Digital Illustration: Easy Simple Shaped Cartoons

1. Introduction: welcome many Miss Diana Sheehan. I'm also known as Doodle Dee or doodle head D. I am an illustrator. I am a designer. I've been designing logos for years. I love fan art. I am a fan Art of doing are inside of illustrator on and I'm also motion graphics. Are it'll scenery touch her help out. Welcome to simple shape cartoons with adobe illustrator shape Builder Tool. In this last time, we're going to talk about reference material. We're gonna talk about how to break that reference down into simple shapes, and we're gonna take those simple shapes and then apply them to our our character, which you're gonna follow along with. We're gonna talk about how those shapes get broken down and how we use guides to help us create symmetry in our design or then going to go over the reflection tool and how to build one side of the design without having to worry about the other. And we're going to flip are designed to the opposite side. Once we've done that, we're going to use our shape builder tool to then either add or subtract are overlapping shapes so that we end up with our final hour character, Leinart, which we will then take in two colors. We're going to talk about color palettes and using unique color and different references. Sites that we can use, like color lovers dot com, is one of my favorite sites to use. We're gonna talk about bringing out that pallet and then applying that pellet to our character globally, using global colors inside of Illustrator, which means that if you change the color the entire document changes. You don't have to select individual shapes. It automatically updates for us that will also apply to our highlights and shadows when we get into using the transparency palette with our shape builder told to create our highlights and shadows on our character well, then and some extras to our design adding a branch and suddenly used to kind of finish it off, we're going to talk about how other designs were built with simple shapes and how those simple shapes were applied when getting to the final design. And we'll also talk about using the PDF guide. If you want to follow along with a little bit more structure, how to go from one step to the next and actual written instructions on how to help you get through this. Um, I hope you enjoy. And please show me your finished project. 2. Breaking Down the Reference: welcome to the first part of simple shaped cartoon with adobe illustrator shape Builder Tool. So let's start with just a quick, a quick little search. We're going to be starting this assignment, um, with an owl. So I'm doing a quick little Google search for an hour, and I'm gonna find an image that helps me break down the simple shapes. Now it's completely up to you. What do you want to search for? In the second half of this project, I'd like you to file along with me first on building the actual first out, and then we will move on from there. So finding a good quality image Ah, great little tool is if you're doing a Google search to click on the tool palette up in the top here, Okay, and we'll click on size and we'll click large. Just make sure that we get a large enough image. You'll see this is 20 508 by 16 72 pixels per inch, which will help us get a much better quality. But remember, don't take this one is this is the thumbnail image. Also, don't take this one. If this is the one that you plan on using whatever image you plan on using to break down simple shapes. Make sure you click on view image over here on the right and make sure you're getting the largest one possible. Okay, I've already gone through this process. You don't want to watch me be all boring. Um, I already pulled an album, have also pulled a pug and you'll see an example of the pub later on. Now, you don't have to follow this process with me inside of Illustrator. You can draw it on paper. You can print out a picture and at a lower opacity and actually draw right over the top of it to break down the simple shape. But I wanted to show you how we quickly break down. How something is built with simple shapes is something I learned in college a long time ago when I took my first class. Um, everything in this world could be built with simple shapes, So I'm gonna start with the owl on the left, and I'm just going to do a quick little overview, and then you'll follow along with me in the next video. After you set up your file. So if we look at the owl shape here and I'm really gonna break this down into very simple shapes, So if we look at the owl here, we can see that it's kind of made up the head. It's kind of made up of us oven ellipse or a circle. The body is about the same thing. It's kind of like a circle. But if we even simplify this even further, and I'm just gonna kind of do like a rectangle here, you can kind of see that the owl is broken down into kind of like an elliptical circle at the top and the bottom mixing gonna go show corner widget down here so I can make sure and you'll see how to do that in the last eight. So it's kind of like a circle at the top and then, like 1/2 a circle like this, then if we really get simpler, we can see the wings are basically just a long ellipse. I'm going to just copy that one on the other side. You learn how to do that later. The nose is basically just a circle. The eyes, air circles, the legs, our squares or long rectangles. And and really, we're going to simplify this even further. We've got, like, the foot here, get some toes that the foot and the toes. And we actually have, like, a triangle shape here and then another triangle shape here. So basically, we just have some rounded rectangles, ellipses and two squares that make up our entire owl. So what we're going to do when we get into actually breaking these down ourselves is really kind of putting the characters into the simplest form to get the cute ist kind of characters. I'm gonna just copy this and I'm moving it over to the other side. You learn how to do that in the reflect video. I mean, he has this, you know, you can actually put a stomach on here. It's kind of later here in the stomach, so it's basically what we're going to be building. But if we took this entire shape and we squished it, get rid of the eyes and the eyebrows and we squished it down. We get a much closer view of what we're going to be building. And again, it's just simple shapes. Let's take a look over here at the pug. If I take the pug and we break it down again into the simplest shapes, I see a rounded rectangle Here I see another rounded rectangle here and again. He's kind of an it now pictures that puppy isn't going to stand still. So cute. But they're so cute. I'm going to look at the nose here, which looks like a round shape, the mouth part like the muzzle of the animal. And because this pug is so cute, we're gonna call him Pugsley from the Ana's family. So I've got four ellipses here that make up the mouth. I have one for the I got a cute, um, little eyebrow here on top. And for the years, we've got triangles granted there lopsided triangles, but they're still triangles the back leg here And even though it's covered up, we know we have, like, a little foot kind of right here for this back leg for the front one, and I have little pause here. Couple of toes. I like to take my cartoon animals and generally give them three toes. I just think it's cuter, but it again, it's it's just a personal preference. I'm gonna copy the leg to the other side. And I'm just holding down option and dragging on a copy this leg to the other side, and I'm gonna just copy these now if I was building this and you'll see that later on when I've actually built one of these is it's very simple shape. It's very rough, but again, if we took this pug and we switched it up a little bit and we took the mouth and we made it smaller, we can get a much kind of cuter little pug design. But once you start with the simple shapes, it's easy for you to break down how to make that character into something cuter, more dramatic. And it's up to you what your simple shapes end up being, And I can't wait to the end of the lesson when you post your project so I can see what you made after we make the our first. So I will see you in the next video. We'll talk about how to set up the file properly for building things correct 3. Setting Up Your File: Welcome back now that we've gone over how to find reference images and how to break down our characters into simple shapes or at least our reference in tow, simple shapes. We want to make sure we're setting up our file properly. So I'm going to go into Adobe Illustrator Sisi. I'm using CC. Whatever version you use, this should be perfectly fine as well. And we're going to start by creating a new document. So file here and new, or you can choose command And Okay, so I'm a big key command junkie, So I'm gonna hit command and and the new version of Sisi, the relatively new versions actually start with these little categories at the top. And since we're gonna be working with art, I'm gonna go to the art and illustration category. I'm not going to choose one of the defaults because I actually want to set up a file that could later on be used in animation. So we're going to use, like, a 3/4 each d size and the first thing I want to do over here on the right is set points, two pixels, and I'm gonna set the with 29 60 and the height to 5 40 and it automatically adjust the orientation to landscape instead of portrait. It's just automatic since the width is bigger than the height. I'm not worried about any bleeds on this. We are going to use the RGB color mode scheme. RGB color mode has tons more colors in C m y que Aziz much more colors available to it. And I'm just going to start by naming this, I will start and we're going to click create now real quick. Um, we want to make sure we're drawing are out in the center and we're going to use some guides to help us do that. So the first thing we need to do is bring up our rulers now again, Big key command junkie. So if I hit command, our control are on a PC hit command. Are it'll bring up my ruler guides. If you want to go to view, you can also go to ruler and choose show rulers. Okay, are your little key commands are always gonna be over here on the right, your little quick keys to get to these things, okay? And our document is 960 pixels by 500 import 40 pixels. So I want to bring a guidance at the halfway point here vertically and horizontally. But I'm not a big math person, and I don't want to sit here and do math in my head. So easiest way to do this is I'm actually going to drag out a guide, and I'm gonna go to view guides to make sure lock guides isn't on. So if I choose lack guides here and go back to view and guides, you'll see that if they are laughed, you wanna go to unlock guides? Okay, so what? I'm gonna do that now and I'm gonna select this in. The best part about this is once I have this guide selected, I can go to this menu up at the top here, which is the Align board. And this is our little quick palette up here. A the top. If you want to see the actual palate, you can go to window and choose a line, or you can see that it's shift F seven and I'm me a line palette here. I can go to this little menu on the right and choose show options and this will give us to the same thing aligned to art board, and it gives us all our line and distribute functions. But I'm just going to select this. Use the quick one up here, So I want to make sure aligned our board is checked and I'm going to click the, um, align center button. And I'm gonna bring in a vertical guide, our ah, horizontal guide. And just so you can see, I'm going to drop it way up here. Then when I click a line, um, center here vertical line center, it will center it completely for me. Another thing that I want to set up is a grid. Okay, so I want to go to view show grid. It's also command apostrophe, and your grid probably won't look like mine. So I'm gonna show you how to make it look exactly like mine by going to illustrator up here in the corner preferences and we're going to choose guides and grit and what we want to make sure we do is you can actually see you can change the color of the grid here. I like the light grey, cause it's not gonna get in my way were going to make sure we grid line every 60 pixels and we want 50 subdivisions. And once you have that set up, you can click OK, and we're ready to go to start drawing are owl. 4. Creating Your Simple Shapes: Welcome back. Are we excited to start our owl? We've got a guide set up and we set up our grid. And our next step is going to be starting are simple shapes for our out Now, the previous video we went over how to break down things into simple shapes. With our owl, you can follow along with me, get as close as you can, or you can actually bring up the pdf guide, which is explained in one of the last videos on how you can actually follow along exactly with the pdf guide to get the exact owl that I do in the demo. So let's start off by checking our layers panel. Now it's over here on the right. It looks like these two overlapping pieces of paper. I'm going to click that, grab the tab and pull it off. If it is not over here on the right or you cannot find it, you can go to window and you can go to layers and check that if you want it to be over on the right here on the little quick menu, go to essentials and choose reset essentials. I'm going to double click layer one. I'm gonna call this guides, and I'm going to lock it that I'm gonna make a new layer with the make new layer button down here on the right. And I'm going to rename this layer draw here, and I'm going to lack the guide layer. I'm gonna move this over to the right, and now we can start with our simple shapes. So I'm gonna start with my rectangle tool, which is the M key. It's also up here. If you roll over it, you can see the quick key is the M key. Now I am a absolute key command junkie. So doing key commands allows us to move a lot faster with an illustrator. So it's just easier and faster. And you don't have to keep going back to the tool palette. And I'm gonna start now by drawing a rectangle, and I haven't let go of my mouth. I'm just clicking and dragging and I'm gonna start with the rectangle shape and I'm watching my guide. So the little red ax you see in the center there I'm going to line up with that centre guide and I'm also going to use my grids to make sure that we're pretty close. Umm staying within this center mark now, if I had d, I could default my colors to black and white. But I want to be able to see through this because we want to be able to see where our shapes overlap. So the whites watch this white Phil Swatch here. I'm gonna click the nun. You could also click the slash on your keyboard to make no, Phil. Okay, we're gonna keep the stroke, but we do know fill. The next thing I'm gonna do is decide about where the bottom of my owl should be. And if you're not seeing your rulers, you can hit command are we can actually bring a guide in and say, You know, the bottom of my AL should be right about here. It can actually, unlike my guide and dragged that back and relax it back up again. And this time I'm going to bring up my ellipse tool, OK, which is the Elke. It's also located under the rectangle tool, and we can actually click on this little tab here which will create a pop out for us, and we could move it over here so that our tools are easily accessible. Space bar is our toggled to move our screen around if we want to in command Plus zooms us in and command minus zooms us out. Okay, so my next step I'm hitting command zero to center. My screen with my lips stool is to click and draw in a lips. And I'm using my space bar toggle while my mouse is held down to create the bottom part of my owl shape. Now, how much you do this and how around you make this is up to you. Just making sure that little red X in the center is lining up with my owl shape. My center guides there, and I'm going to let go. So basically what we've created here and don't worry about if it goes on to the actual paste board here, this is our art board. This is our paste board. I'm not worried if I go outside of that because I'm actually going to be getting rid of that anyway. OK, so again, I'm gonna hit d to default my colors. I'm gonna click the none or click the slash to get rid of that. Okay, So, basically, what would create a here is the bottom part of our owl. Okay, the next thing that we're going to do is use the Ellipse tool to create the eye, nose, stomach and wing. OK, so I'm going to start with the stomach and I'm going to kind of click in the center here, and I'm holding down shift an option which will allow me to draw a circle from the center. And I'm creating a stomach here, and I'm gonna hit my wiki cause I actually want to squish this up a little bit. V is our move tool or are direct Select tool. And now I made the stomach. My next step is to make the I. And again, I'm gonna use this guide here to kind of help me. But I'm only going to make one side. So if I actually click on this corner and hold down shift an option, I can kind of draw out from the center and then kind of move it over where I want to be using the space bar. Now, if you're not good with the little toggles on your keyboard for your commands, just hit your wiki and then you can go back over and decide where and how big you want this . I Okay, If you want it a little bit smaller, you can click and drag the corner by holding down shift shift constraints, proportions. It's going to allow us to make sure that this stays a complete ellipse. Go a little bit further down, something like that. And I'm gonna move this over to right about here. Okay? So that's one I drawn. I'm gonna use the Ellipse again. It's our alky. Don't forget. And I'm going to make the wing next. And if you look, this line right here is where the bottom of our owl is. So I'm gonna make sure that if I want my wing to go a little bit further than the body that I'm following that around now I'm using a command toggle, which is our top go for our move tool, which will allow us to go back to the last tool that we had so that we can resize this. Okay, so there's the I. There's the stomach, there's the wing and we're going to use it to create the foot and the middle tool. The middle toe. OK, so I'm going to kind of start with where my leg is here. So I'm gonna hit the M key again, and let's actually create a leg. So I'm gonna click a leg from right about here, and it doesn't matter. I want toe overlap. These I'm making sure I'm overlapping these. Then I'm going to hit the alky again, and I am going to click and drag out for the foot. I want to make sure both of these are centered. So I'm gonna click them both with my wiki. I'm hitting V. I'm gonna click here. I'm hold down, shift and click here, and I'm gonna click the align horizontal center button at the top. If you're not seeing this, you can go to window and choose a line and use that palette here. Okay? So once again, I'm actually going to create another lips inside of here, but I'm gonna copy and paste it in the front, so I'm gonna copy command, see and paste in front command after pastes the copy right on top and then holding down shift an option. I'm going to scale this down so that I get the middle toe. So so far we've done I stomach, wing, leg and beat. Last thing I'm gonna do is the nose. So I'm gonna hit the Elke and I'm gonna create a nose right here. Notice I am making sure that I'm overlapping my shapes. That looks good. Remember, if you're not happy hitter Wiki, and then you can adjust. Thus Okay, the next step is our pentacle. Now, I'm not as worried about the pen tool showing you how to use this because all we're going to be doing is doing simple click. OK, so to make the eyebrow, I'm going to click, click, lick, click, quick and click. Now we are ready to move on to our other I and are towed. Okay, So let's create our other eyes. And we're going to do this again. The the simple way. So I'm gonna click here to select with our move tool, the main I I'm going to do the copy again. Command, See Command after two paced in front, holding down shift an option. I'm going to make the outer eye. I'm gonna do that one more time. Copy paced in front. Shift an option and I'm making the main I and the last thing we're gonna do and I'm gonna zoom in. I'm actually hitting command. Plus, you can also hit your Z key to bring up your zoom tool, and you can click and drag to zoom in. Or you could go over to the tool palette and click it up to you. But I'm gonna go back to my move tool, and we're going to do something a little bit new, which is copy drag. OK, so I'm going to hold my option key down with this clicked and you'll see that there's a double hero that cops up. Okay, it's a double arrow, which means make a copy. I'm going to click with my option key held down and drag off a toad this way. Move, tour, make it a little bit smaller and again I'm holding down option. I'm gonna drag this one to the other side and now our character is ready for the next step , which is taking one side copying and reflecting and putting it on the other side Hope you're got your all going. Don't forget to remind me And don't forget about using that pdf guy I'll see has the next video where we're going to duplicate and reflect 5. Editing, Duplicating, and Reflecting: Oh, right are I was looking great. Were ready for the next that we're going to do some a little detail, things which were going to change The knows that we're going to change the eyebrow, and we're going to change the wing just to give him a little bit of a point for the nose in the wing. And we're going to round off that eyebrow, okay? And after that, we're going to select our elements that make up the I the eyebrow in the wing. We're going to group them, and we're gonna copy that group and using the reflect tool, we're gonna use it to create the opposite side. Okay, so we're ready to get started. So the next thing we want to do is make sure that our live corners is turned on. So I'm gonna go to view, and I'm going to make sure that the corner widget doesn't say show. Okay, I want to make sure that it says hide. So if I go down to show corner widget, we want to make sure show corner widget is checked. If it says hide corner widget, then you are ready to go. You also know that by if you hit your a key. Now, this is our direct selectable. This allows us to select points in handlebars. Okay, which is the a key this way. If I click on the owl and I click on one of the points, I get this little radio here which will allow me if you see, I can click and drag to round off corners. Okay, we're using that because if I use my normal selection tool and then hit my achey actually does all the corners at the same time. And I want to be able to do all of these points individually so that I have control over how this eyebrow works. Okay? We could also hit our move tool, which is our wiki if we want to change this a little bit, so maybe I want to rotate this out. So if you click on it and you go to one of your corner point, you can actually rotate your eyebrow in a different direction. We can also hit are a key to click to actually change where these points are located. So if you're following along with the guide and you need to move a point. Just use your a key, which is your directs electoral. To be able to move your eyebrow around and rotate it if you need to. Okay, with the a key selected, I'm gonna click on this top point, and I'm just gonna click the radio to drag to round that up. I'm gonna click here and grab the radio to Rome that, uh, I'm gonna click this one on the corner, and it does a pretty big radius first. So just holding my mouse button down so that I can click and drag us so I can get a little rounder corner there I am going around this one off as well, and this one which it's we're not going to see it. We're gonna actually be getting rid of it. But just in case we change our mind, we want to make sure that's done properly. The next step is to select our pen tool, which is our peaky, and we're actually going to use the convert anchor point tool. And if you had PPI for your pen tool and you hold down option, it will actually give you that convert anchor point tool. Now what? I want to Dio is Hold down Maiken Command or on on PC. It's a different key, which is the Ault key, and I'm going to select my no shape while holding down option. I can click to turn this into a corner point, which is getting rid of these busy A handles again if you're not good with the whole keyboard switch E keys. I've been doing this for 20 years, so for me it's second nature. You can actually go over to the pen tool here, use the little tab to bring that out, move it over to the center and actually click on the tool, which is the convert. It looks like a little upside down V here. Then we can click. To get rid of that point, you can again, I'll do the the simpler way without the key commands on the wing over here. So when hit my wiki to select, then I could grab my convert anchor point tool here. It's also shift See is your quick command for it, and I'm gonna click to get rid of those anchor points. We're ready to take the rest of this except for the nose, the stomach in the main shapes. I'm going to use my wiki, which is gonna allow me to select multiple things while holding down shift. So holding down shift shift is add two optional is always subtract. So holding down shift, I'm going to click, click, click, click, click. And for this one, I'm going to click and drag a marquee. So what you want to make sure you have selected are your toes and your feet, your leg, your wing, all the parts that make up your eye, including the eyebrow. And we're going to put these in a group. The quick command is command G, or you can go up here to the top under the object menu and choose group. Okay, now that these are grouped, we're going to do this the easy way. We're going to copy. We're not just gonna pace could see how that puts that anywhere over here again. We're gonna paced in front, which is command up. If you don't like your key command, you can go to edit and you can choose paced in front. If you're on a PC, you can actually see what the command is here as well. So right now, we just have one. Okay? I'm gonna copy paced in front command af If I move this over, you'll see we have to. Okay, I'm gonna commands ease to make sure I put that right back on top. I'm going to zoom in command, plus assumes a sin, or you can grab your C key. It's just a little bit easier hitting command. Plus does Uman, and I'm going to use the reflect tool, which is actually the okey. But up here in your tool palette, it's actually located under the rotate. Oh, it's the reflect tool. The quick command is the okey. Once again, you can pull off that little tab if you want to pull it over here so that you have both tools there for you Now with that selected but a zoom in here and you'll see there's this little cross hair that I'm looking for looking for this cross hair because I want to roll over it with my reflect all and drag it right over here to the center guide. What that's doing is it's creating the anchor point where my reflect is going to happen from So with that in the center here and I hit command minus to zoom out. I'm going to click, hold down, shift and drag to the right. Now we have an owl that's perfectly even an in perspective, and we're ready to move on to the next lesson and use our shape builder tool to make all of these individual shapes see in the next video getting excited. 6. Using the Shape Builder Tool: Welcome back. Are we excited? We're ready to use the shape builder tool just for a quick little demo of what the shape builder tool is and how it works. Just gonna show you with a bunch of little ellipses here. You could do this with me if you want to test out the tool, Um, or you can just watch just so you can understand how the tool actually works. And with all of these selected, I can do the coolest kind of thing with shaped builder tool, which is shift em. And the shape builder tool actually looks like this. I'm gonna zoom back out here, and what it does is it allows us to add or subtract over lapping shape. So I am going to click and drag with my option key held down to subtract. And if I let go of my option key, I can then add so you can see how we can hold down option to subtract and let go on, hold down. Nothing to actually add so we can create some really interesting shapes that work a little bit better than if you tediously tried to draw this shape out with the pen tool gonna delete that. And I'm gonna select this whole thing. You can also do command A which is a select all. And I am going to default my colors. So I'm hitting the d key to default my colors. Now, what this is gonna allow me to do is actually add or subtract things a little bit better. You can see if I select the outer circle in the main body shape here could actually see how are always coming together. Okay? And if I hit the No Phil, okay, you can actually see all the lines that overlap that we're going to be using to create this . So I'm going to start with my direct selectable, which is my achey. I'm gonna zoom in and I'm going to click on the main shape here, and I'm gonna click on the circle that I'm gonna hit Shift em, which will give me my shape, builder tool and holding down option. I'm going to subtract the top shape and I'm gonna subtract the bottom shape now really quickly. These corners are corner points and I want him to round off. And if you remember previously how we did the eyebrow. If I hit my a key, I can get my live corner widget here, which will now allow me to round off those corners. Shift am gives me back my shape, builder tool. And if I hold down my command key now is actually going to give me the toggle. So if I click off here, you can see I could actually toggle to the tool I want to use to select my parts. Okay, Now that I'm doing that, I don't ever have to go back to my tool palette because I will always have my shape, Builder, tool. The next step that I want to do is grab the main outer eyes and the stomach. So again, command Keum and grab this one. Then we have to hold down shift to get more than one. And I'm gonna get the stomach now for this one. We're not going to subtract, because then we'll have a whole here, so we actually want ad and we want to add I'm gonna select the nose. Next. I'm actually holding down my commander control on a PC and shift, and I'm getting the nose and I want to combine this and this Just that little wherever your nose overlaps your eyes. The next thing that I want to do is the outer eyes and the nose, the outer eyes and the eyebrows. So I'm holding down my command and my shift key, and we're going to combine the outer eyes again. We're just kind of clipping off a lot of these little paths. I'm gonna do the outer eyes and the main body. Now we're to the point where we can select everything. So I'm gonna hit command A to select all. And by looking at this, we can kind of see what we need to do here. So this wing needs to come be combined. So I'm gonna click and drag. I'm gonna go to this wing. I'm gonna click and drag, and you can see where the lines are going through. So, for instance, right here this needs to be one shape. This needs to be one shape. This needs to be one shape, and so does this part of the eye. The legs need to be added into the body. And if we look at our feet, we want to subtract this part and this part, holding down option holding down option. We need to combine these two pieces not holding down anything. And then we can kinda zoom in here to finish off the toes. And I want this toe to be in the front. So watch how I click and drag to make a full circle. But to do the same thing here, I'm gonna do the same thing here. I'm gonna zoom out and are. Owl is ready for the next step, which is color. Now, I'd like to recommend going back to your shape builder tool, which is shift. Um, I like to make sure everything is selected with command A. And I just like to kind of click over the parts that were created just one more time to make sure there's no stray pieces and making sure I'm doing every little shape. But I'm just kind of clicking through. I'm gonna save my file when I'm done and I'll see you in the next video. We'll learn about how to do global colors. Why we use global colors and will start coloring are all 7. Coloring and Global Colors: Welcome back. Guys were at one of my favorite parts of this lesson, which is introducing you to global colors and showing you why we used global colors. And I'll be able to show you once we get to the end of the hour, how quickly we can change the colors of the US based on our global colors. I'm also going to show you that in the final touches video, which it adds, are highlights and our shadows just to show you why we're going to limit our colors now. I don't like a stagnant street screen here, so let's get to our website. I love this website. I love color. I love everything about color. I love using unconventional color. So instead of always having a black stroke, what if it was a dark red or burgundy or a navy blue or a magenta or a dark forest green? I don't traditionally use blacks unless I'm adding a warm or a cool tone into it, depending on what I use. So I want to introduce you guys to color lovers dot com. Make sure you do the O. U R for color lovers, and once we load this site. I'm going to click on, browse and choose pallets. Now, the cool thing about this is we can actually search for a palate up here. So if I click on the search box here and I am a nerd so nerdy me who loves guardians of the galaxy less search for guardians of the galaxy and, you can tell, have search for the before When it pops up in my search box of them typing, it'll bring up pallets that people have made, and we will give credit to those people who made the pallets, um, that allow us to kind of start with a color theory, a color combination that actually looks good together. And the best thing about this site is it limits us, and limits are color options. Not that we can't add many more colors, but it usually has a 23 456 sometimes seven color palette, which allows us with the least amount of colors to use our final design on multiple things . If you wanted to screen printed on a T shirt, you would have a color separated already with the color limits that you need and keeping them down to a reasonable amount of colors. So if you were into doctor who also something I've surged for, you can find some pallets that match that or what people think matches that. So, Inspector Space times a pretty cool on 11th doctor. That's a little too brown for me. Um, come along, Pond. Amy Pond. Love it. There are five colors here. Um, I'm gonna go back to the star Lord Pellet, cause I really I'm kind of digging that, so I'm gonna click back. You can pick whatever color palette you want if you make a free account on this site, Okay? If I scroll down to the bottom here and we click on the pallets and searchers, I'm gonna click Stahler first before I scrolled down. That would make sense. We're going to get wonderful credit here, too. Starred. Sarah, this fellow it was made in 2014. It looks like, but with a free account, we could actually go down to download options. And I can click this ai download button. It's going to download the palate for me. I'm gonna close out of this and go back to illustrator, and I'm gonna bring up my swatches palette. Now, if you're not seeing your swatches, if I docket back over here on the right, you can see that it looks like a bunch of overlapping squares. Here I click on that and I've gotta pull it off. Here is the other palette that was used for the sample that's in your pdf guide. So this palette is here. If you want to use those colors, you can sample the ones from the pdf. But I really want you guys to go for it. Really? Try bringing in your own palette. So I'm gonna click on the little horizontal lines up here, and I'm gonna choose open swatch palate and then choose other library. Then what I can dio is get the one that I downloaded, Star Lord here, I'm gonna click. Open it and you'll see it's gonna open that pellet for me. Now, these air? No, not global colors yet. First we have to select these. We're going to bring them in. I'm gonna close this out with these selected I'm going to click on the new color group. I'm actually gonna call this star Lord, I'm gonna click, OK, And then the one thing I like to do is I like to add a white to that group as well. So I'm clicking the white and dragging it in whites A good one to use for highlights When we get to that point now, thes are not global colors. The difference is you'll see These are global colors. They have the little triangle in the corner thes air, not global colors. But it is very simple to make these global colors. I'm going to double click and I'm gonna click the global button. We can also name them appropriately when a double click I'm gonna call this one dark brown Click the global button click OK, I'm gonna call this one burnt orange I'm gonna click the global button and click OK, you see, once I make the global, they get that little triangle in the corner. This one is regular orange double click global. This one is my dark blue name Appropriately named him Whatever you want, This is my light blue quick, My global button and I'm gonna click Ok, now we can start coloring our out. Okay, so I'm gonna do another select all So command a selects All could also click the little radio here on the side. If it's selecting your guide like minus here, I can toggle this open can open this up and see there's the guide layer. What I'm going to do is unclip my guides that I'm gonna pull this guy layer to this one. Relax, my guides back up so we can actually select this by clicking the little radio on the side. You can click and drag with your move or selection tool, or we could do a select all which is command A. I want to default my colors by hitting the default key or the D key on your keyboard. Or you can hit this little default Fillon stroke button right here on the left. So now that I have ah, Phil on this with my a key, I can actually select individual pieces instead of with my wiki where I click and it selects more than one. So with my achey selected, I can now choose where I want to put my colors. Okay, So, looking at this, I am thinking that the dark blue I'm going to use for the strokes in this ok? And the rest of our mom and use for the Phils, including the whites for the highlight. So the eyes I'm going to click with my direct, select a whole downshift and make sure my Phyllis selected not my stroke. If you look over here on the left, the stroke is selected. This is the Phil being selected. I'm going to click on the blue click on the nose and the wings. Actually, I'm gonna de select the wings. I'm just going to do the nose in that orange and then I'm gonna marquis around the feet. Here. Marquis means click and drag to draw box, and let's select those feet with that orange as well. I'm going to select the main body here, and the main body also includes this part at the top. And so let's make the main body the orange. When I click on the stomach, gonna make that the lighter orange out her eyes, and each time I'm clicking, I'm holding down the shift key in between. Let's make that the it's a little bit too much. Let's Ah, let's do the dark color. Come in and grab the eyebrows. Make them the same color as the stomach. I'm gonna click these I'm gonna make those the white I'm gonna click the wings and I'm going to make the wings go the lighter color as well. Now again, The reason I didn't do the Dark Blue is I'm gonna select this whole thing. Then I'm going to go to my stroke options. I'm gonna click the stroke button and the strokes on this. I'm going to make the dark blue. It changes it. It makes it a little bit better. And here's the best part. Okay? And I'll show you more of this later. Even though we picked the Star Lord Color Swatch Okay, it's I like the dark blue, but it's not dark enough for me, and I like the orange, but it's not light enough for me. So the best part is notice. I have nothing selected. I'm gonna click off in a blank space. The reason we use global colors is because if I double click this blue swatch and I click preview down here a the bottom and I dark in this, you can actually watch how that changes to a different color. And it updates everything without it even being selected. For instance, let's change this orange maybe the orange We want to go more green. Not that that looks good, but we can change this. And it live changes for us. And because anything that has that global color, it'll automatically change for us, Which just makes things so amazingly better. Okay, I'm gonna hate cancel for a second. Um and I'm gonna change my colors up just a little bit. What we can do is go back to the sample here, So I'm gonna click on the two eyebrows, the nose and the stomach here. But I don't have to do that, because if I click on my a little light tan here and I click it to replace everything that has that orange the regular orange, it's gonna update that color completely for me. The dark blue. We can select the dark blue and turn that toe everything. That's the orange color molding down option. And I'm clicking and dragging to replace that. Now the rest of this, the wings and even this little section up here I want to make the lighter color and the nose and the feet there. We want to make this orange right here and that anything that has the stroke where we want to make this dark brown. You can see how it actually changed for me. I can do the same thing with the eyes here. We can actually make them that dark brown colored. Just so he stands out just a little bit more. And now we're ready for the next video where we're going to add the finishing touches, the highlights and some extra elements. 8. Adding Highlights and Shadows: all right. Ready to finish this up? Now that we have all of our colors in here? We've used global colors. We've used overlapping shaped. We've used a lot of tools, including the ellipse, the rectangle, the shape builder. We've used panels like swatches and layers and pent will flip out tablets and shape layer flip out tablets we've used reflect all we're ready to learn one more tool, which is our with tool. The whip tool. I'm gonna on the left over here. I'm just going to make a line to show you what we can do with us. Our wit toll if you hit the shift. W key. That looks like this little pork scurry kind of a thing here, which actually just is a whip kind of tool. Um, what it allows us to dio instead of just being able to change a stroke. Now, with this selected, we can bring up our stroke pallet over here on the right and pull that off. It can click on the little menu here and choose show options. We can actually change the stroke with by clicking on the point size of the stroke. We can also take the caps and round them off. You can see it rounded here. It's not round, it's around. We can even do a projecting cap, which goes outside of where that point actually ends. But what, Of course you can look at this about there's dash lines. Um, there's tons of things we can do. We can also choose profiles. Now, what a profile does is Ah, plows applies a pre set profile. So this is what profile one. And what that does is it thins out the ends and makes the middle thicker. Okay, we can choose the width profile to which actually does thick, thin, thick. But I'm gonna undo that with Command Z. Remember, that's your favorite tool in your toolbox with the with toll, which is shift W I can click and kind of roll over. I want to get in close to you guys. Conceive this. I can click and drag and actually create with of my own. And if you notice if I roll along this line, you see that little triangle It's actually a diamond there which will allow me to create wits. Okay, so if in the center of this line I wanted a thick, but I moved to the middle of the line and I wanted it to be thin. Now I can have complete control over this stroke. And the best part is it actually remains a stroke. Okay, so no matter what we dio by, grab the curvature tool and I click on this point, it actually remains a stroke with that with palette or with that with profile that's been set. Okay, so what we can do is actually put some with sun this just to make it a little bit more interesting. So with my achey, I'm gonna select the main outer eye here. I'm gonna hit shift W to get my wittle and we can just thick and then up. Some of these just some of the our you know, some parts that that will create a thickness for us. Now, we have quite a few points here that we can play with. We can add points and subtract points. If you don't like the width that's working, you can actually do a thickness based on your with here. And then we can go ahead and thicken it out a little bit If we need Teoh, a key again selecting the other eye. Let's move that back up to the same thickness four. And I'm gonna grab the top part here and put a thickness on that. I'm gonna click on the eyebrows. A key shift. Select shift W Well, I was to put some thickness on her eyebrows. A key allowed me to select my nose shift. W I'm just gonna do this middle point. So we've got a thick going up to a thin there a que Allow me to grab the bottom part shift W When the thicken up the bottom part, the only other thing I may do is move these to the back. So if I select both of the legs here because of my width profile, um, a key will allow me to click in the centres of these. And if I go to object, arrange and choose son to back two c x all the way to the back. So what I did was I actually hit Command X to cut it in. Command B is our paste in back. Okay, I'm gonna do the toes now. I'm shift selecting him and some thickness, they're gonna grab these toes, add some thickness to the sides each time. Amusing my direct selectable, which is the a key or my toggle. Ah, yes, crab. This one. Lets actually go up two point. They're gonna grab the wings. Shift selects with are a key shift. W is our with tool. I'm gonna grab the stomach. It's, um, thickness. There. Grab this top shape. It's crab. I'm actually adding points here. It was actually grabbing the eyes that I didn't want it to grab there, so keeps it a stroke, and it just makes it a little bit more interesting for us. Okay, the next thing we're going to do is talk about our transparency palette and our global colors for that transparency palette. Okay, so what I'm going to do is over here on the right. I'm gonna bring up the transparency palette, which is the two overlapping circles. If you're not sure where it is, go to window and choose transparency. And this is where we get to have a little bit of fun. We get to create some highlights and shadows and some little extra details based on your taste. You don't have do exactly what I dio. It's completely up to you. So let's start with something simple. I'm going to add some shaped to this. So I'm going to use my Elke to grab my lips. I am going to select white as my fill color. Make sure you have nothing selected. I'm gonna go to my stroke here on the left, and I'm gonna choose none. And holding down shift must add some highlights. So there's one there's too. There's three, but I want to be able to create some transparency within these shapes. So I'm gonna select all three of these. And in the transparency palette, I can bring the opacity down. I can take this one. Let's make this one a little bit brighter. I'm gonna click all three of these, and we're gonna option Copy. We talked about this before in one of the previous videos, but hold down the option key, click and drag off, holding down shift so I can copy that highlight that I just made to the other side. Now I'm gonna take this shape, and I'm gonna make a copy of it. So minute, command, see command af to paste in front. So now I have two copies. Gonna get rid of the stroke by clicking none. Using my wiki, I'm going to scale this down and I'm gonna move it forward. I'm actually using my arrow keys to nudge it down. Now, here's the cool part. Even though this is still orange as a fill. If I take my blending modes here, my transparency palate and I change this to screen, I'm actually using the same color. And I can pull the opacity down to create the highlight because it's screening the color over the top, which gives us a lighter color. Okay, we can do that for anything. Okay, Another let's do the stomach here. I'm gonna hit the a key. And now let's use most of the tools that we've used together. So a key I'm holding down option. I'm gonna copy off a copy and kind of overlap it here. I'm gonna select both of these shapes, so I'm gonna click with my achey, hold down shift and click again. And let's use that shape builder tool. So I'm gonna hit, Shift em. I'm going to subtract holding down my option key those portions. So now I have two pieces. I have this one and I'll move the south so you can see it and the one on top. So for this top one, I'm gonna do no stroke. And instead of highlighting this portion, let's darken it by choosing multiply notices the same color. Okay. And if you go through these, you can see like color burn will give you a different option. That we move that up color burn will give you a different option than colored Dodge. That'll give you a different option than overlay and overlay looks to light. So let's go into the darker categories. And generally these are darks. These air lights, these are lights. Um, it's a little bit different inside a photo shop, but I'm gonna go to multiply on. Actually, let's go to color burn. That gives us a more bridge balloon that I can pull the opacity down. So I've got a highlight there. Let's go down even more. I'm at 53% here and let's do the wings to do the same thing. I'm gonna option drag a copy off. I'm selecting both of them and using our shift em for our shape builder tool. I'm gonna get rid of that piece. I'm gonna take this top portion. Get rid of the stroke using my move Key here. I'm going to move this over. Gonna move it up. Just kind of creating a little kind of section here. And it's notices the same Phil. And I'm gonna put this on, multiply and pull the opacity down. Do the same thing for the other side. Click hold down option and drag off a piece. My swatches. Spell it out of the way so he doesn't see what I'm doing here. Select both of them. Shift em. Subtract the front one. Grabbed this No stroke. Change this to multiply. And actually, if you want to get the exact thing if you hit your eyedropper tool, it'll give you the exact opacity percentage and blending mode. If you sample what's already there using my move tool or the wiki. And again, this is the easy way to do it. Meaning if you wanted to draw shapes in here to do that, you can as well. It's completely up to you. So we've got highlights. I was do the eyebrows gonna click both of these holding down option to copy and holding shift down to option copy drag. I have two copies. Shift em. Gives us that shape. Builder tool. Taking these bottom pieces. I'm going to do no stroke. And I'm gonna set this to multiply. Or let's try color, burn or hard light. Let's try hard light for that one. I'm gonna select these two, and we could go to object. Arrange sent to back. Um, you have to do that multiple times and you could see the commander's shift command left bracket, um, which you can hit repeatedly to get it to send to the back. Or we can open up our panel here and drag those layers actually to the back. Um, easiest way to do it is me. Undo his command X and command be Then we know it's directly in the back. These now have points, so it becomes an easy edit to actually grab the points with the direct selectable. If we want to move them so that the stroke is showing, you can move them individually or move them as a whole. It's kind of up to you. What? Your preferences for how you move these, You know, some of the tools now, so it's not that difficult anymore. I'm gonna go to the toes and let me show you a nisi way too kind of add something to the shape I'm in to select both of these. Actually select this one first gonna choose draw inside, which is going to give me this little bounding box here. Then if I grab something like the rectangle tool and I go like this, it actually stays within that shape. Now, if I change that blending mode to multiply, get rid of the stroke. It actually did that. Inside of that shape, it creates what's called a clipping mask which now this big rectangle will stay inside that shape. I'm gonna do the same thing for the side. I'm clicking it, click normal Draw And then I'm gonna click the shape and choose Draw inside I'm gonna grab my rectangle tool again. Let's do that one more time. Change this to multiply No stroke. I'm gonna click on this point and we could go back to draw normal. Now click on the option Dragged down Select all three. Get rid of the bottom ones No stroke. Let's go multiply which will create the highlights on the top of the toes. I'm selecting all three option dragging these off because we know these air the same on the other side. An hour owl is ready for extras. I will show you that in the next video. 9. Adding the Finishing Touches: Okay, Now that we have are ill finished, I want to go over just a few things with you. The first thing I'm gonna do is select everything on my canvas with the drag selectable I'm gonna make my how a little bit larger by holding shift an option and grabbing a corner, move it down a little bit And now we kind of used up more of our canvas, which is a great thing. Um, I wanted to show you how those transparency's work. So if I made a copy of too transparent images because the transparencies airlink over the top of each other, we actually get different results by overlapping them. You may want to do that on some of your parts, maybe your nose or something, just to give it a little bit more interest. But that's completely up to you. You have fun with that? When you get to this point, I'm going to lack my draw here, layer, and I'm gonna make a new layer in the back. So I'm gonna make a new layer, and I'm actually gonna call this my branch and using my pen tool or using again. I'm not gonna go over completely how to use the pen tool toe such details clicking and dragging handles. But I am going to default my colors. And I'm just gonna put a little branch here, Okay? So because I'm behind it in the stacking order, if I draw a branch like this, it's actually going to go behind and notice. I'm just kind of clicking. I'm not worried about, um, being exact. I'm even going to hold my option key down in D Select and actually do the other side. Don't even want to close out the path. So it's a full shape that I don't want to end on this. I don't want these two to have a line like this actually want to leave them open. I think it adds a little bit more interest. Um, drag select tools, my achey. I'm gonna click a marquee around these two points and let's make him a little bit longer. Do the same thing here. So I've created my branch there. But remember, I want to use global colors for this, So I'm gonna select both of these by making a marquee. I'm gonna go to my swatches. They're already saved here. I'm going to make sure my stroke is selected on the left. I'm gonna add the brown, and I'm just gonna mess with this a little bit. I'm gonna make a thin thick, so I'm gonna make it about two point and then hit shift W for our with tool so I can actually play with this even more. I'm going to do some thicker pieces of the branch. I'm gonna do somethin. Earpieces. Just a handsome interest. So it doesn't look all the same, actually. Creating a thickness there. I'm gonna create a thickness in the top here. Over here. I'm gonna make it a little bit. Dinner and thinner. Same thing on this end. Let's go back to a little bit thick. And it's a visual thing at this point, so it kind of depends on what you want to do to make it look interesting. So I've added my brown for the branch there. The next thing I'm gonna do is just add a couple of leaves. I'm not gonna pick green for the leaves because I don't need it. I like my six colors that I have here, so I'm gonna make a leaf with the pencil Now it's up to you. Um, unease. E way to make leaves honestly is to use your lips tool and then using that convert anchor point tool, you can actually get rid of the two points, the handlebars for the top and the bottom, and then stretch your leaf out and you could actually make a leaf that way, which is actually a little bit easier of a way to do it and then manipulated accordingly. So I'm gonna change the someone actually used my my flip here, shift x. I'm gonna make it. Just have the blue Phil and just using my regular wiki. I'm gonna select and kind of and some leaves to this. Um, if you want to make a little bit more difficult leaf, that's completely up to you, I'm gonna make a couple of different sized ones here, do three on this site. And how am doing those copies is I'm just option dragging off to make a copy and then manipulating that copy. It just allows us to move a little bit quicker inside of Illustrator, and I don't think I need any over here. I think that works good. Maybe a little bit bigger on this one. And it's a visual thing at this point. It just helps us visually see what we're doing. When we zoom out a little bit, you can kind of see a little bit better. What's going on, actually gonna copy this one by holding down option and dragging it off? I'm gonna make the copy here. Gonna rotate this one again. And I'm only rotating it by clicking on it with the selection tool and rolling over till they see the corner handles that Allow me to turn the US on a zoom out. I'm gonna look at my whole thing. I hit the tab key. So I'm not seeing anything and I'm gonna hit command zero. So I'm seeing my whole hour to decide if I want to add anything extra to it. Um, after this, it's using those shape builders to create your own. I'll do a quick little video next that will go over. How, Based on doing your simple shapes, how we can build something quickly and a little bit differently based on overlapping shapes . I'll show you an example or two. I'll see you guys in the next two video. Have fun adding your extras 10. CONGRATS! Now it's your turn.: now that you've learned how to build your cartoons using simple shapes, I want to thank you for watching. I want to thank you for taking this class. Hopefully it helps you learn a lot that you can go on with into the future. Um, and use simple shape for tons of different things, including icon design and loca, logo design and actual character. Art and poster are dumb. It's completely up to you. I wanted to show you guys a little bit about the building process. You can see it was just these simple shapes edited and then reflected with shape builder tool. The global colors were added and then the final extras were added in this stuff. Same thing for this acute little cap. These were the simple shapes that were you did it used. It was reflected shaped builder tool was used, global colors were added. Here are the extras right here and then, of course. Ah, simple shapes as well reflect and shape builder global colors. And here is our final little pug. Now the public is done showing you the simple shapes from earlier in video, one where we were talking about breaking down the simple shapes between the owl and the pug . And this is kind of what happened with the little pug. You can see There's the two squares and it's made up of seven circles, two triangles on one little tail path. Um, so you can pretty much build anything by overlapping shapes. Just make sure you're looking at the negative and the positives and where things kind of go together. Um, always remember that before you used the actual, um, shaped builder, you can edit things beforehand. So, for instance, if with our pug here, we decided instead of having this big giant head, we wanted to do a little head on a big, giant body, we would do that before we got to this step. Please show me your projects. I can't wait to see them. I would love to see your owl. And I would love to see what you ended up with as your own character for the, um, class assignment. Kind of at the end of this little tutorial. I'm excited. I can't wait. Um, make sure you show me I'd love to see your color palettes. And I would like to see your shapes if you can break down the process. Kind of like what I did here. I'm so excited. And thank you for watching. Please stay tuned. I've got a couple more very exciting tutorials headed your way from Illustrator and from Photoshopped as well. So stay tuned. And again, Thank you for watching. I'm Deanna. She and from Doodle head D and please sure to be check out all my tutorials once they come .