Designing with Spirals in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Designing with Spirals in Adobe Illustrator Introduction - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Designing with Spirals 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. In this class, I'll show you how to create a range of designs in Illustrator using spiral shapes. We'll create these effects using both the spiral tool in Illustrator and a special script which creates the very beautiful Archimedean spiral. We'll combine these spirals with brushes and blends, the Shape Builder, and Reshape tools, and the Live Paint tool, to make a range of effects, designs, and patterns. Along the way to making these awesome designs, you'll learn some handy Illustrator tools and techniques to boost your skillset. Enough for me, if you're ready, let's get started designing with spirals in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Ribbon Design from a Sprial: One way that you can use the spiral tool is to create some ribbons that ultimately you could make into a pattern. We'll look at this by creating a brand new document. I'm just going to make mine a square document, 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels in size. It doesn't really matter how big your document is. We're going to use the spiral tool, which has a toolbar position with the line segment tool. I'll just click on the spiral tool, click once in the document, and they set a default settings for the Spiral tool. The radius of 50 pixels is quite small. It's going to create a very small spiral. The degree of 80 percent means that you're spiral is going to go round and slowly spiral in. The lower the value, the more open your spiral is going to be, so 80 percent is a pretty good starting point. The segments of 10 allow you to have 10 segments around your spiral. The good thing about these settings is that you can actually do them as you draw the spiral. I'm just going to click "OK", so that we can see what that spiral would have looked like. But I'm also going to remove it from the document and with the spiral tool selected, I'm going to click and drag, but I'm going to leave my finger on the left mouse button. I'll hold down the spacebar because that allows me to move my spiral while I'm drawing it and let go of the spacebar to continue to draw it. I can increase the number of segments by pressing the up arrow key. You can increase the segments that way, decrease the number of segments by pressing the down arrow key. In terms of the decay on your spiral, if you hold the control key on a PC, that's command on a Mac, then you can change the decay rate. This is going to be a very high value, something like probably 90-95 percent. This one is going to be a value like about 10 or 15 percent, so that's the difference in the spirals. I'm just holding the control key on my PC to get the spiral that I want. I'll increase the number of segments too. When I'm pretty happy with the spiral that I have got, I'm going to let go of the left mouse button. For the spiral effect that we're going to create, the ribbon spiral effect, I'm going to select over my shape and move it down a little bit, because I'm going to drag this point back up here. To do this, I'll use the re-shape tool, and you'll find it here showing a toolbar position with the scale tool. Click on the Re-shape tool and then go and locate the last point on your spiral. If it doesn't drag properly to start off with, just go back and re-select it. I'm going to pull it apart a little bit because I want this separation here. Of course, I've run out of room on my art-board so all I need to do, is to re-size the shape. I'm holding Shift as I do, so that I'm constraining it to its original proportions. What I'm looking for is this shape pretty much up to about this point here. I don't want it where it starts to overlap. To reduce the size of this shape, to get rid of these end bits, I'm going to the scissors tool. It shares the toolbar position with the eraser tool. Click the scissors tool and then you want to click where you want to cut this shape. I'm thinking that I can cut it probably all the way over here, and that will just give me that perfect loop at the end. Having clicked on it with the Scissors tool to cut it, I'll just immediately press delete a couple of times and that gets rid of all the bits that I don't want. At this point, I'll just increase the stroke size just by one pixel so we can see the shape really clearly. I'm going to drag a duplicate of this away. With the selection tool, select over the shape and then hold the Alt key on a PC option on the Mac to drag a duplicate away. What you're looking for is a nice arrangement of these shapes relative to each other, because this is going to become your ribbon. I'm just looking for something that I like. You can also rotate it. You probably want to rotate it a lot, but you could rotate it a little bit and I'm really liking the shape that I have there. I'm just going to click away from the combined shape. Now these are just two lines. If we want to make these into shapes that we can fill, we're going to need to use the shape builder tool. The shape builder tool exists over here. It's the top tool in its little tool collection. I will select the Shape Builder tool. I've got my shape selected, so at this point I just need to drag over the areas I want to join up. This is an area I want to join up. I want to join this place, the bit in the middle and this place. I'll just click and drag over them. You don't have to make big selections here, you just need to point out to Illustrator the bits that you want to join together. Let's just move in here, back to the shape builder tool, and I want to join this and this and this. I'm going to click and drag to join those, click and drag to join those. It is a fairly simple move. You can zoom in and out of your shape as you work, you just need to re-select the Shape Builder tool, when you're ready to go and shape these elements. I've got those places together, and I'm going to join these together too and these over here. I also want to make sure that I'm telling Illustrator that I want these to be shaped, so I'm just dragging over them. Not seeing any change, but Illustrator is working out that I'm serious about keeping those as shapes. I've got everything nicely joined up together, now I can go ahead and fill the shapes. For that I'm going to use the Live Paint Bucket tool. I've still got everything selected. I'll go over here and choose the Live Paint Bucket tool. It sits underneath the Shape Builder tool. I'll double-click it because I want to check it settings. We want to paint fills, these filled areas. We don't want to paint strokes. I've disabled paint strokes. Cursors watch preview just means I'll see the color in the cursor as I hover over an element, and that's a good idea. It's wise to select highlight so that you can actually see the areas you're about to put paint into. I'll click "OK" and then I'll go and get a color to use. I'm thinking this red color. What I'll do is hover over these shapes, so that I can paint with them. I'll click here to fill this shape with color, and then click here and here. Any one of these closed shapes can now be created as a filled shape. The bits on the end, I'm going to get rid of those. Now with everything still selected, if I don't want a stroke, I could come in here and remove the stroke, but I'm actually going to make it just a darker red entirely. Let's go and get a crimson red. Let's make it a darker version of the color that we've used. To get rid of these ends, we'll go to the Eraser tool, and it shares the toolbar position here. Because we got the Scissors tool earlier, the eraser tool is not the top tool, but generally it will be the top most tool. You can increase and decrease its size by pressing the open and closed square brackets. Open square bracket makes it smaller, closed square bracket makes it bigger. You want to adjust it to the size you want it to be. Zoom into the area where you want to work and erase over the lines that you don't want. I'm going to do that at the other end as well. Go to the zoom tool, zoom right in, re-select the eraser, and then just remove the bits that I don't want. I now have this really attractive ribbon shape. 3. Pt 2 Pattern from the Ribbon Design: Having created this ribbon shape, we can create it as a pattern in Illustrator. I'm going to select over this ribbon, and just make it a bit smaller. So I'm holding the shift key as I constrain it to make it smaller but keeping it in its proportions. Remember that these are vectors shapes, so, they are going to be able to be increased really large without compromising them. So starting small is just fine. I'm going to make a duplicate of this shape by pressing the "Alt" key or the option on a Mac as I drag a duplicate away. I'm going to change the color of this. To do that with it selected I'll just go to the re-color artwork tool. I'm going to make sure that both of these colors are selected. This looks like it's black. I didn't think it was black, but it does look a bit like it is. I'll click on "Edit", and then I'm going to increase the brightness a little bit, and just drag these colors around until I find a different color combination to use here. I'm going to use a dark on the outside, and a sort of purple in the middle. I'll just click "Okay". So we now have two ribbon shapes. Before I go, and make my pattern, I'm actually going to flip this with object transform, and then I'll choose reflect. I'll reflect it over the vertical angles, click "Okay". That adds a bit of variety to my shapes. I'll select both of them to make a pattern. I'll choose object, and then pattern, make. If you see this dialog click "Okay". Then from the grid options, I'm going to choose brick by row, and I'll use a one-half offset. To say a bit more of the design, I'm going to set this up to seven by seven. This number of copies has no effect whatsoever on your pattern. It just shows you more repeats when you come to look at your design. So it's not actually affecting the design. It's just making sure that you can say things a bit more clearly. Now I want to say when my tile ages up, because right now it's really hard for me to see which of these ribbons can actually be edited or moved. Because when I try and select either they, they're not select-able. If you click "Show Tile Edge", you'll see that these are the actual pieces that make up the pattern. Again, having that visible or not, is not going to affect your design at all. It just makes life a little bit easier. So I'm going to move this in, and I'm really liking this design. It's not one that I had actually planned to use for this class, but I like it enormously. Let's just have a look at how are we going to finesse it. I'd like to close this space up a bit and open this one up a bit. I'm going to make sure that this option is not selected because I want to reduce the height. So I'll start reducing that by just pressing the down arrow key. Shift down arrow will take it a bit faster. I'm going to widen this up so I'm going the other direction in this case. I'm actually going to call this pattern good because I like it enormously. So having created that, I'm just going to click done, but obviously you could experiment with these patterns, and create other elements. One thing you could do, let me just double-click this one to open that up again, show the tile edge. What I'm going to do is save a copy of this. I'm going to call it new pattern 2. So I've got a second pattern that I'm working with. In this case, I'm going to make a duplicate of they. I'll grab both of them and choose edit, copy, and then edit paste. That just pastes a duplicate of the shapes. Now I could do something like shrink them in size, and put them in different positions inside this pattern. So we could sort of have a pattern in pattern effect, if you like, so that this we're doing slightly different things. We could recolor them as well. I'm going to make a third one in here, and I'll rotate that all the way around. So this is a more complex pattern, and it obviously has more elements in it. The reason why I wanted to show you this was that when I click "Done" on this, you'll see that we still only have the original two pieces of our pattern. We don't have those additional pieces visible, and that's the way that the pattern make tool works. You've got the pattern with its complexity, but the extra elements that you created, you only did it inside the pattern make tool. So they're not accessible outside it. Let's go, and create a rectangle that is the size of this art board 2000 by 2000. I'll center it over the outboard using the align options. If you don't see them, you can go to window, and align, and they'll open up in a panel that looks a bit like this. This is the rectangle I want to fill with my patterns. So I'll turn off the strokes. There is no stroke. Target the fill, and let's go, and fill it with the first pattern that we made, which is this one here. I also made a second one, and this is the second pattern. Let's go back to the first one. If we want to scale our patterns at anytime, object transform scale. Disable transform objects, and make sure that preview is enabled, so you can see what you're doing. I'll take this one down to 75% of its original size, and just click okay. Now we can also re-color this design again using the re-color artwork tool. Just make sure that you have the shape selected, click "Recolor Artwork". I'm going to click "Edit" so that now I can drag these colors around. I'm just going to brighten it up a little bit, and start moving these colors around a bit to where I want them to be. This is a sort of aqua color here. Just need to pick up which color is related to the surrounds on this actual shape. If you find it difficult to see, then you might need to cancel out of this dialogue. Zoom in so that you can actually say the paces in the pattern before you go ahead and select the shape, and go on recolor it. This color here is the color around the outside of this particular shape. So now if I take that shape into the sort of aqua area, I can see more clearly where I might want to take the outline for it. So are these two pieces obviously belong to this shape over here. I'm just going to brighten them up a little bit. By choosing HSB as my color model here, I'm able to brighten up a color a little bit more. So let's go and get this one and brighten it as well. You can select HSB or RGB from this drop-down list here. Selecting HSB means that you've got a brightening option. Again, it's just a little bit easier to brighten colors when you actually can brighten them this way. When you're done click "Okay". Now, because we've recolored this pattern doesn't mean that we've lost the original pattern. If I click here in the swatches palette, this is the original pattern, and by re-coloring the artwork, in this case because we're recoloring a pattern, then we get a brand new pattern. So we have three patterns from the exercise that we went through with these ribbons that we created using the spiral tool in Illustrator. 4. Pt 3 Create an Archimedes Spiral: When you think in terms of spirals, you probably think in terms of a spiral that looks like this. This is not the type of spiral that illustrated can produce this as illustrated spiral. This one is what's called an Archimedean spiral. It's very different, it's very even and the illustrated version is not. There's no way that you can make the illustrated version look like this. If you want to create a spiral that looks like this, you have to look elsewhere and the elsewhere that you look is for a script. I'm going here to a page on the Internet and we've used these scripts before in other of my illustrated classes. What you'll need to do is come to this page and download the entire script bundle because in the script bundle is this script for an Archimedean spiral. When you get this zip file down on a PC, you're going to have to open up the zip file, so double-click it and choose to expand its contents. On a Mac they'll probably expand automatically for you. You'll navigate through the folder that you've got to locate the Archimedean spiral, and you can right click and copy it. Then you need to find the place to put it. On a PC I'm going to my C drive and I'm going to locate Program Files and then Adobe, and then Adobe Illustrator, and choose the version of Illustrator that I'm using. I'm using CC 2019 so I'll double-click on that. Although there's a scripting option here, this is not where you put it. You go through to presets and then your version of language. In my case it's English US. Then I'll go to scripts and paste that jsx file in so I'll right-click and choose Paste. Now its in my scripting folder. I'll need to close and reopen illustrator to get access to it. On a Mac, you'll go to your applications folder, and then locate your version of Illustrator and you'll progress through the same series of steps to get through to your scripting folder where you can paste that script in. Again, you'll want to close and reopen illustrator aside that the spiral will be in the list of scripts that are accessible to you. I've gone ahead and closed and re-opened illustrator so I'm going to create a brand new file and we'll test out our script. To begin with, I'll create a spiral that's just done using the illustrator spiral tool. Hold the control key to close it up quite a bit, increase the number of rotations, and then just move it over to one side so we can compare it with the spiral we're going to create using the script. To run as, script, choose File and then Scripts. You should see the Archimedean spiral script in the list. That's going to be the case if you put it in the correct place and that you've restarted illustrator so that illustrator can see that that script is available. To run the script, you just click on it and it just creates a spiral. Now, it's a very small spiral, but these evict the objects so that doesn't matter. What we'll do is select it and hold the Shift key as we enlarge it and it's enlarged at scale. Anytime you need an Archimedean spiral rather than the spiral that Illustrator provides you with, you can simply run the script if it's too big. A spiral, all you do is go to the scissors tool and cut it off where you don't want it any longer. I've just cut this outer edge off. I'll just press Delete a couple of times and now I have a reduced size spiral, but it's nice and even. 5. Pt 4 Make a Pattern from an Archimedian spiral: Archimedean spirals like the one that we created in the last video really lend themselves to be used with blends, and so we're going to look at doing that right now. For this, I need a fairly small spiral because there is a limit to how many steps you can have in a blend. I'm thinking just two or three rotations here will be plenty. I'm going to click here to cut the shape at this point and press "Delete" twice to get rid of the excess elements. Now, I'll go to the Ellipse Tool and I'll drag out a circle. I'm going to fill this with a gradient and then go up to the Swatches panel, which of course you can get to by choosing "Window" and then "Swatches". Go here to the library, click on "Gradients" and then choose a gradient set to use. I really like the sky, so I'm going to select Sky gradients. I'm going to choose one of these to use. Probably, this one here. I'll make a duplicate of this shape by holding the "Alt" or "Option" key as I drag a duplicate away. For this one I'm going to set the rotation on this linear gradient to be a little different. With the shape selected, I'll go up to the Gradient Tool here. I'm just going to reverse the gradient. It's going from light to dark whilst this one's going from dark to light. I'll select both of these shapes and choose "Object", "Blend" and then "Make". That makes these into a blend. What you see might be different to this. You might see something like Smooth Color or you might see Specified Steps but maybe only 10 steps, so that your blend is going to look like this. It doesn't really matter what it looks like, because what we're going to do is put it around this shape and then we can edit it. I'm going to make the shape a little bit bigger. I'm going to select my blend and the shape. It doesn't matter what order they're selected in or how they're layered, that's just fine. They're going to behave perfectly either way. Choose "Object" and then "Blend", and what we'll do is choose "Replace Spine." This blend has a straight line spine through, you can see that line there. What we're doing is replacing that spine with this one, which is the our spiral. When we do the dots go all the way around the spiral but there's not enough of them to give us any real effect. I'll double click on the Blend Tool, make sure that Preview is turned on. I'm going to choose "Specified Steps" and the maximum here is 1,000. At least that's the case in the most recent versions of Illustrator. When I click "Okay," we get this really interesting spiral effect. You can edit these blends very easily or go to the Layers palette. Of course, if you don't see it, you'll choose "Window" and then "Layers". I'm just going to make my options a little bit larger so we can see them more clearly. Inside the Blend, you're going to have three things: each of the ellipses, the one at the beginning and the one at the end or the inside edge of the spine, and then you've got the spine itself. If you want to adjust the spine itself, makes sure that only it is selected, and now you can adjust the size of the spine without affecting the size of the blend. In actual fact if you get too big, you're not actually going to be able to see these all jammed up together. We're just adjusting the spine at this point to get whatever it is that we want. I want mine closed up. Then if you want to change the blend itself, then you can select each of these ellipses, and you could for example, choose a different gradient. I'm choosing a different gradient here. We're going to choose this one for both ends of the spiral, and I get a different effect. Of course, if I rotate this shape around, I've only got one shape selected. If I rotate it, then I'm going to have an effect on how the blend is rotating around my spiral shape. Your gradients at either end don't have to be a pigeon pair, they don't have to be exactly the same gradient. So you can select different gradients and just see what kind of effects that you can create that are interesting to you. I really like that one, so I'm going to leave it as it is. Having created your Archimedes spiral and put a blend around that, there's nothing to stop you creating a pattern from this. I'm just going to size mine a little bit smaller, and I'm going to rotate it around, so that, that little end area here is the bottom of the design. Having done that, I'll select over my shape and choose "Object" and then "Pattern Make". I'll click "Okay" if I see this dialogue. Then I'm going to leave mine set to Grid, but I'm going to close up these spaces. With this option here selected, at the moment it's set to 900. I'm going to drop it down to about 600 and just see what happens. That's going to adjust both the width and the height. This is looking just fine except that I'm seeing the tails and I didn't want to see them. If I click this option Bottom in Front, then I'm going to hide the tails. Then I can experiment with the overlap, whether I want it to be left or right. I like this a lot. If you want to, you could also select something like Brick by Row, and just change the look of the design a little bit to see if you like that better. I'm going to do a 7 by 7 here just so we can see what it would look like at a 7 by 7 arrangement. This is just a gorgeous pattern, I love it a lot. I'm going to use it, so I'm just going to click "Done". Illustrator has set that as a pattern in my pattern swatches, so I can select and move my spiral just off the art board here, go back and create a rectangle that is the size of the art board, line it up through the art board, make sure I targeted it still and just click on the pattern that I want to fill it with. Of course, we can resize that with Object, Transform Scale. Make sure you turn Transform Objects off. Make sure you turn Preview on so you can see what you're doing. I'm going to set this to say 75 percent of its previous value, and click "Okay". You can also rotate this for an interesting effect by choosing "Object", "Transform Rotate". Again, you don't want to transform the object, but you do want to transform the design itself, the pattern. I'm going to rotate mine 45 degrees and click "Okay". That's a way of creating a really sophisticated spiral style pattern using that Archimedes spiral script, adding a blend to it, and then making a pattern from the result. 6. Pt 5 Fluid Spiral brush: This next effect that we're going to create is a brush that has spiral elements in it. It's a really attractive brush. To start off with I'll create a brand new document. You can make yours any size mine is 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. It's a square document. The actual dimensions don't really matter. I'm going to set this up with a black fill and no stroke. The no stroke is really important. The black fill, I'm using that simply because if you make a brush that has black as its base color, it's really easy to change it's color later on. It's less easy if you use a colored brush in the first place. Going through Rectangle tool, I'm going to drag out a nice tall, thin rectangle. I'll go to the Selection tool, hold the Alt key on a page that's option on a Mac and drag a duplicate out of the way. I'm going to drag three in total. I have four rectangles. Select over all four rectangles, go to the align options. You can get to those by choosing Window and then align from the aligned to options. Make sure you have aligned to selection, selected. Click here on horizontal distribute center, then adjust they saw that the spacing between them is identical. Looks mine would just fine. I want to skew these lines. I'll go to the Direct selection tool, I'm going to select over the top of this rectangle size, select every one of these points. Then position myself in the middle of one of these shapes and click and drag to the right. I just want this to go at an angle. That's a pretty good angle. Now I'll select other all of these shapes and make this into a symbol. I'll go to the symbols palette again, if you don't see yours, it's window and then symbols. Click on this icon here to create a new symbol. All you have to do is click OK. Don't make any changes to the dialogue. Everything set up exactly as you need it to be and so you'll just create a symbol from the shapes. At this point you can go ahead and delete those shapes you don't need them any longer. Press D for default, so you get the default fill and stroke. You'll going to drag out a narrow rectangle, something that looks pretty much like this. Make sure it's filled with black and it has no stroke at all. We're going to draw a 3D revolve on this. With it's selected, choose effect and then three day and revolve. Don't worry if you've never used the 3D tools before, this is simplicity itself. I'll click on Revolve. Now we're going to make the position of this front, but right now you even see what you've got. Let's turn preview on, so we can see the 3D effect that we've got. We're going to choose front as revolution or our position. Then we'll click here on Map art. Now you get three surfaces. You're always going to have three surfaces here, the top, the bottom and the sides. I'm going to click through here to the surface number 3, because that is the sides of this rotated cylinder. We want a map onto it. We're going through the symbol drop-down list. Your symbol is going to be at the very bottom here, so you'll just click to select it. Right now you can't see much at all. You click here on Invisible geometry, and that will show you what this effect is looking like. What we want is these elements that are sweeping up here. We're just going to adjust the size and positioning of them to suit. I'm just going to drag them down so that they're filling the shape a little bit better, a little bit big in the style dialogue. I'm going to drag it over, and what I want is pretty much to position the bottom of the shape at this point. I want this element here, the first of the stripes to be positioned about here on the rectangles. I need to bring this in a little bit and down. There's one I'm trying to do is to create the nice spiral at this point. I want it to be just over the edge here, and so I'm looking here and saying "Okay this is the sweeping shape that I want." This is going to become my brush in a few minutes time. I'm looking for the longest possible sweep here, but don't want to compromise that by taking it too far. Let's just have a look. It's looking really good there, and the last of these is looking really good here. Now this point you can click shade art work, so that you can actually see the shading in place. I'm looking at this and it's looking really good at this point. I'll just click OK and then OK again. We now have a rotated shape, but we want bits of it and not the rest. For example, I don't want the bottom bid of the shades. I just want these sweeping twisty bits. We're going to select over this rectangle because that's all it is. It's a rectangle that has a 3D revolve applied to it. We're going to select over the rectangle and we're going to expand it. Choose Object and then Expand appearance. Will go to the last part because they're bits that we need to get rid of. There are a few things that we need to do while we're here. I'm just sizing my thumbnails a little bit larger, so you can see what I've got. You're going to have exactly the same. You have a clipping curve appear at the very bottom, which is this bottom elements. If you'd turn it off, you can see it's disappearing and we don't want that pace. I can just grab it and put it in the trash. Don't need that. I've got a clipping curve here that looks like it's empty. I get rid of that tool because you definitely don't want that. Now we've got a coping group that is left, which is the elements that we do want. They're inside a group and inside another group and there's a clipping mask in here as well. What we're going to do is go grab this clipping group and we're going to drag it all the way to the top. Now it's just a single group. When I open it up, I've got a group of objects and clipping path. I'm going to pick this clipping path up and move it above the group. It's still operating as a clipping path by moving it, so that's just fine. But what's important is that when it's at the top and if I use the crop tool, I can use it to crop the shapes. We need to get rid of this clipping path, because it's going to be a problem with a brush. What I'm going to do, it's now select the entire group. The group is the clipping path on the top, that's vital and then a group of objects underneath that are being clipped by this clipping path. With all of that selected will go over the Pathfinder palette. You can get to yours by choosing Window and then Pathfinder and go here to the Crop tool and click only once. What they does is it gets rid of the clipping path. What you'll be left with is a whole heap of shapes, lots of paths, which together make up this semi spiral. I'm to turn this off because they're all inside a group so they neat and tidy, which is one of the things that we really like in our layers palette, is neat and tidy groups of objects. We're going to pick up this group and we're going to make a brush from it. I'll click here on the brushes palette. If you don't see your brushes palette choose window and then brushes. I'm going to click here on New brush and will make it into an art brush and I will just click OK. Now you can pretty much leave the settings as they are and the art brush, you might just want to change the direction of this so paints going up. For the colorization method, you want to set that to teens. We spent all the time making a black brush because we want to be able to recolored and so teens is going to allow us to recolor, just click OK. Now we can move that out of the way and let's test out new brush. It's already selected in the brushes panel here. I'll go to my Brush tool, please drag out a brush line. You can see that the shape here is now being extended along this arc brush line and I'm getting really beautiful shapes. Also easily able to be recolored, select the shape, go to the stroke and select a different color for it, and all over the shading that we had coming through from that 3D rendered object is being applied to our recolored brush. You'll see it more on dark colors. You'll say that really nice shading coming through the brush. That's a way of creating a really lovely brush using a spiral effect created with the 3D tools in Illustrator. 7. Pt 6 Spiral Coil Brush: The next element we're going to draw is a sort of spiral coil. This is going to be something that we can stack on top of itself to create some interesting effects. I'm choosing File and then New and I'll create a document that is 2000 by 2000 pixels in size and I've clicked Create. Now I'm going to draw an oval. So I'll go to the Ellipse tool and I'll drag out a sort of tallish oval. Now I want it to have a stroke but it cannot have a fill. Zoom on to be really careful about removing its fill. We're going to zoom in so we can set close up. Now what we'll do is to break the ellipse at the point that is directly opposite its midpoint. So we'll go to the Scissors tool, which of course shares a toolbar position with the Eraser tool, and just locate this anchor point, and if you hover over it, you can just click once to break it at that point. Now, don't do this, but I want to show you what you've just done. If I drag here, you'll see that you've opened this shape up. So instead of being a closed shape, it's now an open shape. I'm going to just undo that. We'll go ahead and select this entire shape and then we'll go to the Reshape tool. That shares a toolbar position with the Scale tool, it's the re-shape tool that you want, so go ahead and select it. You're going to locate this point where we just broke the ellipse and hold the Shift key as you drag it. Now this is the behavior that you should see, if you don't get it right, you'll have to just undo it and try again. But holding the Shift key as you click and drag makes the entire shape sort of re-form. So what we're looking at is to start the beginning of a coil. I'm just going to drag over a little bit, I think about here will be just perfect. The closer you go, the more tight your coil is going to be, the further you go, the wider your coil is going to be. I'm looking at sort of a balance sort of coil, about there is really good. Now, for us to create this as a brush, we need to be able to Illustrate a way to begin and end the brush. So we need a no fill no stroke rectangle. So I'm going to the Rectangle tool. I still have no fill, which is really important. I do want to stroke at this point. I'm going to use my smart guides to line everything up. So I am looking for a point that is directly opposite the top of this shape and also opposite this anchor point here. There is perfect and I'll just click and start to drag. What I need to do is to go to the anchor point here, and just line up with that and the bottom of the shape. I'm looking for those smart guides to appear, and as soon as they appear, I'm just going to let go the left mouse button, so I have my rectangle. I'm going to turn off the stroke on that, so it's technically a no fill, no stroke rectangle. However, some of you like me, have been encountering problems with these patterns because a no fill no strike rectangles aren't really no fill no strike rectangles, they look like layer, but they're not. If you need to make sure that yours is going to be a no fill no stroke rectangle, select it and go over here to the appearance panel, which you can also get to by choosing Window and then Appearance. With this rectangle selected, click the Flyout menu and make sure that you select Clear Appearance. It's critical that you do that because illustrators got a really nasty habit in the most recent versions of creating what look like no fill no stroke rectangles that are not. So brushes and things just don't work when you use them. Now it's important that we place this no fill no stroke rectangle behind the coil that we've got. So I'll select it and choose Object and Arrange, Send to Back. So if we check in the last panel, we're going to have a coil and a no fill no stroke rectangle that is directly below it. That's exactly what we want. We're going to select over everything, and because we've used black, that's going to be good because it will allow us to recolor that as a brush. We're going to the brushes panel if you don't see yours choose Window and then Brushes, click the New Brush icon here, and this time we're creating a pattern brush. Click, Pattern Brush, click, Okay. You'll see your little coil is already created here. Now this is actually no fill through coil. It's a really big coil. If you want yours to be littler, just go and adjust the size of its source taken down to a smaller percentage of what it is currently. You can also set these corners because it doesn't have corners right now. Now you won't be able to do that, I think it is illustrator says five and earlier. So just ignore it because we're not really using corners much anyway. But if you're using more recent versions of illustrator, you can click this drop down list and choose something that would make a better corner. I'm thinking this sort of auto between is probably a good option. For this inside corner here, that's this option here, click the drop-down list and choose something that's going to give you a nice sort of corner element. Because we made this black, we can recolor it, but we have to set the colorization method to tints, click Okay. I'm going to zoom back out. I'm pressing Control or Command Zero just makes the screen zoom out to the art board, I'll move this little object out of the way. I'll go and create a circle, so I'm using the Ellipse tool and just drag out a circle. I want it to have a stroke but no fill. I'm going to apply my pattern brush tool. I'll click here on the pattern brush. We get this sort of cold spiral shape. If we were to apply the brush to a line, then we're going to get a coil. Now it's possible to add these effects to each other, so I'm going to change the color on this. Let me just go and make that a sort of red color, let's go for a dark red. Now I'm going to expand it. I'll choose Object, Expand Appearance. So now we've broken it out so it's not aligned with a brush applied to it. It's actually a coil shape, and because it's a coil shape, we can apply the brush to it yet again. I'm going to click on it and apply the brush to itself yet again. You get this sort of layered approach. Now we might need to adjust the fit on this, so it's marked as stretched to fit. Approximate path might give us a better finish to it or even add space to fit. You'll need to experiment with what's going to give you the best result. You may also want to enlarge the amount or shrink the brush again to close it up to get a better finish on it. Known to apply this to strokes. Yep, that's looking a bit better this time. You can say that just a simple coil can be created as a pattern brush and then applied to a shape in varying ways. Now there's also a possible variation of this. I'm going to choose the Paintbrush tool, I'm going to select my pattern brush, and I'm just going to paint a sort of wiggly line with the coil applied to it. I'm going to select over this line and you'll see that there are some brush profiles here. I can select an alternative brush profile, and when I do, the coil actually adjust to that brush profile. I chose this profile and so my coil now has type it ends on it. If I choose a different brush profile, it's going to have a different look to it. In this case, it's thick at the bottom and thinner at the top. You can experiment with the possibilities of using this brush. You could of course create this as a thicker brush to get a thicker line on it. 8. Project and wrapup: We've now completed the video content for this course so now it's over to you to complete your class project. Your project is to take one or more of the examples shown in this class and produce it yourself. Post an image of your completed art as your class project. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you complete the online review? Your answers help other students to see that this is a class that they too might like and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.