Design an Illustrated Map in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Hey, guys. My name is Andrew Brooks, and I'm a graphic designer in this class. I'm gonna walk you through how to make an illustrated map Illustrated map. Just bring the surrounding area toe life. Whether that be your favorite, place your favorite city make believe place from your head. That's what I'm doing anywhere. It could be your from your favorite TV show, your favorite movie. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, we're going to create this map and it's gonna be very simple. Very basic shapes, very basic tools. And I just want to walk you through and maybe teach you some new tips and tricks that you didn't already know. If you're anything like me, I love learning from other designers, and so maybe I could do that with you. And while we're at it, we make a cool, awesome creative map. So go ahead and click and rule, and I will see you in our first video 2. Sketch It: What's up, guys? I am so so glad that you decided to enroll in my very first skill share class. I'm so excited to teach it before we jump into Illustrator, I want to encourage you to do two things. I want to encourage you to look for inspiration. You know, whether that be on Google or Pinterest or dribble or whatever, Um, magazines anything. I mean, anything like that. Just something to inspire you to get your get your ideas rolling, get your brain thinking. And then I would encourage you to sketch your ideas down. I have found that sketching really helps me get my ideas out and helps them develop and just really gives me freedom. And then I take that into illustrator and go from there. So to save some time, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sketch right in front of you, but I want to show you what I've done for a client. It actually ah, youth ministry that I work with. And they wanted Teoh make a height map and they wanted to go from where they were now to a better destination. And so, you know, I created this out there outdoor world that I kind of just fall up from for my imagination . And so you know your project. It can be your favorite town. It could be your favorite place. It could be maybe from your favorite TV show. Um, that possibilities were endless. Be from your imagination, Could be anywhere. And that's what we're gonna be making in this class are route forward to seeing those. So we'll take this and we'll go into illustrator from here. And this is where I do will start to unfold. So I see in the next lesson. 3. Mainland: we're gonna go in, jump right in. So open you up. A new document. I've set mine up to 11 by 8.5 because I'm a print it so upset color mode seemed like a which is most printers and upset it the raster effects to 300 bp up. If you wanted to just do this for a screen, you could send it up to 72 d d p I. And set your width and height to whatever you want and be good to go. So cancel this one. I've already got my document ready to go here. I've scanned in my sketch, just so I have something to look at. So I could look at everything on one screen. We're gonna take our mental, and you can get that by going over here to your toolbar or by hitting p on your keyboard. So we'll go right up here, And I'm actually I want to switch this feel to a stroke and dark in it just a little bit. No. Let me do that. What's going on here? Here we go. Get that stroke out in front. You just do that by clicking on it. We'll get this watches back over here, and we should be good to go. Okay, So I'm gonna start right here in the right corner, and I'm just going to start skip sketching. I'm going to start laying some maker points down and get me some land edges here. We're just going to start with the mainland. That's a little too harsh. Start with the mainland here, and they don't have to be perfect. If you're like me, though a lot of times I like to try to get it as close as I want it the first time around. But for the sake of his class, I'm not too worried about, um the way it looks. I just want some just something to work with here. So let's see here. Yeah, that looks good. Okay, so connect these anchor points now we have Ah, we have a working shape here. So I'm gonna do now is go down here and hit this swap arrows for my feeling stroke. And that's gonna that's gonna fill that in so you can see it's coming together a little bit . You could You could see we have something working here. Someone grabbed up into again this Someone do it by by hitting the p button on keyboard. And, uh, I want to bring this color, get slightly different, great color, and we'll start adding some death to these cliffs here. Um, we'll see here. Yeah, I think. What? Did you come all the way down like that? So there's that, and then we'll do it again down here, we'll grab slightly lighter hope. Didn't mean to do that. Was you know what? We can fix it here in a second. All right? Now, if actually this is a good point if you're ever if you ever sitting like this and you want to hit, you know you can't. If you connect here, it's gonna bring up the Monets some, which is gonna take away your anchor point. You don't want to do that so you can control. I mean, command click, and that will. That will de select that while you have mental. And then you can join up right here and start a new shape without interfering with the other. That's a little too much. All right. So remember that it was command click that gets for another and brings your pencil right back. Finish that up. Right here. When I get slightly, there we go. Slightly darker. Gurry, come down here. And now that now that you're not connected here, you don't have to do. You don't have to do the command click to get rid of you. Certainly could. But you don't have to, because you're not connected here. So we just dropped down. Connect those two do command click again. That de select. That way I don't have to worry about subtracting one of those anchor points, and right into there, we will lighten that up just a little bit. And then let's see here, Command click. Don't grab that anchor point and just come down here to the edge. See? Yeah. Here we go. Dark in that up a little bit. So there you go. Now, you see, we quickly we did a mainland, and then we added some depth in. And so from here we will move on to add a background with some waves, maybe had some rocks, made a little beach in there, and this thing's going to start coming to life. So I'll see in the next lesson 4. Water: all right. Once you have, you are mainland constructed. You're ready to move into creating the elements around it. We're going to start with the water background. So go over here and grab your rectangle tool, square toll and, uh, just draw it out from corner to corner. Then take command shift and left bracket. We're gonna move that to the back. They were just gonna turn this a blue hope I did. Stroke will switch those sit here. You could've just switched another way. Now, I'm not quite set on that blue yet, but it's more just to get it back there. Now, I want to lock this later so that when I'm editing and stuff, I'm not accidentally clicking moving it around so you can lock that layer by hitting command to. And now it's locked and I can't move it, which is awesome. Save you some time. So we're gonna add some waves in here. Just zoom in by kidding command plus equal sign, um, from your keyboard and we'll go over here, grab our mental. Been using our pinto a lot here lately. That's OK. It's, uh, to get tool. So we're going to switch to a stroke over here. And I'm just gonna go with just the white for now, and we're gonna just create some waves. Now, there's several ways that you can make some waves, and I'm gonna do it this way. Now you can Certainly. You can certainly dio you can do it like this Where you wanna where you don't bring that anchor point down and you have more rounded, more rounded ways. You know, like that? No, not like that. Drag it up. You know, you get creative. Those are actually horrible. Um, you make yours better than that. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to I'm actually going to fix this handle here. See here. All right. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna drag it's over until it snaps in like that. And so then I have some waves. Numberless Go ahead and hit option while I click and drag this to go ahead and have a duplicate. And so then you can have in create some larger waves and have some smaller ones Tuesday have some diversity in your waves. So that's how we make our waves. I'm not gonna lay all those out. You'll see those what it came to be in the next video. I won't spend too much time doing that. I also want to add some rocks. So grab Grab Pinto again. This time I'm going to switch over to a solid down here, not a stroke. I'm just gonna just make a simple, rounded rock shape here. See here? Uh, yeah, that works right there. All right. And so then you know, you can go over here and change it. Change it, Teoh. You know, rock kind of color mess around with it, Then you can drag those all around as well. You can shrink some of them. You can reflect some of them so that they're they're not the same thing repeated over and over again. You could make several different kinds. Just something to kind of flavor. This water up a little bit is what we want to do. You could even yeah, change him up a little bit. Just like that. And last not least for this for this one. We want to add some shore, take mental again. It's awesome. Tool. See here. Uh, sorry on. Yeah, there we go. It doesn't have to be perfect. Now we're gonna move this to the back command shift. Left bracket. Sorry. Had a brain spasm there and then to move it up. One. We just want to move it in front of the water. We want to bring it all the way back to the front. We hit command, right bracket that brings it back up to the front. Now, what we want to do here is we wanna all set the path. So we're gonna add a little You'll see what? This See what happens here. Gonna add a little shore line like a foamy white around this so we'll goto object path, offset path. And from here, turn your preview on and I want it. I don't quite want I don't Whoa, I don't know what just happened. All right, so let's go back down. That was crazy. All right, so I just want to bring it in. Let's go. One point to do that Looks like Yeah, I like that. And then we just want to weigh. Just want to pick up a white there for now. May be here for the sand. We wanna do like a just So we can start Tell the difference between some of these rocks and stuff. Yeah, that'll work for now, I see. Yeah, like that kind of a yellowy rock. And so I kind of flavor this up some more. You certainly play with it as well when you're in and you may not even be making waves. You don't You don't have to do that. I just wanted to add that in. So if you're in the background, dress it up a little bit and I'll see in the next lesson. 5. Mountains: Hey, guys, this is coming together. I'm really starting to like it. You can tell that I've already changed the green or the gray to green. So the mainland is is green. Now you can see the beach and the waves. All that stuff is coming together. It's looking really cool. So now we need to start laying out our mainland. There's a couple different ways you can do this, especially dependent on what you're making. You know, you made if you're making your town, you may need Teoh find a map and really lay out your streets and stuff first. If you're getting that detailed, um, for me, I am going to make my destination first. So this is like a start finish kind of map. And so I'm going to make my destination first before we get started, just like we did before. Um, I need to so that we don't move in this around. We need to lock it because we're gonna be working over this mainland. So remember, you can go to you can hit command to, or you could go toe object lock selection, and that locks it. So now we're not moving these around more. You know what? I'm gonna go ahead and do that to the beaches as well, because they are up under the land. And so I want to go ahead and lock those as well. I'm gonna have committed to this time. So this one, we're just going to start off with mountains. And I'm gonna do that by creating, um, some simple triangles. So I want my mountains to be, like, kind of like a navy blue. Uh, yes, I'm a running there. I may have just that later. So have that set. Oh, um, also, because I'm gonna be using the pin tool, and these wage back here were made with pencil. I'm going to select a few of these just so they don't get the way and I'm gonna lock those as well. All right. So, having mountain and I want to mountains here, and I am keeping this super simple, I'll really like the look of this simple, simple triangle. A not command. I'm gonna option shift drag, uh, that over to make a duplicate, and I'm gonna turn that into a light gray. Now, I'm gonna want to move that behind the Blue Mountain and So I'm going to command it command and left bracket, and that will move it right behind. And then I'm just gonna shrink it down a little bit, and you can certainly adjust it however you want. All right, So I may actually move this green or make movies up. I'm undecided, but for now, what we're gonna do is I want to add some snow peaks here. So I'm gonna grab a pin tool and changes still white Because I've never seen blue snow before. No, I don't want change the mountain to blue. I want to just change. I feel toe blue so that when I start drawn the snow peak snowcapped mountain that it looks right. So we'll zoom in. I'm gonna go up here and lock onto this anchor point. I'm just gonna follow the path down and start drawing this snow out, and yeah, not quite that much. There we go. Now I'm gonna do the same thing going to this mill and we will have our mountains done. There we go. All right, so that is my destination. That's where I'm gonna be pointing this map to. So the next video, we'll add some other stuff in 6. Trail/Path: Now it's time to add in our path. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the pin, tool, and I'm going to switch my field to a stroke and one go down here and grab the eyedropper tool. You can do that by right by getting it right here. Or you can hit I on your keyboard. I'm gonna go over here, hold shift to sample this color because I do not want to change it back to a field. I just want to get the color. And so there you see, we got the same colors beach as stroke. I'm gonna go up to a stroke, and I'm going Teoh hold shift. Because I don't want to hit this every time up to 10. So what I want to do is I wanna hold, shift and click the up era, and that jumps in increments of 10. So what about a 10 stroke? Wait, are 10 weight stroke hair every you want to say that? Zoom in just a little bit and I'm gonna start my path. So I'm just gonna make a rule. Uh, jagged path here. Just some zigzags. No, I won't extend that out. a little bit more. Yeah. There we go. That's about it. Let's see. That's too much. Let's go back. You wanna? Yeah. There we go. Not quite that much. We'll get there. Yeah, sometimes. Just can't make up. That may change, but that's the general idea of what I want to do. I made make less zigzags, but that's easy. Now, um, are several things that you could do with this path. You can go up here and play with your stroke, and you can you can change the profile of it. So you make it look. You see how it starts thin, widens out and then ends thin. You can make it, you know, do some do some cool things here. Just be creative. Use your imagination. You can. And you can even break the stroke up and get really crazy with it. So, yeah, right now I'm going to leave mine like this for the time being. And I will see you in the next video. We'll start. Add some stuff around this 7. Landscaping: Alright, guys. So we have the path done. And now I want to start adding some elements around there. So we're gonna first, we want to start with some hills, just some little rolling foothills, and this is really easy. What we're gonna do is switch our swap, are filling our stroke, and I'm gonna go down here and I'm going to select a dark, dark green, uh, somewhere right in there. I think I think I want a little bit bluer. Yeah, right in there. All right. So we're gonna do is take our pin tool and, um, make a at an anchor point and then go right over. I mean, straight over. And we're just gonna drag and make us a little hell. All right. So that it I mean, that is all you have to do to make this hill. Um, So then hit command click to get rid of that to get rid of the pin so that it doesn't keep going. What we're gonna do is I'm gonna click on this now. I wanna increase the stroke, wait the way to the stroke, and then I want to change the stroke profile. So you just click on stroke right here. And I want to change it to this one right here. Now, I need to add a feel to this. What we're gonna do is we're gonna grab our eyedropper tool, and we're gonna hold shift and click the background. Now, you don't see any change there, but the reason that I need to lock this back later I don't know. All right. Sorry about that. The reason that I added this feel so that when we drag and we kind of overlap these, that it does look like it's overlapped. If we didn't add a feel it would look like this. You would see them cross in like that. I don't want that. I don't want that look. So, uh, hit Command Z that brings feel back so that those air heels I'm gonna place those around and you'll see what those look like in the next video. Also, want to add some trees in here? I'm gonna add a little forest right down here, but trees air really easy. We're gonna take three triangles. Um, let's switch the swap. Feeling the stroke. Get rid of this stroke. I'm gonna decrease those in size scale those down animal drag out to more trains. All right, we're gonna bring these up under each other, start making him look like a little Christmas tree. The bottom of trees are a little wider, so I want to hold all as I drag this out, and it increases Both sides. Want to do that in the middle as well? Just a little bit. Hold all. Not quite as far from bringing it down just a little bit. Bring that down just a little bit. See? But better. So now you can see that we already have something that looks like a reasonable tree. Looks pretty good. So now I wanna change my feel. Teoh Brown cooler. And we're gonna take our rectangle tool, Zoom in a little bit. We're just going to give this tree a truck. Looks great. I'm going to select all this. I'm gonna click on the trunk that sets That is my key object. And then I'm gonna go appear to align, so you may not see this up here. If you don't, you go to the line window. You can also get to it by going toe window a lot. And then I'm going to click the horizontal align center button. Now, it didn't do anything because it was just happened to be centered up. Now I'm gonna group this. I could unite these triangles and make him make him all one shape. But you may want to adjust them so that the normal state treat. But for this say, I'm gonna start making my little forest down here. And you can You can add diversity to these trees just by making some skinnier. You can make some little stubby er you get the idea with without having to make a new tree . So, um, you can tell It really starts coming together. You make some small, skinny ones. Small, fat ones. You could do all kind of things just with those four little shapes. And now I want to add some grass. Okay. This is really easy. Um, we're gonna make a triangle. It's another. It's gonna be another simple shape. Three simple shapes that create something that looks awesome. So I'm actually gonna go down here in sample this screen from the trees. Um, now, grass is not very big, so we're gonna zoom in, scale this down now. You want to go to your pin tool, and you wanna grab your anchor point tool. And what we're gonna do here is just grab this line and we're gonna bring it in. You could see what we're creating. Is this blade its blade? Look, grab on direct selection tool. Bring this in. Gonna bring this guy over. You can see that. We're starting to get some grass here. I'm gonna bring this anchor point down, bring it back over a little bit, and so that happened just from a triangle. So we're gonna hold option shift in click and drag, and I want to reflect This would do vertical reflect. You see, I see this a bushel of grass starting to come together. I just said bushel. I don't know that I've ever said bushel. Please forgive me that just free all. All right. So I'm actually gonna bring this and it's a little bit. The base is just a little fatter than no. Then I want it to be I did not hold shifted drag. I want that flat edge flat based on me. All right, so now we're gonna hold option shift, click and drag again, and I wanna reflect this back, and then I want to just bring it down, scale it down a little bit. Not gonna do much adjusting here, and you can see this piece of grass this little bushel of grass come together. Now, you you could groups. You could, uh you could unite all this by going to Pathfinder and night. But then you can't edit it anymore as's faras moving those three shapes around. So I'm just gonna group it by hitting command G or by going to object, and his group have already have it group. So that option is not available, and I'm zoom out. You could see that just by placing these in a couple of places, shrink it down some more, just about placing these in a few places. You start, it starts to come to life, so I'm not gonna movies all over the place right now, but you'll see it. You'll see how it comes together, and you can certainly make many bushels of grass as you want to make it all look different . Or you can drag the same ones all over the place just for some added detail 8. Pond: this is really starting to come together. You can really see this thing. Start to have some life to it. So we're gonna add a lake in here now, little pond. We're gonna do that. Just zoom in command plus equal son, Or you can, uh, hit Z on your keyboard and you can zoom in, drag out, drag out a little area. All right, so we're gonna grab the circle tool. Gonna change this. Teoh blue. Actually, you know what? Let's just stable the blue we have over here. Perfect. All right, so we're just gonna draw out a little little upon little oval and I'm gonna add another little piece to it. Yeah, that's perfect. Okay, so we want we want to give this a little bit of depth kind of go along with with our cliffs over here just to show that it's kind of in the ground. So what I want you to do is I want you to select both of those, and I want you to come up here to path Pathfinder tool. If you don't see this, then goto window and Pathfinder and your one you're gonna want to click on Unite. That's What that will do is that makes that one shape. All right, So here's the next thing I want you to do. I want you to command C, which is to copy in command f So that paste another one right in place. You see Bansi to back up. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna take our arrow keys on your keyboard and just drag it out just a little bit. Actually, I don't think I wanted I see here. Yeah, that'll work. That will change that to a different color just so we can tell the difference. And now we're gonna take this back later and do that again. Command C command after paste it in front. Um, right in place. Now, we're gonna take these the one you just, uh, turned a different color. And this one here and we're going to minus the front that's also in your path under. So now if you go down here and you change the color Teoh dirt kind of a dirt brown, you see that? We just added in an edge around our pond, which is pretty cool. So then we come back up and we can go grab some of these waves that we created for our C and bring them to the front command shift. Right bracket. We'll zoom back in, and now we'll just, uh, we'll make these a little smaller, make him a little smaller, and then drag a few waves here and there. And we've made us upon. All right, see in the next video. 9. Campsite: now one at a campsite. So his e on your keyboard Zoom in right down here. You can add anything wherever you want. I'm gonna add mine right down here. Gonna grab a triangle. So go to your polygon tool. DoubleClick. Make sure three sides set, and from here, you can edit it. So we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our pin tool, hold it down and go to your anchor point tool just like we did our grass. We're gonna bring these in just a little bit. Kind of just want to give it a like a draped look and grab your direct selection tool. And I'm gonna move these in points. These anchor points out, make it a little bit wider. Now, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna duplicate, make a duplicate Excuse me of this ticket. And so what we're gonna do is hold hall and click and drag down, get set where you want, and then we're going to minus front. That's in your path. Finder tool. So just put modest front, and that takes the front shape out of the back shape. So now you have. You could see that you have yourself a little tent now with the sky right over here. Get a position the way that you want. Now what we're gonna do now is gonna stake this guy. You can't. You can't. Can't about on the edge of a cliff without having some stakes in the ground. Just just be silly. So let's take this guy in. So one on each side, we're gonna take our pin tool and just draw from the top of the tent down to your steak and just make a little rope curve. You could switch here. There you go. Switch your swap. Your feeling, your stroke. Give that a lot of feel. I mean, a stroke instead of a field. And then we want to move our tent in front of that rope for the sake of your eyes. So you do that command shift, right? Bracket that moves, moves that to the front. So we're gonna make a duplicate of that. We're going to reflect that. Go over here to your reflect tool is right here. Um, actually, I have set this up my own lives right here. So then we will do a vertical reflect, and we're gonna connect this guy on the opposite side. There you go. We got ourselves a tent now, actually. Will I want to tents. So I'm just gonna drag this up here, shrink both these down just a little bit, and I'm gonna change the color of this. Tend to like an orange or so, uh, let's go yellow. Yeah. All right. Now we have us a little campground over here using some simple shape. She's in triangles, the rectangle tool, and then just added some rope. And with your pencil, simple is that 10. Final Touch: Yes, we are almost done. You comptel have already colored a couple of these, um, these cliffs over here. I went ahead and change those two brown. And now for our final touches, just, you know, just make sure that you have everything laid out, that the way you want, you know, play and tweak with some stuff. And the last thing that I want to do is I want to add a little title to my map, and I want to give some location. And so I thought it would be cool to, uh, to name this skill share class, land. This is really my first my first attempt at doing a class. And there's a lot of hard work. You gotto gotta work in some time. And, uh, you know, there's gonna be some speed bumps along the way. And so I thought would be cool to name these. I come up with some cheesy little little map spot names, and so we're gonna lay those out right here. Just select your fun. It doesn't really matter what it is, but you grab your type type tool. And I'm calling this skill skill, share, class, land. And so you learned some quick text stuff right here. I want to change this to Boulder. Fun. I like insurable. It's one of my favorites. Now, you type that out in with regular and regular casing. What I want to do over here is I want to It's because I didn't want to use caps lock. I'm gonna go over here to my character window. You could do that also by going to a window, and it's down here with type, and then you go to character right there so you won't find character here. You have to go down the type. Um, and then I'm gonna click the all Caps button right here. And there we go. And then I'm just going to mess around this color sample of background and then just Mm, yeah, something like right in there that works a little bit darker. Paulson Now on them in Do them on to grab this same same fun on your trick before I'm going to use Ault and click and drive. And that created another one created a duplicate. And so now I want to name desk down here. Woods of Wonder. Super cool name, right? Yeah, no all right. Except I don't want these to be all caps, and I'm actually going to make these a lot thinner. Well, you gotta selected text first, make these thinner, and I'm just gonna make him white shrink these down. I don't know where My no, no wides Acting weird. So that will go down here. Woods of wonder. There we go. And, uh, let's see, you'll go Name this creation camp. Oh, they got a spell that right creation camp. So, you know, you get your ideas through the woods of wonder, and then you go sit through creation camp and you come up cannot hash this idea out, and then you may have some, uh, you may have some rocky run throughs when you're filming, but you know what? Don't let that stop you, and we need to spell that right. And then you get up here and now it's time to put the hard work in so good, uh, hard work highway, even though it's not really a highway. And I said, that's what I come up with. And then you got Publish it, Pond. You're super cool, right? Oh, I know. Tell me about it. And then get up here to my first class mountain. And you know what? Basic success. Success? Because I completed it and it's here. And you guys were watching this to me that successful? Um, So I do appreciate you taking this class really? Really do. And I look forward to seeing you guys more. Look forward to your comments. I look forward to learning from you guys, and, uh, I hope to see you in many more classes. And hey, guys, for real? If you have any tips for me, police passed them along. I am always willing to learn from you guys. I appreciate it. And I look forward to your comments. Take care, guys.