMI direct daily interaction with brides as a wedding invitation retailer. In fact, I did everything I could to try to get everyone else I knew interested in designing for me anything to keep from having to learn that dreaded design software myself, but it didn't work. I had to learn the most intricate software ever laid eyes on mine. I've been using computers since. This is what you saw when you signed into one of your computer apps, which we call programs back then. Little by little, asking questions, watching videos and spending hours asking Google how to do something that I didn't even know what the name of it was. I taught myself to use Adobe Illustrator. That it's now my go-to program for anything I create and don't tell InDesign. But I've even designed all of these purely on Illustrator. But given all that, I am still by no means an expert in this class, I won't be teaching you the only way to do something, or even the best way to do something. I'm merely teaching you the way that I've learned to use Illustrator and what has worked really great for me as an invitation designer. If you type in invitation design into YouTube search window, the first selection that pops up, and therefore the most popular, is in Photoshop, not in Illustrator. So why is it that I, a wedding invitation retailer come designer choose to design in Illustrator and Photoshop. Well, it goes back to the phenomena I discussed in design wedding invitations. One of the online universe being inundated with graphic designers throwing their hats into the ROI of invitation design in the wedding invitation design marketplace. Just because one has professional grade software and can design beautiful artwork and then surrounded with wedding invitation wording sounding words does not make one a wedding invitation designer or an invitation designer for that matter. If you are a designer serious about a career in wedding invitation design, you must be able to create artwork that can be professionally printed on an actual printing press. Not just your really good desktop printers. You're printing fulfillment partner will need to take your rendered artwork and create printing plates with whether the process be thermography or engraving or letterpress or foil stamping, even professional grade digital printing must be about wallets and resolution. And that clarity can never achieved in Photoshop. In this Photoshop example here, I've opened a 300 dpi document and typed in sample wording. Look at what happens to my text as I zoom in on it. A printer would never be able to make clear plates using artwork rendered this way. Yet on the other hand, opening up the same size document in Illustrator and creating the exact same artwork. This is what happens when you zoom into your text. Beautiful printer plates would come from this, which in turn would create beautiful Chris, invitation products. And not only that, should you find your fulfillment printer needs aren't rendered at a higher DPI, you can easily increase your resolution at the last minute. Why? Because Illustrator renders vector artwork. The raster art that's created through Photoshop, which helps you understand that all of these Photoshop invitation designers have never had their invitations professionally reproduced, let alone do they? No proper wedding invitation protocol. But instead are likely non-professionals who just really know their way around a graphic design program and are just trying to be really helpful with what they know. But that's not to say I never used Photoshop. I actually use it often to render or recolor my digital art when I'm doing a digital print design. But then again, I import it back into Illustrator and render my preprocessor output from there. For this class, we'll begin with the simple premise that our newest brighter client has requested an invitation with vintage style monogram as it's designed elements authentic. You remember that I did say I'm not an artist, right? So there's no way that I have the skill to produce something like this for her. Right. Or like they say, I wasn't born yesterday. I had been at this business since 2008. And if there is something that I know, It's fonts or things that act like bonds. From my recollection, there's a boundary that does a fantastic job of curating heraldic and Victorian style monograms and turning them into fonts. So when I got this request, I went straight to my browser and typed in intellect. And sure enough, there they were. Collected designs has a great page on my fonts. They've accumulated a huge amount of original monograms and turn them into a font that you can buy for a nominal price, which I would simply just conclude in my production cost if I needed to purchase one. I'm a GP, so I always look for a way around it. And lo and behold, on the font.com, intellect ahead, multiple miscellaneous font selections available free for personal use. The Ladies and gentlemen just found a treasure trove of authentic monograms to use as our foundation base. Our re-creation of an authentic style month gram, which is why we say we are creating an authentic Victorian monogram. What we will be doing is creating a new original monogram by taking one initial from one intellect a monogram, and merging that with another initial from another intellect, a monogram and buy this creating our own unique, yet still authentic Victorian monograph. So the first step for a project is for you to choose the two initials that you will be wanting to merge. For the single monogram, my brides initials were H and C. So those are the initials that I'll be using for this tutorial. Steps for creating the monogram will be the same regardless of the initial set you choose. Once you've selected the initials for your monogram, step two is to go through the different collections and find your first initial in the available monogram. And more importantly, to find the letter in that style that you or your bride likes the most. There are plenty of different styles for each letter of the alphabet. So take your time and finding the one that works best for you. Once you find it, make note of the collection it came from. And most importantly, the letter or number that will render that initial from within that font collection. Then do the same with your second initial, making sure that the two letters will pair nicely with each other and becoming a whole. Now that you have your initial selective download the particular collection or collections that contained the initials you chose and install your downloaded fonts in your project area. Let us know what to do, since we'll be working with and also let us see which to monograms you've selected that you will be verging into your unified. If you don't yet have a subscription to Adobe Illustrator, I've placed a link for a free seven-day trial within the project description area. So make sure to download and install that. As well. As I mentioned before, my brides initials were see an H and these are the options that I gave to her for her to choose from. Meet me in our following lesson. And I'll show you just switch one. She chose to you there. 3. Our Monogram Begins!: Hey, welcome back. By now, you should have decided on the two initials you're going to be using for your final monogram. Found those particular initials in the style that you want it, and downloaded those fonts to your system. So if you've got all that done, let's get going. Let's begin by creating a new document. And since we'll be working in vector and placing our art later into our invitation or into another project. We won't need a specific size, so we'll just use the first one here, but we will be creating this for print. So we'll want to make sure our raster effects is at a 300 DPI or higher because we will be printing this. And right now we're going to keep our colors RGB, because we'll be sending proofs back-and-forth to our bride. And if we're working with any sort of color, will want to make sure it's showing up correctly for her on her screen or her monitor. And then once you're ready to go to Print, will want to remember to change our document color settings to a CMYK because that's what our printers will print it and you want your colors to print properly. Okay, so let's click Create. Now as I plan to work with our monogrammed initials side-by-side. I'm going to go in and change my art board settings here to horizontal. Now this is a layout that I generally use when working in Illustrator. So for the rest of the project, the panels that you'll want to make sure you have available to you, or of course, your layers panel, your Pathfinder panel, and your appearance panel. Now if you don't have those showing up on your workspace, what you'll wanna do is simply go here to the windows drop-down menu in the toolbar and just select those from here. Okay, our next step will be to pull in the two monograms with the initial selected that we're going to merge. And these were the two initials at my bride settled on for her age and her see, my initials will be coming from the intellect or monograms, random samples five set, and going through their character map, I have located that those initials are the lowercase g and the lowercase j. Back in our document. Let's grab the text tool, click anywhere on your art board, and then change the text to our first initial. Highlight, your initial and your character window on the menu bar, again, typing in the intellect of fonts that you installed and select it. Next, grab your Selection tool and holding down the Shift key, pull out one of the corners of your initials bounding box until it's the size you'd feel comfortable working with. And while it's still selected, holding down your Alt key, your command key on a Mac click and drag to create a duplicate initial, grab your text tool and type in your second initial. I'm gonna go back into my selection tool to get out of my type tool. And the reason that I don't just use the V shortcut is because if you go right into your V, When you're in your type tool, you'll pull up whatever the V is in the font you've been using. Which is the main reason I keep my selection tool really close to me on my workspace, since I'm always working with type and I go back-and-forth with my type tool so often I need it as close to me as possible so I can get to the actual menu item as quickly as I can because I can't use a shortcut for it. Now as opposed to Photoshop, where you're told over and over again not to work destructively because we're working with vectors. I do work destructively. So because of that, I always make an additional copy of the elements I'm working with. And I set them aside by holding my Alt and clicking on them and pulling them off in case I need to go back and pull them back up there already here. And since we are working with layers, what I like to do is put these on a layer of their own at the bottom and disappear them. So I do that by first cutting and then making sure I highlight the layer I want this on and pasting in front and then disappearing them while I work on my art board here. Now fortunately for this monogram that my brightest selected, her C has the same style k within it that she is wanting for her age. So what I am going to do is size these equally so that in the end this H will be the size of this case. So to do that, I'm going to pull up my rulers and pull down guides to let me know how tall I want my h. So this will be my top, my bottom of my age. I now call my h over here and size it accordingly. And I'm holding down the Shift key as I do it. And there I am satisfied with the size of this age and the size of the sea. Now that I have my h size, I'm going to disappear it and work on my seat. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to disappear the k. I'm going to cut the K out of my C So that what I'm left with only my C and I'll do the same with my h. And we will then merge the two together. In order to do this, I'm going to go to my type menu and select Create Outlines and turn this monogram now into a vector shapes so that we can use our various tools that Illustrator has in order to modify our artwork. And one of my favorite tools is the Eraser tool. Let me enlarge the size of my eraser by pressing my right bracket. And now I can go in and just wipe all of this out. And this is the reason why I make sure that I keep a copy. Now I'm gonna go in deeper it by hitting Control plus and cool the art board much closer to me so that I can get in with a finer detail on the eraser. Now, at this point, we're not trying to perfect our artwork just yet. We're just trying to clean it up as much as possible. And I'm wanting to review my two original monograms. There are some shadow pieces that I might want to preserve in case I'd like to add them back into the design and make it look as authentic as possible. So if I go back to my original, I can see that the original K had an over, under, under over pattern. And I'm going to want to repeat that same pattern with my age. So I definitely want to preserve this shadow here under the sea in case I want to use that when filling in my age. So let's zoom in to get closer to our artwork and we're going to use another one of my favorite illustrator tools, which is the knife tool. We're going to slice off a shadow right here. But before we do, will have to activate our artwork with our direct selection tool. Then grab our knife tool and slice cleanly over each of the blue anchor points in our path. Then de-select to our artwork by clicking on the selection tool, then deactivating your artwork by clicking on your workspace and then using the direct selection tool, again, select only the shadow and pull that away from the artwork. Hit Control X to cut it from your layer, create a new sub layer. Paste it onto your new layer, disappearing it, and shifting it to the bottom. Then grab all your bits and bobs is Lisa glands called them that are left behind and delete them off your workspace. Now we're going to disappear RC and rearrange our age. Make it visible, move it to the center. And now it's time to work on our H. So again, as before, we're going to turn our text into outlines, grab our eraser tool, and start erasing everything that is not the age. And of course I'm going in super-fast moment as I'm demonstrating this for you. And as I get closer to the edges, I'm going a little bit slower. I think I bought my speedup about four times. Four times. You're looking good. Let's resize it a little bit to make sure it's saying between those guys pretty evenly. I'm going to pull up my C position, turn a little bit. Alright, so the very first thing that I want to evaluate is where my H falls in relation to my thing. Looking at it this way, we've sized it so that the H was equal in high the two, the k that we took away from the sea. But now, if I take a look at this, I've got this area here, this dimple that I want to keep. I really do like this part of the artwork, but it's a little too close for comfort to the age. It doesn't quite work. There's just some perspective that's off a bit. So what I'm thinking I'm going to do is I think I'm going to balance the see a little better by increasing the size of just the sea while maintaining the age. So let's go ahead and see how that would look. I'm going to just highlight my C by clicking it and then grabbing one of the handles and holding down Shift, I'm going to pull out my C so that it will grow in proper perspective and use my arrow keys to bump it up a little bit. I'm checking this area here to see if I need to go up one notch higher or two. I think that's good. I might try. Let me try one notch lower. I like the spacing here and this spacing is good. So I think that's where I'm going to keep it. Evaluating. Evaluating. Yeah, I think I'm good with this new size. Now, my next step is taking a look at these particular elements that I'm going to want to do something about. We've even got a little bit of a hook here missing. And of course we've got wonderful empty spaces here that we're going to show you how to fill those out. Now, one thing I had in mind that I thought would alleviate those problems, really, really easily. Swapping them out with the little serifs from the original monogram or the case tariffs. But pulling up that monogram by making that layer visible. And I'm going to zoom out of my art board and I'm going to pull my K onto my art board so I can see it a little better. Zoom back in with control 0. And sure enough, we've got some beautiful little serifs here, but they're not the same shape. So scratch that idea. But now the other thing that I wanted to take note of right now, and you should be doing the same also with your pairs is looking at the intertwining. The design on the right-hand side are lower. Right-hand side is an under. So we're going to make this Sarah will go under and we're going to keep this part of the age as an over, make our serif here, go under and keep our H here as and over. And in our next lesson, we're going to clean up RC and figure out what to do about these empty spots here. And we're going to show you how to clean up these areas that we might not want so that we get pristine initials and perfect principle artwork. Come on, let's go. 4. Our First Initial!: Welcome back to lesson two. In our previous lesson, we isolated R2 desired initials, and we clean them up somewhat. We took time to settle on our initial placement, one to the other, and look to see if we could borrow any additional pieces and might help in filling up somebody empty spaces that we've been left with. In this lesson, we're going to go a little bit further into cleaning up our first initial. Now, I don't want you to stress over really perfecting it at this moment because we're going to have plenty of time for doing that later. Once we start seeing how everything is falling together and we start seeing what really needs to be cleaned up and what we really don't need to spend all of our emotional energy and sometimes feels with filling up those things that don't seem to want to work for, use them die. But I digress. Anyways. Let's get going. All righty. So now that I have my initials place pretty much where I like them, I'm setting up some guides so that should anything be moved out of place, I'll be able to refer back to them. And so evaluating our C in reference to our h, We're going to start working on these various areas to make sure that they're functionally properly with that under over, under, over under pattern that the age has. So let's get started by disappearing are h and zooming into RC. So the first area we're going to begin cleaning up is this upper right-hand area here. So let's grab that eraser tool and get to work with that down a bit. So you can see this is just awesome. It's just created a whole path right through. All right, let's take a look at this. Beautiful. The h and k. Hide my guides. So we can see through this again. I think we can get rid of something here. And then we want to get rid of these lines here. It's high my age. I'm going to take my pencil tool, actually my smooth tool. And I'm just going to keep join over all these points until they finally smooth out. There you go. Now I'm going to grab my Delete Anchor Point tool. Delete you. You, you delete you. Now working with the direct selection tool, I'm going to start working with my handles to fix my curve shapes and also move my end points around some here to try to get a nice brown curve. Let's see. Like just move this up a little bit here. Here. This guy. I'm going to premium and not so awkward there. Okay, I am liking that. I think I can go here. Let's smooth it out. Okay. Liking that. Chill. Okay, let's keep working on cleaning up our scene. Julian days to make circles. Okay, Let's do this. I don't want to leave these alone instead of changing their style. This is not connected here. Show what I'm going to do is pull mission to here. Okay, since these aren't really seen in the foreground, I'm going to leave those as is. I just want some continuity. I could use my Pathfinder to merge these two shapes, but there's a possibility that will merge all kinds of other stuff. And since this is not going to be seen, I'm just going to go with it as it is. Alright, I'm liking what I see. Okay, So I'll say our RC is finished. This is imperfect, but it gets covered up by her age because this one isn't over, this isn't under. This isn't over. And this is our first initial is looking pretty good. So join me in our next lesson where we'll start working on that second one. 5. Our Second Initial!: Hey, welcome back. If you're a second initial is anything like mine. We've got our work cut out for us. So let's get going. Alright, so we're gonna start by focusing on the right leg of our h. Let me see how this art work is for staying together. The copy you paste. Okay, I'm kinda nice piece going to transform. We can just reflect this horizontally. We go, okay? And look what we have using the service from our K didn't quite work, but this is turning out to be an even better method for filling out our h. I'm going to change my coloring on this so that I can get a good grasp of where I want to place my age. And let's see how we can do that. Though. I want to grab this part of it, and I want to grab these parts of it. So what I'm gonna do then is go back in with my awesome eraser tool, right bracket. And I'm going to erase some of this stuff. Okay, great. So I've gotten rid of all those little blockages and you better believe from here above, I want to maintain as is. So let's right bracket and get rid of all of you. You, again. Alright. I'm gonna delete this in here and pull these off. So I'm gonna go into my Appearance now. Let's pull this down to 50% so I can see what's going on underneath. Let me work here with my black layer. Eliminate what's showing the red. Then Walker Black, unblock her red. And let's move this change to our Direct Selection Tool. And I'm going to just move now un little tip here that we need to work with. Un. Un. We're going to have to look at what we've got here. Where's my on my handles? Pull this baby. Of course, we'll see what that looks like. Okay, get rid of this. Again. New season. It's connecting to see this baby. So much. Alrighty. Got some issues here. I think we've done. I'm going to go back and erase on my black layer. Okay, We're not quite there. Okay. Now let's turn this into black and take a look at what we have here. Let's give it some shape there. Alright. So what we're going to do now is activate our two pieces and using the Pathfinder tool, select the Unite icon. Okay, got one piece here. Okay, so let's take a look at what we've got in relation to our C over under grabbed my selection tool. Let's pull this up. Again, lower the opacity. 15, positioned in the right location. You can go lower on that. Now we have it. Soon then. Grab my eraser tool. Erase this piece. I think I'll erase that piece. All right, Then let's switch to erasing the black portions. This is sticking out. I want my lines to be my red portion now. So whatever is taking out, blocking out the red, I want to eliminate. Okay. I think we're good. Just in case this is overlapping. Okay. Let's merge them. Bring that back up, change my color. And let's merge them. And now our bottom piece with our top piece. And we got one piece. Okay, now we've got a full working side of the H. Let's go get working on the other side. 6. Our Second Initial Continues: Welcome back. Lucky for me. I now have a full working part of my age. You know, what I'm going to do is simply duplicate it and use that to fill in the missing parts of my second side. Let me show you how. So now that I have the one side of my initial complete, I'm going to duplicate, transform it vertically, and then let's place it here so we can use a little serifs. Again, pulling the opacity down to 50. Looks good. And this does not look good. So I have to do this one at a time. So I'm losing visibility of what software. So what I'm going to do is cut this from this layer, add a new layer, and paste in front. Raise your tool. I'm going to want to be under. Make sure that all of this gets in the line. So here is our national one. Okay. About one portion there. Here. Okay. Race. But it's showing through and read just lemonade and my black. It's showing through my red. Okay. Again, so we made sometimes when you're in the middle of working on something, you don't realize there could be a real simple way of doing it. It took me awhile, but it violates Lincoln. Just realized. That eliminate the whole thing. Yeah. Okay. So there we have it. A little bit here. We've got our syllabus tariff. Okay, so my next step is going to be erasing all over portion. So serifs first. Okay, that's seems to be well in place. Then what I want to erase is going to be the dark portion here. Now, I want to go back to this portion, can eliminate everything that is not needed for it. Grab it, and change my opacity. And it's merging. Okay, that's not connected. Let's see what happens with my Pathfinder. Okay, that's gonna be hidden by the outlet of the sea. So I'm just going to leave it as it. Okay, so now we're going to work on the tricky part, joining the two pieces. This was a bit more challenging than I expected, because as you'll be able to see, being that these are hand-drawn initials to begin with. The sides were not symmetrical and yet they're beautiful. So that goes to show you that your art doesn't have to be perfect. To be perfect. Let's create this center portion here. Transform, Reflect. We go change the color of this portion. Easy just to distinguish, red. Okay, so we've got quite a bit different here. So I want this bridge. I'm gonna need a taller bridge. That interesting. They look really, really symmetrical and we're just seeing that. But then again, okay, So we need to make a call on this. Where's our center? This is a little fun thing I like to do in situations like this. Pretty much. This is center, bottom is wider and neither of them are centered. Interesting. Okay, what I want to do first then is you erase this portion here. Let me review or okay, so now I'm going to begin using various processes and tools included in Illustrator in order to begin to merge these three pieces into my intended a whole. I'll be erasing pass. I'll be moving endpoints. I'll be changing my curves. Anything that I need to do to molded into my endless. It's what you end up, not the process that matters. I want to eliminate all of you. Oops. Here I'm trying to create some uniformity between the horizontal lines and somehow work these through. Change are passing again. It's portion here. Okay, Let's see what we've done. I'm going to deal with this little puppy after we merge everything portion to go. Okay, So we looked like a little bit too much going on here. Let's eliminate some of that. Where is it coming from? We have here. So now I'm going to start my clean-up by zooming in and out of my art work to be able to see what's hollering at me and telling me it really needs to be cleaned up. When you zoom out, you can get a better idea What's just not working. A little bit of an issue here. Good. All right. We'll clean this up kind of bet. Now let's see what we have. We've still got to do, but I think it is time. Oh, yay. Okay. One didn't work. I used another. And there it is. One solid piece. We have filled up all of our empty spaces, fixture wonky serifs and RH is complete. But our monogram is not quite just yet. So let's keep going. 7. Final Clean Up!: We completed our API. But as I've said many times, we have an over, under, under over pattern on the monogram. So we still got to go in and finish that last under portion. We'll also be looking at the final monogram that we created and cleaning it up a bit more. Now, this portion is totally subjective and completely up to your preferences. You can go in and absolutely perfect every line and every dot. Or you can maintain the rustic and hand-drawn elements of it. Either way is your preference and there is no right way to do it. This is your monogram. After all. Now, you'll see me use all sorts of tools and methods in order to get my monogram complete. So like I said before, the way you get there is totally up to you. There is no correct way to do it. Dave Krause always says in his tutorials, necessarily the process used to get there that matters as much as it is. What you end up with. That matters. Let's begin by eliminating our last under portion of grab my eraser tool to screw up here through my outline to have it change this to, okay. Noticing this little portion here. Let's see. Let's get rid of it. And I will leave except for this portion. Rural. Ready to go? Now let's go in and edit all these extra points individually. Review Sakai. All right. Actually let's make or rounded curve. Looks like. Okay, So, so, so essentially we can spend a little bit more time tweaking some of these areas here we'll use our Smooth Tool, my collection, my smooth tool. Just work on these little places and I'm telling you I have to bring it up. So I'm going to pull this out here. Since there's no shortcut this baby out. And essentially you just work at. We're happy. Just cleaner piece here. Got it. I'm not your work on this, but the meantime, I don't want to get rid of this guy is going to move this up here. And any good point here. Now, we're going to get this weaker. Alrighty, ladies and gentlemen, who we are, our very own Victorian, authentic Victorian monogram. Before sending this to my bride, I'm going to eliminate all these additional layers. So my C, we will merge as one. Those are our paths there, which are separate from the rest of the shape, right? Age. Plenty of paths here, but let's give them one last merge to unite what we can. And you can either group these or keep them separate, whichever works for you. And that's ready to go to my bride. And the next thing I'll do is size of my art board. And save my file. And then save this as a PDF. And smallest file size since I'm sending it to my customer, I want to make sure that it fits in via e-mail. Now, this is a really crucial step for me. Whenever I feel like my artwork is getting near completion or I might be finalizing my work. I always save it to a PDF so that I can see it without all the distraction that Illustrator's interface adds to it. And sure enough, whenever I do, something always pops up that needs a little bit of adjusting. And sure enough, like it usually happens when I look at a PDF, there's always something that I'm just not happy with. This area here. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom into that area, see if maybe eliminating that will do it. She'd been off. I'm going to pull it into words. There we go. I think that's much better. Okay, so always remember you are in a PDF generally when you save to PDF. So what I like to do is go and save this again as an Illustrator file so that all the changes that I make Don't drop off my original. Now I'm going to save this new one again as a PDF. Same name, again, smallest file size. There it is, our completed monogram. Now, you can either stop there or go into more detail by adding shadows to all those intersecting pieces, like the original monogram hat. To be honest, I simply added blocks of transparency, should have finished monogram that I printed for my bride, knowing how the print medium would translate it. So if this is where you will be finishing, makes sure to post your final monogram into your project area. We're all going to love seeing all the different pairings that everyone comes up with. But for those purists that believe in doing something completely authentic, join me in our bonus lesson, where we will tackle those shadows. 8. Bonus Lesson: Alright guys, here's our bonus lesson. Let's go and pieces some authentic login shadows. In our last lesson, we ended with our two initials adjusted just to our tastes that you could have gone a little bit further if you want it and just really perfected every single line or did something similar to what I did where I left a few imperfections that really didn't drive me crazy, but just kept the hand-drawn look. Now, let me show you the exact artwork that I sent into the printer with the shading that I added, what I did was simply add these areas here with additional elements of shading. So let me show you what's behind those areas. Simply sum squares that I may and skewed off a little bit. And it's simply a transparency of about 50% and that's what I was able to sent into production. However, we're going to take it up a notch and make it as authentic as possible by borrowing the shading from the first element that we originally isolated our initials front. So let's begin. Once again. Let's begin by taking a look at our original. Fortunately for me, my original K is super similar to my H in that it has these four intersecting areas that I can easily borrow to use for the shading of my h. So let's go ahead and pull my C onto my art board. I'm just going to force it on over here. Looking at this, you can see major imperfections here that we already cleaned up. But this is what I want to take a look at these particular pieces. And I think what I'm gonna do is simply steal those and work them into my final product. Let's take a look at these items that I had originally set aside. Thinking, again, we were going to be using these for our serifs, which we did not. So let's just eliminate you and eliminate u. And we only had this one piece left, but no worries because we still have the original pieces that we started with and we can pull things off of that. Let's pull this down a bit out of the way. And this would have been apportioned here, which essentially belongs about right here on our final h. So let's take a look at a couple of things here. We've got a kind of like an angle going here because there is an angle coming off this way. But our H's in a 90 degree angle to our baseline. So we wouldn't necessarily be using this at an angle. And so what I had originally envisioned was rotating this segment just slightly to make it parallel with the H's base. But when I did that, I realized that the shadow lines we're now going diagonally to. So that wasn't going to work, but it suddenly dawned on me that I already had perfectly bearable bull shadows that I could use from my original H. Let's move this guy back to my art board. I've got shadows here and here. So let's get rid of this guy and disappear. Let's move my c and k of trouble as well. And now we'll resize this. So that is equal to our final age. Right? First we're going to go up to this guy here. So what's the drill merch outline? Let's grab our knife tool and borrow this piece right here. And we've got to cut off those edges where it's attached to the rest of the artwork. The artwork, and click back on with the tool so they're only that piece gets activated. Go back to your V tool so that you can move the entire peat. Change the contrast and color. Take your transparency down. And we begin. I'm trying to find a size it I think it's going to work the best. Okay, let's put this on its own layer. Okay, that didn't go anywhere because it's still attached as a group. So grab the direct selection tool and let's try again. I want to be able to use this area right here. Let's try it. And trim this down. Okay, Let's lock our black layer so it doesn't go right through. So the only whitespaces that I want showing are the ones from the red element. So I want to clear out anything in the black showing through. So now we'll lock the red layer, unlocked the black, and grab our eraser tool. No block showing. Let's get rid of this. Change this back to black. Grab our selection tool. Select our new shadow. Are Sarah. And let's do tonight. Okay, let's merge. And there it is. Okay, let's get going on shadow number two. How about we still have this shadow right here? Okay, my demarcation line, I've got a bit too many layers selected here, so I try to eat something that work better for being here. Okay, We've got a few little things here I want to keep working on. Oh, oh boy, this time I'm seeing even more things. I want to adjust. No telling where this rabbit hole is about to lead me. And here I'm using the pencil tool and serve the smooth tool. And I'm just redrawing. Surprisingly looks decent. Which is why sometimes if you say to me things are going, you can start to step up when it starts again and again, because now I'm trying to figure out There's our second shadow. Alrighty, In this portion, we're going to work on the shadows for our c. And the first thing we're gonna do is resize the original C with the K to fit the size with the H so that the shadows that we're going to be borrowing will be proportioned to the size. For now, we've got a real mess up here. Okay. Looks like I'm going to have to come back once I get this all cleaned up. Our whole ride. Let's try this again. We're going to resize our C, but to maintain your sanity, we've changed colors. Okay, so now we're going to borrow this guy and this guy. Let's put these nucleuses on a layer of their own. Japan. Japan, then a pull up the cage you as a writer. So now the biggest challenge here was finding the right fit and angle to you in order to be able to use this piece and merge it as the shadow Odyssey of my mind. I kind of went counter-intuitively. I think I'm going to add a few more of those white spaces here. I'm going to try to sharpen my edges here by moving my points around and converting them somewhat. Thank you for your time. I want to compare these two and see what the shadow looks like on the original. Good. Good. Right? That looks better. I am calling it a day. I am saying I'm Brandon. Yeah, I'm here. Okay. Okay. I think I'm much better. Okay. I'm back. I quite almost lost my sanity. They're thinking I had finally finished this project. And lo and behold, I still had another part of the sea to clear up, and I still had the bottom line and the sea to clear up. To spare you any more time. You know the drill here it is real quick. And let's get this party on the road and done with and as if that wasn't enough, let's go ahead and merge the C and the H together. Since we haven't really done that yet. There that is. All these extra pieces are individual pieces that aren't connected here or there. And it looks like it worked and it looks like we're done. I am so proud. I actually completed this project myself because as I said before, I didn't do it. I've run. But I had so much fun doing this. I hope you have been to, but make sure that you post that completed project in your project area. Or you post that completed monogram in your project area and let us know that you did add your authentic shadow details to it. Okay. I hope you enjoyed this how-to tutorial as it was my first and it was kind of challenging, venturing into it. But you live, you learned and you have to see all of these challenges as learning experiences. I hope to see you next time. And more importantly, I hope to see you in the project area. Buh-bye, though.