Digital Illustration: Creativity, Style and Efficiency in Adobe Illustrator

Chris Leavens, Vector Illustrator and Artist

Get unlimited access to every class

Taught by industry leaders & working professionals

Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Get unlimited access to every class

Taught by industry leaders & working professionals

Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

- 1.
  
  Trailer
  
  1:41
- 2.
  
  Intro and Gathering References
  
  1:19
- 3.
  
  Getting First Ideas on Paper
  
  2:28
- 4.
  
  Breaking Your Routine
  
  2:03
- 5.
  
  Reference Sketch Part 1
  
  7:02
- 6.
  
  Reference Sketch Part 2
  
  5:42
- 7.
  
  Critiquing and Annotating the Sketch
  
  4:07
- 8.
  
  Setting up Your Document
  
  4:17
- 9.
  
  Blocking In Shapes
  
  6:08
- 10.
  
  Appearnce Panel Overview
  
  2:21
- 11.
  
  Pen Tool Tips and Blocking Adjustments
  
  7:55
- 12.
  
  Layering in Illustrator
  
  5:13
- 13.
  
  Setting Swatches and Graphic Styles
  
  6:03
- 14.
  
  Drawing Inside Objects
  
  5:48
- 15.
  
  Dealing with Draw Inside Mode's Funky Behavior
  
  4:36
- 16.
  
  More Masking!
  
  5:01
- 17.
  
  Drawing Basic Details
  
  11:20
- 18.
  
  Adding Details Using Strokes and Custom Brushes
  
  9:55
- 19.
  
  Making Sure Composition and Color Tell a Story
  
  5:40
- 20.
  
  Adding in Finer Detail 1
  
  8:28
- 21.
  
  Adding in Finer Detail 2
  
  9:21
- 22.
  
  Suggesting Volume with Subtle Gradients
  
  6:23
- 23.
  
  Creating Interior Shading
  
  7:29
- 24.
  
  Creating Cast Shadows
  
  8:11
- 25.
  
  Homespun Vector Textures Part 1
  
  13:29
- 26.
  
  Homespun Vector Textures Part 2
  
  5:34
- 27.
  
  Exporting and Parting Words
  
  5:53

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About This Class

I am an illustrator who has been creating artwork professionally for fifteen years. Throughout my career, I have assembled an arsenal of techniques to help improve my creativity, efficiency and style as an illustrator.

I create my work in Adobe Illustrator from start to finish... and I am going to walk you through my creation process. Illustrator is an incredible tool to use to develop yourself as an artist, and by following along with my process, you will develop a more grounded, organized and efficient way of working. I take full advantage of my computer's resources to execute my vision.

What You'll Learn

You will learn vector-based illustration using Adobe Illustrator's most essential tools. I will help you hone in on a whimsical illustration style. We'll cover:

Generating ideas. I will encourage you to go somewhere you are inspired by to collect imagery and resources.
Reference sketching. We will compile your inspiration into reference sketches for your illustration.
Blocking in your shapes in Illustrator. You will start your illustration by blocking in shapes and colors, suggesting the composition of your piece.
Vector drawing. We will begin by drawing in your characters and working with the shapes.
Layer and label organization. I will share with you best practices in organizing your layers and labels to maximize your workflow.
Masking. I will show you how to use masks to make a complex illustration more manageable.
Shading & volumizing. You will bring your sketch to life with sketching and volumizing teachniques.

What You'll Do

You will Illustrate your favorite scene, and will finish the class with a final illustration piece created entirely in Adobe Illustrator. I will teach you how to develop a whimsical illustration out of real-life inspiration. You will develop your scene and characters using rendering techniques in Illustrator. By completing this project, you will walk through every tool necessary for an efficient and creative illustration process. This will hone in on your design skill, and you will notice a great improvement in your work.

Meet Your Teacher

Chris Leavens

Vector Illustrator and Artist

Teacher

I create story-rich artwork, surreal landscapes filled with bizarre monsters and fantastical characters. Heavily inspired by the outdoors, I bend the beauty of the natural world through a prism of humor and absurdity, resulting in whimsically-twisted, highly-imaginative images. I use a variety of media to create my work, but I'm best known for my colorful, detailed vector illustrations. My art has appeared in art galleries, computer games, books, magazines, TV shows, and feature films and I've written contributions for numerous vector-art publications, including Sharon Streuer's excellent "Adobe Illustrator CS5 Wow! Book".

I am currently a senior digital designer at Disney Publishing Worldwide.

See full profile

Related Skills

Adobe Illustrator Art & Illustration Digital Art

Hands-on Class Project

Digitally Illustrate a Story Scene

Generating Ideas

Introduction
Regardless of whether you're working for a client or creating artwork for yourself, an open and refined approach to idea generation is incredibly important. By laying a solid foundation for a vector art project, you'll be able to move more confidently throught the process. Jumping straight into the execution phase or focusing on tiny details can frustrate and stifle the process.

That doesn't mean we're going to be approaching vector art conventionally. Instead of using Adobe Illustrator as a tracing and finishing tool, we're going to integrate it into the most skeletal levels of our process. In the process, we'll learn to use Illustrator as more of an extension of our creativity and less as a cold, technical toolset.

We're going to explore digital and vector illustration by using Adobe Illustrator to create a story scene, either from your own imagination, or from a favorite story of yours. Follow along with my videos and the project guide to learn how to take your vector art creations and love for Illustrator to the next level.
Collecting ideas
Visual aritists tend to jump right in and start drawing when it's time to come up with ideas. As we all know, sketching is a terrific way to explore ideas, but observing the world around us is just as important to the process.

Since we'll be illustrating a story scene, we'll be seeking out inspiration and ideas from a variety of sources. We'll also take ourselves out of our normal routines in order to turn on our creativity.
- Start by thinking about the type of scene you want to illustrate. If you want to focus on a preexisting story, make sure it's fresh in your memory by reading it or watching it again.
- Once you've pinpointed a general direction, start compiling visual references, both physical and virtual. This will help spark visual ideas and inspire different creative directions.
- If you have any quick ideas, sketch them or write them on paper. Keep it loose and spend almost no time on details.
Now that we've come up with some quick ideas, let's take a little breather and let those ideas stew a bit.
Breaking your routine
Before you really start fleshing things out, give yourself some time to think. Take yourself away from your normal work area and let your mind wander. The best ideas aren't usually the first ones that come to mind. Breaking your routine can give your mind the opportunity to turn good ideas into great ones. Here are some ideas:
- Go on a walk, run, or hike. Try to go someplace you don't normally go, see things you don't normally see.
- Visit an art museum and see if anything you find can be applied to your idea.
- Experience a new part of town or spend time in a park.
Personally, I like to go outside, but if you can't, try to remove distractions and let mind work through your concept. I see so many talented artists who end up drawing nothing but iPads and headphones because they never break away from their desks. Experiencing the world around us is as important as practicing our skills, working, or fiddling with electronics.

Regardless of how you do it, breaking your routine and letting your mind focus on the art you're about to create will do wonders for your process.

Reference Sketching

Gather your inspiration
Now that we've spent some quality time preparing, it's time to create a rough reference sketch of our story scene.

Try to bring all of your inspiration together in advance of creating your sketch.
- If you've taken any photos or drawn up any notes or doodles, get them in front of you.
- Feel free to search for any pertinent images that you might think would help you with your sketch. Google image search is an invaluable reference source for artists.
- Write down any quick notes or thoughts that you haven't put to paper yet, just in case your creation process gets delayed or you get distracted.
Now that we've got everything together, it's time to sketch.
Drawing the reference sketch
If you've ever taken a class in vector art or Adobe Illustrator, then you've probably been taught that the best way to approach the toolset is to create a tight pencil sketch and use Illustrator as a tracing/finishing tool. Personally, I can't stand working this way. I find it stifling, dull, and overly technical. I find that I achieve much better results and enjoy the process much more when I allow myself to draw freely in Illustrator.

With that in mind, we're not going to focus our energy on creating a tight/finished pencil sketch. Instead, we're going to create a rought draft of our final product, a reference sketch.
- Feel free to make the sketch as detailed as you like, focusing primarily on getting a solid sense of both the concept and the final composition.
- Keep in mind that the goal will be to skip the "scan-and-trace" process portion of vector art creation.
- We're looking to create something we can sit on our desk, something to reference when we jump onto the computer to create our final product, so don't use giant paper!
Take time to work and refine your sketch. The more ideas you get onto paper, the better foundation you will have laid for your final art.

NOTE: some clients require artists to follow a specific process, one that starts with a tight pencil sketch and ends with the traditional scan, trace, and finish approach. It's a time-tested approach that works for a lot of people, but I've personally never once in my fifteen years of work as a professional artist been required to follow this process. Contrary to what you might be taught in college courses, there isn't a right or wrong way to produce art. The method that works for you and produces the best outcome is the right way.
Annotating and self-critiquing
Personally, I find writing notes about my art to be just as valuable as sketching when I'm getting ready to create. Now that we've finished our sketch, let's engage in little self-critique.

Study your work. Look for areas you'd like to refine when you start redrawing the shapes as vectors. Are there ways you can reshape your work to improve it? Are there better ideas that can be injected into the sketch, things that would make the final piece a better overall scene?

Write notes directly on the sketch or in the margins along side it. After it's fully annotated, you'll have a solid guide to move you into the vector creation phase of the process.

Blocking In Your Shapes

Setting up your document
Now the fun begins. Let's fire up Illustrator and create our new document. Before you set up your new artboard, think about what your image's destination is going to be. Is it going to be a computer wallpaper? A page of a book? A piece of wall-worthy art? Set your document up accordingly.
- Name your document.
- Work in the proper color mode to suit your destination, CMYK for print, RGB for screen-bound images.
- If necessary for print, add the proper amount of bleed to your image.
- Make sure the resolution for raster effects is set to 300ppi.
- Tip: whenever possible, keep the physical dimensions of your art small and use math to scale the art up when it's time for output. Remember, vector art is scalable. We'll be using raster effects in this process and your computer will better handle them when the artboard sizes are smaller.
- My suggestion is to keep the dimensions similar to standard paper sizes while making sure the aspect ratio you're using matches your final output.
Our document is initialized. Time to start drawing!
Drawing in your shapes
Starting with your most important objects, start blocking in your composition by drawing simple silhouettes with Illustrator's pen tool. The pen tool requires some practice to master, but once you understand the mechanics behind it, you can create incredibly accurate, clean shapes very quickly.
- Reference your sketch and, with the pen tool, redraw your compositional elements.
- Attempt to improve upon and refine the forms you've created.
- Try to isolate characters and objects on their own layers. I usually try to group like objects together on layers to make it easy for editing later.
- Don't be afraid to work outside the boundaries of your artboard. The artboard will crop out excess art. Working outside the bounds will also give you some extra leeway if you decide to adjust your composition later.
- Think about color during the drawing process and start building a simple foundation for your final palette while you're blocking in the composition.
As a stylistic choice, I avoid using outlines, so I'm always very concious of my color choices. I use color for both emphasis and contrast, and I'm always thinking about it while I'm composing.
Understanding Illustrator's appearance panel
Illustrator's Appearance Panel is going to be crucial to the process we're going to be following, so let's take a quick look at.

Of all the panels in Illustrator, Appearance is one of the most important if not the most important. For any given object, path, or group, the Appearance panel identifies the type of object (path, compound shape, group, etc.) and defines stroke and fill color, opacity for the entire obect, the stroke, and the fill, and any effects applied to the object. Storke settings can be accesed, as can colors and swatches. Multiple strokes and fills can be applied to an object to create complex appearances.

We'll be leaning heavily on the Appearance panel throughout our process, but before we start, let's check one setting. Click the fly-out menu in the upper-right corner of the Appearance panel and make sure "New Art Has Basic Appearance" is turned off. This will allow new objects to inherit the appearance attributes of the last object selected. You'll see just how helpful this is as we move through our process.
Adjusting your composition
We've got a basic composition and a basic color palette. Let's make some adjustments before we begin adding detail to our work.
- Resize forms and nudge them into place where necessary. Give your forms the proper amount of visual weight and compositional prominence.
- Add in any additional compositional elements.
- Use this as an opportunity to study the color palette you've created.
- Are there any refinements that can be made? Can the palette be simplified or unified? Can better harmony be achieved? Does the palette you've chosen convey the story feeling you're going for?
Once you feel like the composition is locked, we're going to look at document organization and masking before we jump into the next phase of the craetion process.

Layer & Label Organization

Layering in Illustrator
Before we jump into detailing our illustration, let's look at ways to keep our document organized. If you do nothing else, layering your document will help immensely when putting your art together.

Since Illustrator is an object-based method for creating art, it's easy to get lazy and create an entire piece of detailed art on one layer. Each object you draw is essentially its own discreet sublayer, there are ways of grouping those obects, and they're fairly easy to click and isolate... until your art gets too complex. Once that happens, you have a frustrating mess on your hands. You're locking and unlocking objects, grouping objects, forgetting to include one object in a group. You get the point.

Make your life happy and easy. Here are a few layering tips:
- Label layers as you create them by holding the Option/Alt key when you click on the new layer button.
- Use practical names for the layers. Save cleverness and comedy for a night out with your friends.
- Isolate important/prominent objects on their own layers. Think important characters or other compositional focal points.
- Group less important sets of objects in other layers. Examples: "trees", "clouds", "birds".
- Organize objects within layers by grouping them together (cmd/ctrl+G)
Set your swatches
One thing I like to do while I'm exploring color is to save color swatches to my swatch panel. If the swatch panel isn't exposed on your screen, open it by going to the Window menu at the top of your screen and choosing Swatches.

My favorite way to get new swatches into the swatch panel is to drag them in from the color panel (Window->Color). If I've already added a fill color to an object on my screen, I usually select the object and drag the color into the swatch panel.

If you'd like to name your new swatches, it might be easier to just select your object, hold the Cmd/Ctrl key, and press the "New Swatch" button at the bottom of the swatch panel. Personally, I rarely name my colors when I'm creating fully-formed scenes in my art, so I wouldn't spend too much time naming swatches.

One more thing you can do to keep your swatches organized is creating color groups. If you'd like to distinguish certain sets of colors, this can be really useful. Also, if you'd like to quickly recolor your work using Illustrator's Color Guide panel, setting up a color group can make the process easier. The Color Guide is great, and although I'm not going to touch on it in this tutorial, feel free to look into it if you plan on creating multiple colorways for a given set of objects (for example, a character) in Illustrator.
Creating graphic styles
Setting up graphic styles in Illustrator is a quick and painless way to speed up your workflow, especially if you're working with objects that have effects or multiple appearance attributes. I use graphic styles to store settings for shading, strokes, and gradient angles.
- Make sure your Graphic Styles panel is open (Window->Graphic Styles).
- Click on an object with appearance attributes you'd like to use later.
- Click on the New Graphic Style button on the bottom of the Graphic Styles panel or Option/Alt click the button to name your new style.
- Because the preview thumbnails in the Graphic Styles panel don't always clearly convey the final look of a given style, naming can help.
I usually set graphic styles as a project is in process as opposed to doing so at the beginning of the process. We'll touch on this a bit later, especially when we start shading and lighting our art.

Masking

Drawing inside objects
We've laid a solid, organized foundation for our artwork and we're ready to start adding details to our forms. We want the machinary of Illustrator to disappear into the background so we can focus less on technical ins and outs and more on the joy of creating. For me, masking does just that. For this tutorial, we'll be focusing primarily on a type of masking in Illustrator called Draw Inside mode.

With a simple keyboard command or at the click of a button, Draw Inside mode turns any selected object into a mask. While the mode is toggled on, any art you create will only be shown if it falls within the borders of the object you selected. Here's how you do it:
- Select an object
- On the keyboard, press Shift+D twice or click and hold the drawing mode button at the bottom of the toolbar and select "Draw Inside".
- If Draw Inside mode is on, you'll notice a dashed line around the corners of your object.
- Start drawing. Everything is sort of "trapped" inside your object.
The benefits of Draw Inside mode are enormous.
- It allows you to quickly add interior detail to any object without having to trim edges or line edges up.
- You can work fast and loose and the mask created by Draw Inside mode keeps your art collected and tidy.
- A nice byproduct of Draw Inside mode is that it groups objects together, helping to keep your art organized and easy to manipulate.
Let's practice using Draw Inside mode on one object. After you're done, we'll quickly go over some strange behaviors you might encounter when using Draw Inside mode.
Learning draw inside mode's funky behavior
I can't say enough about how much Draw Inside mode helps speed up my workflow, but there are some strange behaviors you need to be aware of and get used to.
- After you draw inside an object, you'll notice that selecting that object becomes more difficult. Illustrator acts like the insides aren't there. Weird. The remedy for this is to select the edges of the object, not the middle.
- If you want to alter the appearance attributes of an object that's been converted to a Draw Inside object, use the Direct Select tool, click the edge of the object, and make your changes.
- If you want to turn Draw Inside mode on again for an object you've moved away from, Direct Select the edge and re-toggle Draw Inside mode. Alternately, you can double-click the edge of the object and jump into isolation mode.
Probably the trickiest issue you'll encounter with Draw Inside mode occurs when you attempt to draw inside a Compound Path. To rememdy this:
- Draw at least one object inside your compound path after Draw Inside mode is toggled.
- In your Layers panel, locate the Clip Group that's associated with your compound path.
- Press the little arrow to the right of the Clip Group to show its contents. Lock the object/layer called Compound Path.
- If you need to move the whole Clip Group, you can easily unlock it at any time by pressing Option+Cmd+2 (Alt+Ctrl+2 on Windows)
Once you've learned to work with these funky behaviors, Draw Inside becomes a really quick and easy tool.
Masking using alternate methods
While Draw Inside mode is an incredibly powerful part of the Illustrator toolset, it doesn't solve all masking-related issues. What if you want to create the illusion that part of your object is being block or is transparent? What if you want to contain several objects inside a mask of a certain shape.

For issues like these, Illustrator has offered a couple solutions for a long time. First, let's talk about Opacity Masks. They work sort of like Layer Masks in Photoshop and can be initiated via the Transparency panel.
- Create a black or white object (generally speaking, black hides and white shows) and position/draw it to block or hide part of another preexisting object or group.
- Select both the new object ant the preexisting one.
- Press the "Make Mask" button in the Transparency panel.
- Toggle the "Clip" and "Invert Mask" settings in the Transparency panel to get the look you desire.
- If you have to edit the mask after it's locked in, click the thumbnail of it in the Transparency panel. Remember to click back on the thumbnail of your art when you're done editing.
Honestly, Opacity Masks can be a little tricky, so don't feel like you need to use them unless you feel comfortable doing so or if a project you're working on specifically calls for one.

Much easier to understand, but sort of buried in Illustrator's menus, Clipping Masks are quick and easy way to clip one or multiple objects or groups inside a predetermined shape.
- Draw your clip shape, making sure that within Illustrator's stacking order it's on top of the objects you'd like to mask.
- Select the clipping shape you've created and everything you'd like to mask.
- Hit Cmd/Ctrl+7 on your keyboard or dig into the Object menu and find Clipping Mask->Make.
Once your clipping mask is made, all of its fill and stroke attributes will disappear. It will become a "clear" object, but its edges will mask out anything that falls outside of the clip shape's boundaries.

Now that we have a solid grasp on masking, let's use what we've learned to detail our composition.

Vector Detail Drawing and Color Palette Refinement

Drawing in basic details
Instead of focusing too much on one portion of an illustration, I like to work on the entire composition, bringing the whole piece to life together. Let's start doing just that.
- Add finer details to the silhouette-like shapes you've created. Think faces and clothing for characters, architectural details for buildings, leaves and flowers for plants.
- As you're working, try to keep your workflow as fluid as possible. Use tools like Draw Inside to help speed up your process and allow you to focus on enjoying creating art.
- If you get stuck on detailing one object, don't let it stifle or frustrate you. Move to another part of your illustration.
- Focus on a holistic approach to creating your art. Look at the big picture (no pun intended) the whole time and make sure all of the parts work together.
Keeping an eye on color
As you're adding in details, always keep color in mind. A cohesive color statement will be a significant portion of our final story scene.

A lot of time new artists will pummel their pieces with loads of unharmonious, bright colors. One of the most frequent comments I hear when people talk about my art is how people love the bright colors I use. The thing is, I don't use a ton of overly bright colors. I tend to use contrasting colors. I'll put a pop of very bright color on top of a field of otherwise drab or subtle tones to draw attention to the bright color.

The key to color is control. Don't dial all of your colors to 11. Put thought into your palette. Think about the mood or moods you'd like to convey.

For my piece, my main character symbolizes warmth and nature and he's roaming through a sad mechanical wasteland. I'll use earthy, warm organic yellows, oranges, browns and greens for his color palette, whereas I've chosen to color the backdrop a cool bluish-gray.

I want my main character to really pop and look like brightness and hope amid the overly machined world he's moving through, so I'll keep his palette bright, but not too bright. I'll save the super-bright colors for details like the birds flying around him.

Just like we approach detailing our work in a holistic way, we should be doing the same with color. Color and the palette you choose should be on your mind constantly as you work over your piece.
Adding in finer details
Our piece is really coming together! We have a sense of the overall story scene we're trying to convey and we have a good grasp on the color and everything color can do to help us tell our story. Let's start adding in some finer detail to really enhance our work.
- Using Draw Inside mode, start adding simple drawn patterns to objects. Think stripes, dot patterns, machined bits (think lines of rivets or seams in metal), brick patterns, any type of pattern you think might help enhance the look of your work.
- For now, let's focus on hand-drawn patterns, not automatically-generated ones. Hand-drawn patterns will give your piece a more organic feel, setting your work apart from traditional vector work.
- Let's also consider adding doodles into objects. A subtle, semi-transparent doodle drawn inside an object can lend significant visual interest and sophistication.
- During this phase of the process, I like to draw in suggestions of fur or hair where warranted. Although we're not at the shading portion of our process, I usually think about shading, lighting, and volume while I'm doing this. I like to use semi-transparent objects for hair and fur – multiply mode for darker regions, screen mode for lighter regions.
The key here is to keep things appropriate. If you're going for subtlety in your details, don't let your patterns, doodles, and fine details overpower the image. If you want the patterns and details to be the focal point, focus your use of color on bringing details to the forefront of your composition.

For my piece, I'm trying to tell my story through the compositional elements, so I'll be keeping my details knocked-back and subtle through the use of semi-transparent obects and slight color shifts. Experiment with different approaches to achieve the look and feel that best suits the story scene you want to illustrate.
Adjusting composition and color
Our artwork has come a long way and we're almost in the homestretch. Let's look at it with a critical eye and make adjustments before we add our finishing touches.
- Now that our details are in place, how does the overall layout of our composition look? Adjust the composition to draw attention to areas you'd like to showcase.
- Don't be afraid to nudge or resize elements in your composition. Remember, the reference sketch we created at the beginning wasn't the final word on what we're creating, so don't feel locked into it.
- Take some time to really assess your color palette and make any adjustments you see fit. We're trying to convey a sense of story and the colors you've chosen should be helping us do that.
Once you're feeling good about your work, let's jump into our final unit and bring our work fully to life via shading, lighting, and texture.

Shading, Volumizing, and Texturizing

Coloring with gradients for simple volume
Gradients are a quick and easy way to add volume to objects in Illustrator. We'll be adding in shading and lighting, but let's lay a foundation for those effects by popping in some gradients first.
- Select an object.
- In Illustrator's Gradient panel, define a simple, two-color linear gradient by dragging colors into the panel and adjusting them.
- I like to base my new gradient on the original color I've chosen for an object.
- Keep the gradient subtle. Wild variations and high-contrast gradients will make your work look amateurish.
- Use Illustrator's Gradient tool (the G key on your keyboard) to adjust the angle and direction of your gradient.
Once you've applied gradients as you see fit, we'll be moving on to my favorite step, shading and lighting!
Shading your scene
I've got to admit, this part of the process gets me pretty excited. I love seeing the scene pop to life when I draw in shading and lighting effects. We're going to start with shading.

To shade objects (characters, plants, buildings, etc.):
- Click on your object and toggle Draw Inside mode.
- Deselect your object and choose a color for your shading. I like to base my color on the object's original color, but it depends on what you're going for.
- In Appearance panel, turn the opacity for the new, undrawn object to somewhere around 50%. We can adjust this later if necessary.
- Change the blend mode from Normal to Multiply.
- Here comes the fun part: at the bottom of the Appearance panel, press the effects button and choose Blur->Gaussian Blur. Set the number to somewhere between 10 and 20. We'll be adjusting this later.
- Draw in your shading as you'd like it to appear.
- You'll notice that the Gaussian Blur gives it a nice, soft, blended edge. To adjust the level of blur, make sure your new shade object is selected and press Gaussian Blur in the Appearance panel.Turn preview on and you'll be able to get it just the way you want it.
- Adjust the opacity level if necessary.
- Layer shade objects on top of each other to get really nicely rendered shading really quickly.
- The shade objects are always really easy to move and edit.
To add cast shadows, simply draw shade objects under and behind the objects you've already drawn. I like to create a whole new layer just for cast shadows. One trick I like to use when I'm creating cast shadows is to apply a gradient that has two different oppacity stops to the shadow. This way, it sort of fades out into nothing.
Brushing in some highlights
To add highlights to your scene's objects, you can use the same methods we used to add shading. Just use the Screen blending mode instead of Multiply and choose lighter colors instead of darker hues.

That said, there's really neat technique I came up with to add rim light/back light to an object.
- Deselect everything.
- Choose white as your stroke color.
- In the appearance panel, add a Gaussian Blur effect. Keep the value low, somewhere around 5. Remember, we can easily adjust it later.
- Select the Blob Brush tool from the toolbar, or if you want to keep things easy, just press Shift+B on your keyboard.
- Press the left bracket key [ until the brush size is as small as it can get.
- Paint highlights around the edges of your objects. Pretty cool, simple way to add lighting effects!
Once you're done adding in your lighting, we'll add in some textures.
Finishing up with textures
Our illustration is looking really great, but let's make it look just a little bit more organic by applying textures.

There are a bunch of different ways to add textures. Most artists like to use raster images (photos and scans of real-world objects) to add texture to their images, which works out really well. I like to create my own simple textures using Illustrator's Brush tool.

I usually create one of two custom brushes for my textures: Bristle Brushes or Scatter Brushes. Either type can be created in the Brush panel. For the sake of this tutorial, we're going to keep it simple and create a single Scatter brush that can be repurposed in different sizes.
- Draw an organic-looking ellipse. Don't make it too perfect.
- Set its fill color to black. It should have no stroke color.
- Make it fairly small, just a few points wide.
- Drag it into the Brushes panel.
- Select Scatter Brush.
- For now, press OK.
- Use the Brush tool to draw a line.
- Double-click the new brush's thumbnail in the Brushes panel.
- Turn preview on and adjust the settings until you have a nice, random-looking scatter brush that covers a lot of area.
- Set Colorization method to Tint.
- Pick the color you want your texture to be. Redraw the texture onto your scene if necessary.
- Feel free to use Draw Inside mode to trap the texture inside objects.
- Adjust the transparency and blend mode to suit your needs.
- To adjust the size of the Scatter Brush texture, simply adjust the stroke size for the path you draw.
I like to keep my textures pretty subtle, so I usually set the transparency to 10% or less. It's really your call, though. One note: adding textures like these can be pretty processor intensive, so proceed with caution and save before proceeding with this step. Rarely has creating textures like this crashed Illustrator for me, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Most of the time, it just adds a lot of time to screen redraws, therefore slowing Illustrator down.
One last look and exporting for print
Now that we're finished, let's look at our piece one last time to see if there's anything else we'd like to change. If you're happy with your final art and you'd like to print it, I'd suggest exporting it as a JPEG or TIFF. If you want the final output to be a large file, you might have to open and rasterize it in Photoshop. Illustrator has a memory limit that sometimes causes it to abort large exports.

We've covered a lot in this process. Thanks for taking the class. Hopefully you've learned a lot and come out of class with a great piece of art!

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Transcripts

2. Intro and Gathering References: - welcome to my class, - creativity, - style and efficiency in Adobe Illustrator. - I'm sure everyone's really eager to jump right on the computer and get to work in - Illustrator. - But before we do that, - let's think through the process a little bit and try to build as solid a foundation as - possible for the artwork that we're going to be creating. - If you remember from the Project Guide, - we're going to be creating a story seen so it can either be from your own imagination or - from a story that you really love. - We're going to basically start by gathering ideas, - so there's lots of great ways to gather ideas. - You can look through books. - You can watch movies, - read stories. - You can also look for visual references. - One of my favorite things to do is go on Google images and get some visual references. - Other things I like to do or go out in the world and explore and take things in. - I'll take pictures and bring a lot of stuff back home with me. - I think one of the mistakes a lot of artists make is that they don't spend enough time - really thinking through the reference material portion of the process. - It doesn't have to be a long, - drawn out research project. - It's just a matter of going out seeking some reference materials, - not just for poses and different textures or something you might want to draw from the real - world, - but just for ideas and inspiration. 3. Getting First Ideas on Paper: - when I'm illustrating story seen are one of the first things I like to do is start doing - some really simple sketching and getting fast ideas out of my head. - Keep it really loose and simple. - I don't spend any time really at this point on refinements. - So what I'm doing right now is I'm drawing the concept that I came up with and the concept - that I came up with was a bear who was kind of wearing a television as a helmet. - And now it's a little strange, - but this is how my mind works. - So again you can tell him I'm keeping it really loose, - really simple. - And I like to take notes while I'm working on things like this as well. - So I was thinking this through as I was walking around, - just going during my day to day business and this this idea popped into my head. - So I'm trying to get as many ideas down on paper, - just in as notes as possible, - because sometimes I can refine things a little better with notes than I can with just a - simple sketch. - So I've got that down. - I'm gonna start drawing a little bit of the background now, - Um, - so I had this idea that it was the barrel to kind of be roaming through this man made - wasteland, - but that the wasteland would kind of resemble, - in some ways, - a forest. - So it's not. - It's not a forest in the conventional sense. - Um, - it's these broken pieces. - So it's just like broken metallic sort of world. - And in what made me think of that was I originally thought of him roaming through the - forest. - But I like the idea of flipping it and making it, - making the force made out of this, - like grey dull metal instead of a nice, - lively forest to kind of put him in a pinch. - So the bear himself I'm going to use I want to use bright, - warm colors to symbolize nature. - So I'm making a note of that. - So I don't forget that when I start moving into, - you know, - moving into to the major pre creation process, - um, - and that TV I want, - I want it to be a wood green TV, - and I thought there would be nice if some other animals from nature kind of followed the - bear. - So I want to put some birds in here, - so he's kind of got these these ah seekers with him. - So they're looking for refuge as well. 4. Breaking Your Routine: - Okay, - so we've made a pretty good foundation for the arts we're going to be creating in this - project. - But let's take a break now and kind of break our routine, - get away from our workspace and think a little bit about a little bit more about what we're - going to be creating. - I personally find it to be incredibly important to get away from the work area and get away - from the computer. - Get away from people, - for that matter, - kind of isolate your thoughts. - Give yourself some time to mull over what you're going to be creating, - because I feel like some of the best ideas come during that period. - So you laid out some ideas. - You have an idea where you want to go and you walk away. - Give yourself a break. - Think about stuff a little bit more, - and it's amazing the great ideas that will come into your mind. - So what I personally like to do is get out of the house. - I like to be outside. - I like to be in nature, - so a lot of times I'll go on a hike or I'll just run or walk around the neighborhood. - All often see things that inspire me or something will trigger thought that will be fed - back into my final product. - It's good to bring a very along, - like a sketch patch, - something little or camera or something that you can record some reference images if you - need to. - Sometimes it's good to go to a place like a museum. - You can get some ideas and inspiration from art in the museum. - Another thing I've done before that's been really great for me is I like to go to parts of - town that are a little different horse. - They're not necessarily text of places ever normally go, - so I might take a break and take a trip to Chinatown and walk around some shops. - It's pretty amazing. - Some of the things you'll see and what will kind of be fed back into your final product. - So I think right now put your pencil down, - shut your computer off, - take a break. - Think about what you're going to be creating and see if you can come up with any great - ideas that can be fed back into the reference sketch will be creating in the next step 5. Reference Sketch Part 1: - Okay, - so now it's time to start the reference sketch. - Um, - you can't see it, - obviously, - because we're focused on one piece of paper, - but around me, - I've got all of my materials that I've gathered already. - Um, - and I've got a big picture of one of the bears that I downloaded on the screen so I can see - it really big in front of me while I draw. - Uhm I'm going to start by kind of drawing in just really quickly. - Uh, - my bear And, - uh, - I'm gonna I had a little detail along the way, - and I'm just trying to I'm drawing it really in light pencil right now is I'm gonna go over - this again in just a few minutes. - So my goal right now is just to kind of set the initial composition, - and I'll probably be brushing this up and fixing it as we move along. - And I could see that bears face a little better now and get a better sense for what a - bear's snout might look like. - Um, - because I'm looking at right of my screen, - okay? - And, - uh, - he's kind of got a little whiter for around his now. - Probably have to breathe this a little bit here. - Anyway, - there it is. - That's basically what I'm looking for. - And I'm gonna box that in with kind of this idea have for almost, - like, - uh, - helmet made out of a television set. - I'm gonna refine all this in just a minute. - Uh, - but right now I'm just trying to get this done quickly. - As you can see, - I'm not really taking too much care. - Teoh iron out all the details, - so I'll refine it a little. - But generally speaking, - I don't spend a lot of time on these sketches. - Um, - I'm just doing this for ideas. - Put some Dial's at the bottom. - Always liked when TV's had these dial's at the bottom to kind of control different levels - like tint in contrast and stuff like that. - As a kid, - I always played with that stuff. - I always like the way it looked, - and I'll put these knobs here A little power button. - Maybe I could put like a little speaker grill. - I don't know. - I could play around with that again. - I I'll do more of this when ah, - again to vector. - But right now I'm just trying to get these ideas down and get a little more of a refined - composition before I start creating the vector art. - All right, - so draw the back of this television set, - and I'm gonna add a little instead just having dropped straight back at a little kind of - contour or, - you know, - a little extra element there on the back because I always like when those when objects like - this aren't just flat rectangles and at a little ventilation grills just for decorative - purposes, - you know, - just kind of to make it look a little more interesting. - Maybe some dots, - whatever I want to do. - Okay. - Anyway, - um, - now that I've got that, - I'm gonna look at another image. - I'm gonna quickly switch images on my computer, - and I'm going to move into doing a body now for him. - I'm kind of a kind of one. - Um, - I want him to have its head turned a little bit. - So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to have his body kind of twisted. - So his head, - he's kind of looking behind his shoulder a little, - um, - and give him a big old belly. - I'm gonna want to refine this anyway. - Um, - have his arm and here, - and one of the things I thought is that he could be carrying something important. - Uh, - arm needs to be fatter anyway, - Refined this a little bit. - Like I said, - his arm needs to be fatter. - Fattened it up. - But I want him to be holding something that kind of symbolizes this idea that he's, - um he's, - like, - kind of symbolizing nature and in this wasteland of mechanical kind of decay, - and so he's going to be holding something special. - I haven't have to think about this a little bit, - and I'll probably in the next step of my more refined sketch will probably add that in. - So for now, - I'm just putting some little magical kind of dust. - And now add Ian some hills. - So I want these hills to be kind of nice and sloping, - um, - so compositionally it wraps him and focuses attention in on the bear. - So then I'll add in these kind of weird metal structures. - So in my story, - this bear, - it's kind of going on a journey to reestablished the nature that he he lived in, - um, - the world around him is kind of crumbled a little into this kind of, - uh, - metallic man made wasteland. - So there's gonna be some objects that kind of resemble trees, - But they're not trees there, - these pipes and metal parts. - So I'm gonna draw more of these weird kind of objects in. - And these are gonna be pretty simple in the final rendered piece on when I ticket in the - Illustrator. - These aren't gonna be anything crazy is going to be pretty, - pretty straightforward. - Simple pieces. - Like I said, - they're going to kind of look similar to trees, - but not necessarily exactly like trees, - But they're gonna look a lot more spare and kind of broken. - Ah, - I may add some clouds into the sky a little bit. - Um, - but I'm definitely going to be adding a few birds. - I love drawing birds. - Um, - I think they're ridiculous animals. - They're absolutely insane looking. - If you really look at them, - these little tiny dinosaurs flying around, - um, - and there a lot of fun. - Two draw. - So I love whenever I can tow work birds into a piece, - I'll do it. - And I usually make them look pretty insane. - E think that's even more fun. - All right, - so I'm gonna refine all that I may have one more, - but, - you know, - I'm probably not going to go too far because I don't want to spend a lot of time when I'm - trying to demonstrate stuff a lot of time on trying to refine my details. 6. Reference Sketch Part 2: - Okay, - so I've gone in a little bit here, - and I've started to refine my sketch a little. - And what I'm doing is I'm going in with a darker gray pencil, - and I'm going over my lines and refining as I go along. - One thing I didn't mention before that I probably should mention is that I wouldn't suggest - using giant paper for this. - I actually suggest using pretty small paper. - I'm just using a normal letter sides us letter sized piece of paper 8.5 by 11. - And the reason for that is because, - remember, - this is just a reference sketch, - you know, - it might notice. - I'm I'm adding a little for in here. - So this is just a reference sketch. - This isn't going to be a final peace. - And this isn't going to be scanned in by me. - I'm I just don't like to work that way. - Um, - sometimes clients will ask for that from, - I guess, - other artists. - I've actually never been forced to follow that process where you, - you know, - create artwork on paper, - a really tight pencil sketch, - and then scan it and trace it in. - Um, - that's never happened to me. - Uh, - I've always kind of told clients how I work, - and they're okay with it. - So, - you know, - explore your options. - But if you have to scan it in, - then do it. - You know, - do whatever the client needs. - If you're working on a job, - I'm not going to say Don't do it. - Absolutely. - I just think that it kind of stifles the creature the creation process a little bit. - Personally, - I'm not a big fan of working that way anyway, - so I'm not looking to create something that's really tight or really finished, - but I want to get enough in there that I can be comfortable and have a nice foundation. - Um, - moving into illustrator. - So I like to darken it. - It just kind of makes me feel like this is a little more solid and it's relaxing. - I like L a sketching. - It's fun. - So I'm gonna kind of refine this a little more. - Um, - and I'll make these birds look a little more finished, - so kind of how it usually draw them an illustrator. - I'm gonna give his eyes a different look. - I like this upward glance because it be speaks wisdom. - I like to put a humor in my in my work here. - So, - uh, - if you've ever noticed it looked at my stuff, - you've probably seen it's a little strange. - Um, - but generally, - just like things that kind of make me laugh. - Sometimes I'll just put in little facial expressions or whatnot toe that make me laugh a - little bit. - Or sometimes I'll give the birds strange hairdos. - I have given them bald heads before with that little little Tufts on the side. - I like that. - It's fun. - Anyway, - um, - so trying to get them a little more refined and ah, - a little more in line with direction. - We're going probably wanna brush that up there. - But I can fix that. - An illustrator to Because, - like I said, - this isn't final. - Um, - I'm gonna get my quickly get my landscape here a little more solidified. - Probably gonna be adding some rocks or other metallic kind of objects once I get into - illustrator. - Um, - I'll draw few in here quickly, - but this stuff in the background for me for what I'm trying to achieve Not as important, - um, - these air atmospheric elements I'm gonna create one. - Get it down. - I'll mimic it. - I'm not going to copy and paste it and like, - warp it or anything like that, - I'm actually just going to mimic the pieces. - So I'll probably put something in the foreground like a little bit larger version of one of - those broken things. - Give it a little volume, - you know? - Anyway, - you get the idea so you can kind of give myself an idea of what this might end up looking - like. - And in some a little rivets. - Rivets are fun. - Anyway, - um, - I'll do the same thing, - flesh this out a little more and then here I've thought about this some more. - I think I just want it to be a little plant. - You know, - I think that would be fine. - It would be kind of nice. - So the bear is walking through. - Let's give him a little fair on that arm and that are back a little, - All right? - And then I billy out a little more. - And so well, - anyway, - so make this a little plant and will draw attention to it. - An illustrator with some contrast in colors and effects. - So he's kind of transporting this in my story. - He's finding refugees trying to find a place to rebuild nature in my story anyway. - Um, - so there it is. - I'll probably brushed this up a little more, - and then I'll jump in the illustrator. 7. Critiquing and Annotating the Sketch: - Okay, - so I went in and we did a few more refinements here, - Drew in a couple quick things, - Um, - added a few more rocks made of another foreground object. - Before I move on, - I'm going to do one other step before I movinto to Adobe Illustrator. - I'm gonna look at this and kind of do a little self critique and try to think through some - things that I feel like I could make better once I take it into illustrator, - I guess. - One of the things I feel like I could make this tree antenna idea. - Um, - I feel like it could make these branches better, - so I'd say, - uh, - work on branches. - I just feel like I can refine those a little bit more. - Once I get into illustrator, - I make some leaf shapes and probably work through that a little bit and make that a little - better. - Other things I'm going to do here is I know I want wood grain for the TV, - so I'm going to be adding wood green here, - so I'm what I'm doing right now is I'm not only self critiquing, - I'm going to annotate this a little bit as well. - Um I noticed that this is probably going to need to be bigger. - So let's say make larger. - Okay, - so I know that moving in. - So I'm kind of just trying Teoh like, - tighten things up a little bit just with notes. - I feel like this is a little bulky back here to it almost looks like the weight of it would - be pulling the bear over a little bit. - So maybe I want to say, - um Ah, - play with angle on this part here so I'll play with the angle and lessen the weight of that - a little. - Try to bring it in a little bit and tighten that up. - Once I get into illustrator, - I'll be adding a little shine in here to make that look a little more. - So maybe I should say that so ad shine to the glass, - so I need add shine to the glass. - I'm also going to make sure that of the colors I want this to kind of be a dead blue gray - all throughout here and in the sky. - So I want to make this kind of this dead bluish gray color to kind of give this illusion of - coldness. - I definitely want to annotate that because I like Teoh kind of get an idea how I want to - play with color once I jump into illustrator, - which is where I really do most of my color thinking, - Um, - one other thing I definitely want to make a note of is that the colors on the bear are warm - , - natural colors. - So on the bear and on the TV. - Okay, - uh, - gonna really focused on making it look as organic as possible. - Even though this is a television, - I'm going to try to play with it and make it look like something from the natural world. - So it has would grains almost. - I'm probably gonna add some more leafy elements make it look almost like a living thing - instead of a mechanical thing again trying to play with that contrast of this mechanical - world versus this natural thing that's happening here. - And I feel like I can do that by kind of playing with the idea of this TV. - And this TV kind of becomes a symbol. - Instead of the machine world, - it becomes a symbol of the natural world. - So it's gonna be kind of a weird juxtaposition. - There hopefully that works out, - we'll see how it is. - But I kind of think it's gonna work, - and I'm feeling pretty good about this. - So I'm gonna stop doing this, - and I'm gonna get ready to put it into illustrator. 8. Setting up Your Document: - Okay, - Now that we've finished our reference sketch, - it's time jump into illustrator and start creating vector art. - This is where the majority of our artwork is going to be produced. - So I'm gonna press file an illustrator and new, - by the way, - I'm using Illustrator CC Creative Cloud. - The newest version that's out right now. - First thing I'm gonna do here in the new document box is I'm going to type a name. - I'll type Baehr V one because I'm drawing a bear. - And that's my descriptive title of my personal peace and V one for version one. - I like to version out my files just in case there any major changes, - then I can go back and and and revert to a previous version. - So maybe I'll make a major change later on in the artwork. - I might give it a new version name, - so I might see it as Baehr v two. - And maybe I don't like it's all revert back to bear V one and work from that again. - It's just my way of kind of keeping track of things and moving forward in a safe way. - All right, - moving on. - We're gonna talk a little bit about size very quickly. - One of the really cool things about illustrators, - pretty much any box where you can type a number. - It will do automatic conversions for you, - so you'll notice that I have the documents set up in points right now, - and that's how I want it. - I am going. - Teoh set this to 10 inches wide. - Now you notice I didn't type it in points. - I typed in inches. - That's perfectly fine and illustrated by press tab. - It will automatically convert it to points. - Pretty cool. - Same thing. - For the height, - I'll type eight I m for inches Tab automatically converts two points. - It's really, - really a nice feature. - It tends a 10 inch wide by eight inch high. - Canvas isn't really that big, - but the reason I'm choosing to do that is because keeping your your actual physical - dimensions of your image smaller helps with pushing raster effects through illustrator, - and we're going to be working with raster effects, - so we want to keep our files fairly small. - What you want to do is think about you know the ratio of your final document and then try - toe shrink it down using math. - So in this case, - Maybe I'm making a 20 inch wide by 16 inch high document, - and I'm going to cut that in half to 10 inches by eight inches, - which is gonna work really well for me, - and it's gonna help with that. - You know, - kind of kind of the processing power of the computer will overwhelm the computer. - All right, - if you need to set a bleed, - go ahead and do that. - I'm not doing that for this piece, - but if you do, - there it is. - It will set. - If you set one, - it'll be reflected throughout the whole thing. - So maybe if I had 1/2 inch bleed, - you'll notice that it's all locked in because of this. - Little, - uh, - setting is clicked in right now, - but I'm gonna go back to zero. - All right. - Finally in advanced. - This has collapsed a lot of times, - but I'm going to open it up in the advance settings here. - We're going to make sure that our color mode is set correctly. - If you're printing said it to see him like a RGB for screen raster effects, - make sure it's at 300 especially we're printing, - which we are in this case 300 is gonna keep things safe. - Keep things easy. - You can actually change that again later, - so you accidentally don't set it in the beginning. - It's pretty easy to change. - Once you get into the process, - I'm gonna press OK, - and I've got a new blank canvas or blank art board. - You'll notice. - On the right hand side, - I've got a whole bunch of panels opened up. - This is how I like to work some of these panels. - We're going to be really important pretty much every panel I talk about today. - In fact, - all of the panels I talked about today can be accessed up here. - If you go up to the window menu, - you'll see there's a whole list of them. - So if you can't find one or one's not open, - I always feel free to reference that as we're working through today one window you'll - definitely want open for one panel you'll want open. - Is the appearance panel really important? - The layers one is probably another one you're going to want to have open the whole time 9. Blocking In Shapes: - Okay, - now that our document is ready to go, - um, - gonna jump into illustrator, - and I'm going to start blocking in the composition. - And what I mean by that is I'm going to be creating kind of just basic shapes that ripped - represent all the main elements within the composition. - Um, - I'm gonna start just by drawing in the background, - adding a background color. - So what I'll do is just rename layer one hate having layers just called layer one and layer - two and stuff like that. - So I'll call it BG for background. - So that's going to be my sky. - I'll select the rectangle tool, - and I'm gonna come up here to the color panel. - I keep my panels, - opens for easy access and all mix a color that I like That kind of goes along the lines of - what I'm looking for. - That dead it dead blue grey kind of color. - All right, - so you notice this is kind of it's a little bit on the light side right now. - As we move along, - other colors will work with it to make it look a little bit gray er and more mechanical. - All right, - so this is just a foundation. - You'll also notice that I've worked. - I'm working outside the bounds of the art board. - Uh, - for what we're doing, - it's inconsequential. - You don't need to be within the art board. - The art board will actually crop the art for you on export, - so don't worry about it. - Uh, - some people might consider it sloppy work, - but to me, - it makes sense because it gives me extra art to work with. - When I have are kind of on the edges of that art board, - you'll see what I mean. - A little later, - um, - I'm going to now add another layer, - and this is for the ground. - So I'll add in my ground and going to make that a little darker. - So you notice I d selected my sky shape. - I can lock that layer too, - if I'd like. - So I'm making this a little darker, - and I'm looking at my reference sketch. - You can't see that, - of course, - but I've got it next to me, - and I'm kind of going to rough this in just similar to what I have on my reference sketch. - And probably I just hit the key. - The use direct to change my pen tool to direct select, - And I'll kind of smooth this out a little bit. - And I want this kind of depression here in the ground that's gonna be drop focus towards my - bear in the composition. - So get that right. - So I'm adjusting that using the direct select tool. - Okay, - now that I've got that, - I'm gonna lock that layer and I'll move onto the bear. - I'm gonna do the bears body. - I work with the pencil and illustrator almost almost exclusively when I'm drawing object. - I personally don't like to use the pencil or brush tool for art creation. - I use it for more like effects and smoothing and things like that. - Now, - remember, - I'm making this bear the color of this bear a little warmer. - I'm adjusting my colors. - Okay, - so I'm gonna come in here with the pencil and draw in my bare. - Now. - Now, - something about the pencil. - I want to just discuss really quickly while I'm working here. - Uh, - it takes some practice. - This is not a tool that most people pick up right away. - It infuriates some people. - Zoom in just a touch so I can get some for details in here while I'm moving along. - Um, - it's it takes some practice to get used to, - and I'm not going to lie. - For most people, - it feels pretty technical. - I and used to it at this point, - I actually enjoy working with the pencil. - I may be a freak of nature in that regard. - I don't know, - but to me, - it's fine. - Um, - I like the process. - I love the control of the pen tool. - It is pretty much, - in my opinion, - unrivaled in that regard. - So I'm looking at my reference sketch and trying to kind of come up with the basic shape - I'm going for, - all right. - And I'm gonna move on to my other side here again, - working outside the art board at the bottom that keeps things kind of flowing. - It keeps things moving fast. - I'm gonna undo that. - I want to make this barrel fatter, - so I'm going to bring this up. - I'm actually going to add in some of the for detail. - A little later, - you'll notice that I'm hitting. - I'm kind of toddling between the pen and direct select. - I'm doing that by holding the command key on the keyboard, - and that allows me to reposition points on the fly. - So there you go. - If you're not used to the pencil and you want to use it and you want to feel the control of - it practice, - it'll come to you. - Anyone? - Absolutely. - Anyone can learn the pencil. - No exceptions. - I never met a single person who is incapable of learning something like this. - Just takes practice. - So I'm gonna finish this bear, - shape up a little bit here and make some minor adjustments. - But zoom out here to get a look at the composition, - but I mean, - essentially, - it's it's shaping up the way I want it to its. - The shapes are similar to what I've drawn on paper, - and it's moving in the direction I wanted to move. - So there it is. - I'm going to continue blocking in this. - I'm not going to bore you, - but having you watch me block everything in So I'll Bloxham more stuff in and we'll come - back for the next step. 10. Appearnce Panel Overview: - Let's take a really quick break from blocking our composition to discuss the appearance - panel. - I have the appearance panel open on the right side of my screen. - I keep select panels open on the right just for easy access. - While I'm working now, - the appearance panel, - I'd have to say, - if it's not the most important panel in Illustrator, - it's one of the most. - Without a doubt, - it gives you lots of different options and controls in one easy place. - So if you select any object, - it will show the attributes of that object. - The appearance attributes. - It will show you the stroke color, - and you can see the opacity settings for that and any effects that are applied directly to - the stroke. - It'll say it do the same thing for the fill so you can adjust capacity independently for - each one. - You can turn them on and off the visibility. - That is, - um, - you can adjust global opacity for that whole path or object right down here, - and then you've got some more stuff you can. - You can apply effects. - You can add a new stroke. - You can add a new Phil. - All appearance attributes will appear here in the appearance panel. - You can clear the appearance now. - One thing before we move on, - we are going to be using this a lot. - While we're going through this process, - we're going to be coming back to this. - So I'd highly suggest you keep it open one thing before we move on in the fly out menu on - the right upper right hand side. - Let's go through and make sure this setting new art has basic appearance is turned off That - is going to be crucial. - It's going to allow us to use any object within the composition as a um, - basically as a reference for what? - How you want to create the next object. - So all you'll have to do is select an object, - and whatever appearance attributes that object had the new one you will draw afterwards - will basically retained those same attributes. - It's a really useful thing. - It allows you to create quickly if you want to kind of use stuff. - You've already built appearances you've already built, - but I highly suggest you keep this open and definitely turn that off. - It might be a little tricky to get used to it first, - and you'll see why as we move along, - but it's really helpful 11. Pen Tool Tips and Blocking Adjustments: - Okay, - so we're moving ahead and blocking things in. - You'll notice that I've stepped forward a little bit in the process here. - I've added some new objects in, - and I've added a new layer over in my layers panel called Pipes to I want to talk about - this really quickly because it kind of addresses organization. - We're going to be talking a little more in depth about organizing things, - but right now I just want to talk really quickly about it when we're building our - composition. - What you want to try to do, - if you can, - is organize things and keep objects basically like grouped in layers by like object. - So I could group all all the pipes together in one layer, - but it would get really messy. - So I'm doing it by low levels of depth, - the farthest level in depth, - like back receding back into the composition I labeled pipes. - That was my 1st 1 So those are going to be small. - They're going to be in the distance kind of in the mid ground, - have this new layer called pipes to and then in the foreground will have one more called - pipes three, - which will be a lot closer to us, - and therefore the objects will be bigger. - The colors will be more, - I guess, - saturated and and such So anyway, - with that out of the way, - I want to do one more thing before we move into our next part of this unit. - And that's I want to discuss really quickly some more ins and outs of the pen tool on. - I'm going to do that. - I'm going to draw another one of these pipe trees, - so I'll draw it really quickly. - Try to not spend too much time on this, - okay, - so I like this interplay between, - um between hard angles and curved lines for making spooky forms. - I think it kind of gives a funky and spooky feel to things. - So that's what I'm going for here because I want this to look like I said, - like, - sort of a wasteland. - Help pop this guy up here and then we'll swing this in here. - There we go. - Now I want to edit this a little bit. - So what I'll do is I want to move this point. - For instance, - I'm holding command. - I get direct select that shows up when I hold command and I'm able to move that really - quickly and easily, - right? - If I want a curve, - say the bottom of this form. - I want a curve that I'm keeping. - My pen tool is still selected. - I haven't switched tools. - Okay, - What I can do is I could hold the option key down and you'll notice I get this black arrow - with a little curved line. - You can drag that down or up. - Whatever. - And now have curved, - curved, - that little path segment. - Just Teoh. - In case you're wondering which version of illustrator I'm on, - I'm on the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud. - The one that came out in January 2014. - So, - um, - if you're working on an older version of illustrated, - the tools might be slightly different, - but it's not gonna be so different that it wouldn't make sense. - Okay, - So other things I can do if I want a curve like an angled line. - So here I've got this angled point. - It terminates here. - There's no curve on this particular point. - If I hold down the option key, - I get this carrot. - OK, - I drag it now. - I've curved just that point. - Now that's only directly on that point now. - I don't want that curved. - I actually want an angle there. - So that's that's that. - I'm going to draw another shape on here, - add it in, - Okay, - And then I'll be adding some more stuff in. - But those are just some quick ins and outs of the pen tool, - and it just shows you how easy it is to actually go in and edit things. - You don't have to go and redraw the whole thing. - You don't have to command Z or undo whole bunch of stuff. - You can actually go in and do some really quick and easy at it. - Okay, - so I'm pretty far along and blocking my composition in. - I'm feeling pretty good about it. - I'm feeling like it can start moving into details pretty soon here. - I just want to sit back first and assess the entire composition and see if there are any - changes I want to make before I go into that. - So I don't know if you remember, - but in the sketch process, - I mentioned that I thought that plant this plant here could be a little bigger. - I also feel like this arm can be a little bigger, - So I've already made sure of unlocked both of those layers in the layers panel I've layer - called plant and layer called Bear, - and I'm going to hit the V key on my keyboard to you to switch to the regular selection - tool, - and I'm going to select both of those items. - I'm going to de select the bear's body. - It's now I've just got these two objects selected, - and I'm going to resize that holding shift toe lock in proportions. - Hopefully, - you know that by now kind of important are any way. - I think that's about the size I want it. - So it's a pretty big arm. - It's a pretty big plant. - Gonna be adding in some more detail, - some other things I want to change. - I'm not feeling like these pipes in the foreground are exactly what I want, - um, - in in terms of size and placement. - So I'm gonna change them very slightly in the layer panel. - A quick thing you can do, - you can hold the option key down and click this little area next to the right of the eye - and that if you if you hold option down, - it will basically lock everything except for the layer that you want to be unlocked. - It's great thing to do. - Makes it so you don't make any mistakes. - Gonna resize this minute Make it a little smaller, - Just gonna rotator to touch. - So my goal with this composition is two draws much attention inward towards the bare assed - possible. - So you might notice that these all of these objects, - these tree type things, - are all kind of pointing inward. - They're all pointing toward the bear. - So, - compositionally speaking, - I'm trying to draw as much attention to that center as possible. - Um And then I'm using really kind of hot colors for only very small objects. - I try to limit the use of really bright colors and crazy colors to just pops of color. - Um, - and you'll see how effective that is later. - Right now, - it's very effective because there's not a lot going on. - So these red birds, - um, - unlock that layer quickly to show you that these red birds really stand out. - Um, - as does the red plant in the middle here. - One thing I'm not really happy with is the color have chosen for the leaves and the stems - on the plant. - Something to change that quickly. - I'm just gonna tone it down a bit, - actually. - Gonna bring the magenta up and I think I'm going to hold. - I'm holding command and I'm dragging one of these down. - And what that does is it takes all of them down together in unison, - so proportionally changes them. - So I'll probably tinker with this a little bit later on as well, - to get it where I want it to be. - But it's getting closer. - I just don't want it to be so hot that green was really, - really vibrating against the red and against some of the other elements. - It was just a little too much. - I'm gonna be at ingredients to these as well later. - So they'll all kind of toned down a bit. - And they're all going to get a little more subtle and nuanced as we move forward. - But I'm feeling pretty good about this. - I may make some more adjustments to the composition, - but for the most part, - this is the direction I'm heading 12. Layering in Illustrator: - So before we start detail, - ING are illustration. - Let's take a quick moment to talk about organization a little bit. - First, - we're going to talk about layers. - An illustrator. - Um, - I actually know a lot of illustrators I've spoken to who don't really use layers. - Even with complicated artwork, - I personally feel like this is a mistake, - especially when you go back to edit. - It just makes it so easy to go into edit things and quickly understand what's going on with - the structure of a document. - When you have layers organized and labeled really well, - if you're ever handing your are off to someone, - it's really great toe layer for them. - So they have an idea of what's going on now. - Illustrators and objects based method of creating our It's a little different than photo - shop in that way. - So Photoshopped works specifically with layers all the time. - You're manipulating layers, - but but illustrators layers are basically objects or groups of objects. - So the main levels of these layers that I've created so if you know you notice on my layers - panel, - I've got a whole bunch that I've created, - um, - inside of each of these. - So if I go up to birds. - For instance. - If I look down here, - it shows sub I'm going, - going to call them sub layers. - You can think of them that way. - But all they are are individual objects within that layer. - So every single one of these is a path or an object Within that layer, - I don't go unnamed Those personally, - you could if you really wanted to, - if you're completely O c D. - But for the most part, - you don't really need to worry about that. - So I'm just going to close that up and we'll look at it this way. - So each of these layers is kind of an important section of our composition. - So what I like to do is when I'm creating my artwork, - I'll label it as I'm going along. - I've pretty much created all of the the layers I'm going to use. - I might add a few more, - but just for the sake of teaching, - I'm gonna add one more right now, - while I'm adding this layer, - I'm holding the option key on the keyboard. - I'm holding the option key, - and I'm pressing this new layer button at the bottom of the panel. - And what that does is it brings up this layers option. - Ah, - window. - And then I can name the layer. - So we'll just call this, - um, - tests later. - One other thing you'll notice is that the color is down here. - This is the color of the ah, - the points. - And you know that you're drawing when you draw path on that layer. - Brown is the best color to draw with. - And there's some really awful ones in here. - Black and yellow are absolutely horrible to draw with. - Gray is not so hot either. - The best ones are actually at the top of the list. - Light blue light red, - green, - medium blue, - magenta science are all pretty good sans a little bit on the light side. - But usually it works out for me. - I kind of cycle through those. - So with this one Brown, - I would probably just switch it to light blue. - It's gonna work for me that way. - Uh, - don't worry about any of these settings. - We're not dealing with these right now. - If you do have other needs, - you can, - you know, - switch these honor off. - But right now, - let's just keep them at the default settings. - We don't need to change them. - I'm just going to press. - OK, - so now I have this new layer. - It's called test layers in my layers panel. - Um, - one thing I like to do I like to make sure I use practical names for my layers. - I've seen people name their layers. - Ridiculous things. - They think they're comedians. - I think I can be pretty funny occasionally. - This is not the place for it. - Try to keep your layers as simple and practical in naming in terms of naming as possible, - you want it to be easy. - You don't want to name a layer Kevin and then come back and wonder what the hell Kevin is. - So just, - you know, - be easy on yourself. - Name the practical things. - Don't be clever. - Another important thing is to try to isolate important objects on their own layers. - I'm gonna actually ditch this test later now, - because I don't need it anymore. - I'll throw in the trash, - but let's look at these other layers and see how we group things. - So my most important part of my composition is the bear. - I put the bear on its own layer. - There's gonna be a lot of detail in that bear, - so I want to have it separated from the other things. - Now, - on the other hand, - the birds are going have a lot less detail, - and so I'm grouping them on one layer together, - the two birds air on one layer together. - Um, - the TV is on its own layer because it's going to have a fair amount of detail. - The plant mostly because it's the only plant, - Um, - and so on. - I already talked about how I've grouped the pipes in different layers, - and and I think that makes a lot of sense. - So everything is kind of groups and separated to make it really easy for me to go in and - add it, - Um, - I if I open this file up three years from now, - I'm going to know exactly what I was doing, - and it's really helpful 13. Setting Swatches and Graphic Styles: - another great way to keep your artwork organized and to keep your workflow going. - Moving in a sort of a faster way is to, - ah, - populate your swatches panel. - Now you'll notice. - Right now, - mine is empty. - I haven't been populating my swatches panel because I've been trying to just move through - the art quickly. - I'm gonna take some time right now to do that, - and it's really simple process. - For instance, - if I want to grab this red for this bird, - I'm just going to click the bird. - I'm going to come up here into my swatches panel, - shows my field color and just drag it in its that simple. - Same with the TV. - Same thing. - Just drag it in and I can keep doing that. - It's really fast, - really easy. - I usually keep mine organized as I'm moving through, - so that similar colors air kind of next to each other, - and you can always slide them around and reorganize them as you see fit. - It's pretty easy to dio, - so I'm just adding those in, - um, - get the sky color. - Put that here and you'll notice it's got a nice array of almost creating greedy int there. - I'll bring this brown that I used for the branch, - and I also used that for the back of the television. - We'll bring this green in next to my read, - and I'll get the color that I used for my bear kind of separate my cool colors from my - warmer colors by nature colors from my more Matar, - I guess you know, - man made sort of great blues shades, - and, - um, - I think I've got almost all of them. - Just get the arm color, - even though that's just there for contrast. - Okay, - so I think that's it. - I've got those all in. - It was pretty fast. - Another thing you can do with colors that's really helpful is you can create color groups. - There's a couple cool ways to do this. - One way you can do it is just by selecting a series of colors, - and we can go here new color group. - You can name it if I want. - I can also press that down there. - I can call these nature, - and it groups them together in a folder. - Could do the same thing with my man made ones. - I'll do it from down here this time, - and I'll call these metal perfect there they are all group together. - These groups are really helpful. - There's another really cool way to make them. - What you can do is say I select an object. - I can actually press that, - and it will create a little color group just from that object. - That's pretty cool. - Way to do stuff, - too. - It's really fast, - really easy now. - I don't need those, - so I'm just going to command Z and undo that really quickly to finish up this - organizational unit. - One thing I want to talk about really quickly. - Our graphic styles Graphic styles are quick and easy way to apply, - uh, - and objects visual attributes to another object. - So you could basically save the attributes of one object and apply them to another. - So let's just quickly pan our screen over. - I'm just holding the space bar down and panning over and let go. - I want to work off the art board because I don't want to use this. - Are that I'm going to be using as a demonstration in my final piece. - So I'm just gonna quickly draw a shape. - Okay, - so there it is now, - but I want to make a radiant for this. - So I'm going to go to my greedy it panel and just apply this black and white radiant. - That's fine for demonstration purposes. - And I'm going to show you how you can do. - Ah, - quick diagonal ingredient because I used the eggnog radiance a lot and we will be using - them in later unit here. - So I hit the G key on my keyboard toe. - Go into the greedy and tool and you'll notice I have this line across that's basically - showing a visual representation of how my ingredient is applied on this object. - We're gonna drag a diagonal line with that. - Now I have a nice Diagne ingredient. - It's applied in a different way. - I'm gonna add one more thing to this. - Uhm, - I'm going to feather this object. - So in my appearance panel over here I am going to go down to effects for stylized feather - click preview and you'll notice Now I have this nice soft edge. - So with that in mind, - if I had a new object or different objects somewhere in the same image, - maybe have a few of them just gonna drop a few different things and I want them all to have - that same. - The same attributes. - Easiest way I could do that. - Select this object and I'm going to create a new graphic style in my graphic styles panel. - You'll notice that shows up right here. - Now all I have to do select both of these objects. - I'm simply using the regular selection tool saw Hit V and I will hold shift. - So I've got both those objects selected. - Click that, - and now they all have the same, - uh, - same attributes. - The same appearance attributes I select them all you'll notice in the appearance panel. - It's all the same stuff, - and that's how you do that. - That could be really helpful. - And you'll see why, - in a little bit, - we're going to be creating some shadows using some effects and will be using some - directional Grady INTs. - And if we can apply that those settings Teoh those appearance attributes to a whole bunch - of objects in Mass, - it's a lot easier than doing one at a time 14. Drawing Inside Objects: - We've laid a nice solid foundation for artwork and we've gone over organization. - So now we're ready to jump into details. - Well, - I guess almost ready. - One thing I want to cover really quickly is masking. - Masking to me is the easiest way to make illustrator feel faster and make the workflow and - illustrator feel a little bit more realistic and looser and less technical. - Um, - I I like to use masking too. - Add details to my objects without having to do any of the technically precise movements - that happen a lot of times with things like Path finding an illustrator and, - uh, - and just trying to match the edges of paths against each other. - So we're gonna go over that really quickly. - There's a few different types of masking, - but I want to focus mostly on something called drawing side mood, - which, - to me, - is one of the best tools in Illustrator Hands Down. - It is so, - so useful. - Almost everybody who I have known who have talked to about this and if they didn't know - about it at first once I've told them about it a little bit, - it's kind of been one of those life altering moments So I really think this is gonna be - super beneficial for you, - especially if you have kind of, - Ah, - a little bit of trepidation about approaching illustrator and you're a little bit cautious - or, - you know, - you feel like it's a little too technical for you. - Think this might take a little bit of that out? - I'm going to start right now with the bear here, - this bear shape, - and I'm going to just demonstrate a little bit about how draw inside mode works with this - bear shape. - So what I'm going to be doing is my goal is going to be to create some, - um, - some furry sort of shading along the left edge of this, - this object to trigger drawn side mode. - There's a couple different ways you can do it. - There's one way that slow, - and there's one way that's fast. - Almost always the way that's fast is the best way to go, - in this case, - the fast ways to use the keyboard. - First, - let's talk about the slow way, - just in case you need a visual on the tool bar on the left side of my screen. - Here at the bottom, - there's a little button that allows us to shift drawing modes. - You'll notice it says Press shift D, - and that's what we're going to be doing. - But right now, - I just want to show you where it's hidden. - If you hold this down, - you can switch it. - Switch to right here, - says Draw inside. - I'm not going to do that to me. - That's a waste of time. - If I hold shift and press D two times on my keyboard shifty twice, - you'll notice I get this nice line around my object. - Okay, - this dotted line around the corners. - I d selected my object because I want to draw inside of it. - I don't want to use manipulate the object, - so I've d selected it. - I'm going to press P to trigger my pen tool to get my pencil to come back up, - and I'm going to use a method for drawing inside that I find to be really fast and easy - when it go over to my appearance panel press change my opacity, - transparency blend mode to multiply, - and I'm going to change the opacity. - Knock it down to about 40% since I have in my appearance panel since I have new art has - basic appearance turned off it just what this has done is that just inherited the same - color values as and the same appearance attributes as you know, - as I already had set for the Bears body. - So all I just did was take that bears basic base color. - And now I've created Multiply 40% version of that. - I'm going to start drawing inside my object now to demonstrate this a little bit. - Hopefully that wasn't too daunting or technical. - Right? - So here we go. - So I'm gonna make this kind of jagged to make it appear as if it's for and I don't know if - you noticed or not, - but I started outside the bounds of the bear, - sort of like starting outside the bounds of the other outside of the boundaries of things. - I think you may have become aware of that already. - So now I'm really quickly closing that path and de selecting it, - and there it is really fast. - Okay, - if I want to alter that or edit it, - I'm going to hit the a key to toggle the direct select, - maybe drag some of these in a little bit so I could edit that quickly I'm only editing it - because I didn't really like the curves of it. - It's kind of not contouring the way I want it to. - All right? - Really fast. - Easy. - There. - There it is. - Now I want to add another one. - I'm just gonna show you one more time how this works. - I'm needs the exact same in image attributes. - I'm not changing anything, - and I'm going to go over top that other one. - This kind of feeds into what will be talking about when we do detail ing a little later, - quickly going through here, - making this jagged sort of for shading and closing the path really fast. - Back to the beginning. - Done. - So there it is. - That's how drawn side works so easy so fast. - You know, - your pencil, - you can move. - Justus fast, - as I just did is really quick. - Really easy. - Really great way to do quick detail work and not worry about 15. Dealing with Draw Inside Mode's Funky Behavior: - Okay, - So I'm trying to sell you pretty hard on this draw inside thing, - and I personally think it's terrific. - But I have to admit, - and I have to warn you, - there are are some strange behaviors that go along with it that you kind of have to get - used to. - So to make sure that it doesn't get frustrating, - I'm gonna go over those really fast. - Um, - 1st 1st thing I want to talk about is this kind of weird behavior that occurs after - something becomes a draw inside object for lack of a better term. - So I made this bear shape a draw inside object. - In other words, - it's masking out these objects that I drew inside of it. - All right, - Normally, - any object I click if I use I'm using the directs electoral. - If I click that object anywhere on the object, - it will select it like this arm. - Now I'm going to click this bear object. - I'm gonna click it right in the middle. - I'm clicking it right now. - Nothing is happening. - This is weird. - Okay, - so this could be really confusing. - What happens when you create this direct, - select object is I'm sorry. - Draw inside object is that it kind of almost behaves as if it's hollow, - as if there's no Phil, - um, - to to mitigate that, - to make sure I can select it. - All I have to do is click the edge, - so I click the edge and it selects the object. - That's it. - So just make sure you do that. - Then you'll be able to do any editing. - You'll need to dio also to jump back into draw inside mode once you select that edge. - So I'll select the edge. - And all I have to do is hold shift and press D two times. - And there I am back in now. - I can redraw, - can re edit. - I could. - I can always edit things inside, - But now I can draw more stuff inside this this object. - Okay. - All right. - So that's not too bad. - Here's the tricky one. - I'm going to switch to this TV now. - Now I'm I created this TV and I have this cut out in the middle. - So what happened is when I made this, - it formed a compound path which you can see over here in the appearance panel. - Also added some rounded corners. - Actually, - I'm going toe quickly expand those so that that appearance attribute goes away. - So now I just have a compound path drawn side. - Moon really doesn't work that terrific, - Lee with compound paths. - I'm gonna demonstrate really quickly some of the issues and some of the frustrations that - come up with it. - It could be pretty annoying. - This is the most annoying thing that draw inside does the other one, - I think, - is pretty simple. - So I'm gonna hold shift, - impressed d a couple times, - get my dotted lines. - I'm going to create a quick, - um, - would wood grain pattern in here. - So I'm going to use the same method I used before. - We're using the same color as the television. - I'm just switching the opacity, - the blend mode to multiply. - And I'm gonna turn the capacity to 50% and I'll draw really quick. - What Green. - So I'm just drawing this detail and really fast, - and I'm going to de select that now. - Now I'm going to try to select it with direct select again, - and it is not happening clicking it and it's not happening. - So it's it's just selecting the entire clip group. - I don't want that to happen. - One really cool thing. - That illustrator added. - I think I think when Creative Cloud came out was they added this This thing in the layers - panel called Locate object. - It's a little magnifying glass at the bottom. - If you have an object selected and you press that, - it'll zoom right to that object super helpful, - especially in this case, - because in this case, - to make it so that we can edit this object that's clipped inside of this compound path. - One of the easiest ways to do it is to lock the compound path. - There we go. - Now I can edit it. - Okay, - It's now I can move the points and edit it. - But this is honestly, - this is a little frustrating. - This gets annoying, - Um, - not the best way to work. - But I think it's a decent compromise, - given the other, - you know, - the other ways you could work. - So I'm gonna unlock that, - and I'm going to re initiate my drawn side, - and then I would probably, - you know, - continue toe work inside of there. 16. More Masking!: - in addition to drawn side mode, - there are a couple other types of masking the illustrator has to offer, - and we're going to quickly go over those. - We're not going to spend as much time on them because I don't think they're quite as useful - in the long run, - especially for the process we're using. - Ah, - as drawn side mode is. - But you should still know about them. - Uh, - one of them is called a passive. - The mask opacity masks are located in the transparency panel in Adobe Illustrator, - I'm going to shift over some holding space. - I'm shifting over to a place off my our board to demonstrate this really quickly. - All right, - So really fast. - I'm going to make a box, - all right? - And now let's say we want to cut out part of this box or include it in some way. - What I'm going to do is I am going to create a black object so I'll press the l key to make - it a lips, - and I'll put this black circle over top of my box. - I'm going to now hit the wiki selectable and select both objects. - I'm going to go to my transparency panel and I'm going to press make mask and oh, - no, - they've disappeared. - Well, - we have to tell Tell illustrator what type of behavior we want this to have. - So I'm going to turn off clip and you'll notice it now has the behavior that I actually was - looking for, - which what I was looking for is I wanted to have that black object mask out what was behind - it. - Okay, - so this black object, - that circle now becomes a mask and you'll notice here when I have them both selected but - down in the transparency panel, - it shows the object, - and then it shows a link to the mask. - Kind of a weird behavior here. - This is a little bit different than how illustrator normally works. - This kind of works in a similar way to the way Photoshopped works with masks. - Is that here? - We've got the object selected. - And if you want to edit the actual mask object, - you have to click this this button right here or this area, - this thumbnail and that will allow you to alter the actual mask case. - Now, - I've altered the mask and then I have to click back on the object to enter back into normal - illustrator world. - It's kind of like you're in this this black hole when you're over here. - So that's that Capacity masks. - Not too difficult. - I like to think of when I'm working with masks. - I just like to make it simple and think anything that I draw in black Will will hide an - object or hide something. - Anything I draw in white will show. - So just keep that in mind when you're working. - All right? - So I'm gonna race this really quickly now, - Um, - really fast. - Let's talk about one more type of masking. - We're gonna talk about clipping masks. - I like clipping masks. - They could be really useful. - Sometimes. - I'm going to draw to make a few read circles. - Okay. - Almost like dots ends. - We want to mask these within a certain shape. - Let's say we want to put all of these in a box, - but we want the box to clip out the edges. - So we want this kind of weird, - funky pattern to show up in a box. - Whoops. - Una de select that object. - I'm gonna click a different color, - and I am going to draw a box over these. - All right? - I'm gonna select all of these objects and I'm going to hit command seven. - Now, - this is also in the object menu under clipping mask and make. - I pressed the keyboard shortcut because I think it's about 1000 times easier up to you. - There you go. - Now they're all trapped in there. - They're all in the mask, - massed in that object, - these air really helpful, - Really useful. - You'll notice one different thing. - One different behavior that this takes on that draw inside doesn't when you use the - clipping mask, - it basically zeros out all of the appearance attributes for that mask object so that that - rectangle that was green is now just clear, - has no parents attributes, - so it just shows the clips everything out and becomes kind of invisible. - So that's one way. - It's a little different from the drawn side mode, - so this is a really useful type of masking for certain applications. - But I think most for the most part, - when we're doing our artwork today, - we're going to stick withdrawn side mood. - We might use a passage e masks a little bit. - It's up to you in my piece. - I'm not sure haven't gotten there yet, - so we're going to get there, - and that's what we're gonna move into now. - We're going to move into the detail in portion. 17. Drawing Basic Details: - Okay, - We've got our composition all blocked in. - Things were looking good. - It's time to start detail ing. - This is one of the most fun parts of the whole process. - Because you get to see things really start to come to life in a big way. - Um, - one tip I'm going to give before I start is that you don't focus in on any one section too - hard. - Instead, - you'll want to try to kind of jump around the composition and work from piece to piece to - work detail, - like, - kind of work holistically. - Try to get all of the pieces working together. - It'll make things come to life in a better way. - You'll see what I mean is we work here. - I'm gonna start with the bear. - So I unlocked the layer for the bear. - I have already created a drawing side mask for this, - so I'm just selecting the edge and I'm using direct select to do that. - I'm gonna hit shifty couple times, - and I'm going to start drawing in some details in the spare. - So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use ah version of this color. - I'm gonna go a little lighter. - So in the color panel here. - I'm gonna mix a color that's a little lighter, - and I'm going to start with the ears, - zoom in a little bit, - so try to make them kind of like a little fuzzy to mimic the rest of the look. - I'm going for here and I'm glancing at my reference sketch as I'm doing this just to get an - idea of where you know what, - my initial thoughts on this war and I'll make adjustments as I go along because I'm not - like I've said before. - I'm not using that reference sketch as a hard and fast final, - a piece of art. - It's just a suggestion of where I want to go. - It's a reference. - So here I go get my years in. - Alright, - so I've got that part in, - and now I have my bare set up where he's got kind of this instead of eyes that he's got - hair covering his eyes. - So I'm gonna de select quickly and I'm going to hold shift and press X. - If you'll notice up in the color panel that switched our color, - our stroke, - the filled color went into the stroke. - What I'm going to do is I'm going to switch that now to this darker brown that I have in my - swatches panel. - And I'm actually going to do a little trick with stroke. - So in my appearance panel, - I'm going to press the word stroke. - It brings up the stroke panel, - which is one of the cool things about the appearance panel is. - A lot of stuff gets nested within that. - So it's really quick and easy access. - I'm going, - Teoh make the weight of that stroke a little bigger and down at the bottom for profile. - I'm going to choose this one that's tapered on both edges. - Both ends rather. - And I'm going to just quickly draw something that mimics this look of this kind of flap of - hair going over the Bears face. - I'm just using the pen told do that. - And for this one, - I'm probably gonna put in very little, - very few curves. - I'll put in a few here just toe just for posterity. - Um, - there I go. - All right. - I'm gonna switch the opacity mode on this quickly to multiply. - Probably gonna turn the opacity down a trick. - An illustrator. - You could hold, - shift and press up or down and it will go in 10 in increments of 10. - So I like 40. - Let's stick with 50. - That sounds good. - Alright, - so I've got that and I will de select that. - Now I've got this nice, - really simple tapered path. - I like the way it looks. - I'm gonna go and quickly draw in the snout area. - So what I did just there is I clicked on one of these ears. - These you're interiors that I created. - And because I have the appearance panel set to Newark to turn off new art has basic - appearance. - It inherited the appearance attributes of that, - which is what I wanted to dio. - Because I want that the snout to kind of match that for my color palette so dry and a quick - snout here, - muzzle wherever you wanna call it. - And just like everywhere else, - I'm kind of keeping with this whole training meat. - Really? - Um, - suggest suggestion of for its Not necessarily for per se. - I'm not gonna go in do crazy detail on this, - but this is how I create a suggestion for is what I like to do. - Now I'm gonna overlap this a little bit and you'll see why in a moment. - Alright, - So I've overlap that I'm going to send this behind the little line. - That kind of shows the flap of hair. - So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hold command, - and then I'm going to press the left bracket one time, - and it will go behind that. - Now, - there's a little problem. - This isn't really behaving the way I wanted to, - so I'm gonna have to make a change. - So what I've done here is I had made this line semi transparent, - and it's not really working with, - you know, - now that it's going over a light area, - so I'm actually gonna make it fully opaque. - And then, - um, - turn off that multiply mode so we'll change it back to normal. - And, - uh, - I'll just shift the color to get where I want it to be instead, - There we go. - So that's kind of similar. - What? - What I had before. - Maybe not dead on, - but that's okay. - All right, - moving on. - I'm gonna create a nose, - so I'm just drawing in Quick beast. - Basic details. - Um, - not going to crazy here. - I made sure to d. - C. - To select the image attributes of the muzzle again because I didn't wanna have the stroke - attributes that were attached to the last object I had. - Which was this This line here. - All right. - Kind of at this a little bit. - Might lighten that a little, - even hold command and drag one of these points in the color panel one of these, - that Here we go. - All right. - And we do one more thing here, - grab the click on my flap of hair again to grab the attributes from that minute. - Go into my appearance panel, - turn the stroke down to two points, - and I'm going to create my mouth. - There we go. - Gotta face. - All right, - So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. - Kind of got what? - I'm looking for their and I'll move into another section and detail that. - So maybe I'll jump up to one of the birds quickly. - So over my layers panel unlocked just that layer and I'll start detailing this bird, - so I'm gonna give it a little belly. - Mina, - click it. - Press shift D twice to go into a drawn side. - Moved. - Give it a belly. - I'm going to create a derivative of this red color by command dragging this down. - I think I might make it a little more yellow kind of orange is. - And I will create this kind of jagged belly, - every girl. - Okay, - so I've got it for that one. - Um, - maybe now I'll set some eyes in here to really quickly. - So I'm going to use this dark brown again. - I like to use a lot of the same colors. - Drag that one over a little touch. - Getting him up pretty high here slumps. - If you ever make a mistaking Just Kip commands he really quick. - I hope everybody knows that one. - All right, - so there's that and I think I'll give it a beak really quickly, - too. - So for the beak, - I'm gonna go with a version of the red that's really dark. - And I'm just gonna make a really easy beak like that. - I'll go in and add some more details and probably work it out a little more A little later - . - One thing I'll do really fast is add some pupils in. - So for the pupils, - I'm going to use this tan kind of color that I use for the television. - And I think I remember I wanted to give it kind of an upward glance. - So I'm gonna actually click on the I object and do a draw inside on that really fast. - Just like that. - And I might I might change this later on. - We'll see. - I might change the color scheme a little bit, - but for now, - that works for me. - All right, - so I'm gonna work. - I'm gonna keep working, - moving around my my composition. - I'll move now to this other bird already. - Kind of have it set. - I know what I want to dio, - and my first bird is already set up for this. - So what I'm gonna do really quickly because I'm gonna hit the F key on the keyboard to - Philip all my screen space and then hit tab. - Now, - I've got just my image. - No panels. - I'm going to click the belly. - Gonna mimic that over here. - May maybe make it just a touch different. - But for the most part, - same. - My eyes. - You'll notice there's a little bit of red sticking in here. - And I'll tell you what that is in just a moment. - All right, - So that red is that part of the wing. - So what I can do is I can click that wing, - and I'm just going to hold command shift and left bracket. - And I'll press the left bracket once and that will send it to the back so it sends it to - the back of the order of arrangement. - So it's the back of the stack for that layer now, - all right, - and I'll create the same sort of beak that I created for the other guy and you'll notice - again. - I got a little overlap, - some to do the same thing. - Command shift, - left bracket. - Now that's behind in the order of everything. - And last but not least, - I'll do the same thing that I did with the other guys. - I. - So I select the object. - Hold shift Presti twice, - three times. - In that case, - switch from the other object. - Select the eye over here so that I'm using the same image attributes. - And there we go. - All right, - so I'm going to press tab, - bring my panel's back up, - and I'll move around the whole composition to work this up a little more 18. Adding Details Using Strokes and Custom Brushes: - for the pipes. - You may remember I wanted to put kind of a seem and some rivets along here. - I'm gonna do this with a really quick and simple trick. - I think one of them will be pretty obvious. - The other one might not be so obvious. - Gonna hold shift? - I'm gonna select my object here. - The layer, - of course, - is unlocked. - And I'm going to hold shift and press d two times to start drawn side mode. - Do you select my object when you go up to my color panel? - Okay. - I'm gonna hold shift and press X to drop my fill into my stroke. - Go into that stroke and alter the colors to make it tiny bit darker. - Change the opacity in the appearance panel. - Change the mode to multiply. - Okay, - um, - and I using the pencil, - I'm going to quickly draw a seam here. - That kind of follows the contour of this pipe. - You can see it's really dark right now. - That's not really the effect I want, - so I'll be altering the opacity of it toe kind of knock that back a little bit. - I'm also going to just quickly hold command and edit my path to get it a little more to my - liking. - I think I might holding option here to curve that out a little bit. - All right. - I think that's a little more what I'm looking for and how re select that. - And I'll drop the opacity down to 50. - I'm holding shift again. - Highlight this. - Hold shift. - Press the down arrow a few times, - drops it in there. - You can also just type it in. - You can slide it. - Whatever you want to dio, - it's really up to you. - Um, - sometimes this going on these stop points is really easy. - All right, - so there it is. - That's kind of what I'm looking for. - I'm gonna I've accidentally de selected or are gone out of draw inside mode. - So I'm gonna click the edge of this pipe Hold shift, - press d Do that two times. - And now I'm going to re select this line. - The stroke I created, - Then I'll de selected I re selected it just to get the appearance attributes to show up in - the appearance panel. - Now, - what I'm gonna do here is where it says stroke. - I'm going to change it to two to make it a little thicker. - But before I escape out of here, - I'm also going to mess with some of the other settings I'm going to Where it says, - Cap, - I'm gonna choose around, - Cap. - Okay. - And what's his dash line? - I'm going to turn that on for the dash. - I'm going to set it to zero for the gap, - going to set it to six or smells to eight. - And what this is going to dio, - you'll see in a moment it's going to create a dotted line that will kind of look like - rivets, - which is what I wanted. - I really like the look of rivets down along a scene so you can see here. - We'll zoom in just a touch, - so it's a little more evident. - There it is, - all right, - so I might want to sneak this closer to the seem to give it that look like it's holding. - It's holding things together, - sort of. - So I'm holding commands. - I just added a point there by just letting go command and letting the pence the pen tool - kind of at a point. - Right there we go, - just holding command to move to move these points. - I'm still in the pen tool. - When you're in the pencil, - command just toggles. - Whatever the last moving to our last selection tool was whether it's regular, - select or direct select, - I usually try to keep it on direct select because it's a little more useful. - These rivets. - I'm gonna want to make a little darker and I think a little bigger gonna change. - Go over to my appearance panel up the stroke. - Wait a touch. - And I'm also going to and make that gap a little wider because they're bigger now. - I'm also going to go and change the the, - uh, - capacity to help make this one set these 2 50 And I'm also going to darken it just a little - bit in the color panel. - I want those to kind of pop a little more. - There it is. - Nice way to get some really quick and easy rivets on this pipe. - You might remember that. - I said I wanted to add some leaves to these kind of twig ish antennas coming out of the TV - . - Ah, - that's what I'm to do right now. - I'm gonna pan my screen down just a little bit holding space bar to do that. - Um, - zero out. - My appearance attributes in the appearance panel by pressing that little clear appearance - button, - and I'm gonna come up to my color panel and shoes about a I know 60% gray, - maybe 50. - Now the 50 So 50% gray. - I'm gonna press p to turn my pen tool on and above my object. - I'm going to draw a little leaf. - I'm gonna show you a cool trick for how to make repeatable leaves. - Leaves aren't really something I want to redraw since there's such small details. - So there, - there we go. - Drawing kind of. - Ah, - move that point being a little stubborn. - All right, - so I've got that. - Now I'm gonna hold shift and press X to swap my fill color into my stroke. - A press the X key without shift to bring my stroke to the front. - Um, - so now that I've got that, - I'm going to change that color and make it a little darker. - I'm gonna go to about 70 and down in my appearance panel. - I am going to press stroke at the bottom. - I'm going to choose this nice, - double tapered profile, - okay. - And, - uh, - going to use the line tool illustrators lie until you can quickly toggle that on your - keyboard by pressing the backslash rate above return, - it will bring up the line tool and that just draws perfectly straight lines can always edit - that. - It's not points not coming together the way I wanted to. - So I'm just gonna draw these little like the little veins on the leaf really quickly, - and then I'm going to in my stroke panel Are I'm sorry? - My appearance panel. - I'm going to make one minor change up the weight to to and I'm going Teoh, - change my profile to the single taper and I'll make just a quick little stem on the end of - my leaf. - Really simple. - Alright, - so I've got that. - I'm going to select the entire object and go over to my brushes panel. - Have over here. - You can always open that through the windows menu at the top, - and I'm gonna drag this sucker right in there. - I'm going to create an art brush. - This one you will pop up. - It's telling me how this is going to operate showing me this arrow overlaying my my leaf, - pointing from the stem to the end of the leaf. - That's the direction of going to be drawing it in. - You'll see how it works in a minute at the top. - I'm just gonna call it Leaf. - Okay? - Leave all these other settings. - Well, - no, - actually, - I'm going to see stretch to fit stroke length. - I think I'm going to scale it proportionately to the size of the line I draw. - So that will make it. - How large the line I draw is it will apply this this brush stroke proportionally. - You'll see what I mean proportionately. - I should say you'll see what I mean. - In a moment for colorization method, - I am going to go down here and print press tints and shades. - You'll see what that does in a moment and you'll see why I chose Gray in a moment as well. - Press, - OK, - actually going delete the object I have in there that I originally created, - cause you'll notice in the brushes panel. - It's over here. - It's right here. - All right, - so up here now, - in color, - I'm going to choose a color, - so I'm gonna choose kind of Ah, - no. - A warm pink color for my leaves. - A pinkish Let's see. - Play with it a little bit. - I want these to stand out, - all right. - I think that's sort of where I'm going. - I'm gonna hit be on the keyboard to bring up the brush tool, - and I'm going to brush in some leaves and you'll see they just sprout right up. - Super easy, - really fun way to do this kind of thing. - And they because you can kind of curve them, - um, - they can look a little. - They don't all look identical. - I don't really use this kind of technique for larger objects, - but for small ones, - I think it works out terrific. - Lee really works out well, - fills it out really quickly. - Could make bigger ones if I want bigger ones, - smaller ones. - If I want smaller ones and you'll see that it takes on that that color instead of gray, - they're taking on that the pink color that I chose. - And that's because of the setting I chose inside here where I went and chosen. - Switch it from none to tints and shades. - I chose gray because then it doesn't have any tint already to kind of, - uh, - muddy up the waters of the color. - So if you choose grit, - something that's a derivative of black essentially so gray in this case, - it works perfectly. - Takes on the attributes of the color that you chose in the color panel. - Zoom out. - I've got these really nice leaves now. - Really cool, - easy trick. 19. Making Sure Composition and Color Tell a Story: - one quick little thing as I was working here and like I said, - I like to work holistically. - I I noticed that it seemed like the composition was getting really top heavy, - so I wanted to pull some visual interest down towards the bottom of the frame. - I What I did is I went into this pipe and I added some little color patches here, - and I'm going to do the same thing on the other pipe on the other side really quickly, - and that's gonna draw the I e mean suddenly towards away from that top a little bit. - So it'll kind of balance things out a little more clicking on that pipe and and doing my - normal shifty you notice. - I clicked over on these guys over here to pick up the image attributes the object - attributes rather and Ah, - and I'm just drawing these pieces in these little patches. - It's just a really simple little detail. - Super easy, - nothing crazy, - holding my option key down to curb those out a little bit, - so they follow the contours of the pipe a little better anyway, - So that's it, - and that will draw attention down a little farther. - I'm gonna keep working the details on this and I'm going to try to get some mawr just basic - details down. - And then we're going to shift into talking a little bit about color. - I've added a lot of the details I wanted to add in. - Um, - I approached the entire composition the way I wanted to approach it, - and I feel like I'm ready to move on to finer detail ing now. - But first I wanted to talk a little bit about color. - Wanted to have a quick, - quicker, - a quick but deeper discussion about color before we move on to detail, - Um, - one of the comments that people make about my artwork. - A lot of people comment on the colors, - and I often hear people say stuff like, - I really like the bright colors you use if you look at my work. - I don't actually use that many bright colors per se. - I kind of use color in a way to make bright colors pop off the page. - Um, - you'll notice, - for instance, - these red birds are probably the brightest thing on here. - All right, - um, - they wouldn't pop if the other colors were all really crazy. - Bright so you don't want to make all of your colors bright. - You might want a really lively palette. - But if you make everything bright and everything kind of lit up, - nothing's going to look lit up. - So you need to use a little restraint when you approach color. - So I've really given a lot of thought about color in this piece, - particularly what I've. - The approach that I took with this is I wanted it the color. - It kind of helped tell the story. - So I've created this gray kind of cool blueish gray, - a little bit of purple backdrop looks cold and mechanical to me. - That's the that was my goal. - I wanted to contrast with this warm looking natural palette that the bear has. - So the bear and the birds are kind of. - They signify warmth and nature, - so I wanted them to pop out. - I wanted to the color to tell that story, - and one of the nice things about it is this warm palette that the bear has really pops - against that cool blue. - It's not an overly bright palette. - It's not like a screaming break power. - But this, - uh, - this kind of oranges brown that I've used for the bear and this yellow here really kind of - pop against that blew it just It's a contrast very nicely. - So it works and you'll notice that in for the background. - I tried to use all tones that were kind of part of the same color family that didn't - contrast against each other. - They all lived together, - so they're all living together. - There's there's a harmony there. - Even if it's not a nice you know, - it's not a pleasant look I'm going for in the background. - There's there's harmony in those colors. - So I wanted to discuss that quickly. - One other thing might be doing is, - and and I think you saw what I was doing in one of my last steps is I was adding in these - little pink panels here, - these pinkish purple panels to these pipes. - Um, - there's a lot of deliberation in that sentence, - but up anyway, - what I was doing there was trying to draw more attention to those regions. - I may be adding some more stuff, - and I may be pulling color out a little bit more there and kind of ah, - bringing those colors up. - Just a touch to draw more attention there because I still feel like the composition is a - little bit heavy on the top. - But what I also could dio is I can zoom in here and tone down these birds. - They don't have to be this bright. - I mean that that red color the birds have right now is pretty pretty hot. - Probably will need to pull that back if I look at my c m y que Mixer here, - it's pretty, - pretty much pegged at the top so I can pull those colors back a little bit. - Even if I did that now, - you notice a difference almost right away. - So if I pulled those back, - it's not drawing quite as much attention. - You could see the contrast between the two birds here, - so I'll play around with it. - I'll probably do that in the later step. - Right now, - we're going to move away from color, - and we're going to shift into detail. - Last word about color. - Just make sure that color helps tell the story you're trying to tell. - Don't just use it as a superficial touch 20. Adding in Finer Detail 1: - our piece is really coming together. - Now it's time to go in, - do the really fine detail and have already started doing a little bit of it. - You'll notice on the bare here I've added some like, - sort of suggestions of for And like I mentioned before, - I didn't really want to make it. - They didn't want to go all out and render the for. - It's not really what I'm looking for. - Stylistically, - I want to just suggest this idea that there is for and another thing I've been doing is - while I'm working this through, - I've been keeping in mind my direction of light. - You'll notice that on the left side, - things or darker on the right side, - things were lighter. - I'm going to approach the entire composition that way, - so all my shading will be coming from that direction. - Uh, - starting to consider now is really helpful because then when I go in and start adding in - shading later, - I won't have to make any adjustments. - Things were kind of already moving in the right direction. - What I'm going to do now, - I'm gonna jump in and add some details on these birds. - Add some details on this TV. - I'm gonna start with the TV quickly. - So what I want to do is make thes dial's really pop. - Um, - I'm going to add some volume to it on the side, - and I'll add little center dial here. - So I'm just going to use the pen tool. - Many do it a little bit of draw inside, - shifty twice on that object, - and, - uh, - he select changed my opacity to multiply. - Gonna leave it at 100%. - I think I want a full full on, - uh, - strength for this. - It's really simple drawn side there. - I'm gonna hit the a key on the keyboard to switch to direct select because regular - selection tool was toggled there. - All right, - so I kind of have ah, - a little bit of a suggestion of depth. - Um, - what I'm also going to do is add similar detail inside, - sort of like this, - a little crescent, - and that gives this feel of a little depth there and all of its trapped inside this object - . - One of the great things about drawing side is that it groups everything together. - So anything you put in that object kind of is part of a group. - Now, - all right. - So I'm gonna draw that kind of the thing that you hold on the dial. - And I'm just going to say again, - just suggest it with some shading and lighting, - um, - going to dial back my capacity and, - um basically, - just play around with this to get this right, - get over a little bit. - And so I just clicked on the the original shade object I have appear getting pretty close - to what I want. - I'm going to click the outside of this to pick up the appearance attributes of that, - and I'm going to go up to my color panel and make a lighter version of that, - and I'll put that on the top of the dial here. - Now it's a little bit skewed. - I think I'm gonna have to fix this up, - salt tidy this up, - drag this in a little bit, - so it's not quite as exaggerated. - It's a little too exaggerated right now. - It looks like it's sticking to far too, - to the right, - and we don't want that. - It should look a little more like it's coming straight at us. - So I'm just gonna just this till I get it right There it is. - got my dial. - Okay, - you can tidy that up. - Um, - what I'll do quick is I'm gonna hit the cue key on the keyboard toe last. - So some stuff I've lasted all those points. - I'm gonna hit option command J for average and let it set to both that a link. - All of those points are not linked them. - It'll move them all into place. - So they're all together do the same thing down here. - So what it does is it puts them all in the same location, - essentially things around a little bit. - All right, - there's that mimic the same look on my other dial here. - One of the other things I'd like to do here is I'm I'm going to pull the the attributes - that appearance attributes from that object, - and I'll put them behind this dial. - So I'm going Teoh. - Now that I've drawn it over that object, - it's gonna cut it, - and then all will select using using regular selection tool hit veto toggle that I'm going - to select that and then I'm gonna paced behind command be to pace that cut object behind my - dial. - And the reason I did that is because I'm going Teoh actually going to change the color, - make it darker. - So now it has that kind of look that it's stuck into the television set instead of on top - of All right, - so here, - I'm going to create a quick ah, - little grill. - And to do that, - I'm going Going to use one of the tricks I showed you before. - So I'm going to change my color just to black in the color panel. - I'm gonna hit Shift X to move my fill into the stroke. - And I'm just going to use, - um, - some quick dotted lines again. - So I've got my weight set toe, - one cap. - I said it to a round cap, - turn, - dash line on. - And I'll probably want to make this a little smaller and tighter. - So I'm going to change my gap to matter. - No, - little will do. - Well, - try three and my dash at zero. - I'm going to press the back slash button right above the return key on my keyboard. - So those are a little small going to there. - We go change it in the appearance panel, - I upped the stroke weight and I'm going to make the gap a little bit bigger okay. - And this time I am going to duplicate this for little tiny details like this. - I don't mind if they look machine. - It's just the bigger stuff that I really don't like. - Looking that way can alter this. - Like I'm holding the option key to duplicate these lines. - By the way, - I'm not copying and pasting, - but I'm just holding the option key and dragging them, - and it duplicates them really quickly and easily. - I'm gonna sneak these down a little. - Looks like I have an extra one there. - I must have duplicated two by accident, - so I deleted one of them. - It's giving myself a little padding on the around the edges here. - All right. - Doesn't have to be lined up perfectly selecting all of those. - And I'm going to change my opacity mode to multiply during the opacity down there we go - zoom out to see how it looks. - Yeah, - I like that. - I think I might put a little border around this volume or that the speaker here, - just like I put around these guys. - So has a little edge around it. - I think that will look a little better. - Same thing I just selected it I pressed Command X to cut. - I'm selecting my my little speaker rectangle and I'm hitting command beat pace behind. - You could also draw behind. - But it's to me. - I just don't like to do that. - I, - like draw inside mode, - drop behind. - I think it's a little confusing and irritating to me, - so I don't use it very often. - Do the same thing around here. - The thing is, - this is going to be a little trickier because I have to paste it inside my draw inside - object. - Um, - and we talked about how that works with the clip groups when it's compound path. - There's another really kind of tricky way to get it in there. - What I'm going to do is I selected the corner of this and it grabs this object that's - inside already. - It's gonna click that, - and I'm going to paste in back of that command be. - We'll put it in back of that. - Inside that clipping mask are that compound path clipping this you'll notice again. - If I try to click on it, - I can't. - But if I kind of pulled down and last so I can 21. Adding in Finer Detail 2: - Okay, - so I zoomed into this bird. - I mean, - add some more details to this guy, - so, - uh, - first I'm going to start with the eyes. - I'm going to jump into that. - It was already a mask. - What I'm going to do is add some darkness into the center of the eye. - So I am going to use the same color as the outside and then just put it in, - sort of like this, - going to see what it looks like if I turn on multiply mode. - Yeah, - I like that. - Do the same thing on the other one. - And this is kind of the look. - I want this upward look. - Upward stare, - looking out and up and looking a little little selling a little sad, - uh, - but but still soldiering on. - So I'm gonna add some little I think I'm gonna add some eyebrow details to this guy to, - um to do that, - I'm going to use the same color I'm using for the beak. - So I selected that and he selected it. - That just picks up the appearance attributes. - There we go. - There's one. - And there's to just these little details. - Start picking things up. - It really starts changing the feel of everything. - Now for the for this bird, - I want to add some some kind of funky stripes to it. - So, - uh, - what I'm going to do is I'm going to just make my my color in the color panel White - capacity on that ill switch to I don't know, - 20%. - Let's see what happens. - I'll probably end up altering that, - but we'll see. - Maybe that'll work. - So I'm just doing a kind of ah zigzag. - And you can see I toggled the drawn side mode on this really quick and easy zigzag here, - and I'm gonna show you a quick trick because you'll notice that it's going in front of - everything. - It's not really what I'm going for. - I'm gonna want it to be behind things. - I wanted to kind of just be hand drawn pattern and not this prominent thing. - So I'm going to select one of these. - I'm gonna click the middle of one of these stripes. - It selects the entire object at the top of the screen. - I'm going to find this button that says select similar objects. - Gonna click the little down arrow next to it and I get a menu What I'm going to do is I'm - going to choose appearance. - It's select all objects with the same appearance, - and now I'm just simply going to send it all to the back of the stack by holding command - shift and left bracket. - Now, - if I d select, - you'll notice it's behind everything. - Okay? - I have to make some adjustments. - First of all, - I've got it. - Send these guys the wings to the back of the stack, - so they're not going over. - Secondly, - I don't really like the way it's intersecting or not. - You know how it's kind of messing with the top of the belly here. - So what I'll probably do is drop that down, - just a touch. - And then and then I'll edit this path so that there's no gaps there. - At another point here, - I like that better. - I don't like it, - kind of. - It was drawing too much strange attention to that weird space between. - So there's that I've got that going on, - and then maybe I want to add a pattern to the belly as well. - So what I'll do for the bellies? - I'll add some dots, - um, - some darker dots, - so I'll use the same color. - As I use for the belly, - I'll switch the opacity mode to multiply. - It's a very light color, - so I don't think I'll have toe do much might. - Actually, - I might end up turning that down. - Let's delete that was Try that one more time and I'm just training. - Create some visual interest here. - That's even though these are going to be small. - I want them to be kind of interesting. - So I'm just creating some hand drawn patterns to distinguish it. - Now I'm going to do the same thing I did before going to select one of these up objects. - Go up to my select similar objects. - I select all of those, - and I'm going to turn the opacity down to 50. - They're now, - I've got a nice, - subtle pattern. - Just adds a little extra visual texture. - And I'm getting pretty close to what I want with this bird. - I'm probably going to add in some things to the wings. - Um, - I'm gonna make a really quick, - you know, - I'll exit drawn side mode really quick. - Uh, - really quickly. - I'm going to draw there, - have this horseshoe shape. - I'm going, - Teoh, - drag it into my brush panel. - I'm going to create an art brush with that, - and I'm going to scale it proportionately change my my colorization motive tents. - I always like to start with the derivation of black. - It works better that way. - And I think I showed you how that works before, - So I deleted that object. - Now I'm going to choose my brush tool set a stroke color here, - and what I'll do is I'll set it to White, - and I think we did 20% for those stripes will do 20% for these guys. - And now I can just draw them in here, - kind of like the leaves. - So there it is. - Now, - I've got one bird fully detailed. - I'm gonna have to shave him and do some more stuff, - but he's getting pretty close. - I'll go and do the other one and add some more details, - and I think we're gonna move on, - then. - All right. - I'm feeling pretty happy with the level of detail I put into my my piece here, - and I'm just going to sit back for a second and think about what little changes to the - composition into the color palette I can make before I move into shading, - which is maybe my favorite part of the whole process. - So anyway, - one thing I know that's been bothering me up just a little bit. - Um, - and I have made some minor adjustments along the way, - but I think the bear is a little high in the composition. - So I have unlocked all the layers that that he belongs to or that make up the bear that - composed the bear. - And I'm gonna drop them down here. - I'm gonna drop this object down a little bit, - and I keep the navigator window open in the corner a lot of times, - um, - the little navigator panel to kind of give me a quick thumbnail view. - I feel like I can get a really quick, - easy assessment of the composition that way. - Um, - one other thing I'll change is I will move this bird in the upper rights over a touch. - These are just minor adjustments. - Nothing. - Huge. - All right, - so I'm feeling pretty good about that. - One thing you should keep in mind is that you can change any of this stuff as you move - along. - I mean, - it's great to get to build a really good plan in your reference sketch, - but don't feel locked into it. - Don't feel like you can't deviate from it. - That's one of the reasons I like the freedom of doing working this way so much is because I - feel like it. - It kind of gives me 1/3 clean draft of something where I don't have a guide underneath that - that's getting in my way and kind of taking over. - Sometimes I'm anyway. - Let's look at color quickly. - I've actually changed a few the colors a little bit. - I've I've kind of changed the side of the television over here. - You'll notice consuming on that. - But, - um, - I change this to this green sort of color because I wanted to pronounce the wood green a - little more. - I wanted to pop a little more, - and I wanted this to look a little more, - I guess a little more like the back of a television does where the whole thing isn't - necessarily made out of wood, - all right, - And, - um, - I can look at the colors, - and like I said before, - I think the major problem that I see is that the red the reds of these birds are a little - too hot. - So I'm probably going Teoh Teik, - knock this down a little bit. - But I'm going to do that when I start working with radiance and apply ingredients, - so I'm not going to do it right here. - I definitely feel pretty strongly about that, - that I want to change that up. - Other than that, - I'm actually pretty pretty satisfied with the color palette here. - But I think this is a great time to kind of try to get everything solidified and put to bed - in terms of color so that when you move to the next step, - you're ready to go and refine those colors and used radiance and start creating some really - nice tonal shifts. - So I'm feeling happy about this. - I'm gonna say I'm done with this this step of the process and I'm going to move into the - shading and volumizing process part of the process, - which again is to me where everything really jumps toe life 22. Suggesting Volume with Subtle Gradients: - now that we've added a good level of detail and we added some patterns and stuff like that - to our objects were going toe change some of the flat, - just basic colors that we've used into. - Grady INTs toe add a little volume. - It's a great, - great way to provide the illusion of volume really quickly and easily. - Uh, - I'm going to start with these with these red birds. - I'm gonna start in the upper right zoom into this guy, - going back one step. - So I've got my bird isolated here. - I'm going to make sure that layer is unlocked and I'm going to start by direct selecting - the wings and the body. - Remember, - these are all clip objects right now, - so I have to direct select the edges. - All right. - And now I'm going to make sure we start with the same base color. - So we have this this red that I've mentioned before. - I think it's a little too hot. - It's a little too loud. - I'm going to tone it down with the use of ingredient. - I'm going to bring up the Grady int panel, - which I have opened down here. - You can go toe window and pull it from here is well, - all right, - I'm going to click the stock greedy int that's already in there. - And it makes this black and white thing. - I don't like that. - Obviously, - that's not what I'm going for. - Um, - but you'll notice in the color panel, - there's something that says last color and it shows the last color we used. - I'm gonna grab that and I'm gonna drag it down into my Grady in into one of the stops and - I'll do the same thing again for the other stop. - So now we're back to the same color we started with. - We have two stops that are basically the exact same color, - so there's nothing that has changed, - but we're going to change it really quickly and easily. - So what we're going to dio is we're going to edit each stop. - We're gonna make a dark one and a light one, - and ah, - we're gonna start with the one on the left and so all dark in that by adding a little black - to it in the color panel mostly going to de saturated a little bit I'll take the yellow - down Just a touch they go keep the magenta a little higher like it is like that. - I think I'm pretty satisfied with that. - Maybe I'll make the black a little a little more pronounced and then for the one on the - right were gonna make that a light color or lighter color. - So that'll be the light side of our greedy int gonna drag that yellow down a little and - take magenta down as well. - Now, - I have a nice, - subtle Grady int, - all right? - Once one thing to note a lot of people, - when they start use ingredients, - they kind of make these really wild contrast ingredients. - I'll show you what I'm talking about something like this where we have to extremes. - So something really harsh We're not going for that. - Look, - at least in this, - if you're creating a really high contrast image, - it might work. - But generally speaking, - when people use really extreme Grady INTs, - it's a sign of amateurishness, - and it doesn't really look that great in the end. - So we're going to avoid that, - Um, - what I'm going to do now that I've got my ingredient. - I'm happy with the colors. - I'm gonna hit the g key. - You'll notice we have these three lines one for each object. - Each line represents the Grady int and how it's applied on that individual object. - I am going to alter this. - So what I'm going to do, - I'm gonna keep all three selected, - and I'm going to do one global kind of ingredient for all three. - So this will apply the greedy in the way I want it to across all three objects and you'll - notice it's very smooth and even blends right together from one to the next. - It's exactly what I want. - Now that I've finished this, - I know I'm going to reuse this Grady in some, - dragging it into my swatch panel, - and I can really quickly and easily now apply it to this guy. - So I'll do the same thing now that I've got all those things selected. - Drop that great in in and I'm going toe Teoh, - use the greedy int tool to apply it the way I want to apply. - I might alter this one. - Just a touch. - Something like There we go. - That's how I want it on this one. - Okay, - so now I have have these really simple, - very, - very basic illusions of volume. - We'll do it. - One more time here on the bear really quickly. - So I'm going to select the bear's body and I am going to go to my grade. - Ian Pannell. - I'm going to just pick the greedy in. - It's already selected their drop my last color in both sides, - and I'll make a darker version on one side, - lighter version on the other. - Because when even a little darker and richer you bring these guys up a little. - Maybe take that black down a little, - okay? - And I will apply the same thing to the arm because I have the arm is a separate object. - Whoops. - Try that again. - All right, - now I've got the arm and I've got the body. - They both have the same Grady in applied, - and I'm going to do the exact same thing I did before. - But this time I'm going to start it somewhere in the middle here. - So there's more dark over here and more light on this side. - These select everything's a smooth Grady in over. - Now, - I can enhance that a little bit. - If I want to mess with that, - I can I can go back and edit that a little bit, - so maybe I'd want to bring this darker or bring the magenta up. - I don't know. - You can play with them. - Obviously. - Make them a little more. - There we go. - So that's looking pretty good. - I'm pretty happy with that. - And, - ah, - I'm gonna go and apply ingredients to all the other objects. - And when we come back after that, - what we'll do is start shading. 23. Creating Interior Shading: - I've added a few more, - Grady. - And since my scene, - and now I'm going to start shading. - So there are two types of shading. - I'm going to go over one that I'm going to call hard Shading and another that I'll call - soft shading. - So most people, - when they're doing vector, - are pretty much stick to hard shading hard edges. - Very solid. - We'll start with that. - All right, - So I'm going to select this pipe in the lower right to demonstrate that process. - Let me, - uh, - isolate those pipes, - lock everything else off. - So I'm not moving anything by accident. - All right, - so I got this selected. - I'm going Teoh press shifty, - twice drawn side mode. - You know the drill. - And I am going Teoh. - She was one of my purples for my color pent up panel. - Here. - Multiply mood. - Go 50%. - It seems like a quick and easy thing to do and drop it on. - There's one so it doesn't interfere with that object. - I'm going to drag it over a little bit, - maybe drag this object in here. - There we go, - and then I'll draw another one on top of it. - I'm going to have to use the eyedropper grab the attributes accidentally clicked on another - object. - So I did that really quickly. - I just pressed I on the keyboard and I dropped that other object. - And, - ah, - if I want to, - I can add another one here to the edge, - really up to me and, - ah, - a lot of times where I'll do. - We'll add some underneath things like this, - like this pipe fitting and maybe for that one, - I'll make it darker, - so I'll go all the way up to 100% on that one, - and you'll notice a lot for almost all my shading. - I'm basing it on the color that I'm starting with. - It really depends on the type of artwork you're doing, - but for me, - that usually generally works. - So there have got that, - and I'll put some really light highlights in there too quickly. - Using the same technique. - I'll just switch my blend mode to screen, - and I'll knock it down to about I'm not 20%. - So we put some nice, - really quick highlights in there and there we go. - So that's hard shading just gives. - It gives a really hard look very solid. - Let's talk about soft shading we'll zoom out. - We can kind of get a look at that. - See how it looks? - Looks pretty good. - Now. - I want that to look metallic. - I wanted to look hard. - That's the look I'm going for on the Bear. - On the other hand, - I wanted to look soft going to in the layer panel. - I just isolated that bear, - locked everything else out. - I'm going to select edge using the direct selectable. - I've got my pen tool selected, - as I almost always do, - and I am going to use one of these lips. - Don't want to do that. - Go. - It's like that again. - So I'm Inter drawn side. - Motive de selected. - Now I'm coming over and picking that color, - and what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it mix in a little Scion to give it a little - bit of darkness. - I might want to take that back later. - We'll see. - It makes my color together here quick or my appearance rather setting my appearance mode, - my blend mode to multiply. - I'm going to set my capacity to 40% and I am going to add a blur effect, - so we're going to be creating soft shading using blurring said that blurt around? - I don't know. - Just guessing 13.4 sounds terrific. - I can't see it yet, - but when I start drawing, - you're going to see the effect pretty quickly. - All right, - So and you can see I got this nice soft shading sitting in here. - I think I can probably darken it a little. - I'm gonna shoot the opacity up a little, - go up to 70% and I also think I can adjust the blur. - I'm gonna hit preview here, - and I just grabbed that for my, - uh, - appearance panel. - I just went into my pick appearance panel quickly. - I'm gonna just that to get it to where I want it to be. - So I put it around 30 and I was nice. - Soft shade object. - I'm gonna click that and delete it so you can see the difference that's without, - and that's with. - And I'm going to add another one quickly, - right on top of that one to make the edge even darker. - Sort of like I did with the pipe. - But these air softer. - So I'm going to go back into my appearance panel and I'm gonna hard on the edge of this one - just a little. - So it's not quite a soft is that 1st 1? - And I've got this nice contour here coming in. - I'm going to keep working through these objects, - doing more on the other ones. - I'll dio we'll do one more example really quickly on one of these birds just to give you - one more quick look how that works. - So I'll go unlock my bird layer, - select the edge of one of the wings, - and I'm going to use whoops to get inter drawn side mode, - picking the red color that I originally based everything on and making it a little darker - by adding and some black and maybe a little site. - And and this time I'll just draw the shading in quickly, - accidentally linked up with that path Undid that because it took on the attributes of that - path. - I don't want that to happen, - so I press command Z to undo that quickly. - All right, - so I've got this. - I'm going to select just that shade object. - Come over here, - multiply it effects style. - I wrote Blur, - Goshen, - Blur Preview. - Take that down. - So this is another way you can do it. - Probably good right there. - Yeah, - that's good. - Like that. - All right. - Another thing you can do with these is you can create graphics styles based on these shade - objects so that you can just quickly pick them up. - And I could go over to that other bird and apply it there. - I'm going to keep shading. - I'm gonna work through my image. - Probably refined some of the colors as I'm doing that because of the shading, - sometimes muddies things up a little bit, - but I'll work through, - and when we come back, - we'll talk a little bit about some lighting. 24. Creating Cast Shadows: - Okay, - so we've finished up these nice highlights, - and we're going to zoom in and create some cast shadows to complement them. - So you'll notice that these pipes and this metal debris and I added this metal debris and a - little later, - uh, - just to kind of fill out the the compositional or more. - But the pipes in this metal debris kind of just looked like they're stuck to the surface to - this plane, - but they're not really grounded with shading. - So we're going to change that now by adding a little shading. - And, - ah, - I'm going to create a new layer above the ground layer in my layers panel holding option - and pressing the create nuclear button. - You call this shadows gonna change my color here from Violet to read. - I'm just a little afraid with all the purple that violets going to be hard to see. - All right, - I'm going to go to my appearance panel and zero everything out, - and I am going Teoh, - actually, - just start with basic black and using my pen tool. - I'm going to draw a quick sort of disc around the base of this, - so I'm creating a little based shadow now because my light because of the direction of my - light, - you'll notice that it's a little it cinched a little closer on the right hand side and a - little bit farther on the left. - Just trained. - It kind of keep a consistent illusion of light and shadow. - I am going, - Teoh change the opacity mode for this to multiply. - And I'm just going to turned down ever so slightly. - There you. - So I wanted to be darker, - but not necessarily hard Black. - All right, - so that gives a little bit of help, - and I'll go and duplicate that throughout. - But first, - I'm going to show you how to create a really cool shading effect. - I'm actually going to turn the visibility off on the front pipes later so we can see how - this turns out. - All right, - so for now, - I'm going to keep the same attributes. - Just for the moment, - I'm going to draw this nice cast shadow following the base of this pipe that this is not my - goal in doing this isn't to make this a perfect representation of what the shadow would - look like. - I think you've noticed I've taken a lot of liberty is here and I'm not going to stop now. - So I'm just kind of coming close, - a close approximation of what this shadow would look like. - And you'll see why we have some room and some liberty to play with this in a moment. - Sometimes these points, - for some reason, - if a point is underneath another object when I'm using the pencil, - I can't close the path as I'd like to. - So I just have to de select it. - There's ways to get around this, - but basically you have to move the points, - so I'm not gonna mess with it right now. - It's just not worth my time anyway. - You can see it just it gets a little messy so I could just de select it. - It's fine if you really are compelled to join the points, - you can zoom in and join them by selecting both end points and hitting command J on your - keyboard. - Alright, - so I've got this nice cast shadow. - But it's not exactly what I'm looking for. - It's a little too hard. - It's also, - um, - I probably need to change the angle of this a little bit. - I'm just gonna, - you know, - use it just the basic selection tool and change the angle, - angle it down, - just a touch there and move into place. - There's you can use the rotation tool as well. - I'll edit this path quickly to get it a little more in line without should look, - they're better. - All right, - so I've got this in place now. - What I'm going to do is I'm going to apply a Grady in. - I'm going to use a normal radiant on this. - All right? - There's already something interesting going on. - You can see it kind of fades out. - I have a technique that I like to use for this, - where I use the same color for both radiant stops and then for one of them, - for my final end, - part of the Grady in all shifted to zero. - Then I'll hit the G key on the keyboard, - and I will skew that radiant whips. - It's backwards right now from the way I want it. - I can quickly change that by reversing the Grady in the radiant panel. - Super fast. - All right, - so this kind of peters out a little too quickly and I could change that always great thing - about illustrator. - You can change things really quickly there we go. - And probably what I would do is turn the opacity down on this guy a little bit. - And if I wanted to, - I could soften this. - Make it a soft shadow instead of a hard shadow, - and I could bend and warp it a little bit. - Teoh, - Get it. - You know, - to follow the contour of the hill a little here a little better, - but overall, - it's the look I'm going for really quickly. - I'm gonna show you that rotation tool minute are on the keyboard place by rotation point - here, - and I'll rotate that down just in case. - People are wondering how to do that quickly. - I tend to just go to that, - hit the wiki and hit selection and do everything there. - It just it's a reflex. - I think I've built up over the years, - and it's hard to break occasionally out. - Go to the rotate tool, - but it doesn't really matter. - Whatever gets you the results is what matters, - all right, - so I still think this might be a little too dark. - I'm gonna just turn that down a touch so I'll go down to 35 and that's probably about where - I want it to be. - So I am going to select that eminent hold command and shift and left bracket. - Send it all the way that back. - You didn't notice anything, - But now it's behind this disc here, - the base shadow. - And I'm going to quickly just repeat this to show you the whole process again. - So drawing a base shadow and I like I have been all along I selected this object first to - suck up the appearance attributes going to do the same thing with this one. - What you might want to do with your cast shadows to be safe, - create a new graphic style me redo that So I could name it. - Call it Cast shadow that will ensure that you have the proper direction for the Grady in. - Okay, - uh, - so I've got those appearance attributes for cast shadow now in my appearance panel, - and I'll start drawing another object here, - and you'll notice here again, - it's not gonna link up now if I Here's what I was saying before I could move this out of - the way. - Now it will close the path Really weird behavior. - Some. - There's some strange behaviors, - and illustrator, - you just kind of have to get used to, - um, - so I'll rotate this a little and getting in the place. - And if I zoom out, - it's pretty much where I wanted to be. - So I'm going to continue moving around my, - my, - um, - composition, - and I'll continue adding in shading. - One tip about shading like this is that probably if you're doing depth layers of depth like - I am as you go back farther in depth, - you should turn the opacity of your shadows down. - It will give the illusion of depth. - It'll heighten the illusion of depth. - Okay, - so when we come back, - we're gonna add some textures in to make this really pop. 25. Homespun Vector Textures Part 1: - All right, - We're done with sheeting. - Got some really nice looking cast shadows here. - I've added some detail into my rocks. - Now I'm ready to add some texture. - I'm going to let illustrator do a lot of the heavy lifting here. - I'm going to create some, - uh, - textures completely with an illustrator. - I'm not going to be bringing in image is gonna be drawing and creating my own textures. - Brushes are going to do scatter brush in this case is going to do the heavy lifting for me - . - So I'm going to be creating some texture inside this ground. - Uh, - layer here. - So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna start by drawing a black box. - It's pretty small, - and I'm purposely making a little bit, - you know, - it's not perfect. - Gonna drag that into my brushes panel, - Get my option window in my option window. - I'm selecting scatter brush, - and I'm just going to press okay, - right now. - So there it is. - I'm going to delete this object I drew and I am going to hit Shift X. - Now my black is set to stroke instead of Phil going Teoh. - Oh, - you know what? - One quick thing. - Let's going to drawn side mode on the ground, - and then I'm going toe restore that black color to the strip. - All right, - now that I'm in drawn side mode inside of my ground layer, - here I am going to click my brush that I created, - and I'm going to draw a path, - and it is going to look hideous, - but I promise it's gonna be worth it in the end, - because we're going to make some changes to this. - Okay, - so we've got this ugly, - ugly black path Marring are nice artwork. - Adjust it, - bring it down a little bit. - Here. - You might be wondering what the heck I'm doing. - Well, - we're gonna edit this the look of this in just a moment. - So we're gonna come back over here. - I'm gonna zoom in one level, - gonna come back over here to my brushes panel, - and I'm going to double click that scatter brush that I created can drag it out of the way - a little bit. - You know what? - I'm gonna cancel that. - Drag this up so we can see a better preview. - What's going to happen? - Double click this again there. - Make sure preview in the lower left hand corner is turned on. - You can name it if you want. - I think this one's going to be pretty easy to distinguish So first thing I'm going to do - size. - I'm going to change it too random, - right? - I've got to controls gonna make both of these smaller. - So the one on the left is my smallest size. - The one of my right is my largest size. - Both of them are adjusting to be smaller. - Make that left one even smaller. - Okay. - Spacing gonna randomize this as well. - So I'm adjusting me the spacing here to make it a little bit haphazard. - All right, - scatter scatter with that. - Does spacing by the way spaces the it changes the the amount of space in between each - scattered object scatter changes the the basically the vertical space so you'll see in a - moment Scatter in the press, - random. - I'm going to make this and so you can see what's happening now And what my goal here is is - I want to create sort of this look of strewn rubble, - a field of stuff kind of rubble here. - Now, - one thing you could you might notice if you look closely, - is that these little all of these. - Ah, - these boxes that I created, - they're all kind of following their all the rotation of the boxes is relative to the page. - And if you notice there's a a box down here a combo box that we can choose dropped down and - choose path, - I switch it to path. - Now all of my objects are the way I want them to their rotating according to the path. - So as the path bends, - so so do the objects rotate. - I'm going to change the rotation of the objects to random, - and I'm only going to very slightly randomize this Don't want to make it a big shift, - but I want to give a little bit of play to those objects so they're not all straight up and - down. - And 01 last thing colorization mode going to change two tents and this is asking me if I - want to make it saying, - Hey, - do you want to apply this where you've already used it? - And I do impressing Apply two strokes and move this down so you can see what's happened - here. - We've got this kind of strewn rubble. - Look, - switch to my swatches. - I'm going to bring one of these couple colors up here. - I'm gonna change my capacity to multiply. - And now I've got something that's kind of in line with everything else I created. - I am going to duplicate that by making another pass a little more into the foreground, - and it's giving a similar randomized results, - and I like it. - I'm going to go to my stroke here, - turn the stroke up to 1.25 So it's slightly bigger, - giving the illusion of depth the one in the back here. - We're going to select it again, - and I'm going to turn the opacity down a touch. - 50%. - We'll turn this one in the middle, - 75 at one more sort of in the front. - Change the stroke weights to 1.5. - Change the opacity to 100. - Now I've got a nice illusion of depth, - so I'm making that that ground is getting where I wanted to be. - Now I can add that to my back Hill to, - and I probably will. - But before we do that, - I'm going to make one more texture. - This one's going to be a little different. - Choose Black. - My color panel hit Shift X to switch that black into my fill. - I like shift X. - You don't have to do it that way, - but that's a personal just a habit of mine. - I drew this little circle. - I'm actually going to make it a little smaller. - Go to my brushes panel. - I'm gonna drag this this circle in here and we're going to create another scatter brush. - All right, - press. - Okay. - Again. - Delete this. - Now this one is going to be entirely different. - And the goal of this one is going to be entirely different. - You'll see in a moment what we're trying to achieve. - So the last one was a pretty sparse texture. - With this one, - we're going to create something a little denser. - What? - I'm going to dio I am going. - Teoh, - use the brush tool and brush a quick line in. - Let's try that again. - With the new brush, - you're going to see a series of dots again. - Not so cool. - Right now. - Double click. - And I am going to change this colorization motew tents. - We'll do the path rotation relevant relative to path this time our rotation and I'm going - backwards here, - but doesn't matter what order you going? - This time, - we're going to make the rotation a little wild. - So the rotation is going to go from one minus 1 80 all the way up to 1 80 so it could be - anywhere on the spectrum. - You'll notice that this object is the rotation really isn't affecting it all that much, - but it will give a little play to it. - Andi again like before. - I've kind of gone with a more organic shape instead of a perfect circle because I'm going - for an organic looking texture. - All right, - scatter again. - I'm going to make this a little more wild this time, - so I'm really going to heighten the scatter effect. - You know, - I might even adjust that spacing. - The spacing I want to randomize again. - This time I'm going to keep it. - Well, - actually, - tighten this up instead of keeping it that far will tighten it again. - You're gonna see why in a few moments now, - size where the magics really going to happen here. - So I'm gonna drag the size down. - They don't want the size of this to be too great there. - That's looking pretty good. - I'm gonna change the spacing and tighten that up a little more. - It's getting pretty close to what I want. - Okay. - Gonna press, - OK, - Going to apply to strokes. - I'm gonna actually delete this line I created. - And I am going to go back to my swatches, - pick up one of these purples again, - sent my mode to multiply down here in the appearance panel. - But I'm going to really turn down the opacity, - and I'm probably going to turn it down even more. - And with that, - I'm going to start drawing in this texture. - You'll see it gives a nice tipple. - Look, - not exactly a conventional stippled, - but, - you know, - it's getting these little dots. - Um, - and I'm going going to start with kind of foreground stuff because again, - I don't want that texture to it. - I want to keep my illusion of depth, - all right. - And then what I'll do is I will turn my opacity down to 10. - And let's change the stroke as well. - So go 2.5 on the stroke and I'll fill in my back a little bit. - Here, - you'll notice that I'm not in drawn side mode anymore. - I'll show you how to rectify that in just a moment, - because I don't. - I want this stuff to be captured within. - It's pretty easy to get it jammed in there. - So I'm just brushing this texture on now. - You can always go in and pull in a visual like a photo texture. - This is just a technique that I personally find really appealing. - And I like the finished look of it. - I think it gives a really nice look, - and it kind of feels nice to be able to create these on your own. - All right, - So I will do one more where my opacity is turned up to about 35 I'll put that all the way - in the foreground here when it turned my wait back up a little too. - All right. - Now, - I'm kind of getting in line with what I want. - Um, - so since all of this, - this ground is basically inside of the since everything on this layer is pretty much inside - of the ground object. - If I just select all by hitting, - I'll do that one more time. - I hit command a to select all, - and then I'm holding shift and I'm de selecting the ground object. - I've selected all of these things all of this. - This texture that I've created, - the texture of that airbrushed in I'm going to hit Command X to cut it. - And then I'm going to click the edge of my ground. - Object will shift impressed e a couple times got my drawn side more initiated. - Now I'm going to hit command shift V to Paste in place. - And now everything stuck inside there. - Um, - I'm gonna undo that one time and redo it. - And the reason I'm doing that is just have everything that I put in there just now selected - . - I'm going to group all of that and I'm actually going Teoh and I grouped it, - by the way, - by holding command and pressing G. - It's one of those things you take for granted as you work. - You just remember all these things and you forget to say we're doing so. - Apologies for that. - But command G groups. - So I'm going to change the opacity of this entire group because I think it's a little too - strong. - So drop it down to 75. - Let's see, - maybe even 50. - I don't like the personally. - I don't like the textures to be to in your face. - Okay, - so that's that. - I'm going to go in and add some texture to my back hill here and when we're going to stop - for we're gonna take a break for a second. - When we come back from that, - um, - I'm going to show you how toe adds some texture to the sky using bristle brush that we will - also create custom. 26. Homespun Vector Textures Part 2: - all right. - The last thing we're going to do here is we're going to add in, - um, - a sky texture off using a bristle brush. - So we're going to create a custom bristle, - bristle, - brush and illustrator. - And when I say bristle brush, - it's a brush that mimics the look of a regular riel world brush. - It doesn't do a perfect job, - but for the purposes of what we're going to be using for using it for, - it actually works out really well. - So here I've got bristle brush options. - What I'm going to dio is I'm going to take one of these and alter it a bit. - So what I like to do is I like to use these flat fan brushes or round fan brushes. - In this case, - I'll use a flat fan, - and it gives a nice Here we go. - So I'm adjusting this so it gives this nice like multi. - It gives you a series of multiple lines, - sort of bristle length. - You could mess with these settings. - That's probably where I like density higher density ago. - The smoother the texture is, - the lowered is. - It's kind of like you only have a couple bristles, - so do somewhere in between Bristle thickness Course. - They'll be fat. - Fine. - They'll be thin somewhere towards fine. - You got turned my density up a little bit and make it a little finer. - Um, - I the opacity you could mess with as well. - Think I'm gonna keep it where it is. - You can always come back and adjust this. - I like to set the flexibility of mind toe be more rigid for what I'm doing because I'm - creating. - I'm going to be creating a texture. - I'm not looking to mimic, - um, - real world painting as much here. - I'm kind of just trying to create a new, - interesting visual texture. - So I think somewhere around there is probably good again. - I'm messing with the density and the thickness, - making the lines thinner by changing the bristle thickness and making their giving, - adding more lines by upping the bristle density press. - Ok, - All right. - Now I in my layers panel, - I am going to lock out all of the layers. - I'm going to create one new layer above the background layer and this one will be called - sky texture. - All right, - I'm going to use my bristle breast. - Someone hit the be key to initiate my brush tool. - You can see this funky looking brush on the screen. - We're going to use white from my brush and I'm gonna brush it in. - So what I'm going to do is create some funky contours. - That one didn't show up all that great because the opacity is knocked down really far. - I'll turn the opacity up so we can see this also multiplies turned on from my last - operation. - So I turned both of those offer liquid. - Now you can see what I'm doing here. - So I am going to draw these in quickly. - And now adjust them in just a moment. - I personally like, - Look, - I'm getting right now, - so I'm probably not going to adjust the brush settings, - but I'll show you how to do it, - Just in case you'd like to, - Um, - you'll notice at this point, - if you're doing what I'm doing, - you very well may notice a performance hit. - So your performance of your machine make of town. - When you start getting a lot of these illustrator based textures in with brushes and stuff - , - it's basically creating lots of really small shapes, - really small vectors and stuff. - And so it's gonna it can cause problems being completely straightforward with you, - it can really bogged down your machine. - This is one of the reasons I wait until the end to do this. - So you'll see right now, - like I'm trying to draw some some stuff in, - and it's starting to affect my machine. - Um, - so I kind of have to hang for a second and then pull out the stroke and it's catching up - with me as I go along, - but I'm getting the effect I want, - which is what's important. - All right, - so I've got that. - If you want to alter your brush, - you can always double click it just like we did with scattered brushes and change things. - What I am going to dio I'm going to select one of these and up at the top here. - So I selected one of those strokes, - those brush strokes, - and then I'm up with the top, - impressing this select similar button, - and I'm going to press appearance. - I've got all of these objects selected now, - and I'm going to turn their capacity down cause it's a little too in your face for my taste - . - Personally, - I don't like things to be I don't like the textures to be the forefront. - And there we go. - That's pretty much what I'm looking for with this image again. - I probably personally, - if this was something I was working on, - probably let this sit for a little while. - Come back to it, - look at it again and maybe make some adjustments. - But for the sake of this class, - it's finished. - So there it is. - We'll come back with one more lesson about prepping your files for export. 27. Exporting and Parting Words: - depending on what you have to do with your file, - you're probably going to have to think about ways to export and ways to get this into a - final format that you would like it to be in. - Of course, - there's one thing you can do. - You can always save it for Web. - So if you're saving it for Web, - you can always go to file safer Web or hit command option shift s, - which is what I usually do. - And you can save it for Web and get it prepped for the Web there. - Another thing you can do is export your file. - I will tell you that I'll give you a little caution on this when you create exports in - illustrator, - especially files of this size. - I'm going to use the art board in this case because I wanted to be cropped to the art board - . - So when you create one like let's say where we want to print this and maybe we'll do a jape - Eggert. - If in this case I'll just do a J. - Paige all right, - so I'm using our boards so that will crop it to the art board. - I've already created a folder called exports. - Press this and I'll get some options here. - Color mode. - Pretty common. - I think you'll know what to do with that. - So if we're printing this C M I K. - Unless your printer requires you to do RGB, - which I have some printers who have asked me for the for RGB files before you can change - your quality, - I always put it at maximum. - So, - Jack that all the way to the to the right so you get as larger file and as, - uh, - hi rez. - A file is possible. - I don't really mess with the compression method. - The methods that often one thing that's sorely missing an illustrator for file export is a - destination size. - Sometimes you have to kind of cheated by changing the resolution so occasionally say, - I want to. - This file is set up to be eight inches high or 10 inches wide by eight inches high. - Let's say I want it to be double that 16 by 20. - Sometimes I'll go in here and actually just put in 600 peopie I. - It's a cheat. - It's not a good cheese. - It's kind of a hacky thing to dio, - but sometimes you have to do that. - If you're exporting from illustrator, - keep that in mind. - That's the 11 of the drawbacks of working an illustrator is the size Export doesn't work - out so well. - Now, - you can always hand off your file as an illustrator file or as a PdF, - in which case it would work fine, - especially if you do it is pdf. - It's gonna be hard for somebody to bumper layer message object up or anything like that. - But if you do need to export it as an image like a J peg, - you can always bring into photo shop. - So I am going to open open it in photo shop, - and I will my latest version and press. - OK, - okay, - so here we are. - I've got options here in port PdF so you can change the name. - But most importantly, - you can change the dimensions. - So if I do want a 300 DP i or P P I image and I want to set the dimensions to let's say I - want the with to be 30 inches, - I could type that in, - and that's an option in photo shop. - So if you need to, - basically if you need to Rast, - arise your image and you need to make a much larger than your source. - This is the way to go, - so Photoshopped will do it, - so it's kind of it kind of stinks that you can't do that in Illustrator. - I'm hoping that in the future they introduce that into the export, - um, - options, - but at the moment, - it's just not there. - So keep that in mind as you're exporting. - When if you send a file off like this with lots of masks and things like that, - just warn your printer as to what's going on most most places. - This isn't going to be a problem. - Sometimes you will have to flatten transparencies, - which you can do pretty pretty easily. - I usually do it layer by layer. - So, - like, - for instance, - let's say we're just doing the bird layer were flattening transparencies on the bird layer - . - Ah, - select all and you can go to option our I'm sorry object flattened transparency changes to - high resolution, - and you can basically, - you know, - set all whatever you want to set here and press okay, - and it'll kind of chopped things up, - but it's it's set to go. - It'll be safe to print I. - Honestly, - the safest way is just to rast. - Arise if you're sending it out somebody, - unless they need to alter the image in, - in which case, - just duck and cover. - I don't like it when people alter my images personally, - but sometimes it has to happen. - A lot of times, - I'll just ask them to move a layer. - By practicing and refining your vector art skills and organizing your workflow, - you'll be able to start looking at Adobe Illustrator in a whole new light. - You'll start seeing it. - Maura's an agile creation tool unless, - as a cold technical experience, - I can't wait to see what work you put together. - So please post it in the project section of this class. - And if you have any questions at all regarding anything we discussed in the class, - feel free to post those as well. - I'll be happy to answer. - Uh, - if you found the class useful, - please leave a nice review and let your friends and colleagues no hope to see you again - soon and thanks a lot for taking the class

Digital Illustration: Creativity, Style and Efficiency in Adobe Illustrator

Chris Leavens, Vector Illustrator and Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Watch this class and thousands more

Lessons in This Class

1.

Trailer

1:41

2.

Intro and Gathering References

1:19

3.

Getting First Ideas on Paper

2:28

4.

Breaking Your Routine

2:03

5.

Reference Sketch Part 1

7:02

6.

Reference Sketch Part 2

5:42

7.

Critiquing and Annotating the Sketch

4:07

8.

Setting up Your Document

4:17

9.

Blocking In Shapes

6:08

10.

Appearnce Panel Overview

2:21

11.

Pen Tool Tips and Blocking Adjustments

7:55

12.

Layering in Illustrator

5:13

13.

Setting Swatches and Graphic Styles

6:03

14.

Drawing Inside Objects

5:48

15.

Dealing with Draw Inside Mode's Funky Behavior

4:36

16.

More Masking!

5:01

17.

Drawing Basic Details

11:20

18.

Adding Details Using Strokes and Custom Brushes

9:55

19.

Making Sure Composition and Color Tell a Story

5:40

20.

Adding in Finer Detail 1

8:28

21.

Adding in Finer Detail 2

9:21

22.

Suggesting Volume with Subtle Gradients

6:23

23.

Creating Interior Shading

7:29

24.

Creating Cast Shadows

8:11

25.

Homespun Vector Textures Part 1

13:29