Digital Illustration: Textured Vector Florals in Affinity Designer V2

1. Welcome to Class!: I made that word up. But here's the thing. If I say, I love vectors for their infinite scalability and the fact that you can create shapes and recolor and resize them quickly. But sometimes they're a little too vector. You know what I mean? Right, don't get me wrong, flat vectors have an important place in many of my designs and I love that I can create a fun flower and designer in less time than it takes to say stim, especially when I'm working on illustrations. I want something more organic, something textural, basically. I want to be able to use all of my favorite tools and designer to draw with my favorite textures. Is that so much to ask? What if I told you it's not welcome to class everyone. I'm Tracy an illustrator, surface pattern designer and unabashed digital art nerd. There's a misconception that vectors and textures don't play well together and that it's difficult to incorporate textures using designer. And even when you do illustrations with vectors are still going to look flat and stiff. In this class I'm going to dispel those myths and show you how to create beautiful, organic textured vector florals with ease. Well, I have many tools in my creative tool box designers have been my go to for several years. Over that time, I've taken a deep dive into it, not just to learn the basics of how the tools work, but how to make those tools work for me more efficiently and effectively. I share all of that knowledge here in my classes. And this one's no exception. This class is jam packed with information. But I've broken it down into three sections with bite size lessons in each one so you can navigate through the class. Step away when you need to, and easily refer back to lessons on key tools. In the future, we're going to taking a look at what I call the Creative Helpers. Those are the tools that are going to help you efficiently create and organize your shapes. So things like the bullying operations, the appearance panel and style picker, just to name a few. From there, we'll take those tools and create our florals. I'm going to show you two of my go to ways to quickly create the flat base for your floral shapes so you can build your own vast library of assets for your illustrations, surface patterns, and graphic design projects. We'll begin by creating florals using designers built in shapes and their baked in control handles. Now they're going to give us some pretty symmetrical shapes. But later in the class I'm going to show you how to add warp and texture to them to give them a more organic feel. Before we do that, I'll show you my favorite way to make organic floral shapes using a single stroke and pressure settings. Now this is something I covered in my very first class where I showed you how to use pressure settings to create leaf shapes. In this one, we're going to take an even closer look and I'll show you the basics of pressure settings so they're easier to use, as well as how to avoid or correct issues and go beyond leaves to create flower and vase shapes as well. From there we're going to head into the third part of class where we'll take our flat shapes and add depth and dimension with gradients, warp and of course, texture. I'm going to show you multiple ways to easily add texture to your vectors, including drawing with your favorite textures with the pen and pencil tools. Speaking of texture, when you take this class, you'll receive a set of 70 of my handmade gel plate textures. Which can add beautiful pops of color and depths to all of your shapes. You'll also receive a color palette that I've created that's packed with tons of hand pick colors perfect for bringing flowers and leaves to life. And finally, you'll receive a fun vector stamen brush that I created just for this class and you out. Now, this class is taught in version two of the desktop. But for those of you who are on the ipad, don't worry, I've got you covered because just about everything I show you in this class works the same on both the desktop and ipad. But for those few places where it doesn't, I'll pop into the ipad and show you the differences whether you're using the desktop or ipad versions. This class is intended for intermediate users of the app because even though it's beginner friendly, you will need some experience with the app in order to follow along. When you're done with class, you'll not only have the tools you need to create beautiful textured florals and designer, you'll have the knowledge needed to add an organic textured feel to any vector shapes that you want to create in the future. So you're ready to build your floral library and up your texture game and designer. I'll see you in class. 2. The Class Project: The project for class is to create your own vector floral illustrations using one or more of the techniques we go through in class. Create your florals using either the built in shapes with their control handles, or grab the pen and pencil tools and create organic vase, flower, and leaf shapes. Remember, all of these florals can go into creating a vast asset library for future projects. So when you create shapes you like, gather them up and put them in your asset studio. We'll go through the entire process in class. Once you're done creating your base shapes, try your hand at adding additional embellishments like texture gradients. Using the tools we cover in the third part of the class, I'd love to see what you create. So consider sharing your work in the project and resources section of the class. Not only does it surround us all with beautiful florals in all shapes and sizes, sharing your work also allows future students to see what to learn. In the class, I've included a complete step by step guide on how to upload your project in the PDF I provided with class. Speaking of that PDF, in the next video, we'll talk about downloading it and all of the fun assets I'm providing with the class. I'll see you there. 3. Class Downloads: The downloads for a class include my floral color bust palette that I created just for the class, complete with tons of beautiful colors for your vase, flower and leaf shapes. It also includes a set of 70 colorful gel plate textures created right here in my studio. I'll show you quick and easy ways to add them to your flat vector florals to give them beautiful depth and dimension. Later in class, I'm even going to show you how you can use them, along with the pen and pencil tools to draw with texture. Finally, I've created a fun vector stamen brush just for this class. That's going to allow you to quickly add a beautiful flower metal to your floral illustrations. You can find the downloads in the PDF. I've linked to the projects and resources section of the class. You're going to need to access it through a browser, not the skillshare app. In the PDF you'll find a link that will take you to a Google Drive where you can download the palette textures and the brush. It also includes some tips and tricks on setting up designers interface, as well as some efficiency tips when creating your florals. Next up, we're going to begin talking about the creative helpers and designers. They are the not so glamorous, but incredibly useful behind the scenes tools that will help you build and save your shapes as you create them. I'll see you there. 4. Power Duplicate & the Transform Panel: In this lesson, I'm going to show you multiple ways that you can power duplicate a shape, whether a stroke or a fill, around a set anchor point. This is useful when you want to create something like a flower shape. We'll take a look at power duplicating both a fill and a stroke, as while the overall concepts are the same, the set up is slightly different. So let's get started. The first approach we'll take is power duplicating using the transform origin point from the contextual menu in the move to. Now I'm going to perform this on a fill as it's not the most efficient approach when using a stroke. But later in the lesson, I'll show you a much easier way to duplicate and transform a single stroke. I've created a quick petal shape using the ellipse tool. And I want to create a flower by duplicating the petal and rotating the duplicates around the center of the flower form. Now, by default, if I select my petal and begin to use the handle to rotate, it's going to automatically rotate around the center of the ellipse itself. So I need to tell designer that I want to rotate it around the middle of the flower. With my move tool selected, I'll head up to the Contextual menu and choose Enable Transform Origin. It looks like a crosshairs and if I zoom in, you can see that it's added to the middle of my ellipse. Because again, that's the default for those of you on the ipad version. You can find this at the top as well, under the arrow, as long as you have the move tool engaged in this case, because I want this to rotate around the bottom point of my petal, I need the crosshair to sit on top of the bottom middle control point. Now before we continue, I want to note something, whether it's by design or by bug. Sometimes when you duplicate your shape, if you've already enabled it and move the point, it'll revert back to the middle on the duplicate, I personally find it's easier to avoid their frustration by duplicating the shape first, I'll use command J to do that. And then moving my transform origin point with snapping engaged and shift held down. I'm going to drag this point until it snaps onto that control point on my handle. It's really important that you use both snapping and shift because that's going to keep it in a straight line and it's going to snap it to the exact point that you want. Now at this point, I can begin rotating this first duplicate. And then as long as I keep that shape engaged, it's going to power duplicate all the way around when I hit command J. But I want to rotate this at a specific degree, so I'm going to hold shift down again and it's going to snap at 15 degree intervals until I get it to 60 degrees. I'll hit command J. And again, I want to keep my shape selected until I finish my shape. Okay, so my flower is done and I have six petals perfectly spaced around the form. But what if I want a different number of petals perfectly spaced and don't want to have to do a lot of configuring beforehand. That's where the transform panel comes in. So let's take a look. Once again, I've created a petal shape and I want to create a flower with five petals evenly spaced around my flower form. To achieve this, I need to rotate that first duplicate to an exact degree. And it's not going to be one that I can get to using the shift key. I could sit and do some math before I start, but instead I'm going to let designer figure it out for me. And I'm going to do it without having to engage the transform origin point. I'm going to click on my Shape. And at the top here, I've opened my transform panel. If you don't see yours open, go up to window and just choose transform. Now of course, this gives you some information like where you can find the pedal on the canvas, what the size is. But what I want to draw your attention to is the left most point here. This is the anchor point selector. And just like the transform origin point, this can direct designer as to what point on your selection box you want to rotate your shape around. For those of you on the ipad, you also have this. It's at the bottom of your transform studio. Now the points on the anchor box correspond with the points on the selection handle. The only one that you're not going to see is the very middle because again, that's the default. Now in this case, I want to rotate the shape around the bottom middle control point on my handle. I'll select this bottom middle point on my anchor selector. Now if I manually rotate this using the selection box handle, it's still going to rotate around the center of the shape. What I need to do is use the rotate field here to do that. And you can see that it's moving it around the bottom middle point. The same goes for the shear if you want to use it as well as sizing your shape. But for today, we're going to stick with the rotation to let designer figure out exactly how much I need to rotate my first duplicate to get five petals evenly spaced. The first thing I'm going to do is command J to duplicate my shape, make sure that it's selected. I'm going to go to the rotation selector and type in 360. That's the exact circumference of a circle. I want to divide that by five, because again, I want five petals. I'm going to choose the forward and type in five. That's all that you need to do. I'm going to hit Tab, and in this case, it's going to rotate it to the left. And it's rotated, specifically, 72 degrees. That's the only time I need to enter that into the rotate field. Because from this point, as long as I keep my shape selected, I can command J all the way around and it's going to give me five petals, evenly spaced. We've rotated a fill using the transform panel, but you can also rotate a stroke with the same process. Now in an upcoming lesson, I'll show you how to use pressure settings in the stroke panel to create a petal like this from a single stroke. But for right now, I've already created one. Let's head right up to the transform panel and the first thing you'll notice is that the anchor point selector is different. In this case, it's a single line representing the first node, the last node, and then a point in between. And that's going to be the case regardless of how many nodes you have on the actual shape between the first and last node. The other thing that you'll notice is under rotation, it shows negative 90 degrees because I've created this vertically rather than horizontally. Now I could work from here, but I find it's easier to simply zero out the rotation first with my shape selected and start fresh. I have it selected. I'll go up to my contextual menu and I'm going to choose rotate counterclockwise. And that's zero that out now. Right now, the middle anchor point is selected. And I actually want it to rotate around this third point, the end node. I'll go ahead and click and select that. I'll duplicate my shape. I think this time I'm going to create seven petals under my rotation. I'm going to type 360/7 Hit Tab, and it's going to rotate at 51.4 degrees now from here. As long as I don't deselect the shape, I can command J and get seven petals evenly spaced all the way around. This last method is specifically for those of you on the desktop version. Unfortunately, as of this recording, it isn't available on the ipad, but you can use the transform panel and power duplicate to achieve the same results. For those of you on the desktop. You want to make sure that you're at least on version 2.2 I have this petal shape that I've created. And I want to create an evenly spaced five petal flower. Now of course, I could go up to the transform panel, but instead what I'm going to do is turn on my transform origin point. And I'm going to drag it down to the bottom middle because that's where I want to rotate around. With it selected, I'll hit Return. And it pulls up this move Duplicate dialog box. Now it has a lot of the same options as the transform panel intentionally, but one additional thing it has is duplicate. This is going to allow me to tell it how much I want it to rotate as well as duplicate it at the same time for my rotation. I know that I want five petals and I want designer to determine the amount that it has to rotate again. I'm going to do 360/5 and I'll click on Duplicate. Now I already have one petal in place, so I need the number of copies to be four to complete my petal. I'm sorry, my flower. When I hit Tab, it automatically creates the flower. Now let's say while I have this box open, I changed my mind. I want seven petals. Instead, I can go back to my rotation and I can do 360/7 Hit Tab, and it's automatically going to adjust the rotation from 72 degrees to 51.4 It's also shifted all of my petals. I need to complete the flower shape. So I'm just going to go a number of copies, and click 12, and I'm done. So I'll click Okay. I'm just going to group these and move them over. I think I'll borrow one of these petals from here. Let's do the five petal flour again. Drag this out and change its color real quick. While I have this selected click, Return. My transform origin point is already down at the bottom, because I pulled it from here. Now if I were to click previous settings, it's automatically going to apply the thing that I just used, the seven petals. So you can see the rotation is 51.4 I'm going to turn that off and you're going to see that it stays exactly the same. I can either just key in what I want or I can click reset, and it's going to bring it back to zero. I'll just go ahead and type in 360/5 Click on Duplicate, and in this case choose four petals, and I'm all set. Now that you have several options for duplicating and automatically rotating those duplicates to create your floral shapes, Let's head into the next lesson, where we're going to take a look at symbols which are going to allow you to automatically make changes to all of your duplicates simply by changing one. I'll see you there. 5. Working with Symbols: If you've created surface patterned designs and designer you're already familiar with how symbols work. These are smart objects that can be duplicated. And any changes made to one will automatically apply to the others uniformly. Now you can imagine that using this one, creating florals will create very symmetrical, very uniform shapes. However, it can be handy in building up a library of different shapes, starting with one single petal. Let's take a look. I have a single petal shape here and I want to use the move Duplicate dialogue box that I showed you in the last lesson to create a quick five petal flower. But I want to create the duplicates from symbols so that I can quickly make changes to the overall shape by changing one of the petals. Before we do that though, let's take a quick look at how symbols work overall for those on the desktop. If you don't see your symbols panel open, go up to window and choose symbols for those on the ipad you're already set to go. It's in your tool box. Just remember on the ipad, if you can't find a particular icon, just tap and hold the question mark at the bottom of the screen and labels will pop up. I've pulled in a basic flower from my assets and I want to turn this into a symbol so that any duplicates I create from it can be altered at the same time. So I'm going to select it, and on the desktop I can just click Create. I can also go up to Layer and down to create symbol or use the assigned keyboard shortcut. For those of you on the ipad version, just go to the Burger menu at the top of the symbols panel and choose add symbol from selection. If you're using a Bluetooth keyboard with your ipad, you can also use that same keyboard shortcut as the desktop. Now once my flower has been turned into a symbol, you're going to see the layers panel change. And this is the same for both the desktop and ipad versions. The first thing you'll notice is that an orange line appears to the left side of the layer. If you have it turned on, your object type is going to show symbol and it's basically going to create a group, a symbol group out of this. This is a non destructive change. It's going to label that overall parent layer symbol, but you can change it to whatever you'd like and then the original curve shape. In my case, the flower is automatically clipped inside. Now, there are multiple ways that I can duplicate the symbol. On the desktop version, I can simply click and drag in, but I want to make sure that I don't have the curve layer selected. Because watch what happens when I do that. If I select the curve layer and pull that in, it's going to apply it to the symbol that it's sitting inside of. And that's not what I want, so I'm going to delete that. Just make sure you either have the symbol layer selected or nothing at all before you drag in from the panel. I can also option click and drag to Create. Or I can write click duplicate command J and duplicate, or copy and Paste. For those on the ipad, you have all of the same options available to you. The only difference being is that you can't drag in from the symbols panel. You'll need to click on the symbol and choose Insert instead. Otherwise, everything else works the same. Now at this point, as long as I have a sync turned on, any changes that I make to one of the symbols is going to be applied uniformly to the rest. I could use my move tool and change the size of these. I could change the rotation, or I could even change the color. Anything I add to this or make a change to it is going to automatically be applied. Now one thing about sizing and rotating, make sure you don't have the symbol layer selected. Watch what happens. Nothing is going to happen to the other ones when I rotate it or size it up and down. So you want to make sure that you have the actual curve layer selected before you do that. Now anything I add to my symbols group will be added to the other shapes. So I'm going to create an eclipse here as my middle. Let's drag out a circle. And right now it's sitting on the top of the layer stack. If I drag it over my first flower here, you can see that it hasn't added it to the other two because it's not inside the symbol right now. If I drag this down into the symbol for that flower, it's automatically adding it. If you ever drag something down and don't see it, just make sure that you have it inside the correct symbol. So in other words, if I had this sitting on top of this one but dragged it into this symbol, you can see it's adding everything up here because I didn't put it in the right place. You need to make sure that you're dragging it into the correct symbol stack for that to work. Now conversely, anything that I pull out is automatically going to be removed. So if I pull this out of that, it's going to stay sitting on top of this flower, but it's removed from here because this is non destructive. Again, it's basically creating a symbol group out of this that you can add to and pull from. You can group objects within a symbol or add them to an empty layer. And we're going to talk more about the difference between those two options and the next lesson. But for the purposes of this one, if I group my two layers here, I can more easily size both up and down and move them around because they're together. Now, for the most part, in order for symbols to work, I want to make sure that sync is always on. However, if I want to make a change to a single element without impacting the rest, I can turn synchronization off, make my change, and then turn it back on. So I'm going to turn it off and I'll select this ellipse here. And I'm just going to change the color of it. So I'm changing the fill of the ellipse on this particular flower. Now when I do that, you'll notice it doesn't change the other two again, because sync is off. If I turn that back on, the first thing you're going to notice is that the orange line next to this ellipse is now a broken line. It's a dash. And what that means is that this fill has been detached from the symbol and that's permanent. Once I've done that, any changes I make to the fill color on this shape are not going to be applied to the others even when sync is on. Now one thing I can do in this case is I can add a stroke to this because that's a completely different thing. I didn't change the stroke when I had sync off, so I'll just turn that to red and you can see that it's automatically applied that to the others. This is very useful if you want to add a specific unique element to an object without impacting the others. Just remember that once you do, you're no longer going to be able to sink that specific element back up to the rest. Now if you decide that you want to turn a symbol into a regular group, in other words, it's completely removed from the symbols panel so that anything you do to the other two symbols doesn't apply to that group. Overall, you can simply select that symbol, go to your symbols panel and click Detach For those on the pound version, go up to the burger menu and you'll choose detach from there. What that's done is turn this to a regular group. You'll see my objects are still clipped inside. And now any changes that I make to these are no longer going to be applied to the other one. Now, while it does turn that particular symbol into a group, it doesn't change the original symbol that was in place. That's still going to be in place in the symbols panel until you decide to remove it. One final thing that I want to touch on before we create the flower is that symbols by nature are document specific. In other words, whatever I create in this canvas is only going to apply to this canvas. I can't carry it over to another one. However, you can save a symbol as an asset and pull it into future documents. So if I select this symbol and just drag it in here to my flowers, I can open up a new document. My assets are open here. And you can see that symbol has automatically been applied to the symbols panel for this document. From here, I can go ahead and duplicate it and make any changes that I'd like. How can symbols be used when creating the flower shape? I have this single petal that I showed you before and I'm going to create a symbol out of it. Now I'm going to use the move duplicate dialog box to create my flower. But for those on the ipad, you can also use the transform and power duplicate and achieve the same results. Now the first things first is I want to duplicate the symbol, not the curve inside of it. I want to make sure that I have that layer selected. I want to turn on my transform origin point and bring it down to the bottom middle. I'll click Return. And I want to create a five petal flower out of that symbol. I'll just do 360/5 Again, I want to duplicate it four times when I hit. Okay, You'll see I have five symbol layers now. Based on that first one, what this allows me to do is go into the curve layer. Inside of that, I could change the size. For example, if I hold down command, I could make this wider. I could go ahead and make this smaller. I could change the color of it and it's going to change all of them. I could even go into my fill tool and add a fill to the one petal that's going to be applied to the rest. Now you'll notice it's applied evenly, of course, because anything you apply to one petal is going to uniformly be applied to the other. So you're going to get a very symmetrical flower that way I could add texture this way if I wanted, so if I wanted to create a bitmap texture here and maybe grab this g, el, plate texture, the problem is again with that uniformity because it's adding it exactly the same way, it's going to be a very, very uniform petal all the way around. Now I could detach this from symbols and make a change just to this petal. And just click into each one and do the same thing. Just remember that when I turn, sink back on, it's not going to allow me to make any changes uniformly to that particular fill. Personally, when it comes to using symbols to create flowers, I use it to create the overall shape, not to add any of the effects, because I'd prefer to add those individually to each of my petals or to the flower overall, so that I can add them the way that I want them to without a whole lot of rework. But using symbols along with power duplicate is a great way to create symmetrical flowers and make changes to them to create multiple flowers out of one single petal. However, you decide to use symbols, whether it's to create a flower full of textures, fills, and other effects, or to simply use it to create a variety of single curve flower shapes quickly. They're a powerful tool when it comes to creating efficiently, which of course, leads to building up your floral library all that much quicker. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at groups, layers, and Boolean operations, otherwise known as geometry. The differences between all of them and the pros and cons of each. I'll see you there. 6. Groups, Layers, and Boolean Operations: In an upcoming lesson, we're going to take a look at the assets panel and how you can use it to organize and save your floral shapes. One of the most important steps in saving multi layer forms is grouping them to be sure you're saving a single asset. But what about using layers or geometric tools to create either destructive joins or non destructive compounds? Are any of them a better approach than creating groups? If you're already familiar with groups, layers, joins, and compounds, feel free to skip ahead for those of you who want to explore them a bit more. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at all of them and I'll share the pros and cons for each. That way you can make an informed decision about how you want to approach your shapes as you create them. Let's get started. Let's start with groups and layers as they're the most straightforward. Now overall they work in a very similar way. Just like in other design apps, grouping layers and designer is a non destructive way of organizing and managing multiple layers at once. As I mentioned in the intro, grouping individual layers is key when you're saving multi layered assets. Because if you don't, you're going to end up with each individual layer as an asset rather than a single one. And we'll touch on that more in the next lesson. Beyond that though, combining objects into either regular groups or parent layers allows you to apply effects, transformations, filters, blend mode, and opacity changes all at once. In other words, I can select this group layer, go to my F X and add a Gaussian blur. And it's going to apply to anything within that group all at once. Additionally, you can create multiple groups within a main parent group or layer that keeps everything together. In the case of this group, I have my petals grouped separate from my middle. And then I combine everything and in this case, named it groups for the lesson, but normally would name it something like yellow flower. The other benefit to group, whether it's an actual group or a parent layer, as opposed to the bullying operations that we'll talk about next, is that whatever you group together is going to maintain its original properties, specifically surrounding color. You're basically creating a folder just to keep everything organized. It's not going to alter anything that's added to it unless there's some effect or filter applied to the group or layer overall. How do layers and groups differ? Well, one of the advantages of working with layers as opposed to a regular group is that you can create your hierarchy upfront. When it comes to groups, you have to have at least one layer in place to form the group. With layers, I can go to the bottom of my layer panel and click Add Layer. And then I can just start by naming this one yellow flower. From here. I can keep adding layers and then clipping them inside as child layers so I can open this one up and perhaps name this one petals with that selected. If I keep clicking, it's automatically going to add it inside the yellow layer parent layer. So I could change this one to metals and maybe add one more for texture. Once I'm ready to begin creating my shapes. Let's say I want to create the flower metal. I can just select that layer, select the shape or whatever I want to use to create it. I'll go ahead and choose this swatch, and it's automatically going to add it inside whatever layer I had selected. Approaching it this way organizes you upfront. You just need to be sure that you select the correct layer before you begin creating your objects. Don't if you happen to have one that strays outside, you can just drag it down and clip it like you normally would. The other potential advantage, depending on how you work, is that with layers, you can easily select the individual layers within that parent layer Because they're not actually grouped, they're simply sitting inside that parent layer. On a group, the very first selection is going to be the overall group layer. Now if you want to be able to select an individual layer with a single click, using a layer is a way to go. But if you want to grab the entire object, you're either going to need to drag across and select all of them, or select the parent layer in the layer stack. This part is easy, but dragging across is sometimes difficult, especially when you're working on a more complex canvas where there's other objects close by. For this reason, I actually find layers to be a negative and not a benefit. Because here's the thing. If I click on the group, yes, the initial click is the group overall. But you can easily drill down. And I'm going to open this up so you can see what's happening. If I double click again, it's going to bring me to my petals group. If I double click a second time, it brings me to that individual curve. I actually have multiple ways to select this object, starting at the overall layer. And all I had to do was click on it. One of the potential negatives of using groups and layers, depending on how you work, is that you can't apply a clipping mask directly to either the parent group or the parent layer if I wanted to add texture to this group, for example, I'll go ahead and place one of the gel plate textures. If I drag this and clip it to the group, nothing happens. The only thing that happens is it's now moved inside the group, because remember this is basically a folder, The same thing would apply. If I did this to the layer, I'll just go ahead and place another texture. If I drag it over the layer, again, nothing is going to happen because it's nothing more than a folder. Instead, what I would need to do is create a vector clipping mask. I would have to have this outside of my group duplicate the group itself and then drag this up and over the texture. From there I could go ahead and change the blend mode if I wanted to. I could even move this inside of the group folder if I wanted to have it under the middle, for example. None of this is really a big deal because as long as you're organized about your layers, especially in more complex illustrations or designs, you can easily keep track of what is what. But it is important to note that you're not going to be able to clip anything directly to either of the overall layers. Okay, we've looked at groups and layers. Let's go ahead and take a look at geometric operations, otherwise known as bullying operations. Next Geometry, which is also known as bullying operations, can be found in the contextual menu when your move tool is active and you have shapes selected. So you'll find it right here for those of you on the ipad. It is also at the top of the screen. It looks like a square with a plus sign on it. And if you click on it, you'll see all of your options. There are two ways to work with bullying operations non destructively by creating compounds, or destructively by using joins which are permanent compounds because they're non destructive can be added to or pulled apart at any time because nothing is permanent. You can also remove the compound entirely. If necessary. Joining objects without creating a compound again is destructive, which means you can't add or change anything about your original shapes once it's created. Now before we get into the actual functions, I want to show you the difference between creating a permanently joined object versus a compound object. To create a joined object, select your multiple layers. Go up to the contextual menu on both the desktop and the ipad. And then select the operation you want to perform. In this case, I'm going to choose Ad. And that's it. That's going to create a permanent change that I can't go back and adjust outside of an immediate undo. In this case, it created a single curve made up of all of my petals. Now, there are many times that I will create a destructive ad simply because I no longer need the functionality and flexibility of the individual layers. But again, it's destructive. And in my mind, that is one of the biggest downsides of using this approach because there's really no easy way of going back. That said, if you're going to use destructive joins and think there's a possibility that you may want to make an adjustment to the original shape. I would consider saving your original as an asset, so you always have the original to go back to. Creating a compound starts the same way. You're going to select all of your shapes and head up to the contextual menu. For those of you on the ipad, just tap and hold, and it's going to create the compound on the desktop, Hold down option and click and it's going to Create the Compound. You can also go up to Layer and choose Create Compound. And on the ipad go to your layers panel. And under groups create basic compound. So there's multiple ways to approach that. If I go to my layers panel and open up that compound layer, you'll see all of my individual petals are still there. And I can actually pull them out and move them around. I can size them up and down. I can make changes to them because they were not permanently joined. Let me bring that one back in. Now, by default, the object that's the lowest in the layer stack is going to dictate the properties of the whole shape, specifically surrounding color. And this is what I was referring to earlier with groups, when I said that whatever you add to a group or a parent layer isn't going to dictate the properties of the rest of the group. If I were to change this particular petal, let me back out and get rid of this compound. If I change this petal to, say, this red color, and then create my compound again, this time I'll go up to layer and create compound. It's going to create a red flower, because again that lowest layer was red. It's automatically going to create the compound in red. However, if I get rid of this compound, if I release it, it didn't actually change the color of the individual petals. I can change the overall color of the compound shape by selecting the compound layer and then changing the color. I can't, however, go into each individual petal and change their color with my compound layer open. If you look at these first five layers, everything except for that bottom layer that drives the compound has a little icon next to it. And if I click, it's going to show geometric operations. What this allows me to do is change the geometric operation at a layer level, thus giving me the opportunity to make a totally different shape. So I could change this from Ad to subtract. I can take this one and change to intersect and I'm left with this shape. You can turn a compound into a destructive join by selecting the overall compound layer and then selecting the geometric operation. In this case, I'll right click and choose Add. That's going to create a single destructive curve that in this case is red. Because the compound itself was red. Even though all of the petals underneath, except for the one were yellow, it's going to create a permanent join that's red. Now, like a group or parent layer, I can't add texture directly to a compound. If I place some texture here, drag that out. If I clip that inside the compound, the only thing that happens is that it takes on the properties of the rest of the compound. In this case, it becomes solid and red. And if I open this up, you can see it's sitting there. Again, I would need to drag this outside, create a duplicate out of my compound, and then use that as a vector mask. Let's take a look at each of the individual functions. For the add function, again, it takes two or more objects and joins them to the lowest object, creating a new one from the sum of all the others. Right now I have three different color shapes. If I select all three of these, they're going to form one large shape that's going to take on the steel color because it's the lowest layer with the subtract function. It's going to subtract the top shapes from the lowest shapes where they overlap. In this case, these two shapes are going to cut away anything from the circle. Because the circle is the lowest layer, whatever's left and not overlap is going to remain behind. Everything else is going to disappear with them selected. I'll go ahead and subtract and I'm left with just this part of the circle. Divide is going to break object into separate shapes, both where they overlap and where they don't. Wherever you see an overlap here, it's going to become its own individual layer. I'll just go up to my contextual menu and I'm going to choose divide. And you can see that each one has now become its own layer. The intersect function is pretty much the opposite of subtract. And that the shape left behind is where all of the objects selected intersect. In that case, this is right here. This yellow is sitting on top of the red, which is sitting on top of the circle. If I select all of these shapes and choose intersect, the only thing that will remain is this shape right here. And it's going to become teal. Because again, that's the lowest layer. The X, or combined function, is going to merge the objects and leave the areas where they intersect transparent. And that resulting shape is going to take on the color of the lowest shape. So in this case, the teal, we'll go ahead and select that. And you can see it's left behind the transparencies. If I turn on this solid rectangle that I've created, you can see right through because those are transparent. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at the asset studio and how you can use it to create a vast library of floral shapes for your graphic design projects, surface patterns and illustrations. I'll see you there. 7. Saving Shapes to the Assets Panel: Having a library of shapes on hand as you create your projects allows you to create more efficiently. Assets and designer are application wide, not document specific, which means you can begin building a library and have access to those shapes in any document you're in, present and future. The assets panel is broken down into categories, which is the overall library subcategories, and then the assets themselves. To create a new category, go up to the burger menu and choose create new category. You can name it here, which I'm going to name it flowers, or you can rename it by going back up to the burger menu. In addition, you can duplicate your category. You can link your category so that you can use it in the other affinity apps on the same machine, so affinity photo and publisher. Or you can delete your category. You can also sort your categories by name or date added. And this is also where we're going to create our subcategories. I want to note that on the desktop version, it automatically creates your first subcategory for you. In order to add assets, you have to have at least one subcategory set up. For those on the ipad version, you're going to need to set up that first one manually. So I'm going to set up three subcategories. I already have one in place. I'm going to go up to my burger menu and create two more. And then I'll go into each of these to the burger menu, for each of these subcategories and rename them. So these are going to be flower shapes. I'll name this one leaves, and then this one will be vases. And I can keep going and add as many as I'd like. Once your subcategories are set, you can begin adding your assets. Now on the desktop, there are two ways that you can do this. You can select your shape. Again, you're going to want to make sure that you have the overall group layer selected. Go to your Assets panel. Go to the burger menu for the specific category that you want to add it to. And click Add From Selection. That's going to add the shape to that particular subcategory. In addition, you can also drag it right into the subcategory. Now that only works on the desktop version. On the ipad version, you do need to use the burger menu in the subcategory. Whenever I'm saving assets that are a group of layers in color, I keep them that way. However, if I'm saving single layer assets, especially those I plan to share these, I always create them in midtone gray. The reason for that is because they can be seen on a dark interface like the one I'm using here. If you create them in black, they tend to disappear against the background. Now I mentioned in the lesson about groups and layers that it's important that you save your assets at the group level if you have multiple layers within that asset. And I want to show you what happens if you don't do that. If I select all of the layers in this particular flower, which are made up of a series of strokes and a middle. If I drag this in to here, it's going to save an individual asset for each layer, which isn't what I want. Now here's the thing. If I do this with multiple flowers and realize my mistake, there's no easy way of going back and deleting these. I can't select them all at once and just hit Delete. I either have to individually delete each asset or delete the individual subcategory, or in some cases, the entire category. So it's important that you make sure that when you're going to save something, you command G to group it and then select the overall group. In this class, in addition to saving floral assets, I'm going to show you how you can use the Asset Studio in conjunction with the Vector flood fill tool to add layers of texture with transparent backgrounds to the shapes that we create. So while I don't recommend loading up your panel with a lot of texture heavy assets because they can cause leg and sometimes app crashes. It's not limited to saving simple flat shapes or groups of shapes. You can save textures and patterns the same way that you save your floral shapes. And as long as you're economical about how many textures you add or only pull them in when you need them, you can do so without causing any disruptions. One final thing I want to show you is that on the desktop version, you have the option of re, ordering not only the individual assets but the asset subcategories. If I want my flower subcategory to be beneath my leaf subcategory, I'll just click and drag it beneath. Within the subcategories themselves, I can also re order the assets. I can just click and drag. Now, unfortunately again this is only an option in the desktop version. It's not available in the ipad version. However, you do have the option in the ipad version to sort the category level either by name or date added. Just go to the burger menu at the top. Now that you know how to save your floral shapes, let's take a look at how to use one of the lesser known tools to build up beautiful dimension on them. In the next lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the appearance panel that allows you to add multiple fills and multiple strokes to a single object. I'll see you there. 8. The Appearance Panel: While designer offers many options for adding effects and textures to the shapes we create using layers and various forms of masking, It also has a lesser known, but very powerful tool called the appearance panel, which allows you to add multiple adjustable fills and strokes to a single object. And treat each one individually right down to its blend mode. Let's take a look at how it can benefit us when we're creating our vector florals. I have this single layer, very basic leaf shape that I've created right now. The green fill is the only thing on this object. Now I could select it and go to my stroke studio. And drag out the width of the stroke that I've placed in there. I could change its pressure settings. I can make any adjustments that I normally would because that's how the standard fill and stroke should work on a single curve. But where can I take this from here? Well, I could either go to the stock studio or to my place image function and I could grab some texture. And I could clip that inside the shape if I wanted to and maybe change the blend mode. But what if I wanted my stroke to have a different blend mode than my overall fill? Well, right now everything is on the same layer, so anything I changed here is going to be applied to both. Or what if I wanted to add a second stroke perhaps to the outside of the shape? The stroke studio alone is not going to allow me to do that. To do that, I need to go to the appearance panel. The appearance panel is a very basic panel, but it's very powerful because it allows you to add multiple strokes and fills to an individual object. Now, these aren't separate layers that are clipped inside, they're built up within the object itself. The strokes and fills can be solid colors, gradients, even bitmap textures. And you have the ability to change blend modes on each individual stroke or fill, which is going to give you some really interesting effects within a single shape. Now, on the desktop, if you don't see the appearance panel, go up to window and choose appearance. For those of you on the ipad, it should automatically be showing in your tool bar. I believe the icon has an E in it. Now, when you first open the panel with your objects selected, you're always going to see two lines, a fill and a stroke, because every curve has both. Even if one or the other is completely transparent, or in the case of the stroke, the width is set to zero. At the bottom of the panel, you're going to see add stroke and add fill. Now each stroke and fill has its own settings that you can adjust and use other panels and tools to make changes as well. For the fill, the only setting that you can change within the appearance panel is its blend mode. However, you can go into the Swatches panel, the color panel, and change your colors. You can also use the fill tools to add gradients and textures for the strokes. In addition to being able to change the blend mode, you can also have quick access to the Stroke studio, anything that you see in the overall stroke panel. You'll also be able to access and change here. This panel works very much like the layer panel in that you can change the z order of your strokes. In other words, you can click and drag and change the order of them. If I pull this stroke up so that you can see it's sitting within the shape here and I pull this beneath the fill, it's going to disappear because the fill is sitting on top of it. Anytime you add a new stroke or new fill, it's going to add it above the one that's already there. And again, you can always change the order if you're trying to create a particular look or style. You can delete an added stroke or fill by selecting and choosing the trash can within the appearance panel. And make sure you're choosing that trash can and not the one in the layers panel or on the ipad, the one that's in the bottom corner, because that's actually going to delete your shape. So you just select this layer, click this trash can, and it's removed. Now, you can't delete a stroke or fill when only one of each is present, because again, every curve has at least one stroke and one fill. I'm going to show you a real life example of how I would use the appearance panel on this leaf shape. Now, anything that I'm doing in this lesson, we're going to be repeating at a much slower pace in the third part of the class, where we go over adding texture and dimension. So in this case, feel free to just watch and follow along to get a Ist for the panel itself. Now I already have my fill in place and I've pulled these stroke setting up to about 23 points and I want to make sure that my alignments on the inside, so I don't want it sitting on the center of the line or outside. It's sitting inside of the fill. I'm not going to worry about my pressure settings here. I'm just going to reset that. What I want to do is create a leaf shape that has a hostile leaf feel or something like a snake plant. I want to create a line with some texture here on the outline. I'm going to go to the brush panel with my shape selected. And I'm going to change the stroke from a solid line like this to a textured stroke. I zoom and you can see it gives me some nice texture there. Now I can go back to the stroke panel itself. Or I can go to the appearance panel, which is where I'm going to head. Because again, I have quick access to the stroke panel. So if I want to change the width of the stroke, once I've added that texture, I can do that, but in this case, I actually want to knock this back just a little bit by changing the blend mode. I like how it looks, but I think it's a little bit too bright, it's a little too solid, and I'm going to be adding texture to the fill later. So I want to change my blend mode of my stroke so that that texture shows through. So I'll go ahead and change the blend mode to something like soft light. So it's going to pull the green from beneath it. It's going to keep the texture and I like how that looks. Next, I want to add some texture to the fill of the leaf. But I want to keep this fill layer in place because I just want the texture and the green from this layer. I'm going to add a fill, it's going to add it right above that one. And in this case, I am going to use my fill tool, so I'll grab that. I can either hit Do that or use G on my keyboard. And I'm going to use a bitmap fill. I'll go back to my gel plate textures and I'm going to use this number 52. It's going to pop it inside the shape and I can use my handles to adjust how the texture is laying on it. All right. I like how that looks. I'm just going to change the blend mode of that as well to maybe overlay or soft light. I think I'll go with soft light again because I changed the blend mode of the stroke. You can see the texture from beneath coming through. If I hadn't done that, this is what would happen. I would have a very solid stroke sitting on top. And of course, I could go in and I could change the opacity, but I actually like how it looks changing the blend mode. And I would only be able to do this in the appearance panel. All right. I like my leaf shape, but it's a little too perfect around the edges. I'm going to add another stroke here at the top. And the color doesn't matter because we're not going to see it. I'm going to bring the stroke width up to, I think about 12. I could always change it. I'll hit scale with object and I want to make sure that I have this center aligned so it's straddling the actual path. Now I don't want a solid line. What I want is to use one of my texture brushes again to break up the edges. I'll head up to the brushes and I'm going to go into this brush pack called Bezier Buddy by True Grit. I'm going to pick this rough, fine taper brush. When I do that, you can see it has a nice rough edge to it, but this isn't quite what I'm aiming for. What I want to do is go to my appearance panel and I'm going to change the blend mode on the specific stroke to a race. And that's basically going to mask away the edges of my leaf shape. Now this is a little too intense because the stroke width is up a little too high. So let me just zoom in here. I'm going to go into the stroke panel for this particular stroke, and I'll just bring that down. I'm just looking for something subtle. Again, just something that's breaking up the edge, but not something that's going overboard. So I think that looks good right about there. Now, again, we're going to go through all of this at a much slower pace later in the class. So if you missed anything, don't worry. I'm going to go back through it now. One note about using this process via the appearance panel is that in design, er, anything brought in as a raster. So the textures, the brushes, because they're created from a raster nozzle, even though they're vector brushes, all of those are going to be treated, of course, as rasters. Now in designer, if something's a raster, no matter what format you exported in even fig, it's going to continue to be treated as a raster. In this case, because everything is within a single shape. It's going to take all of those raster elements, combine them together, and call it an image layer. And you're not going to be able to use the appearance panel to adjust anything. As long as you're within the original canvas and you have this saved as an AF design file, you're always going to be able to access the appearance panel. It's only when it's exported that it's going to compress everything and combine. Now if I'm adding texture like this, I'm not planning on using this invector format. I lost the ability to infinitely size this shape as soon as I added the texture. So I would be using this in an illustration or a seamless pattern, something I already plan to export in some sort of raster format anyway. But what if I want to use this shape again in the future? You have two options. Either save the shape as a whole to your assets panel. That way you can always pull it into an illustration or a pattern at any time and you'll be able to access the appearance panel. The benefit of using the assets panel is that not only are you saving the styles you added, you're also saving the specific shape. If this is something that you want to use in the future, the other option is to save this as a style. I'll select my shape and go to my styles panel. For those of you on the desktop, if you don't see that it's open, just go to window and choose styles. On the ipad, you'll find styles at the bottom of the FX Studio. Once I select the shape, I can go to the burger menu and choose Ad Style from Selection. And you'll see this pop up here. You can also right click and rename it if you want. Now, one note about this. Unlike the assets panel, which saves the style and the original shape, this is only going to save the style. So in other words, the strokes and fills that we added. If I grab a rectangle and I draw that out and then click on the style, you can see it's not changing the shape, it's only adding those strokes and fills. But I can use the appearance panel to make adjustments to all of those. Now the benefit of this is that since it doesn't apply the form from the other shape, you can create as many different types of shape as you like, but still apply the same style across all of them. All right, so that's actually a perfect lead into our next lesson. You may be wondering why I like to use the appearance panel to create something like my leaf shape rather than multiple clipped layers. Let's head into the next lesson, where I'm going to show you the style picker and how you can sample and apply a style to any shape you create quickly and easily. I'll see you there. 9. The Style Picker: The style picker is a new addition to designer as a version two. And while it may seem redundant given the style panel, it's a pretty useful tool for sampling styles on the fly. Allowing you to work quickly to copy and paste styles from one shape to multiple without having to head to a panel or even save the style for that matter. In the last lesson, I created a multi textured leaf shape using the appearance panel. In this lesson, I'm going to show you why I prefer to work that way rather than using multiple layers when I'm creating an illustration or pattern with a lot of similar shapes, that I want to have the same feel. Let's take a look. I have my leaf shape here from the last lesson, and I actually pulled this in from the Assets panel. Remember, using the Assets panel is going to allow me to not only pull in the style, but also the original form. Now in this case, that doesn't matter because I've created this second leaf shape here and I want to apply my style to it while it retains its shape. I have saved this to the styles panel, of course, so I could just click this and apply the style. But I want to add a few things to this. First, I feel like it's not quite there, so I'm going to go to the appearance panel and I'm going to add another fill. And maybe go to the stock studio. And I'll just use one of these textures, these concrete textures, to add a little bit more to it. So I'm going to select that fill, grab my fill toll. Just click and it's going to add it inside. Now I can just change the blend mode to something like overlay or soft light and move it around until I'm happy with it. I think this looks good now. I don't want to save this again to my styles panel. I already have the base there. I just really wanted to add this little additional thing. How can I apply this, this form to this? Well, that's where the style picker comes in. So this allows you to pick a style on the fly and apply it to another shape. The style picker can be found under the color picker on both the desktop and ipad versions. On the desktop version, I actually had mine broken out because I use it so often. And again I've included information on how to customize your toolbar from the view menu in the PDF download I provided with the class. When you select the style picker, you're going to see a contextual menu show up here at the top. Now the ipad contextual menu works a bit differently than the desktop, and I'll mention the differences as I go through in the contextual menu. On the desktop, you're going to see Unload all, none, and then a list of attributes that you can sample. Now the first time you select the style picker in a new canvas, all of these are going to be selected from there, it's going to retain the last selections you made. Once you sample a style, you'll see this unload button light up. But before that it's actually going to be graded out. Now just like some of the other tools in designer, it's going to retain the last picket made within that canvas. So you always want to make sure that after you choose the style picker, if you don't want to apply that last style, you click Unload For those on the ipad version, you're going to see Picker is loaded at the top if one's been sampled or Picker is empty, either the first time you open a new canvas or after you've unloaded one. To unload the picker on the ipad, click on the trash can right next to it. Again, don't click on the trash can at the bottom right. That's going to delete your entire object. To tell the designer what attributes you want to sample. I'm going to go ahead and click None first. And then you're just going to click and check which ones you want. On the ipad version, just tap the eye dropper icon in the contextual menu and you can do the same. Now from here on out, the two work exactly the same. So I'm going to focus on the desktop version at this point. Taking a look at the leaf shape that we want to sample and apply to this one. And then looking at the attributes along the top. Let's figure out which ones we want to check off. We know that we have at least our base fill in stroke, so we're going to check these two off. The thing is though, we don't just have one fill in one stroke. We have three fills and two strokes. But these two only account for the base fill and stroke. If I select the leaf shape that I want to apply this style to, and I'm going to click Unload, just so that it shows up here. And I sample this leaf shape, it's only applying that dark green fill and that textured stroke. Because that's all I have checked off here. So let's go ahead and undo that. Let's take a look at the rest of the attributes and see what else might apply. We have no layer opacity changes and no layer effects applied to our leaf shape, and there's no text involved. But Object Settings is the one that we want because it encompasses any miscellaneous attributes that aren't covered by the others, like contours, additional strokes and fills, like we have here, and miscellaneous text settings. So if I go back up and choose Object Settings, I'm going to unload the picker because I'm going to sample again. I still have this selected. If I click here, it's going to apply everything. All three fills and all three strokes. At this point, I can make any individual adjustments that I want to this shape, including adjusting the texture and fill, changing the size of the strokes. Anything that I want to do to make this one slightly different than this one, I can click on the shape and go to my appearance panel. I'll just click on this fill and maybe adjust where the texture is laying. Sometimes you're going to find that if a shape is a different size or smaller or larger, you might have to adjust the textures that came from the other shape. I can also go to here and perhaps change the size of that inner stroke, maybe make it a little bit deeper. Anything that I want to do to make these two look a little less similar. Now you may be wondering why I would use this process rather than simply duplicating the leaf shape or just pulling it from the assets and going from there. Well, if I want to make multiple leaf shapes that have different shapes but the same styles applied, I would have to either pull in multiple copies of the assets and then adjust the shapes themselves. Or make multiple copies of the one I already have in my layers, stack and do the same thing by using the style picker. I can sample just the style and apply it to that new shape while it retains its individual and separate shape from the original. Now again, I can accomplish the same thing with the style panel, but the style picker allows you to quickly sample and apply styles without having to go to the panel, save a style and then apply it. I love tools like the style picker that allow you to make fast work of creating new shapes. And we're going to use it a lot more later on in class when we get to the lessons about adding texture and dimension. In the meantime, let's round out the creative helper section by taking a look at one of my favorite but underappreciated tools, the Contour tool. I'll see you there. 10. The Contour Tool: We're on the last of the creative helpers we'll be covering in this class, the contour tool. Well, there are numerous ways you can use this tool in your every day creative practice. In this class, we're going to focus specifically on how to use it to add additional dimension to our flower and leaf shapes. The contour tool allows you to offset the stroke of a curve or a shape. Now, we're not going to focus a great deal of attention on it in this class, but I did want to introduce it to you as a way of making some interesting in layers and shapes for your petals and leaves. Because it offers an additional approach to simply sizing something down and maintaining its aspect ratio. So I'm going to select the move tool here and I have four curves here. There's two flower shapes sitting on top of one another. I'm going to take this first one and just start doing a simple Re size. I'm holding command and shift down so that I can maintain the aspect ratio. You can see that the shape itself is maintaining its original form, but it's just sizing down. Now, this is lovely. I do this all the time. I could use the blend modes and maybe change it to overlay or something like that. And I have a nice little inset on the petal underneath. But let's take a look at how that compares to the Contour tool. The Contour tool can be found in the tool panel on both the desktop and ipad version. You can also use the keystroke when I select this shape. As I click and drag, it's going to start changing the shape of the overall form. Now I'm getting these very straight lines and that's because of the contour type that refers to these areas right here. If I change this to rounded, I'm going to get a much different shape. And that's actually what I want to use for something like this. Now, options here, you can change to just doing a stroke. In this case, that's not really what I'm aiming for. I already have a stroke. I'm just going to change this back and I'll just size this down. Now once I get to where I want it, I could take this a step further if I want and do something like we did in the appearance panel where I break up the edges of this. I'll go ahead and add a stroke again, the color is not going to matter. I'm just going to bring this up. I'll change this to a textured brush. Go to my appearance panel and I'll just bring this down to erase. Now the contour tool is non destructive until you set it using bake appearance. Once I've done that, if I feel like I need to change it because it's cut away a little too much, I can either change the stroke or I can just use the contour tool and start playing around with that. Instead, I want to bring it right to about there. Now I like how that looks, but I think I'll just go ahead and change the blend mode. Maybe to color burn and bring that down. Now it's important that once you get your shape set the way that you want, again, you need to bake the appearance. Because if you don't, if I select both of these shapes and start sizing down, you're going to see that the Contour tool is still going to continue changing that shape. So I want to bring that back up. I'll select that layer, go to my Contour tool and choose bake appearance. Now in looking at these two shapes, it's a similar function and that you're sizing something down. But obviously we have two very different forms here. So again, this is just another option to create additional unique shapes for your florals. It's something to experiment with and just see where it takes you. All right, enough with the technical stuff. Let's start creating our floral shapes. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can quickly create beautiful symmetrical florals using the built in shapes and their handy little control handles. I'll see you there. 11. Creating Florals with Built in Shapes: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at designers shape tools and how you can use baked in control handles on select shapes to quickly create flowers. We'll explore how to alter single simple shapes using their built in nodes. How to create additional shapes in a single click using the original shape. And how to access shaped presets that are built into Designer for desktop. And finally, we're going to keep this lesson simple and create several basic flat floral shapes that we'll use later on in the class when we explore ways to add finer details such as texture and dimension. Let's get started. Every shape and designer comes with a corresponding contextual menu that allows you to adjust the shape that you've created. In addition, many of the shapes, though not all, come with their own set of red nodes called shape handles, which you can manipulate in a set direction to modify your shape prior to converting it to a curve. Because remember, when you create a shape, you don't have regular nodes available to you. And these shape handles will allow you to do a little bit of manipulation before you convert it. One of those shapes is the cog, and this is one I use all the time to create flowers, which is why I've actually broken it out in my tool bar. I'm going to select it and I'll hold command and shift down and drag out a perfect shape from the center. And if I zoom in, you can see those little control handles I was talking about when you hover over them. Designer is going to tell you the exact direction that you can take them in. Now I'm actually going to drag this one out because I'm going to show you a little trick in a second as to how to create the flower metal using this void. The rest of them I'm going to drag in or out, and I'll form the rest of my petals. Okay, so we have the flower shape in place. Now one thing that does not have a corresponding red node is teeth, and that's what's forming the petals on the flower. Now right now, there are 12 teeth, which means I have very narrow petals and I want something a little fatter, a little whiter. So I'm going to bring the teeth down to seven. And as I do that, you can see those petals get wider to complete the shape. Now that I've done that, if I want I can go ahead and manipulate these nodes a little bit further if I feel like I've gone too far. If you ever want to bring one back to its original point, just double click on it and it will take it back to the original state. I actually like where that's at. I might bring this one out just to touch. Now, at this point I could grab the ellipse and create a center shape for my flower. But instead, I'm going to show you a really quick and easy way to do it in a single click, using the void in the middle. I'll select my flower shape. And I'm going to hit R on my keyboard. That's going to select the Vector flood fill tool. Now we're going to go into much greater detail on this tool in an upcoming lesson in this class. But for the purposes of this one, the one thing I want to note is you always want to select the tool first and then select the fill you're going to use. In this case, I'm going to use a solid color. So you can see that it's changed the fill to orange. It's also changed it here. If I hover over the flower that I've selected, the whole flower lights up in blue and both the outer edge and the inner. But if I hover over the void in the center, the only thing that's really lit up is the center. So I'm going to click right there, and you'll note that it's filled in the space with an exact ellipse. Additionally, it's added a separate layer here as a curve, which means I can grab my move tool and I can size this up and down if I want. I'm actually going to place this over the top of the cog shape, and I think I'll just size that down a little bit. At this point, I could go in a few different directions. I could turn the cog shape into a curve and start using my node tools to add some variation to the shape. But as far as it being symmetrical, there are some tools that we'll look at later in the class are going to allow us to add that variation and some wonkiness. So I'm not going to do that here. I could also group my two layers together, leaving the cogs shape layer and placing it in my asset studio. The advantage of doing it this way is that anytime I bring this into a design, I can simply select the cog shape, make sure my node tool is selected, and I can use these handles to manipulate the shape into a completely different flower that can be then saved as its own asset. So that's the step I'm going to take. I'm going to group both these together with command G, because remember, whenever you're adding multiple layers to the assets panel, you need to make sure you add it at the group level. I'll go to my assets and I'm going to drag this in. So I'm just going to delete this. If I drag this in and hit my Node tool, selecting my shape, and see that I can change the petals, I can change the number of petals if I want, I can make any changes I want. And that original sits here in the asset studio. In addition to the main shapes in the Shape tool on the desktop version, there are also presets built into designer that will provide baked in variations of the shapes all created by adjusting their built in shape handles. Now unfortunately, this is one of those things that only exists in the desktop version, not in the ipad. However, if you do have the desktop version, you can create assets out of the various presets and import and use them in the ipad version, I'm going to drag out a star shape here, and you can see they have the red control points. If I go up to the top here and click on this cog shape, this is going to give me all of the baked in presets for the star shape. If I click on one of them, it's automatically going to change it. And you'll see that I still have the red control points available to me, as well as the contextual menu at the top. I could change the number of points, I could drag the control handles, I can create an entirely different shape starting from that preset. In addition to the baked in presets, you can also add your own, as well as, preset categories. So if you create a shape you like, just select it. Go back up to the presets menu and choose the burger menu. You can choose managed presets, and it allows you to create categories as well as save. You can also import and export presets. Now personally, I find it easier to save and share objects to the assets panel rather than here, since you can share them on both the desktop and ipad. But just note that they're there if you want to explore them as again, some of them can make for some potentially great floral shapes or additions to them. Now, one last thing I want to note is that when it comes to creating leaves, I don't find shapes to be the most efficient way to create them. So we're not going to touch on them in this lesson. For the most part, if I do use them, I use them to create a simple base. For example, if I'm creating a monstera leaf, I'll use the heart shape to create that initial base Before I use other tools to create the little cutouts in them. I'm going to show you a much more efficient way to create leaf shapes, coming up in a future lesson. So that was a quick way to make fun symmetrical flower shapes. But what about something more organic? Let's head to the next lesson where I'm going to share my fabric. Go to Tool for creating flower, leaf, and vase shapes. I'll see you there. 12. Basics of Stroke Pressure: While working with shapes gives a pretty foolproof way to create flowers and leaves. They can also seem a little static while we'll be taking a look at some tools later in class that can help make them more organic. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a setting within the Stroke panel that can help you create beautifully organic shapes. Right from the start. Using the pen and pencil tools, I showed you how to create leaf shapes with the pressure settings in my first class about textured florals on the ipad. But over the few years since then, they've become my go to for creating not just leaf shapes, but also flower and base shapes as well. Once you understand how pressure settings work, you can use them to create all sorts of shapes beyond florals. Let's take a look first, at the basics of how pressure settings work. Pressure settings can be found in the Stroke studio on both the desktop and ipad versions. Now there are some differences between the two, and I'll note those as we go through. I've used my pen tool to tap out a single stroke top to bottom, and I've set the width 2300 points so you can more easily see what I'm doing. When you open pressure settings, you're going to see two control points. And they control the first and last nodes of your stroke. Whether it's a straight curve like this with only two nodes or a curvy line with multiple nodes in between. The left node always controls the starting node, and the right is always going to control the end node. You can tell which is the end node by the pink line just before you get to the node itself. In the case of my line, if I select this left node, the top is going to taper because that's the beginning node. Conversely, if I tap and select the other one, the bottom is going to taper. Now I could use the node tool to reverse the nodes simply by clicking this icon here at the top that's switched my end node from the bottom to the top. And now if I select this left node, the bottom is going to taper because again, that's where my beginning node is. Now it's helpful to have your node tool active when you use your pressure settings so you can more easily see which node is which. Otherwise you just need to pay attention to the direction that you tap out your shapes. And this is going to become more important when we get to creating petal and leaf shapes. While there are only two control points to start, I can add as many as I'd like by clicking anywhere on the line between the two starting control points. Now there's a few things to note about this. Any control points I add don't impact any nodes that exist on the stroke itself. Between the start and end nodes. In other words, if I have a curvy line with several nodes between the start and end, Any control points here don't directly impact those. They work independent of one another. If I add a control point and want to remove it, I can select it and hit Delete. And finally, if I want to reset the entire stroke, I can hit Reset on my grid, On the ipad version, tap on the grid, and you should get a note that says reset pressure. Let's take a closer look at the pressure grid overall and how it impacts the stroke itself. The key thing to remember is that the pressure settings are non destructive as long as you maintain the stroke. In other words, you don't expand this to a fill as soon as you do that, you can no longer use pressure settings. As long as I maintain this stroke, I can add as many control points as I'd like. I can move them around. I can delete them and I can reset my stroke bath to its original state. When you create your stroke, you set an initial width up here in the stroke panel. Anything you add to your grid here is not going to impact this number. Anything that I add and move around, that number will always stay the same. Conversely, this number does have an impact on the pressure grid because the highest point of the grid represents the number you selected. Here, I'm going to create a quick leaf shape so I can show you what I mean. I've added a node here in the middle and I'm going to drag these two points down. So we have a very basic leaf shape here. Since these two are dragged all the way down to the very bottom of the grid, they're now zero points, which is why I'm getting a point at the top and the bottom of the leaf shape middle, the widest point on the leaf is all the way to the top of the grid. If I measure that widest point, it's going to be 300 points. I'll grab my ruler here. I'm just going to roughly estimate the middle. It should hit near 300. I'm getting about 300 points there. I'm probably not right on the middle or right to either edge. If I go back into my grid and I move this middle down, you can see that the width of the stroke is changing. But again, this number is not. If I measure this now, it should measure about 150. Because I pulled it halfway down the grid, I'm getting roughly 150. So you can use this to your advantage. Because while you can't drag this point or any point further than the top of the grid, if you want a wider shape, but you want to maintain the shape that you've created, you can simply change the stroke width. So if I change this to 400, the overall shape is the same, but the widest point is now going to be 400 across. One final thing that I want to note about the pressure grid overall is that the profile you're creating represents half of your overall shape. By that I mean the curve that you see here is going to match one half of my shape here. And it's going to be symmetrically duplicated and mirrored to the other side of the stroke line. It's always going to be symmetrical. You're going to want to keep that in mind when you're adding your control points because you're not going to be able to create two different pressure settings on either side of your stroke line. Whatever you add to this pressure grid is going to apply to both sides evenly. Now up to this point, the desktop and ipad versions have worked exactly the same, But there are some differences on the desktop version, if I simply click and drag on one or other of the original control points, it's automatically going to drag both. They don't work independently of one another. What I need to do in order to drag only one at a time is either double click on the node or option click on it. Now I've option click and you can see it's solid blue. If I drag this down, it's going to drag my bottom in. Because again, that's where my end node is. If I option click on the other side, it will taper the top. The ipad version works differently. The two control points always acted independently from one another. So if you click on one, it's only going to taper the one side and vice versa. In fact, there's no way of selecting both at the same time on the ipad. All right, let's see pressure settings in action and create a vase similar to this one. So first things first, I've got this rounded stroke here. And I know that I want a flat top and bottom. So I'm going to select my stroke. Go to my stroke panel, and the very first thing that I want to do is change my cap from round cap to butt cap. And that's going to give me the flat top and the bottom. Now I want to make it the same height as this. I'm going to hold shift down with my node tool selected and just drag my two nodes up and down. I've done that without changing the points. It's still 300 points. I have scale with object on. I always make sure to turn that on unless there's some reason that I want my stroke to scale up and down. If I change it, let's head right into the pressure settings now. I know I'm going to be creating a taper here and then it's going to bulb out here at the bottom. But let's start by creating or changing the width of our top and bottom. This is my start node so that I know I'm going to use this control point option click. I'll drag this down to here. I can always change it if I want. Option click the other side and I'm going to make this a little bit wider than the other one. Again, I can always change it, right? I have the top and bottom set, and now I want to start creating the curve in between. So I'm going to click and add a node right about here. I want a nice smooth taper here, so I'll just drag this down right about there. I can always adjust it. And then I'm going to add a point here because that's where the jut out is here. So I'll just add my node and I'm going to drag this all the way up. And you can see when I did that, it also helps smooth this out a little bit. If I need to, I can always adjust things so I can grab this node and maybe drag it up a little bit. Or maybe down in all right, so I have my first face in shape. But here's the fun part. I'm going to option drag to create a duplicate of this and maybe move this guy over a little bit. So we have some room. I have an original here that I can always go back to. But remember, this is non destructive because I've kept this a stroke. I can go right back into my pressure settings and I can adjust control notes, I can add control notes. I can delete and make a completely different shape, all out of that initial stroke. I'm going to grab this guy and bring it up here. That's pretty much the only change I'm going to make this one, except to maybe drag this one down a little bit and try this one as well. All right. That's a second base shape. I'll go back to my pressure settings. I think this time I'm going to see what happens when I get rid of that. I've got an entirely different vase, just by deleting a control point. And I can move this around. If maybe I want to have it a little more bottom heavy than top, I could see what happens when I bring it up here. But the whole point is just by adding some control nodes and moving them around. I now have three different vase shapes for my illustrations, simply by creating one single stroke. Now you may have noticed in the pressure sending grid that there is a save profile down here. Now the first thing I want to mention is this is only on the desktop version. The ipad version doesn't have this option on the desktop version, this is only document specific. I can't save my profiles application wide to be able to use them in future documents. So instead what I'm going to do is save my strokes to my assets panel. So I've created a subcategory here called vases. In addition to fills and full shapes, you can save strokes to your assets so that you can always pull them in when you want to. I'll just click on this guy and I'm going to drag him in. I'll do that to all three. Now that I have those there and safely tucked away, I can delete these if I want when I'm in a future document. All I need to do is go to my subcategory here and drag this in. Again, this was non destructive. I still have my stroke maintained, which means that I can go back into my pressure grid and I can make any changes. I want to the shape, and I know that I have that original shape tucked away here in case I want to revert back to it. So since I have these saved, what I'm going to do is expand this stroke because what that's going to allow me to do is use things like my corner toll and other things like that. So I'll go up to the layer and choose expanded stroke. I've also created a keyboard shortcut for it as well. On the ipad version, you can use the quick menu to choose Expanded Stroke. So now that I've done that, if I click a white and Add again, you can see that the pressure settings have flat lined. Because you can no longer use pressure settings because this is no longer a stroke. But what I can do is make some minor adjustments to it. So I feel like the top and bottom are a little too pointy, so I'm going to grab my corner toll and I'll just drag these in a little bit. Select these and drag these in and I want to make sure that when I'm done I click bake appearance because just like a stroke, unless I do that, anytime I size this up and down, it's going to change those corners and I'm going to end up with some really funny looking shapes, so I have those nice and rounded out. I think what I'll finish up by doing is adding some texture. So I'm going to grab my Vector flood fill tool and I'm going to set a bitmap fill again. We'll go into greater detail on this later in the class. I'll just pick one of the gel plate textures and click and I've added my texture. But again, I can always go back to these original shapes because I have them sitting safely in my assets. You may be wondering why I use pressure settings to create a vase shape rather than using the shape tool and either the shape builder or geometric operations for more complex shapes that I can't create using pressure settings, all of those tools are indispensable. However, working with pressure settings to form shapes like the vase or the flower and leaf shapes while we're creating an upcoming lessons allows me to quickly create a number of shapes from a single stroke just by sliding my control points around without having to start over each time. All right, we've taken a look at the basics of pressure settings. Let's head into the next lesson and use them to create some beautiful leaf shapes. I'll see you there. 13. Leaves with Pressure Settings: We've got the basics of pressure settings covered. Let's put them along with some of those creative helpers we talked about to work to create some beautiful leaf shapes. The basics of creating leaves with pressure settings works exactly the same as creating a vase. So we're not going to rehash those. But there are a few additional things that I want to touch on. Especially because in this lesson we're going to begin using the pencil tool. And you can set your pressure settings upfront or as you go, just remember the direction of the start and nodes is going to determine your final shape. I do want to mention if you're using the pen tool and you don't see your node indicator, just make sure that show orientation is turned on. If you don't, you're not going to see it. That doesn't apply to the pencil tool. It's going to show it no matter what the direction of your nodes is. Especially important when you're using the pencil tool to either draw out leaf shapes in this lesson or petals in the next. Because we all have a direction where most comfortable drawing in. So I'm going to go to my pressure settings and just create a basic leaf shape. I have three control points on here. I'm going to set a wider part towards the top here, and there's my end node at the top. If I grab my pencil tool and I draw up and out, the wider part is going to be at the top because that's how I set it here in the pressure settings. But what if I'm more comfortable drawing down and in, if I do that, the pointed part is going to be at the top and the wider part is going to be at the bottom, which makes a completely different leaf. Now on an individual leaf shape, I can reverse this by going to my node tool and just choosing reverse curve. But if I want to permanently change that so that every leaf shape I draw out is created the way that I want in the direction I'm most comfortable, I need to actually change the pressure grid again. Just think ahead to how you're most comfortable drawing and let that guide how you set your control point. The more you use this method, the more it becomes second nature when you're setting up your pressure grid. But while you're becoming accustomed to it, just take a pause and think about it that way You're not going to need to go back and adjust the direction of multiple leaf or petal shapes. And you can create quickly and efficiently while still working comfortably. Let's go ahead and apply pressure settings to draw out a full leaf shape. I'm going to create something like this. Now, first things first, I want to reset my pressure grid because I'm going to start with the stem. Remember, designer is always going to remember the last pressure setting used until you reset it. So always check that before you begin your next shape, I'm just going to add some random control points here to create my stem. I can always adjust them if I want, I'll drag that out and I'm going to bring my stroke down to about seven or eight. I'll grab my pencil tool and I'll just draw out a nice curved shape. Now it's a little too thin, so I'm just going to drag that up. I want to create two more little offshoots here. I'll grab my pencil tool again, drag out if you find that you need help when using the pencil tool, because you're not drawing a line as straight as you'd like, you can use the stabilizer up here at the top. I find using the rope stabilizer set relatively low allows me to create what I want, but it stabilizes it at the same time. Next, I want to make sure that scale with object is set on all of these strokes. That's really important because remember, if you size things up and down, this can go wonky on you. So that's set, I'm good to go. Let's go ahead and create some leaves. Once again, I'm going to reset my pressure grid and I'm going to drag both of these end points all the way down. I'll bring maybe a middle one up there and have one slightly bumped out there. So let's grab a pencil tool. I'm going to drag my width all the way up to 100. I can always change it if I want. I'll just draw out my first leaf shape just to see how it looks. All right? I like how that's looking. I'm going to draw the other two. Now, the great thing about using pressure settings is that once I'm done, I can go into my individual leaves and I can adjust the pressure setting slightly to make them look slightly different from one another. Maybe I'll just drag this over here and bring this point down a little bit. Maybe make the sides a little smaller. Let's see how it looks without that. All right, I actually like that. I think I'll bring the width down just slightly. I'm going to drag the node out on this one. Everything is adjustable because again, we're working with vectors. So you have nodes to use. But in addition to the individual nodes, you can adjust the pressure settings between each one. Now one thing that I want to note here is that if I export this document with these strokes as is, in other words, they are single line strokes with pressure settings applied, even if I export it as an SVG, which does maintain vectors including strokes, anything that has a pressure setting applied to it is automatically going to be expanded to a fill. I don't have a choice in that, within the original canvas itself. In other words, within this AF design document, these will always remain as is. It's only when you're exporting to other formats that it's going to expand it to a fill. The reason that I bring this up is because when designer expands your strokes to a fill, it's going to try to recreate the shape as closely as it can using a series of nodes. And in many cases, what may look pointed or rigid in stroke form is going to smooth out significantly once expanded. There are also scenarios where your pressure settings can cause some little anomalies with your filled form. I always recommend expanding your shapes before you export, just so there's no surprises on the other end. Now in the next lesson where we create our flowers, I'm going to show you a few examples of the differences between a stroke with pressure settings and its expanded shape. And I'll include some of those anomalies that I just mentioned. But in the meantime, just keep in mind that you're going to need to take steps to save any leaf vase or flower shapes that you like and used creating pressure settings somewhere off the canvas and the assets panel is the best place to do that. So I'm going to group all of my layers together here. I've just command click those layers and I'm going to use command G to group them. I'll go to my assets panel and with my move tool, I'll just drag this into my assets. Now I have that available to me. So anytime I pull that into a future document, the pressure settings are still there so I can make any adjustments that I want. In the meantime, I can take this copy and expand my forms. I'm going to expand my three stem shapes by using the keystroke that I set up. So I've set up option E. You can also go to layer and then expand strokes. While I have these three selected, I'm going to add them together. I don't need them to be separate. Now, I'm going to expand my three leaf shapes as well, again using my key stroke that I set up. But I'm not going to add them to the stem because in the next part of this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can add an additional stroke to this fill to add additional interest to your leaf shapes. In addition to using pressure settings to create the original leaf shape, you can also use a second stroke with pressure settings to give it a more organic feel. I've created this basic leaf shape, and if you look at the pressure grid, it's just three control points. Now I like this, it has movement, but it's a little too perfect along the edges. Something a hand drawn leaf wouldn't be. Now of course, I could hand draw it using the pencil tool to get that hand drawn feel. But instead, I'm going to use a second stroke around this leaf shape with its pressure settings adjusted. Before I can do that though, I need to expand this first stroke into a fill so that the second stroke can be placed correctly. If I go to my appearance panel and add a stroke now as is, I'll just go ahead and change it to pink so that you can see it. As I drag up on the width, you can see that it follows the original path. Now I could use this to create perhaps a leaf vein, so I could change the pressure settings on this. I could change the width, of course, and go in and change the blend mode to something like soft light or change the color. But this isn't what I'm aiming for. What I want to do is to have this stroke follow the path along the outside of the leaf shape. In order to do that, I need it to be a fill. I'm going to go up to layer and down to expand stroke. Now if I go to my appearance panel and add a new stroke, you can see that instead of following through the middle, it's following the outside of the shape. If I grab my node toll and zoom in here, you can see my end node right there and my beginning node here as well. They're joined together, which means that any pressure changes that I make are going to be applied around the shape, not through it. I'll go to the pressure grid and I'm just going to start by dragging my two end points down. You can see that everything disappeared because I just basically brought the width all the way down. I'll just start adding control points. I'm not being overly careful, I'm not thinking too much about it. I really just want to create some movement. I might bring the width up though, just a little bit. As I'm doing that, you can see that it's creating a jagged line here. It's not as perfect anymore. Now, I am being careful in my grid to make sure that nothing is directly underneath each other, so I don't get any spots where it's perfectly straight because that can cause problems. Once I expand this, I'm just varying where they're sitting. And I might bring these two up just to touch a few things that I want to note in the stroke panel here. The cap doesn't matter because this isn't a straight stroke. You're not actually going to see the cap. However, you can change your join from either rounded to mitre if you want something a little bit point here. If you do that, you may end up with a bit of a flat head here. Just adjust your mitre accordingly if you need to. I'm going to keep mine on round though. I also have my alignment on center that the stroke is straddling the original shapes path. You can choose center. Outer, but choosing inner or inside is not going to have any effects, so I don't suggest using that. All right, Stepping back and looking at the shape I'm aiming for, little ridges like this. But I'm not trying to go so far that I get perfectly pointed lines overall. I just wanted something subtle. I'm looking for a shape that has a hand drawn fuel, not anything too abstract or angular. But go ahead and experiment to see what works best for your shape. If you get too extreme with your pressure settings and attempt to expand the stroke, you can end up with crossed nodes and a bit of a mess to clean up. So it's better to aim for subtlety than anything, way too wonky. Now, in the next lesson, we're actually going to take a look at how to fix issues. So if you do run into them, you'll be prepared. Now that I have a leaf shape that I like, I'm going to do two things with this. The first is I want to select my style picker and apply the pressure settings from this leaf shape to the ones that I created earlier. Now I've already expanded these three into fills. And that's really important because if I leave these as a single line stroke and try to apply the style from one that follows the circumference of a shape rather than runs down the middle. It's going to cause issues with these shapes. So make sure that you're expanding before you do this. So I'll go ahead and select my three shapes. And I want to hit Unload. Because remember it always remembers the last pick that you chose. Now in this case, I don't need object settings because we only have one fill and one stroke. I also don't need a fill because the color is exactly the same. Because remember, this isn't going to change the shape, it's just going to change the color of the fill. All I need to check off is stroke. Now, with that in place, I'm just going to sample this shape. And it's going to apply those pressure settings to these three leaf shapes. Now I like how this looks, but if for some reason it seems a little too intense, it may be because the shapes you're adding it to you are slightly smaller than the one that you're using. So you can just select your shapes and adjust your width. You can also adjust the pressure settings as much as you want. Now I do want to zoom in to these shapes and just make sure that no problems are being caused by the pressure settings that I add it. This one in particular, if I zoom in really close, you can see it has a little bit of a bump out there because the pressure settings are kind of pushing it away from the stem. So I'm just going to select that and go into the pressure grid. And just drop the two end nodes slightly, and that's going to pull it inside. Let's just check the other ones. Again, I'm zooming in. That looks fine, so does that one, the rest are okay. I like how these are looking. If I wanted to, I could adjust individual leaf shapes, but I'm going to call this one done. Now, the next thing that I want to do with this shape is save it to my assets. You can see that I have a number of single leaf shapes saved here. What this lets me do is pull it into a future illustration and sample the pressure settings that I like without having to start fresh. I'll just go ahead and drag this in. Now that it's there, I can actually get rid of this because for this illustration, I no longer need this. But I do want to prepare this shape for texture. Even though each of these had already been expanded to fills, I've just now added strokes to them. I want to add texture, I need to make sure that I expand these. Now I'm going to do that because aside from the fact that designer is going to do it for me when I export, when I add texture, I want to add it to one single curve rather than multiple. Now, of course, you can add texture to multiple shapes, but it would be very difficult to match them up and make it look seamless. To make it easier, I'm just going to select my three shapes. I'll go up to layer and choose expand stroke. And you can see it creates six layers. Each of these pair off with one another. I'm going to add them together. I'll select these two, go up to my geometry and add them, and I'm going to do the same thing for the other two. Now at this point, I have a single layer for each leaf shape and I can add a bitmap fill on one shape rather than two. Now of course that doesn't mean I lose the flexibility of using pressure settings on these, but again, that's why I save that original leaf shape to my assets. So we've used pressure settings to make a vase and create simple leaf shapes and add additional movement to those shapes to give them a more hand drawn feel. In this next lesson, we're going to take a look at potential missteps that can happen when using pressure settings and how to avoid them. I'll also show you how to fix them when you can't. I'll see you there. 14. Avoiding or Fixing Issues with Pressure: When I was in middle school, I had a teacher who wouldn't give anyone an a plus because nobody's perfect as a kid that annoyed me as an adult. It still does, but I realize it's true and it doesn't just apply to us humans. That's how I look at working with pressure settings and designer 99% of the time they're going to work the way you want. Provided you understand how the pressure grid works. Every once in a while, it's not going to work right. At least not how you expected it to, but within the confines of how designers set up. Before we get into creating our flower shapes, which can involve more complex pressure settings, I wanted to take a few moments to look at a couple of stroke scenarios and how they compare to their expanded shape. We'll look at how to avoid certain anomalies that can create odd shapes by studying their pressure grids. And I'll show you how you can correct the shapes using nodes once they're expanded. Let's prove Mr. Bat right and take a look at the perfectly imperfect pressure grid. Since you've already seen me create several profiles, at this point I'm going to show you two that I've already created. One is more complex, the other is more simplistic, but both have their own issues. Let's go ahead and open up this one. The very first thing you'll notice is I have a lot of control points on this one, and many of them are clustered very tightly towards one end of the grid. Now that's causing very short straight lines. And when you compare the profile grade to the stroke itself, you can see that those tight ****** and lines are creating very sharp bridges in the stroke itself. However, when I expand this to a fill, they're going to smooth themselves out significantly. Because designer is going to use multiple smooth nodes to recreate the curves along this shape. But I could potentially have some problems because some of these tighter areas, Let's take a look. I'm going to duplicate this twice. And the reason I want to do that is I want to show you how it's going to look as is and then how you can correct any issues in the profile grid. I'll go ahead and expand this one. Just going to expand stroke. And the first thing that you'll notice is that I get these little bump outs at the top here and like horns here. Now we're going to skip over those for a second. Let me select the shape and go to the node tool. You can see that these very sharp points here smooth themselves out very nicely because designer added smooth nodes to create the curves. Now if you're actually aiming for something with sharper corners, pressure settings may not be the way to go. You might be better served to use the pen tool on its polygonal settings or something similar. Let's take a look at the top here. This first issue here, this little bow tie is being caused by these two control points right here. This one is almost sitting on top of the other one. It's almost to the far right of the grid, but not quite. And it's just out enough that it's squishing the top of the stroke out because it's a rounded cap. That's why this part is rounded. Remember, anything created here is going to be mirrored on both sides of the stroke line. That's why you're getting one this way and one that way. To correct this in the grid, I need to move this control point over a little bit. The problem is I'm working with a very tight space because I already have these two here. I don't want this sitting directly underneath them because that's going to cause a whole other issue. I'm going to select it and just tap my left arrow key two or three times. I think I'll go with two, maybe three again. I'm just making sure that it doesn't fall right under here. You can see that it smoothed out that ridge right there, But I still have this one and that's what's causing the horns here. That one is caused by these two control points. It's the same thing, except in this case, this control point is pretty much directly on top of the other one. The difference is negligible. I'm going to select it and just move it over maybe two taps. Now, there's a lot more room to work here. So I could move over even further, but I don't want to lose that too much. All right, let's expand this shape and see what happens. So I'll go to layer and expand stroke. And you can see that the top smooth itself out quite nicely. I still have a little movement there. I didn't lose it completely, but I lost these little anomalies here. Now what happens if you're further along in your illustration? You've already expanded your shape and didn't save the original profile to your assets panel. How can you correct the issue without an original to go back to? Let's go ahead and take a look at the nodes for this expanded shape and I'll show you how you can correct stuff. So let's start with this little bow tie thing up here that's being caused by these two nodes right here. So they're squishing in and creating that. If I hit the handles, you can see that this one has a handle going up this way. So it's pulling the path up. And same with this one. Now this node is necessary because it's anchoring the top of my pedal up to this point, but this one really isn't. I could play with the handles and tuck this in, but because these two nodes here are superfluous, I'm just going to get rid of them. So I'll just click and drag until I select both. And then I'm going to hit Delete, and you can see that. Smooth that out nicely. Now I still have this little divot here, which I actually quite like because a lot of petals do have that, so I'm going to leave it. But you could always adjust your handles if necessary. Just remember that this particular one, in this case is anchoring this shape. Because the handles on these two which are starting the curve only go to here. So if you get rid of it, it's going to drop or I'm sorry, the top of the petal significantly. So I'm just going to bring that back. And leave that for these two little horns over here. Of course, that could leave them. This could be something like an iris petal, but I don't really like that. So I know that this node right here is starting my upward curve and this one is continuing it. This node right here is what's causing this little bump out. So you can see that the handle is pulled all the way out and it's creating that little horn shape. I don't need this node or the one on the other side. I'm going to click and select this one. Hit Shift, and I'll click and select the other side. And I'll just hit the lead. Now this created a slightly different shape than the other one. I still have this little bit of a ridge here. The thing is, the more you use pressure settings to create petals and leaves, the more you're going to be able to predict what's going to happen once you expand them and be able to decide which method, either adjusting them in the grid or once they're expanded, is going to give you the shape that you prefer. Let's take a look at our other shape. So this is a very basic petal or leaf shape. And in this case, I have my two end points pulled up from the bottom because I want curved ends rather than points. Now that seems pretty straightforward, and the stroke itself looks exactly the way that I want, so I should be okay. Well, we'll expand it in a minute to find out. But first let's take a look at the stroke studio. I have a round cap because butt cap and square cap would not work. In order to not have a flat top, I would have to pull these all the way down and then it would be pointed, and that's not what I'm aiming for. Round cap is the way to go, but because we're working with a round cap on a single line stroke, when you start raising those control points up from the bottom, it's basically alleviating the pressure on the end and that round cap starts to form. Now that's normal because it's two round caps at either end of the stroke. But let's expand this and see what happens. I'm going to duplicate this first, and then I'll go ahead and expand it. And you can see that instead of having this shape and get what looks like a lemon, and of course, that's not what I'm aiming for. Now, I'll be the first to tell you it's very difficult to get a rounded end to your shape on a straight stroke like this without having some sort of cap formation form. But you can fix it after you've expanded it. And I'm going to show you two ways. The first way is that I can zoom in and grab my node toll. These two nodes here and the two at the bottom are the ones that are causing the issue. I'm going to delete this one, and you can see that it changed the handles on that one. I'm getting that nice rounded tip and I'll do the same thing here. Same thing happens. Now the other way that I can do this, let me just zoom back out. I'll make another copy of this. I can bring the control points all the way down to give myself points. I'll make it a little bit longer so I have the same length. When I expand this I have those points but I can use the corner toll to round them off. I'm going to grab my node toll. This one at the bottom here is already a sharp node, so I'm going to select it and then hit C on my keyboard for the corner toll, you can also select that icon there. I'll just start dragging up. Now. The one on this end is a round or a smooth node, which means I need to convert it first to a sharp one and then I can use my control handle. It's a little extra work, but it's going to get you to the same spot. It just depends on how you want to handle it. Up to this point, with this shape, we've been looking at straight strokes, and that's where I see the most problem. I actually don't find it to be a problem when I use curve strokes. So I'm going to grab my pen tool. I've reduced the width a little bit, and I'm just going to drag out a side petal here and expand it. When I do that and use the node tool and zoom, and you can see that it still has those nodes here and here, but it's not creating that lemon shape. I would actually just run with this and use this. It's really just on these straight strokes that you have the problem. But while you may not be able to make it just using the pressure grid on the other end after it's expanded, you can always adjust your shape overall when working with pressure settings. Avoiding extremes like nodes sitting on top of one another or very jagged ridges will go a long way in avoiding trouble spots. One of the reasons I prefer working with vectors is that in most scenarios, there's at least one way to correct any issues that may arise with your shapes in the case of creating petal and leaf shapes. In most cases, if you can't prevent an issue, you can correct it on the other end. Now that we've gone over a few things to look for, let's head into the last lesson in our section about creating florals and create some flowers. I'll see you there. 15. Creating Flowers with Pressure Settings: All right, we've created vase and leaf shapes. We've talked through potential issues and how you can fix them. Let's wrap up the pressure settings lesson by creating some flower shapes. For my first flower, I'm going to use the pencil toll along with some pretty basic pressure settings to create my petals. The actual difference between the petals is going to come from how I draw them out and then I can make some minor adjustments. After that, I have my pencil tool selected. I have my stabilizer on, but not very high. And of course, I have auto clothes off because I don't want it to close my stroke. Once I create it, I'll go to my stroke settings here. And I'm just going to pull these two down and add one right about there Again, I can always adjust this. I'll set my width to about 100 for right now. But I'm going to start drawing out, and I'm not going to overthink the placement or how I'm drawing it. Again, I want the difference in the petals to come from how I'm drawing them out. So I'll just draw up, and I think I'll go with maybe six petals. Now, they look pretty uniform again because the pressure settings are set the same. But I'm just going to first turn my snapping off and move these in. Then I'm going to make adjustments to them. The first thing I'm going to do is make this one a little bit longer and wider. I think I'll rotate this one up a bit and change its pressure settings just to touch. All right. I'm going to do the same thing here. Maybe make it that way. I like how this one is bending, but I think it needs to be a little wider. I'm going to do maybe 140. I'll make this one a little bit bigger, but bring the pressure settings back here. This one that I'm going to change to 130. I'm just randomly doing this. You can make adjustments however you want. The additional details going to come from the texture and the shading that I add later. But I want at least a head start. I can also use my Warp tools to make some changes as well. I think I might change the pressure settings on this one just a bit. All right. Maybe adjust this one just to touch. I like how this is looking overall. I think I'll just make one little change right here. Maybe adjust the pressure settings. I'm going to call this one done. Now, I already have this in my Assets panel, something very similar to this. I'm not going to resave it. What I'm going to do is select all of my layers and I'm going to expand them and then add them together. If I wanted to, I could add a little contour to this if I felt it was lacking a little bit. So I could click on my Contour tool, maybe drag that up a bit, or drag it in. I could also adjust some of my nodes. I could see where I could do that here. I'm going to back that up and I think I'll my node tool, I have a funny one right here that's causing an issue. I'm just going to click on the desktop version, You have fit to curve delete node. If you right click on the node, it's automatically going to try and create that curve. Unfortunately, that's not available on the desktop version. And I'm just going to drag these out a little bit. All right, Sometimes it takes some playing around with nodes. But for the most part, once you start using the pressure settings and you apply them, you change them up a little bit before you expand it, you can get a really nice shape out of doing that. Just going to make this a little wider, make this smaller. And I'm going to call this one done. So I'll tuck it up here for my next one. I actually want to use a similar pressure setting, but I'm going to use the pen tool. In this case I'll grab my swatches here and I think I'll go with a G, orange color for the stroke panel. One thing I want to do is option click on this control point right here and just drag it up a bit. I have my cap set to rounded. Remember what I mentioned in the previous lesson when it comes to creating these? Sometimes you'll get that lemon look. But I don't find that to be too much of a problem when I'm creating things to the side. I'm going to start with my side petals first. I'm going to drag this down to about, I think, 60. I want to make sure that rubber band is on. This is actually going to help me create the petals. Also make sure snapping is on. I'm going to tap and drag, and there's my first side petal. I'll hit escape with snapping on. You can see where your middle is. I think I'll just bring this one up here. All I want to create my two back pedals, and again, I'm not worrying about them touching there. I'm going to change that after the fact. I want to bring this up to maybe 90. I'll curve this just a bit. I already know that I'm going to have a problem there that I need to fix, but that's not a problem. I think I'll do this one right about there, All right? I'm going to have a problem there once I expand this. I'm not worrying about that though, because I'm working with nodes, so I can always adjust it. I'm going to bring this back down because I want to create the middle shape and I actually want it to be pointed. But I'm going to bring this up to, I think, 200. And I'll click and click. And I want to change the color just slightly just so that you can easily see it. I don't like the pressure settings on this. Not a problem. I'll just go into my stroke panel and just adjust that. All right. I like that right about there. Now again, I have something like this already in my assets, so I'm not going to save this again. But I will go ahead and expand all of these. But what I want to do first is make sure these two are dragged down to the back. And I'm just going to change their luminosity value just to touch so you can more easily see them. I'll select all of my layers and I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut that I set up, and you can see I have a really ugly looking thing right there. I'm not going to worry about it though, because we have nodes that we can work with. I can just delete that. If you find that when you delete something it doesn't quite work, you can always back up. But in that case, it actually worked just fine. All right, so I think that one's looking good. I need to get rid of the little lemon thing going here. So I'm just going to select those two nodes. Click Delete. I'm fine with that little wobbliness there because it's a petal, it's not supposed to be perfect. These two look fine to me. I think what I'm going to do though is drag this down a little bit and I want to curve this up. I'll select my corner toll with that node selected. And just drag this up. Then click bake appearance, that's another way that you can round those off. And I just want to make sure that these are adjusted. Let's bring that down right about there. Now, I didn't make changes to the pressure settings on these before I expanded them, but I could have done that as well. All right. I do see a little bit of a funny thing right here. So I'm going to go back to my node toll. I'm going to right click on that one and fit to curve. Okay, I feel like this one's looking funny. I should have changed the pressure setting as a little bit more. Let's see what happens when we flip it though, all right? I actually like how that looks. I'm going to go with that, maybe adjust this a little bit more. Now from here, I would take this and add some gradient to the inside similar to what I did here. As well as the outer part of the pedal just to give it a little bit more depth, as well as some texture and a flower middle. I'm just going to group this though because that's the base of my flour. And maybe before I do that though, I might just move this in a little bit. All right? The thing about working with multiple layers is that you can very easily adjust it. That's part of the reason I like working with vectors, so I'm going to call that one done and create the final flower for my final flower shape. I've already created some pressure settings on the grid and you can see they're a little bit more complex than the ones I use for the others. I have both of the original control points pulled all the way down and then a nice rigid arc created here. If I were to tap this out with my pen tool, you can see that it's got some jagged lines here. But again, once I expand this, it's actually going to create some nice rounded parts because it's going to use smooth nodes to do that. Now I'm not going to use my pen tool to this, I'm going to use the pencil tool. I'll just grab that again. I have auto clothes off to bring the length down. I think I'm going to start with 150 as my width. Oops. Make sure you don't have anything selected when you do that. All right, I'm just going to start drawing. I'm not going to overthink where I'm placing the petals because I can move them after the fact. I think I'll do five petals. All right? It's a good start. I just want to pull these together. If you find that snapping gets in the way, just turn it off sometimes it makes it easier, All right? And I think I'll just pull that one out a little bit. Maybe make this one a little bit less wide. I'll do 130. I'm intentionally aiming for a wonky flower. I'm not worried about that. Okay, I'm not going to change anything on the pressure grid for this. I actually want to expand these right away. So I'll go to layer and expand stroke again. I could have used the keyboard shortcut that I set up as well. I'm going to add these together now. I actually like how this looks. If I felt like it wasn't bulky enough though, I could select this and go to my Contour tool and just drag that up. But I think it looked just fine without it. One thing I do want to do though is add a quick warp to it, and we're going to go into greater detail on warps in the next section of the class. But I'm just going to add a quick perspective warp to this. Just to bend this to the side. What you're going to find out is using the Warp tool can help add some differences between the petals, even though you started with the same pressure grid on all of them. Just want to make sure I don't go overboard on this. I just want a nice side facing flower. Maybe add another line here and bring this up or down. All right, And convert that to a curve. I like how this is looking. I would add texture to this. I would add a gradient to maybe make the bottom part of these petals darker and some highlights to the top. And a side facing flower middle with a stamen along with a nice stem and some nice textural leaves. But overall, I really like how this is looking already, so I'm going to call this one done. Up to this point, we've stuck to flat vectors, but we're ready to add beautiful depth and dimension, starting with adding a little wonkiness to our shapes using work groups. I'll see you there. 16. Vector Warp Groups: Remember those really perfect symmetrical flowers we created at the beginning of class? Ones that are so perfect, there's no way they could possibly exist in nature. It's time to fix that. Don't get me wrong, I love symmetrical flowers. They definitely have their place in my designs. But when it comes to illustrations, I want something more organic. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can quickly take those perfect flowers and not only add a little wonkiness to them, but also create multiple versions of a single shape using vector Warp. Let's get started. Vector Warp lets you non destructively warp one or more objects by using one of several presets, as well as nodes and handles. In the desktop version, you can find Warp Group at the bottom of your layers panel. It looks like a little mesh warp icon on the pen version, you can find it under the group icon in the layer studio. You can use warp on anything from shapes to lines, curves, and text, and manipulate the warp until you're happy with it. If not, again, it's non destructive. So you can easily remove it if necessary. There are nine different presets to choose from. Let's take a quick look at how each of them works, starting with mesh quad in perspective. These three options are all manual warps. They're going to provide a grid in varying degrees of complexity that will allow you to use nodes and handles to dial in your warps. Let's start by taking a look at mesh warp. The first thing that you'll notice aside from the grid is that when you add a warp, regardless of which preset you choose, the curve or group that you apply it to is going to be placed inside of a warp group, and this is what allows it to be non destructive. The warp itself is at this parent group level. Anything that's added within that folder is going to have the warp applied. But conversely, anything that's removed from the folder will have the warp removed. The mesh option is going to give you a grid with nine mesh patches as they're called. So these nine squares, each mesh patch is bordered by junctions, which are the intersections represented by these nodes. Tapping on the nodes themselves are going to invoke handles that can either be dragged or twisted to create your warps. You can also drag the nodes themselves. In addition to selecting single nodes, you can also select multiples, a few different ways. I'm going to click to select my first one. Shift down and select any of the other junctions that I want to choose. And now I can move those around together. You can also click and drag across nodes to select them, as well as hold down Alt on your keyboard and draw around the nodes that you want to select. So in that case, it works exactly the same way it does when you use the regular node tool. Changing a node when it's selected from smooth to cusp is going to allow you to work the handles independent of the one opposite from it. If I select this one which is currently cusp, these two handles work together. Now I can also temporarily change it to a cusp by simply holding option down or halt, and then I can drag that. In addition to the junctions, you can tap and add a temporary control point within any of the mesh patches so you can make more substantive warps. As soon as I tap away from this and go back in, that control point is gone. You can also add additional junctions to the grid by tapping on any of the lines. If you tap on a horizontal line, it's going to add a vertical and vice versa. This is going to allow you to fine tune your mesh warp, because the more detailed your mesh warp grid, the smaller and more detailed warps you can make. Let me zoom in here to this one. If I add new lines on either side of this one and select this handle, you can see that it's creating very small warps there. While these two are effectively locking anything under them in place that allows me to make a more detailed warp than I would if these weren't in place. You can delete lines simply by tapping on the nodes and then hitting delete on your keyboard. For those of you on the ipad, use the delete in the contextual menu at the top. Not one on the layer, because you'll delete your entire shape. The same goes for the trash can in the layer panel on the desktop. Now as you remove lines, you're going to simplify your grid. Just note, that's also going to change your shape. So you're going to want to adjust accordingly. Tapping reset at the top is going to take this shape back to its original state, but not the mesh grid itself. If I want to take the grid itself back to its original state with its nine mesh patches, I need to go up to the top choose non, then this choose mesh again and that will give me my nine patches. All right, let's take a look at quad and perspective warps. These two are basically simplified mesh warps with four nodes around the corners of the group selection, and each corner node can be dragged to create a warp. You can also drag the path between the nodes, which is going to invoke these handles that you can use to fine tune what you just did. Now as soon as you do that, that's going to change this from a quad or perspective to a mesh. You'll see that change here at the top and that's to be expected. Now additionally, just like with the regular mesh warp, you can add additional lines here on the grid and get additional handles that will allow you to further fine tune your shape with both the quad and perspective warps. Make sure that you're not getting too extreme with what you do. Let me go ahead and change this to a perspective warp and show you what I mean if I drag this down to create this side facing flower. If I add something here and start pulling up, zoom in, You can see that I'm getting that bent line there because of how I pulled that petal up. Just keep an eye on your shape as you're creating it. You can always adjust it or go ahead and hit reset to bring it back. But just be warned that the more extreme you get, it's like working with the pressure grid. The more extreme you get, the more potential you have for issues. All right, let's take a look at these shape warps starting with arc and bend. These four are automatic warps that create a vertical, horizontal bend, or arc depending on your selection. Now, I use these all the time. I personally find them very useful when creating floral illustrations because it allows me to take a very plain flower shape like this one, multiply it, and turn it into a variety of different shapes with different perspectives. I'm going to start by choosing bend horizontal. And you can see that it's automatically going to apply an upward bend with a value of 25% And these selections can be fine tuned by using the slider here at the top on the desktop or at the side on the ipad. I'm just going to start sliding this operating. You can start to see the bend goes up as I slide up. But I can also take this the other direction by dropping into the negative. Now, in addition to using the slider, you can also use the handles on the nodes as well as adjust the path between. In addition to that, just like with the other meshes, you can add additional lines here. That's going to automatically convert that to a mesh warp and you're no longer going to have the slider available to you. Finally, fish eye twist. These are automatic warps also that can be adjusted with a slider. I personally, I haven't found much use for these two with floral illustrations as I have with the others, but it's all going to depend on the shape that you want to create. Just like with the others, when you click it, it's automatically going to apply something. And you can either use the slider in the contextual menu or you can use the handles, in which case, again, it's going to convert it to a mesh warp. A few notes about all of the warps. The first is, if you feel you need to move your shape around or resize it using the move tool to get back to the warp grid, just go to your node tool and you'll get that. The other thing is you can always warp a warp group. So I've already added an arc horizontal warp here. Let's say I want to add a regular mesh warp and just fine tune some things here and there. So I'm going to just push that in and maybe push that up. Now this is one of the other things I want to point out. Sometimes you're going to get these funny little anomalies, and in this case, I think it has to do with the graphics card on my computer, but it happens on the ipad as well. If you zoom in and out, it disappears. So don't fret if you see something like that. Just be patient because it will go away. All right, so the third thing that I want to mention is that a Warp group is non destructive and editable until you opt to convert this to a curve. As soon as you do that, you no longer have the ability to edit your warps when you're done making adjustments, you have the option of leading as is or converting it up here at the top. If at any point you want to convert it and you no longer have this contextual menu, you just go to layer and convert curves. If you maintain the Warp group, it's going to behave like any other group. You can add or remove objects as you do. They're going to take on the existing warp. If you remove objects, the warp will be removed. Let's go ahead and create a center for this flower. I'm just going to grab a crescent shape here, make it purple. I'm going to drag that out. Now if I drag this over, my flower shape, it's already in the perspective that I wanted in. If I drag it into this first work group, it's not going to change much, however, if I drag it into the initial one where I did the arc. It's going to change it slightly so I can adjust the size of it. And where I placed it, whatever warp you place it in, that's the warp that's going to take on. Again, if I remove this, I completely lose that. Sometimes when I'm creating metals like this, I actually leave it out of the work group because I like to be able to manipulate this individually and I just keep the petals warped. It's really up to what you're creating and which warps you use. If you decide to convert a work group to a curve, which I'll go ahead and do there, it's going to convert it to a regular group. Now if I open this up, you can see that it converted both. If you have multiple warps within a parent warp, it's automatically going to convert all of them. If I drill down, you can see that my original curve is there. Now, I personally don't find the need to keep them grouped once I've converted it, especially if I only have a single object. If you have multiple objects and you want to keep them grouped, you can do that. If not just drag it out, it's going to maintain the warp because you've converted it and you can just get rid of the group. Warps are a great way to create multiple versions of flowers from a single shape. As I mentioned earlier, it's another great reason to save your shapes as assets because you can always pull them in and give them a slight warp to make them slightly different. I have three flower shapes here that are actually the same shape. I pulled it in from my assets, and it's a little too symmetrical, so I want to add a little warp to it. But I want each of these flowers to look different. And warps are a great way to create multiple versions from a single shape. But it's another good reason to save your basic shapes as assets. You can always pull them in and adjust them with a warp. For this one, I'm just going to add a mesh warp to it and maybe make some slight adjustments to it. I'll just drag that petal up a little bit. Maybe drag this one, maybe pop that one back a little. I'm just trying to warp this slightly so it's not quite so symmetrical. Again, I can use my handles here. I'll just use the option, You can always mute your mesh to see what the original look like so you can see the difference. That's my first one. If I take this second one, maybe I'll add a perspective to it. And in this case, I can have it go back and to the left. I can add another line here. And just draw this up a little bit. I just took that same flower and created a side facing one. Then for the final one, I could just add a simple bend or arc to it. Maybe I'll drop it down this way. And I have a flower that's going to create a cradle from that same shape. I just created three different flower shapes using one single curve that I pulled in from my assets. All right, we've added a little wonkiness and taken a look at how we can quickly create multiple versions of a flower from a single shape. Now it's time to move on to the texture and dimension. Over the next two lessons, we're going to take a look at two ways to quickly and easily add depth and dimension to our shapes. Starting with adding gradients with the fill tool. I'll see you there. 17. Gradients with the Fill Tool: We're going to be using the fill tool in two capacities in this class. The first is to add shading and highlights to the flower and flower middle. The second is to adjust texture fills. We add with the vector flood fill tool that will cover in the next lesson. In this lesson, our main focus will be the former, allowing us to take a relatively flat shape and add depth to it using gradients that are going to add shading and highlights. Well, we'll focus on specific types of fills and how we can use them on our various floral shapes. Let's start by taking a quick look at the overall basics of how the tool works. The fill tool is represented by a gradient square with control points on top of it on both the desktop and ipad versions of the app. If you're using a keyboard, you can also use the short cut. Now this isn't the same as the Vector flood fill tool, which we're going to cover in an upcoming lesson, but it can be used in conjunction with it. In order to engage the fill tool, you need an object to add it to first. Whether that's a shape, a curve, text, whatever it may be, the object can either be a fill or a stroke. As you can add a fill to either or both. Now I have four floral shapes here representing four of the five types of fills I use for flowers beyond solid, I'm going to focus on this first single petal shape as we go through the basics of the toll. Before we take a look at the minor differences on the rests and why you would want to use them. Now the only one that I haven't included here is the conical gradient. Because in truth, I don't find it useful with flower shapes, but just know that that option is there. There are two ways that you can add a gradient, and the method you use will really depend on what you're adding it to. So I can select my Fill tool, click on my Shape, and go up to the Contextual menu. And in this case, I'm going to choose linear. That's going to create a horizontal linear gradient with two color stops on either side of the shape. If I open this gradient up here, you can see that the first color stop is the lighter one. And that's actually the shapes original color. The second color stop is a darker version of that same color. It's slightly down on the luminosity scale. Keep that in mind for when we create a manual gradient. Now this gradient is fine, but it's not the direction I want. I actually want the lighter at the top here and darker at the bottom. Now I could go up to the contextual menu and I could use rotate gradient until it's the direction that I want. And then hold command down on my keyboard and move this into place. But there's a quicker way to create that. Instead, I'm going to manually drag out my gradient. Keeping in mind what I said about the first color stop being the lighter one and the second being the darker. If I want the darker color on the bottom, I need to click here at the top. And then drag my gradient down. And I'm holding shift down to keep it straight. But if I let that go, I can go in any direction I'd like. Now you'll notice with snapping on it. Snaps right to the bottom of that shape. If I had gone in the opposite direction and wanted to change it, I could go up here to the contextual menu and just reverse the gradient to change either color, you can click on the node and you'll notice it gets a little bit bigger. Now I like to use the color panel set to HSL sliders and the swatches to adjust my colors. As I find I can dial things in a little bit more precisely, so I can use the swatches to pick an exact color. And then I can use the color sliders to change my luminosity saturation and even hue separate of one another. Additionally, I can bring the opacity, my sliders down, or if I click on this color dot, I can add noise as well. For those of you on the ipad version, these two sliders are already separate between my two color stops. Here I have a slider that allows me to adjust the spread of each color on my shape to create a blend of them and give me that gradient. Now by default it's in the middle, but I can slide it around to add more of one color than the other. If I want to move an entire gradient without adjusting its size, again, I can hold command down. I can grab the gradient and I can move it wherever I'd like. I can add additional colors to my gradient simply by clicking anywhere on the line. By default, it's going to give me a mid range color between the two existing ones so that it can maintain the smooth gradient. I can then changes to anything I like, including an entirely different color. So I can go up to my Swatch panel here and pick this teal color. I can move this around to adjust where it's at. And another thing that you'll notice is that as I added that color stop, it added a second mid range slider. There's always going to be a slider between two color stops so that you can adjust the spread between the color stop. So I can do that here and make a very different shape. Now one other thing to note is the opacity of any of your color stops is pulled down. Any new color stops added between that one and the other is going to have its opacity dropped initially. Just to maintain that smooth gradient, you can always bring it back up, but designers automatically going to default to that again to maintain that nice smooth gradient. If you want to remove a gradient, simply click on it and hit Delete. Earlier in the class, we looked at the appearance panel and how we can build multiple fills and strokes up within a single object. In this class, we're going to be using that method to add our gradients so that we can add them independent of a fill layer beneath them that has bitmap texture. This is going to allow you to adjust the gradients blend mode independently of the fill beneath it. Allowing us to create shading while allowing the texture beneath to come through. It also allows us to create a transparency at the ends of the shape so that we can focus on shading specific areas of the flower while the texture shows throughout. To do this, I would just go up to my appearance panel. I'm going to select my shape. You can see that I have my initial fill. I'm actually going to change that back to solid because I want to maintain that pink. I'll add another fill on top, and then I can just follow the same process. I'll select my fill tool and I'm going to drag out a linear fill now in this case, because there's no color there for it to sample, it's giving me a standard white and gray fill. And then I would just change the colors. In this case, I'm going to click on this one and drag the opacity all the way down so that you can see that fill beneath it. If this had texture, that texture would be coming through. And I'll click on the bottom one and change it to whatever color I want that darker part of the gradient to be. I will go ahead and pick a darker pink. We'll just bring this down now. It looks exactly the way that the other one did, But in this case, if I had a textured fill beneath it, I would be able to change the blend mode of my fill while still maintaining the fill beneath it. And I can do it all within the same object rather than dealing with multiple layers. Let's take a quick look at the contextual menu. Before we look at the other types of fills. I mentioned previously that you can add gradients to both fills and strokes, and they're going to work independently from one another on the same shape. In other words, if I add a stroke to this petal, I have my gradient on my fill. But if I go to my fill toll, I can change the context that I'm adding the gradient to. I'm going to change it to stroke, it'll maintain that fill. But now I can drag out a gradient on the stroke itself. Any of the fill types can be applied to both the fills and strokes individually on a single shape, including bitmap. I just need to tell designer which context I want to apply it to. In this case, I have strokes selected already. I'll go to the type and choose bitmap. And I'm going to pull one of my gel plate textures in here. And you can see that it's added to the shape. I can use the handles to adjust it. We'll talk more about the handles for the bitmap texture when we get into it. In the next lesson, I can go back up and change to fill. This time I can add a bitmap texture to fill part of my shape independent of the stroke. Now, this is going to come in handy later in the class when I show you how you can use the pencil tool and pressure settings to draw floral shapes with your favorite textures. In addition to selecting nodes and changing colors using the color panel, you can also open this slider here, as well as change any of the settings in the rest of the box here. I personally don't find this as easy to use as the color panel and swatches. I stick to using that, but that's another option for adding colors and making changes to them. Again, you can rotate the direction of your gradient simply by clicking on rotate, you can reverse the direction and you can also lock or unlock the aspect ratio of the handles. Now this only applies to elliptical and bit fills, which have two handles like you just saw when I added the bitmap texture, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. That's the basics of how the fill tool works in all cases, with the exception of bitmap. We're going to talk about that in the next lesson. For now, let's take a look at these finished versions of the flowers and petals. And I'll walk you through how they were set up and why I choose the fill types that I did with each gradient. I've included the type of floral illustration I would use them on and specifically how I use the gradient. I've also included the full breakdown in the PDF handout that I provided with class. You've seen how linear works on a single leaf or petal shape. But radial is also another option and it gives a slightly different end result. These two gradients are exactly the same and that I have a textured fill on the bottom with a gradient sitting on top using the appearance panel. And both are set to linear burn. Additionally, the actual gradient itself is set up in the same position with the same colors and the same exact opacity. Where linear creates a very distinct line across the petal even though it is blended. As it gradually fades into the lighter color or transparency. Radial creates a circular gradient, allowing the darker shade to work itself up along the edges of the petal shape before it begins to fade out. And it gives it a more rounded look. Both work in this case. Which one you choose is going to depend on what you want your final petal shape to look like. If you do want something more rounded, radio might be a better choice. Elliptical and radio gradients work similarly. And that they're going to add circular gradients, which makes them perfect for front and side facing flowers. Here I want to add depth behind the flower middle as well as on the middle itself. The biggest difference between the two is the amount of control handles you have. You saw that the radial gradient has one handle, the elliptical has two with two color stops at one end and one in the other side. Now these two color stops do not work independently from one another. Under any scenario, whatever color and opacity is set in, one carries to the other. One of the control handles allows you to add color stops and move sliders, just like the radial slider. The other is there simply to allow you to drag out the gradient and create your shapes. Now while the color stops don't work independently from one another, the handles themselves do if you turn off lock aspect ratio. And it's for that reason that the elliptical has an edge over radio. When it comes to particular scenarios, which we'll look at in a bit, let's take a look at how I applied the fill tool to these two flowers. On this front facing flower, I have three fills in place as you can see from the appearance panel. The bottom one is the texture which is set to normal so it's at its full strength. The second is this center gradient creating the depth behind my flower metal. And that's set to multiply so that the texture comes through while maintaining the gradient. Then this third one is on the outer edge of my flower, giving it a little bit more depth. And again, that one is set to multiply, so the texture still comes through. Taking a look at this first fill, I have transparent color stocks at the ends of my elliptical gradient. Remember these two don't work independently from one another. So if I click on this and go to my color stop, you can see that I've pulled all the way down. And that's allowing the texture to come through around the circumference of the flower while maintaining the darker gradient. Here I have a darker color underneath the flower metal, and then I've added another color stop between the darker color and the transparency. A color stop between these two can act as a barrier when you have a very dark color stop at one end and a transparent one at the other, because it prevents the darker color from spreading across the entire shape. So if I delete this color stop, you can see that it begins to spread across the flower and gradually fades out. Now I could use my mid range slider here, but it doesn't have the same effect as using the color stop as a barrier. Additionally, I added a bit more color here by using a slight bit of color on the color stop itself. My gradient here on the top is just a basic elliptical gradient where I have transparency in the middle. Because I don't want any additional color and I want the texture to remain as is. And I have a slight bit of darker color at the very edges of my petals, again, just to give a bit more dimension for the flower middle itself, I have a bitmap texture on the bottom layer, again set to normal so it's at its full strength. And then I've set a radial gradient at the top to add a rounded gradient around the entire edge. I actually have added a little bit of color to the top, but I could just as easily turn this all the way down in the middle and allow the texture beneath to provide the color and light. Let's take a look at this side facing flower now. It's very similar, but this is where the difference in the handles on the elliptical versus the radial is going to give it an edge with the flower set in this perspective, I don't want a perfectly circular gradient like I have here. And that's the only one that I can achieve with the radio gradient because it only has one handle. If I want to create an oblong shape, then I need to have an elliptical gradient where I've unlocked the aspect ratio up here in the contextual menu, so that I can drag the one handle out further than the other. Right now I have this locked because once I found the position I wanted it in, I wanted to lock it. So I don't accidentally move it. But if I unlock it, you can see that I can drag my handles independently from one another to create that elongated shape. In addition to the elliptical fill, I have a radial fill to add a bit of darker color to the edges of the petals so they are at the bottom. Given the perspective of this flower, when you add multiple fills using the appearance panel, each fill can be set to a completely different type, allowing you to create a variety of end results. The middle on this flower is actually the same. I have a radial gradient, again, adding shading to the bottom of the crescent shape that I've added here. Using the radial gradient allowed me to focus the gradient only on the bottom of the shape while giving it a slightly curved feel. Whenever you're adding a gradient for shading and highlight, give thought to where you want your light source to come from and how it would look in a real life scenario If you need to check out reef reference images because they can help greatly giving thought up front to how you want to place your gradient is going to help you make a better decision as to which one is right for the job. We have one more Phil type to go. I save this one for its own lesson because aside from the fact that there's a lot to cover, it's also pretty cool because well texture. Let's head into the next lesson where we'll wrap up this lesson by taking a look at bitmap. Phil, I'll see you there. 18. Bitmap Textures with the Fill Tool: We've looked at how to add gradients for shading and highlights using the fill tool. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how we can use it to add bitmap textures to both strokes and fills. What we cover in this lesson is going to help us later in class when we discuss using the pen and pencil tools and pressure settings to draw with our favorite textures. Let's get started. I'm going to add a bitmap texture to my base flower here. Now the basics are going to work the same way as the gradients we added, but there are multiple ways that you can add a bitmap texture to a shape, whether it's an external file or a photo, the stock studio or your assets. Now, there are minor differences between the ipad and desktop and how you can select them, and I'll mention those as we go through. Let's start with the external files. I have my shape selected, and I'm going to go up to the contextual menu and choose Bitmap. That's going to open up my files. I'll locate the one that I want to pull in, click open, and it's going to add the texture. Now you can see that it's showing the seams of the texture. So I can change that simply by clicking and dragging out the texture however I want it to sit inside of there. Again, because it has two handles, I can use either handle to do that. Now, just like the elliptical fill, the bitmap fill allows you to unlock the aspect ratio. Though truthfully, most of the time I find that the desk warps the texture, so I leave it locked. For those on the ipad version, the process is the same. You'll go to the contextual menu at the top. The only difference is that you may need to scroll down on the fly wheel until you see bitmap. Once you do it will ask you to pick between your photos and files, and the process is the same as the desktop. From there, you could also use the Stock Studio to select bitmap textures. And it works exactly the same for both desktop and ipad. Again, I have my shape selected. I've opened my stock studio and I've just keyed in concrete. I'm going to use that as my keyword. I'll locate the photo that I want to use in the stock studio the same as I normally would, and I can just click on the one that I want to add. You'll see that it does a little thinking there and then adds the shape. Once again, if I don't like how it added it, I can simply click and use the handles to drag it out to where I want it. Finally, you can use textures you've saved in the assets panel and pull them in as bitmaps. In addition to textures, you can pull in any bit maps you saved to the assets panel, including photos and patterns on the desktop. Select your shape, find the asset that you want to use. Click on it and it's automatically going at it, just like the stock studio. Again, I can use my handles to drag it wherever I want. On the ipad version, it's slightly different in that a pop up will come up when you click on the asset and you need to select a set S fill to pull it in. Otherwise everything works exactly the same. Now in addition to raster textures, you can also pull in vector textures from the asset studio. Just note that when you do it using the appearance panel, where you're stacking within a single shape, they're going to come in as rasters. If you want to maintain the vectors, you're going to need to pull them in as a separate layer and clip them inside your shape. Using the appearance panel with bitmap textures works the same as it does for adding other fills. You can replace an existing fill by selecting it in the appearance panel and then finding your new fills. I'll just click on this one in the stock studio and it's automatically replaced it. Additionally, you can stack textures by adding a new fill layer. Now this is where the fill tool works differently from the Vector Flood Fill Tool that we'll be talking about in the next lesson. But the Vector Flood Fill tool, you can only stack semi transparent or alpha textures without a background on top of the existing fills. Anything fully opaque like this is automatically going to knock out the existing bitmap. With the fill tool, I can add as many as I want opaque otherwise using the appearance panel, and it's not going to knock out the one below. I could go to my Assets and select this one, and it's going to add it on top. Now again, you can't change the opacity of bitmap textures using the appearance panel, only the blend mode. But I could adjust this so that I have some of that texture coming through while maintaining the one beneath it. I could also add a fill with a solid color and change the blend mode so that again, I get the benefits of the texture. But I'm adding a color shift on top of it overall. If you want to be able to adjust the opacities of any fills, adding them via the layer panel would be the better bet. The ability to add bitmap fills to strokes is what's going to allow us to draw with our favorite textures later in the class. When working with the layer panel, with clip textures, you can't clip a texture to a stroke until you expand it to a fill. But with the fill tool, you can add texture to a stroke. And as we covered in the last lesson, it works independently from the texture you've added to your overall fill. Doing this with the appearance panel lets you add multiple layers of texture to multiple strokes. I'm going to show you how that works later in the class when we start building up our flower and leaf shapes. I can add a stroke to my flower shape here. Let's add a solid color. The color isn't going to matter because for this one we're actually going to knock it out with the texture. I'll just set the alignment inside so that it's not straddling the line there. I'll go to my fill tool, make sure that my context is stroke. For those of you on the ipad, you're going to see this representatives icons next to where you can select the fill type, the filled shape, the fill context, and the stroke. Looks like a doughnut shape. Once I've changed my context to stroke, everything works exactly the same. I can go to my type and choose bitmap, and select it from a file. Or again, I can select it from the stock studio assets or my photos, you can see it's pulled in that texture. I can adjust it with my handles. I can also move it around because I'm working through the appearance panel. If I want, I can add another stroke, drag it beneath. If I want, I can change this to a solid color and then change my blood mode of this one and get a slightly different look. In upcoming lessons, we're going to use what we learned in this one. Specifically being able to add bitmap fills to strokes. Both to add visual interest to RD textured strokes, as well as drawing leaf flower in vase shapes using the pen and pencil tools and pressure settings along with our favorite textures. Before we do that, let's take a look at another fill tool in Designers Toolbox, the Vector Flood Fill Tool. I'll see you there. 19. Vector Flood Fill Tool: In this lesson, we're going to talk about one of my favorite tools, the Vector Flood Fill Tool. We'll focus on this tool within the scope of adding the gradients and texture to our flower shapes. But the overall tool has tons of uses for both adding fills as well as creating unique shapes beyond flowers. Let's take a look. The Vector Flood Fill tool can be found in the tools at the side of designer. On both the ipad and desktop version. It looks like a little paint bucket with nodes pouring out of it. At a very basic level, you can use the Vector Flood Fill Tool to add solid colors, gradients, and even bitmap textures to your shapes. But you can also use it to create entirely unique shapes from an existing one, best of all. Not only can you pull your fills from the Swatch panel or color panel, you can also pull from the asset studio as well as the stock studio and pull bitmaps in from external files. I have a bunch of flower shapes and I want to quickly change them to a mix of other colors. Now of course, I could use my Move tool, select a shape, and go either to my Swatch panel or my color studio and change the color there. But the vector flood fill tool is going to make it a lot easier and also give me more fill options. So I'll select my vector flood fill hole and then I'll select my fill. And that's an important note, the flood fill tool remembers the last selection you made, in this case, the last one I made is this purple. I'm going to go to my Swatch panel and pick a different color. I'll choose this red, maybe I'll choose this green color here. And I'll just click. I don't have to select the layer first, I can simply click inside. I can keep changing my color until I've filled all the shapes that I want to fill. Now the other option is to select all of my layers, either via the layers panel or using my move toll. I can select a color inside and if I hold my mouse key down as I drag, I can change all of them at once without single clicking. I'll grab another color and do the same thing. And then change the spinal two here. Now up to now, we've looked at shapes that aren't overlapping. However, the vector flood fill tool works a bit differently. Where they do, I have two flower shapes here on individual layers. If I use the Vector flood fill without selecting either layer first, it works the way the other flowers did. I can select a color, click and select another one. And then click this flower. And it's going to simply change the color and leave everything else as is. Now it's going to work differently if I select both the layers first. So I've command clicked to select that other layer. Now if I hover over with my Vector flood fill tool, you can see that individual smaller segments are lighting up wherever my strokes overlap one another. Now if you don't see this, go up to the contextual menu and make sure that fill to visible boundaries is off. If this is on, it's going to tell designer to fill any shape to the furthest visible boundary that it can see. In this case, it will fill this entire flower because it's sitting on top, there's no overlap. I'll select this pink and it's going to change that. However, because this is sitting on top of the darker purple, flower designer can only see these smaller segments. If I select a color, it's going to fill those in. If I select my two layers and make sure that fill to visible boundaries is off, now I can fill those smaller segments in with whatever my color or fill choice is. I'll select this red one. Now if I click inside each one individually, if you look at my layers panel, it's created an individual layer for each smaller segment. But I can approach that differently. I'll just back up with both of my layers selected. If I click and hold my mouse key down, or in the case of the ipad, hold my pencil down. I can drag all the way around until I've filled all of the colors I want. And it's going to create one single layer for all of those smaller segments. Now in this case, it set the layer outside of the shape that I was using to create them. But let me delete this and start over again. If I select these two and change this insertion mode to inside, it's going to set that inside of this curve because this is the one that we're using to create that red segment. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to click and hold. I'll fill all of these shapes and it will create a single layer again, but this time it's clipped inside of the shape. I like to keep mine separate, so I'm just going to drag this out and I'll change my insertion mode back in between. I'll select my two flower layers again and I'm going to finish this shape. I'll just select this maybe peach color. I'm going to fill these petals in. I'm holding my mouse key down again. It's created a single layer and you'll notice that the two original flowers are left untouched. And I'll just pick this pink color and click inside here. Now because this created separate layers, I can use my move tool and select all of those layers I just created, and I'll just drag them over here. And I have an entirely new flower shape that I created out of the original one. Now I have this space in between that's empty because I didn't use the middle here to fill it in. But I'll grab my Vector flood fill tool and I'll pick this orange color with my layers selected. I'm just going to hover over the circle and it's going to fill it in. Now I have two individual flowers that I can add to my acids panel, and I created it using one. In addition to filled shapes, you can use shapes made from strokes only and use them as a reference layer for your vector flood fill tool. I've created this flower shape out of a single ellipse that I've turned into a petal. And I just use power duplicate to duplicate it all the way around and let them overlap. If I select all of those shapes and hover over with my vector flood fill tool, you can see that I'm getting the individual smaller segments and I can work the same way I did with the other flower. I'm going to pick this red color and I'll click and hold. And I'm going to drag all the way around until I fill these larger shapes. And you can see I have that single layer filled there. Let's pick this paint color. And I want to zoom in. I want to stay pretty close to the center of my shape. Because if you look at the strokes, some of them overlap in such a way that I actually have much smaller segments here that you can't see when you're all the way out. I suggest that when you do something like this, zoom in and just make sure that you're getting all of them and sometimes you might miss one. You just have to go ahead and click it Now, if I take these layers and turn them off, you can see that I did actually miss something there. I'm going to select that layer and I'll just fill it in. And I can just add these two shapes together again, just be really careful about how you're filling in. But now I have a new shape that I've created from these strokes and I was able to do it with a few clicks using the Vector Flood Fill tool. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to filling with solid colors, you can also fill with gradients. So I'm going to select this flower shape. And I'll select my Vector Flood Fill tool first. And then click on this gradient. And if I click, it's going to automatically add it. Now if I don't like the direction that it's added, I can just click on my regular fill tool and it's going to give me the handles that created it so I can drag this around. I can also change the type, so I can change this to elliptical and then play around with the settings until I get something that I want and then filing. Another option you can use is to fill with bitmap textures. Now, these are not going to be vector of course because they are bitmap, so keep that in mind. If you plan to fill anything with a texture, no matter where you pull it from, you want to make sure that if you plan to print your document, you size your document accordingly. So the DPI needs to be at least 300 and you should size the actual canvas to the size that you need to print. So I have this flower shape again, and there's three places that you can choose your bitmaps from. The first is the set bitmap fill up here in the tool itself. The other is the Assets panel, and then the third is the Stock Studio. Let's start with the Assets panel and take a look at how that works. I have some textures here that I'm going to pull up. I have my Vector flood fill tool selected already, so I'll just click on this texture. And you can see that as soon as I clicked on that asset, it's changed my fill to this texture. So now I can click inside this shape and it's automatically added it. Now, just like with the gradient, if I don't like how it looks, I can grab my regular fill tool and I can adjust the handles accordingly. Now one thing I do want to note is if you add a vector asset from the assets, panel designer is going to turn it into a bitmap fill, which means it's going to be rasterized. I have these vector textures I've chosen and they're actually semi transparent, so it's going to be added right on top of this one. I'll click on this and then click inside. And you can see that it added on top, which we'll talk about in a few moments when we get to stacking bit map fills. Now this is a vector texture. If I were to pull this into regular shape, you would see that it's made up of a number of curves. But if I zoom in on this, it's been rasterized, this actually has pixels. Now you need to be aware of that whenever you're using textures from your assets panel. Let's take a look at how the stock studio works. So I've just keyed concrete in as a keyword and I'm going to select one of these to add to the flower. I'll select my Vector flood fill tool, and the last color I used was this purple. I'll just pick one of these textures. I'm going to click and you'll see the credit pop up here at the top. And now when I click inside my Shape, it's going to add that texture in the shape. Again, I can grab my regular fill tool and adjust however I need to. All right, finally let's look at set bitmap Fill within the Vector flood fill tool itself. If I click here, it's going to take me to my files and I can go to my photos. My system or I can pick a texture that I've saved elsewhere. So I'm just going to pick any texture here. If I click inside, it's going to add it into my shape just like the other fills. And again, I can use my fill tool to adjust until I like how it looks. Now one note on using fills, whether it's a solid gradient or bitmap, if they're 100% opaque, in other words, no transparency like this one, they're automatically going to knock out whatever fill was already in place. If you look at this shape right now, I have this texture fill in place. If I go to my stock studio again and I select one of these, right now it's this one, but as soon as I click, it's going to change to the concrete texture that I just added. In a little bit, we're going to talk about using semi transparent or alpha fills and how you can actually stack them. But just know that whenever you use fully opaque fills, you're not simply setting one on top of the other, you're actually knocking it out completely. Before we start talking about stacking bitmap fills, let's take a look at the contextual menu and talk about fit mode. This is going to tell designer how you want to fit your bitmap fill inside of your shape. The first option is none. And I'm actually going to use an image to demonstrate this because it's a little easier to see the difference between the four. So if I use none and I click on this bicycle image here and then click in my shape, I can drag this around. And what this is done, there's no scaling performed on this at all. It's setting it inside as its largest size. Now I can size this down using the fill tool, but it's actually easier to use the next option, which is max fit. If I select that, it's going to scale it so that it fills the entire area without any sort of distortion. Now that can mean some cropping, but I don't find that to be an issue most times if I select that and click inside, you can see it's much easier to see the bicycle again, I can use my fill tool and move that around. The third option is minimum fit. And what this is going to do, it's going to scale the image so that it fits entirely within the area. If I click inside, you can see the bicycle. But the problem is you're also seeing the seams where it's tiling the image. Now again, I can use my fill tool to adjust it, but that means I'm going to have to drag it up and I may as well have used Max Fit in the first place. The final option is stretch. And this is going to stretch and scale the bitmap so it fills the entire area. Now this can also mean some distortion. So if I click on the bicycle and click inside, you can see that it's fitted inside, but the bicycle has been distorted and so have some of the areas of the building. So I don't find this particular one to be helpful because if you're using some sort of bitmap texture that has circles or something like that, you can definitely see the distortion. In my mind, max fit seems to work the best and then you just use the fill tool to adjust where necessary. Now if you're working with a non seamless fill, such as a photo like this or a text, again, you're potentially going to see the edges wherever it tiles. But if you use a seamless pattern, you'll be able to drag around and you're not going to see any seams. I'm going to go back to my assets. I have some seamless paper texture that I created here. I'll click inside. And now if I use my fill tool, you can see I'm not seeing any seams because again, this is a seamless texture. All right, we're going to wrap up the lesson on the Vector flood fill tool by talking about stacking bitmap fills and gradients. Now if you have a semi transparent gradient or a bitmap with an Elva background, in other words no background or one that's been reduced to 0 pass, you have the option of adding it on top of an existing fill. Let's head back up to the contextual menu and you'll see fill mode here. If I choose the first option, add on top, I can add a semi transparent gradient or alpha texture on top of my existing fill here as many times as I'd like. Right now I have this fill in place. If I select that vector texture that I used earlier, I can click and it's going to add another layer. I can continue to click, and each time I do it's going to add a new fill layer. I don't personally find myself doing that, but it is an option now like we talked about with the appearance panel. It's added this other line and I can go in and I can change the blend mode, It's treated as a separate fill. The second option is Smart Refill. This is going to allow me to add the semi transparent gradient or alpha texture, but it's only going to allow me to add it once. So if I select the other texture and tap, it's going to add that line, but no matter how many times I continue to tap, it's not going to add anymore. And then finally, knockout is going to work the same way that a solid does. Whether I'm using a semi transparent gradient or a bit map with an alpha background, it's going to knock out anything beneath it. So I'll go back to this texture here, and when I click on this, it's hard to see the texture itself. But I'll zoom in here. You can see in my appearance panel, it's knocked out everything beneath it. Just remember that anything added at full opacity, such as a solid gradient or a bitmap that has no transparency is automatically going to knock out anything beneath it, regardless of what you have selected here. One final note about working with bitmap pills is that you can't change the opacity of them, whether you're using the Vector flood fill tool or the regular fill tool. If I have this solid color here, I can go into my color panel and I can change the opacity of this fill. But if I pull in the vector texture that I used earlier. So I'm going to select my flood fill tool and click, I can't do that with that texture. If I try and drag this down, it's automatically going to pop back up. There's actually no way of reducing the opacity of this texture. If I use these fill tools, even in the appearance panel now I can change the blend mode and try and do it that way. But if I want to reduce it further, I would need to reduce it as a separate file and save it that way. Then use it as my bitmap texture fill or flood fill tool is pretty cool, right? I especially love being able to pull fills in from various sources. Not only can you use it to add texture to your work, but bonus tip, it provides a really quick way to test surface pattern designs by adding them to your assets panel. All right, back to the flowers though. Let's head into the next lesson where we're going to take a look at how you can use vector brushes, both built in and those you've imported to add even more texture to your floral shapes. I'll see you there. 20. Adding Texture with Vector Brushes: Up to this point, we focused on strokes created with solid fills and no texture. Using pressure settings to both create our shapes and add texture to the edges. In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can add texture to our strokes using vector brushes, both those that are built into designer and brushes we've imported. I'm going to show you how you can add additional visual appeal to your shapes by stacking texture strokes, using the appearance panel, and using the fill tool to add additional texture to your strokes to take them to a whole other level. Let's get started. I have these two flower illustrations here, and while I've added base texture that I really like, I want to add a little bit more textural detail using vector brushes. I'm going to take a few different approaches to adding the details using a mix of both built in brushes as well as some that I've imported. Now I've shared the links to all the brushes I'm going to use, as well as some of my other favorites. But just know that you don't have to use the exact brushes I'm using. I recommend experimenting with what you have. Try duplicating the brushes and adjusting their settings. Play around with color, because you might be surprised at the results that you get. Now, there are two things that I want to mention before we begin adding the detail with these vector brushes. The first is that despite vector being in the name, these are not true vector brushes. In other words, they can't be infinitely scaled. The reason for that is that they're created with what are called raster nozzles. So if I open up this built in oil brush, you can see this analog mark here at the bottom. And that's what's making the brush rasters means that pixels are involved. Therefore, these cannot be infinitely scaled. The reason they're called vector brushes is because you can use nodes to adjust them, but that's where it ends. So even if you use no other textures, if you use the vector brushes and designer or any that you've imported. If you plan to print your work, you want to make sure that you size your canvas accordingly and then the word set it at least 300 DPI. The other thing to note is that because of this raster nozzle, even if you export as an SPG, which of course recognizes vectors, anything that's raster is going to be treated as a raster. Unless I tell designer to ignore it. It's going to convert any layers with raster brush, I'm sorry, vector brushes on it to image layers. Now if I tell designer to ignore anything roster when I export is an SVG, it's going to remove the brush entirely and I'll be left with a solid stroke. Neither of those things are deal breakers. I use these all the time to add textural detail to my illustrations. Just keep those two things in mind when you're using them. All right, now that we have all of the technical stuff out of the way, I'm going to begin with this white flower. I want to add some additional detail, the middle here, using some vector brushes, because this middle here is looking really flat and not very dimensional. I'm going to start with the ellipse. The first thing I want to do is add a stroke to the outer circumference of it. I'll start maybe this red color. I want to go to my stroke panel and make sure that my stroke is aligned to the inside. Now I'm going to bring the stroke up so you can see it. But the size doesn't really matter at this point. Because as soon as I change this to a vector brush, it's automatically going to apply its own size and I can adjust it from there. I think I do want to bring the darkness down just to touch though. All right. I'm going to go to my brushes and I want to use one of the bezier brushes by truerate texture supply, specifically this fine line mono. Now you can see that it made it significantly larger and it doesn't look like anything much. But when I pull the stroke down, I'm just going to zoom in here. Let's see, I get that nice jagged line. Now, one thing you'll notice with these vector brushes, and I'll zoom in close so that you can see this, is there's a gap. Inevitably, there's a gap with most vector brushes, unless it's created as a truly infinite brush that's the same on both sides. You're going to get at least a small gap like this one. In this case, I'm not going to worry about it. If I really wanted to, I could fill that in with a vector brush or I could duplicate it and flip it to cover it. But I'm not going to worry about it here. I do, however, want to change the blend mode of the stroke to something like multiply, right? I'm going to add another stroke on top of this. I want to use another vector brush to give a little spottiness to this. I'll add the stroke and I'll pick this butter yellow color again. I want to make sure it's aligned to the inside. And I'll just drag this up just so you can see it. This time I'm going to go to the built in pattern brushes, specifically to this graded stippling to now you can't see anything because it's up really high. But as soon as I start pulling this down. See, I get that nice spottiness. And I'll bring it to right about there now this is overpowering the other one I put in place. So I'm going to go back to the appearance panel and I'm going to change this to Off Light back up. All right. I like how that's looking. I think what I need to do though is give it a little more dimension with a gradient around the edge of it. I'll add a pill to this, grab my fill tool, and I'll put a radial gradient in place. Now I want everything in the middle to come through, so I'm going to bring the opacity of that color stop down. And I'm going to add a dark red color to this one. I'll try this one now. It's a little too intense on the outside, so I'm just going to pull this color stop back just to touch and then just use the slider here to pull more of a feathered gradient in. I can also might make this a little bit more saturated. Okay, I could also add another color stop here just to block that even further, but I'm not going to worry about that. I think this looks good. One final thing that I want to do with this flower middle though, is I want to add a stamen around the edges. I'm going to go back to my appearance panel, add another stroke. But I want to pull it all the way down to the bottom of the stack because I want it coming out from behind that ellipse. I'll grab maybe this brown color this time. I want the stroke to sit on the outside of the shape. I'm going to bring that up. Now you can see I chose brown, but it's giving me that light color for some reason. Sometimes when you use the appearance panel and you apply a new stroke, it changes it to the last blend mode you use in color. Even when you switch it, you just need to play around with it. I'm going to change it back to normal and just pick brown again and see how that works. Let's see, let's go here. All right. I'm not sure why it does that, but you can just play around and fix it. I have the brown in place. Again, I'm not worried about the stroke width because I'm about to change it to a brush. I'll grab that stamen brush and it's way too large. I'm going to bring it down. I like how that's looking. I might play around with the color when I'm done, but I feel like the brown gives it a nice contrast. The only thing I think I want to do is maybe give it a little bit more of a pop here. I feel like that fill is a little too dull. Let's go to this color. I think I accidentally changed the Swatch there. That's why I'm going to bring that up a little bit. Okay. Now that I have that in place, I feel like the flower itself was a little flat. I have the gradient behind here and I don't want to cover that up. But what I do think I want to do is maybe make it a little bit more. Give it more of a pop. It's set to linear burn already, but I want to bring that up, this color. Stop right here. Up, just to touch. I want to add a little something to the petals. I like the texture, but I feel like it'd have a little bit more here. I don't want to cover this gradient up. And if I were to add a stroke to the flower itself, it's going to add it to the outer edge of the petals. And that's not what I'm looking for. What I want is something that sits across the entire flower. So I'm going to create another ellipse. I'm going to hit escape, so that I don't select this. I don't need a fill, but I am going to use a stroke, and I think I'll use this red again. Let's start here in the middle. And just drag a circle out until it pops to the same size as the one that was already in place. Now you can see I have this elipse sitting here on the top of my stack. And that's not what I want. I want to clip it inside of my petals because I want anything that I do with the brush only applied to the flour. So I'm just going to drag this down. Let's just make the stroke a little bit bigger. This time I'm going to go back to the pattern brushes. I know that I want to use this brush right here, this vertical bleeding ink, See nothing's really showing because it's way too big. So I'm going to bring it down. This is fun, but this isn't what I'm looking for. What I want is to use the lines that are in this brush across the petals. What I'm going to do is hold command and shift down so I keep that perfect circle. And I'm just going to start dragging out. I'll just pull it out until the thicker part of it is at the edge of the petals coloring those I can play around with the size of the stroke. That's going to give me a different look. All right. I'm just bringing my stroke size up until I'm covering the leaf. It's a back and forth. You play with it until it looks just the way you want, which is right about there. Now, this is way too intense. I'm not looking for something to show this much. What I'm going to do is change the blend mode of the entire layer to color burn, and I'm going to drop the opacity significantly. I'm just looking to add a little bit of extra dimension to the outer part of my petals. What I could do if I wanted to try it out and see what happens is I could add the fill back in and just see if I like how that looks. Let's just check that. I'm not really loving that because it's kind of too solid. So I'm going to turn that off and maybe bring this in just a bit more. Okay. I like how this looks because the brush itself isn't the same on each petal, and it's not perfect either, which is what I'm aiming for. I like the pop of color here in the middle. And I'm actually going to keep the stamen brush as is, because I like the contrast between the flower and the stamen brush. I could keep playing with this, but I'm going to go ahead and move on to the leaves in the interest of time. And you may be wondering why I didn't simply grab the vector brush and start drawing with the brushes that I chose. And I do that all the time to add some spot detail using the vector brushes. But I also like to experiment with creating shapes and adding the batter brushes to the strokes, to those shapes, just to see what I can get. In this case, I was able to add a lot of detail to my flower overall, simply by creating an ellipse. It's all about experimentation and see what happens when you use the various brushes. So let's go ahead and add some texture to the leaves. Now, of course, I could add a stroke to the outside and just change the stroke to one of the Bac brushes. But I think what I'm going to do instead is draw a line at the center. And I'm going to use my pencil tool for that. I'll select this butter yellow color. I'm going to bring the stroke down. Grab my pencil tool and I have this stabilizer set pretty high just to keep my line steady. I also make sure that auto closes off because you want to make sure that it doesn't automatically close the stroke that you're creating. I'm going to select this curve and I'm going to turn on Insert Inside Selection. For those of you on the ipad, you also have that at the top of the screen. I'll just start drawing my line up. If it's not quite where I want it, I can grab my node toll and adjust it. I'm going to go back into my brushes. Let me zoom in here. This time I'm going to use the Franken tune Al Mallo set, specifically one of the liners here. I want to, I think this wobbly now, that's a little too intense of course, and I'm going to knock that back. But first I want to place it where I want it to go, into the appearance panel. And I'm going to turn this to soft light. I think I'll bring the opacity down just to touch. All right. Now I want to add another line on top of this because I'm going to use a different brush with a different texture just to add a little something more to this, but I don't need to redraw the line. This is where the appearance panel comes in handy. I can go to my appearance panel and add another stroke. And it's going to add it right on top of the line I already drew. And I'm going to use this off white color. I'll bring the stroke up so you can see it. You can say it's right there along the same exact path, which is what I want. I'll go to my brushes and this time I'm going to use the same set, but I'm going to use this FT rush 0.5 I like the spottiness of this. Again, I want to change the blend mode to soft light or maybe overlay. Let's try soft light. I think I'm going to bring the opacity of the overall layer down. All right, let's just back up. I like how that's looking. I think I'm going to apply it to the other one now. I don't need to start fresh. I'm simply going to copy and paste. And then flip it with my icons up here and I'll just move it in place on the other leaf. Drag that up and clip it in place. It could play around with the opacity. This one could probably come down a little bit. Now, the only thing left on this one that I would probably do is add some shading to the vase. I could simply add another fill and grab a gradient here. And I would just draw up a linear gradient. Maybe you reverse that. I'm going to turn this one off and bring that all the way down. And then turn this to more of a blue color just to blend in with that vase shape. And I'll change this to multiply a little too dark, so let's just drop the opacity. And I think that's fine for now. I could add some additional shading up there. But in the interest of time, I'm going to call this one done. I'm going to move on to the orange flower next. All right, so for the orange flower, I really like the texture I have in place on both the leaf and the flower. I don't want to add too much more to this. But I want to add a little bit of fun texture to the outer edge here in this petal. And then I feel like the middle is way too empty. It needs something. I'm going to use a single stroke to add this vector stamen brush. The problem is if I were to simply put something like this in there, there would be a lot that I would need to clean up. What I want to do instead is I'm going to use my pen hole to create a single shape to place inside of that flower. I'm going to turn the fill off and I'll use that same brown that I used for the other one. I'll grab my pen hole and I'm going to start with a straight line. I can very easily turn this to a curve. I'm just going to go to my node toll, drag this up to where I want it. I could make these 90 degrees simply by starting to drag them and then holding my shift key down. Now I'm going to go back to my brushes and grab that stamen brush. It's probably going to look funny at first because it's going to be too large. So I'll go back to my strokes. Now I have the set to 269 for the desktop users. If you want to easily get back to 100, just click the dot. It's automatically going to take it back to the largest point size that you can use with the slider. I'm going to maybe drag this up a little bit more. Maybe in, I'm going to hold my command key down. I want to place this behind these three petals. But in front of those two, I'm going to drag it down in my layer stack. Let me just close this one and open this one up. I want to place it above these two. I'll just drag it over to my flower and rotate it in place. You can see I have some hanging out. There's a couple of ways that I could approach this. I could certainly make it smaller if I wanted to. In fact, I think I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, but I still have some of it hanging out. I could mask this away. But instead what I'm going to do is go to my node, Cole. I'm going to add a node here, here. And then I'm going to take these two nodes. So I'll click and then shift click and just delete them. And you can see it pulls it in. If I need to, I can adjust it. But I actually like how that worked. It looks just the way that I want it to. So I'm going to leave it alone. Like I said earlier, I don't want to add too much detail to this because I really like this texture here. But I want to have a little bit of fun on this side and maybe on this petal here. I don't want to overwhelm the flour. I just want to add a little touch of something though. I'm going to use my pen tool and I'll select this shape, and I have this butter yellow stroke selected. I'll grab the Penthol. Now, when you're using the pen and pencil tool, you can't select the brush first. You need to put the mark in place and then choose the brush. It's only the vector brush that you can choose your brush first, I'm going to click and click again and create that same straight line like I did with the middle. I'll grab my node tool and I'm just going to bend it now. I didn't automatically clip that in place, so I'm just going to drag it down and clip it inside of my shape, maybe make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to use the graded stippling to brush. Now when I do that, it's pulling it in in the direction that I created my line. My end node is right here, so the larger spots are on the inside. And that's not what I want. I want to flip this so that the smaller spots in that gradient are the ones that are showing inside. And I'm sorry, the larger ones are on the outside. I'm going to bring the stroke down and you'll see that a little bit more clearly. I'll just grab my note toll and bring those in. I think I want to change the blend mode on this one to soft light. I don't want it to stand out too much over this texture, but I like that little spottiness there. And I'm going to do the same thing with this one. I'll grab my pen tool and I have rubber band mode on. This time I'm going to select Clip Inside. So it automatically inserts it. I'll click, click and drag, and hit Escape. And I want to change that to that same brush. I'm going to use that graded stippling to, and again I want to reverse it and just bring the stroke size down. I think in this case I'm not going to change the blend mode because it's so small that if I do, you're barely going to see it. So I'm just going to leave that as it is now. I don't want to touch this anymore. I'm going to leave that alone. I think the flower is fine. I just want to add something to the leaf and I'm just going to do the basic stroke on the outside for this one. I'll just add a stroke and I want it to sit inside. Just bring that up and I already have that butter yellow selected. I think I'm going to go to my old standby with this one, which is the built in dry media brushes. I really like the dense charcoal for closed curves, For leaf shapes like this, not only is the texture good, but it's actually set for a closed curve. I'm going to go ahead and drink that down. Then just go to the appearance panel and change the blend mode to soft light. Just stepping back, of course, I would add some shading to the vase just to give it some dimension just like this one. But looking at the flowers and the leaves, I feel like those are both done. I don't want to go overboard adding too much texture because I really want the texture I already added to show through. But I wanted to have some fun with some of the brushes. And then the other case, add a little bit of detail to the petals where I felt like they were lacking. Overall, I really like how these are looking, so I'm going to call them done. Do you have favorite texture brushes that you go back to time and time again? Bonus sufficiency tip. Consider setting up my favorites category in your vector brush panel. Duplicate your favorite brushes and use the burger menu in the brush panel to automatically move that duplicate to your my favorites category. That way you have all of your favorite go to brushes right at your fingertips. We're going to wrap up the lessons with something I can only describe as magical. We're going to use our strokes and pressure settings to create floral shapes. But this time, instead of adding our texture after we create the strokes, we're going to use the pen and pencil tools to create with our favorite textures right from the start. I'll see you there. 21. Drawing with Textured Strokes: Up to this point, any shapes we've created have been flat strokes with texture added after the fact, thanks to the fill tool. In this lesson that's about to change, we're going to create a palette from our favorite textures and complete a full floral illustration using textured strokes, complete with pressure applied. Let's get started. I've set up a palette here with some of my favorite gel plate textures. And this is just a series of vector rectangles that I've filled with my favorite bitmap textures using the fill tool. Now I've chosen two that I like to use for petals and flowers, two for leaves and two vases. That way I have a selection to choose from. Now, of course, I could use these to sample with the style picker. But instead we're going to set up a document, specific palette in the color studio so that we can apply these to our strokes upfront and draw with them. In addition to being able to add solid colors to the color studio, you also have the ability to add textured fills. And that's what we're going to use these for now. I don't recommend loading your app up, whether it's the desktop or ipad with a ton of textured add ons, whether it's color palettes or assets. The more raster elements you have sitting embedded in your app, the more you're potentially going to bog it down, which can become a problem, especially on older machines. For this, I would recommend setting up a document, specific palette and deleting it once you're done. If you want to have it on hand, you could always ex port it and keep it externally on a cloud file and then just pull it in when you want. But I don't recommend building a vast library of textured fills to be used application wide to create a document palette. Head to the burger menu for the swatches panel and choose add document palette. I'm going to name this texture, if you want to rename it, you can go back up to the burger menu and choose Rename Palette. Now I'm going to select each of these and add these as a pill to this palette. So I want to make sure that my color swatches on fill and not stroke in this case. And I'll start selecting them And choosing this first icon here, which is add current fill to palette for those of you on the ipad version, you'll go up to the burger menu on the swatches panel. So I'm just going to select and I'm selecting them in the order I want them, but on the desktop version, you can actually reorder them if you want. So I'm just going to put my leaves together and then my vases. Now, unfortunately on the ipad version, you can't drag them to re, order them, so you're going to want to place them in the order that you want. You can use the textured fills with a pencil pen or vector brush. We're going to set vector brushes aside for a moment and focus on creating our shapes with pen and pencil tools first. Now, just like with a solid fill, if I select one of these as fill in my palette and grab a shape, I can drag out the shape and the texture is automatically applied. I don't need to clip it into place. Now if I don't like how it looks, I can either hit G on my keyboard as the keyboard shortcut or select the fill tool and just drag it out. Move it around until it looks the way that I want it to. Now, I've applied this as a fill, but I can also apply it to a stroke. I'm going to switch this from fill to stroke. I can also switch it up here. I'll grab my pencil tool. I'm just going to set my stroke size. I think I'll stick with 200 here and I'm going to just set a basic petal. I'm going to drag these two down and maybe bring this right about here. Now with that set as my stroke, I can start drawing out shapes. Now you'll notice on that first one, the fill doesn't look great. But I'm not going to worry about that because I can fix it after the fact. I just want to get my shapes on the canvas first. I'm going to continue drawing out my petal shapes. With each one, the texture comes in automatically. I don't need to clip it in place. Now, one thing you'll notice is because most of my shapes are drawn the same, the texture came in the same way. If I want to adjust this just like with the fill, I can select my fill tool. I need to make sure I change the context from fill to stroke on the ipad. Remember, hit that little doughnut icon and I can just click and drag this out. Now the one that's most important for me to correct in this case is this one. The reason for that is I know that I am going to add all five of these petals together. And if you think back to the lesson on geometry, whenever you add shapes together, they're going to take on whatever fill is in place for the bottom most layer. I'm going to click into this. I don't need to choose stroke again because I haven't moved away from the fill tool yet, and I'll just drag that out. The reason that it created the texture that way, it seems like when you have a relatively straight or perfectly straight stroke, the texture doesn't quite come in correctly. But again, you can always fix it using the fill tool. I'm not going to worry about correcting the texture on the rest. But I am going to start moving these around using the move tool, as well as some of the settings in the stroke panel. So I'm going to speed this up and I'll see you on the other side. Okay, I have all of my petals in place. I've adjusted some of them individually, using some of the settings here in the stroke panel. I didn't, again, adjust my fills on my others because this is the most important one at this point. I'm going to go ahead and select all of my shapes and expand them. I could use the keyboard shortcut I set up or I'll go to layer and expand stroke. While I have these selected, I'm going to go right up to the geometry at the top here and choose Ad. Now you can see that automatically applied that texture from the bottommost layer. I'm seeing some seams here, so I'm just going to hit G on my keyboard to select my fill toll and I can readjust that texture if I felt like I needed to. I could beef it up a little bit. I could go up to my contour toll and just click and start dragging, maybe make it a little thicker. I could adjust the contour type to make it pointy leaves and then bake my appearance. I'm going to call the overall flower part done. I like how that's looking. All right, Now that we have the flower in place, I'm going to go ahead and get the vase and the leaf in place and then I'll finish up the actual flower itself. This works exactly the same way. In this case, I'm going to use the pen tool to create the vase. I'll pick this blue texture as my fill. I want to make sure I don't have an actual fill. Just the stroke. I'll go into my stroke panel and just set up a vase setting. I already have one set here. I'm going to use this. I'll just click hold my shift key down and click again. Now again, this is one of those cases where if your stroke is straight up and down, it's not necessarily going to come in correctly. But just go ahead and grab your fill tool and you can select stroke as your context and adjust it. It's really easy to adjust. And I'll just drag this around. I like that right there. I'm going to make this a little bit wider. I'll try 350. Let's see if I want to play around with the vase shape here. I think I'll bring it all the way down. And I'm just going to go ahead and expand this right away. So I'm just using my keyboard shortcut. I think I'll round those corners off a bit. So I'll go ahead and select my corner to select these two nodes. So I'm just clicking and dragging across and just dragging that down and I want to make sure I bake my appearance again, just so it locks that in. And I'm not going to round these off. I actually think those are just right. So I'll move this into place here and I can size this down. All right. I'm going to go ahead and make my leaf shapes. I'm going to use the pencil tool for that. Again, I'll go back to my swatches and I want to get rid of my, oops. Make sure you don't have anything selected. I'll get rid of my Phil. I'm going to, I think with this yellow I'll use this texture trying to make sure I have a leaf shape. So I'll go ahead and reset this. I'm going to click right about there. I don't need it to be 350. I'll start with 100. I can always change it. I'll just start drawing up. I'm going to make sure my stabilizer is on. I have it set to about 50. That's actually pretty high. Didn't quite get it there. Let's see. All right, that's a little too big, I think. Let's just bring that down. I'm going to bring this behind the vase so it's tucked in there. You could also use the keyboard shortcut of command and the bracket keys. I'll do that for this, I'll bring the flower forward. I just did Command right bracket keys. It's up in the contextual menu as well. And then the ipad version, you also have it in the contextual menu. I think I'll make this just a touch smaller. I'm going to add another leaf. I'll just make it slightly smaller. Again, grab my pencil toll and just drag it out this way. I always do all of my shapes first and then I start to add my textures. One final thing I need to do is give this guy a stem. I have just a jaggedy profile set here. Bring my stroke down, grab my pencil. Told again. And just draw a relatively straight stroke there. You bring it up a little bit, just so it's a little beef here. And bring it behind the flower. All right? I have those in place. I'll add my shading and other textures last. But let's go ahead and create the rest for the flower here. Just like with the strokes, of course I can use the fills again, like I did in the beginning. I'm going to get rid of this stroke and I think I'm going to use this white fill as my center. I might change my mind. Let's just drag out a shape now. If you decide that you don't want to use these, you can select your fill toll and just use it like you normally would. You can choose bitmap and it's going to take you to your files. I could pick another one here if I wanted to. Maybe I'll pick just this plain pink one and see how that looks. You can also, of course, go to your assets panel or your stock studio and do the same thing. Now that we have our shapes in place, let's take a look at the appearance panel overall. It works the same as if you're using a solid color, of course, the difference being that you can see the texture as your color swash rather than a solid. And the other bigger difference is that you can't use the opacity slider to change the opacity of your texture because remember you can't change that in this form. As a fill in designer, you'd have to clip it as a layer and do it that way. Everything else though works exactly the same. If I wanted to add a fill to this and go to my stock studio, I could grab a concrete texture and I could change the blend mode to add a little bit more texture to this. If I wanted to change this back to a fill, I could simply grab this layer, go to my swatches, change it to a solid, and go from there. But I'm going to change that back. Everything else works exactly the same. I can build as many strokes in, as many fills as I want to add the detail the way that we've done in the previous lesson. In a moment, we're going to talk about drawing with the vector brush using our textures. Before we do that though, I just want to add a little bit more detail to these flower and leaf shapes. And I'm going to use the process that I did in the last lesson. I'm going to speed it up as a time lapse. But if you want, you can also slow the video down and watch it that way. So I'll see you on the other side. All right. I've placed some additional details using some textured strokes with the pen and pencil tool, the way that we did in the last lesson. Because those two tools work that way, you have to place the stroke first and then apply the textured brush. But with the vector brush, you can actually draw not only with the textured brush, but with the textured fill. So let's take a look at how that works. I'm going to select my vector brush, and I don't need a stroke in this case, but I do need a fill because this is the vector brush, in this case, the pen or pencil. I think I'll grab a nice big gritty brush so you can see what this looks like. I'll select this pink texture. Now you'll notice it didn't change that, it's actually white. I'm not sure why it does that, but typically it worked just fine. If not, then just go back into your panel and select the color. Make this brush a little bigger and just draw out a shape. And you can see that not only do I get the texture from that dry media brush, but the texture from the fill that I just chose. Now, this works like every other shape. If I don't like how the texture came out, for example, I'm seeing a seam here, and over here I can select my fill tool, make sure that it's on stroke, and then just adjust the texture even though you're using a fill to create this, ultimately it comes out as a stroke. And you're going to need to make sure that you change your context stroke to adjust the texture. I applied that to this petal here, instead of using a solid color like I did in the last lesson, I use that same brush, but I used the pink texture. And I left the blend mode alone. That allows not only the texture but the color of that texture to be what provides the detail. I can apply something to this here. I'm going to change, I think to the white texture that I brought in for the vase. I'm going to add a little detail here to the petal. I'll grab my vector brush you could choose inside, so it automatically clips it. It's one less step that you have to do. I'll choose this pattern brush that's built in. I like these stippling brushes. I'm going to go with graded stippling two and make my brush a lot smaller, straw along the outside of the petal here. Now, one, I didn't, I stopped too short. Two, it's coming in here. I want to keep it in here. I could mask this away, but what I'm going to do instead is take a look at the brush. I'm going to open this up and you can see there's no size variance, which means I can't use my pressure setting, even though these are dragged down. I can't use that to adjust anything. I'm going to temporarily drag the size variance up. That way I can go into my pressure settings, I can add one in the middle and just drag this down. And that's just going to keep it here on this particular petal. Now, I want to make sure that I don't permanently change this brush. I didn't duplicate it, I'm using the brush itself, so I'm just going to escape to deselect that shape and then reset the brush. It capped the pressure settings, but I was allowed to reset the brush back, so I didn't have any problems with it in the future. Now, in this case, I'm not going to change the blend mode of this because there is some minor texture coming through. This is a white brush, so it's not showing up as much. But on a yellow petal like this, I wanted to use this particular texture. I could keep going around and adding additional details like that. I could also create a shape like we did in the last lesson that I put around the middle and clip inside. Either way, you can apply a vector brush using vector texture. Now there's a few things that you need to note about this. If you recall from the last lesson, you can't expand a stroke that's been created with a textured brush. Now this isn't an issue if you're going to export this, It's a PNG or Jpeg or something that's already a raster. Where this does become an issue is if you need to export it as a vector friendly format like SPG, EPS or PDF, it's going to export it and turn it into an image layer. Because of that raster, I use this sparingly just to add small colorful details to illustrations, motifs things that I know I'm already going to be exporting in a raster format. So now we have the ability to create both flat and textured strokes to create our floral shapes. And being able to create with texture means we get to create more quickly as there's less time pulling in and clipping the textures after the fact. We're at the end of the lessons, but let's head into the final video or we'll wrap things up with some final thoughts. I'll see you there. 22. Final Thoughts: We're at the end of class and as always, I thank you for trusting me with your time and creativity for returning students. Thank you for joining me once again. And for those of you who are taking one of my classes for the very first time, I hope to see you again in another class. If you enjoyed the class or have feedback, I hope you'll consider leaving a review. Not only does it help me learn what I'm doing well or where I can improve, it also helps future students decide whether they want to take the class. If you create a project, I'd love to see what you create, so please consider sharing it to the class project and resources section. Sharing your project not only helps other students see what they learn when they take the class. Uploading a project and leaving a review helps more students find the class. If you share your project on Instagram, be sure to tag me at the handle on the screen and use the hashtag made in affinity. Because the folks at Sarah love to see and share what's been created using designer. I have lots of classes planned and in the works, so be sure to hit the follow button on my scale show profile, so you'll always know when a new class is published. As always, if you have any questions, please let me know in the discussion section below. I'm always happy to help. Thank you again for joining me here in class and happy creating.