Transcripts
1. Introduction to Drawing a Hot Air Balloon in Illustrator: I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I'm going
to show you how to design a hot air balloon landscape
image in Illustrator. Before we get started
with this project, Let's look and see what it is that we're trying to achieve. This is the illustration
that we're going to create. In Illustrator. We're going to start by creating the balloon and then we're going to create the background. So now that you know
what it is that we're aiming for, Let's get started.
2. Before we begin: Before we begin this class, I just want to address some
changes that have happened in Adobe Illustrator since
this class was produced. In April 2022, Adobe added some new 3D tools
to Adobe Illustrator. And these work very
differently to the old tools. And the two can fit
side-by-side because they are so different in
terms of their effect. For this class, you're going
to need to use what are now called the classic 3D tools. You can't use the new ones because they just don't
work in the same way. And they're also really, really slow in terms of requiring a lot of
machine overhead. So you really want to be
making sure that you're using the correct 3D tools. I'm just going to
select this shape and show you what's different. If you go to Window and 3D, which is what I would have told you in the
rest of this class. You're going to
get the new tools and these are not what you want. So don't do that when you
see me do that in the class, just know that the position of the 3D tools that
you need have moved. Instead you're going to
select your object and you go to Effect and then
3D and materials. Because here are your
3D classic tools. And depending on
whether in the class we use Extrude and Bevel,
revolve or rotate. You're just going to select
one of these three options. The options are exactly the
same as they used to be, and they work exactly the
same as they used to work. So it's important that you understand that there
are some new tools. They're not the ones you want. You want the old tools which
are now called classic. From there, you should be
able to just continue on with the class exactly
as I have taught it. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the question area and I'll help you as soon as I'm able to.
3. Balloon Part 1: For the balloon, I've created a image which is 1 thousand
by 1 thousand points, and it's an RGB image. We're going to start
with the Rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag a
long narrow rectangle. And right now it's
filled with orange, an aid to make 23 more of these. So I'm going to choose Effect, distort and
Transform, Transform. I'm going to type 23 in here, turn on the preview, and then just start increasing the horizontal value by just pressing the up arrow key until
I can see all 23 objects. Now that's a bit
too bigger spacing. So having seen the
whitespace in-between these, I'm now going to decrease it. And I'm looking to get rid of every single one of these
very faint white lines. And only when they've all gone, Can I call that good. We can't have any white lines
at all because if I do, it's going to mess
up my balloon. Later on. I'll click Okay. Now we'll do Object Expand
Appearance and object ungroup. And what that does
is it now gives us 24 individual rectangles. And I would go ahead now and
start re-coloring these. These are going to be the
colors of the gauze that we're going to apply to
the balloon later on. Now you can re-color
these however you like, and you'll recolor
all 24 of them. Later on, only 12 are
going to be used. They're just going to be on the front side of the balloon. The rest is going
to be mapped to the backside of the balloon. But you should fill
all of these in, just in case you want a three-dimensional
balloon later on. So just go ahead
and do that. Now. Once you've done that, select all 23 or
24 filled shapes and drag and drop them into the Symbols panel
and just click Okay. And you're going to
use this symbol later on to color your balloon. I'm just going to press to
delete this set of rectangles. Now you don't have to use 24
if you use, for example, 12. They're going to be mapped all the way around the 3D objects. So the gauze or actually
just going to be wider. So you can choose any number of panels for your
goals, for your balloon. But you'll probably
want something like eight or more at least. I'm just going to
trash the symbol because I don't
actually need it. I'm going to use
the one that I have pre-prepared before I
started this video. Now for the balloon,
we're going to select the Ellipse tool and
drag out a circle. It's filled with
grain right now. I'm going to fill it
with a gray color. A gray color will help me
with my shading later on. So you want a gray, a blue-gray, a pink gray or
something like that. With the direct selection tool, I'm clicking on this anchor
point and press Delete. And now this anchor point, I'm going to move out of the vertical line that it's
in and down a little bit. Just to give it a slightly
more balloon shape. I'm going to Alt, drag on this handle just to make the
bottom of my balloon. Now I want to make
this back into a shape that has a
path all around it. So I'm going to click
on the Pen tool. I'm going to click on
this anchor point here. And I'm going to click immediately
under this top anchor, and then click on
that top anchor. And that's just close the path. And now we have a shape that
we can use for our balloon.
4. Balloon Part 2: In this next video, you'll learn how to make a 3D balloon shape from the shape that we've created, and we're going to map the colors onto it. So to make the balloon, I'm going to click on my "Shape" and let's choose Effect 3D revolve. We're going to turn the preview on, so we can see what we're doing, and you'll notice that there's a more options and a fewer options, so you want to open up this More Options panel. Don't be worried by what you say because it doesn't look like a balloon, but it will very soon, and the reason why it looks like this and not like a balloon is this offset value here, we want to offset from the right edge, not the left edge. There's our balloon shape. Now I'm going to concentrate on the shading here and I don't want plastic shading, I want diffuse or diffuse shading, and I want to bring down my ambient light, because I want quite a distinction between the light and the dark areas here. I'm going to make my blend steps instead of 25, which is the default, I'm going to use six. So I now have six shaded areas over my balloon shape. Now let's go and map our colors to this. It's important that you do this first so you can actually see it, otherwise as soon as you map your art over the top it's going to be less easy to say. Click "Map Art." From the symbol drop-down lists, we are going for the symbol that we just created, I'm going to scale it to fit. Now our art is mapped to our shape and I'll click "Okay." Before I leave this dialogue, I'm a little concerned about this, I don't want to see the top of the balloon, I want to look at the balloon face on. I'm going to choose front, that just changes my view of the balloon. Now I'm not convinced that if I had to have these edges that I would want them to actually look like that. Let's take this rotation option here, and let's just rotate this shape to see if I can get rid of one of those edges. Well, they're not going to go, so I'm a bit stuck with colors on either side. I'll just call that good for now and let's click "Okay." Now I'm going to choose object expand appearance, and that's now created an expanded version of my balloon object. Let's go to the layers panel and just do a little bit of cleaning up, because right now it is a bit of a mess. What we end up with here in the last panel is effectively two versions of the balloon. This is one version and this is a second version, and we only need one, so I'm just going to drag this and drop it on the trash can to get rid of it. I also don't need this clip group, so I'm going to remove it as well. I'm just going to take these three layers and move them up to the top. One, I'm going to take this one. Two, clipping path 3. That's got rid of all those nested groups and all we have now is our mapped colors and a group that holds the shading. I want to bring my shading up to the top, so I'm going to drag it above the shape and I want to start working on its transparency and have it actually do some work, because right now is having no effect on this object at all. I'm going to open up this group and I'm going to have a look, this is the topmost shading shape, I want to eat, but I don't want the second one, so I'm going to trash the second one. I want this one, this third one, but I don't want the fourth, so I'm going to trash it. I want this one, but I don't want the last. I've just narrow this down, so now I have three shading panels instead of six. I'm going to click on the topmost one to target it, and now we're going to work at making these transparent, and so that they're actually adding some highlights to our balloon, right now they're anything but highlights, they're just bands or solid color. Choose Window and appearance because they scares me access to the Appearance panel of this top shapes selected. I'm going to the fill option because I want to work with it's fill. I'm going to click "Opacity" and I'm going to make it, blend mode screen, that means it's going to be lightning the object underneath later on. I'm just going to adjust its opacity down to something like 30 percent, it's pretty arbitrary, you can just choose whatever you like. Now let's go and do this to the second path. Again, I want to go to the fill, I want to change the blend mode to screen and the opacity something like 30, I'm going to do it to the last one as well. Opacity, blend mode screen, lightning blend mode, and then the opacity to around 30 percent, very arbitrary. Now you can say that the effect that this has had is that we've got some see-through to the image below, but we're not actually getting the result that perhaps we might fulfill that we are going to get. Now the way we achieve that is having changed how these layers look, is now we're going to the entire group. I'm going to target the entire group of layers. Now in the appearance panel, I'm going to change the properties of the entire group, not just these three objects in it. Again, we're going to opacity and again we're going to choose screen, and this now has the desired lightening effect, and we can adjust down the opacity if we want to take it down to 86, but just check and see what it gives you and what you like. Now let's click outside of the balloon and you can say that now we have this highlighting effect showing on the balloon.
5. Balloon Part 3: In this next video, you'll see how to add dimension to the balloon gores by giving them a glow effect and then how to add the ropes for the basket using blends. The next thing that we're going to work on is the color layer. Let's go and see what we're saying here. Each one of these paths is one of the gores on the balloon. I'm going to target first, of all, one of these, and I've just chosen the yellow one and then I'm going to select all of the other yellow gores, select "Same, Fill Color" and now I have selected all the yellow gores and there are two of them in this image and now in the Appearance panel, I'm again going to locate the fill option and I'm going to darken the edges of these gores. With the fill selected, I'm going to choose "Effect", "Stylize", and I'm going to choose "Inner Glow". Now, I want to preview what I'm saying here and I want to go and pick up the exact yellow that we were using which is this one here and instead of screen, which is a lightning blend mode, I'm going to choose multiplier because that's a darkening blend mode. I'm going to make sure that my effect is applied to the edges. I'm just going to increase the opacity value making these edges more opaque and less see-through and perhaps just increase also the blur amount. Now I'll click "Okay" and now I'll go and select the next color and that's this maroon and again, select "Same," "Fill Color" and now we have selected all the maroon elements. Again in the fill here, I'm going to choose "Effect", "Stylize", "Inner Glow" instead of the yellow, I'm just going to go and locate the maroon color. Click "Okay". Preview it. We're seeing a darkening of these edges. Click "Okay". Move back to this color. This is the green. Select "Same, Fill Color". This selection routine just allows me to select all the same objects, the objects that are colored with the same color because it allows me then to add this effect to all of them in one hit rather than having to do it with every gore individually, I'm just doing it all at one time and this is the orange object. Select "Same Fill Color". These are all the orange objects. Making sure I have my fill selected there, effect, stylize, inner glow. Just go and pick up my orange color. I'm not having to make any other changes to these settings because the settings are just being carried forward from one to the next. Now we've given our balloon a whole lot more dimension and shine and we've really taken it from something that was quite flat and made it something that is a lot more dimensional. The next step is to add the embellishments to the balloon and we're going to do that first of all by targeting the color that we want to use which is that maroon color. I'm going to use that as a stroke and I'm going to grab the pen tool and draw in the lines that are going to attach the basket to the balloon. I'm going to click here where it says "Intersect" so that my line is along the edge of the balloon and then just drag it down here. I'm going to increase the stroke width to about three points and now you can see that's not quite in the right place. It's just not looking quite where I want it to be. I'm going to click on this anchor and holding the alt or option key, just move this handle out. Now that's looking pretty good. I want to reflect this. I want to duplicate it and reflect it over here. I'll choose object, transform, reflect. I want to reflect it vertically. Let's preview. You can see it's going to be reflected this way and now I'm going to click "Copy" so that I make a duplicate of it. Now I have two of these ropes and I'm going to just move one of them across. That it's on the other side of the balloon. Now, I want a few of these ropes. I'm going to use the blend tool to do that. I'll click on the "Blend Tool", click on the "First Rope", and click on the "Second Rope". Illustrator's giving me just one more. I need to alter that. I'm going to double-click on the "Blend Tool", choose specified steps, click on "Preview" and I'm just going to increase the specified steps and until I get the result that I want. I'm looking to see exactly how many I want and I think that four is just going to be fine. I'm going to call that good and click "Okay".
6. Balloon Part 4: In this next video, you'll learn how to add the rope loops and you'll be using transform shapes and a custom-made brush. Next, we're going to create the loops that are going to join these ropes. So I'm going to start by zooming in here so I can see things a little more clearly. I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool and drag out a circle. I am just going to drag it down into position. I want the anchors to be over the very top of these ropes. If I'm resizing and I'm going to make sure I hold the Shift key so that I'm resizing it in proportion, so it's still a circle. Now with the direct selection tool selected, I'm going to click on this topmost anchor and press "Delete". That gives me the first of my loops. "Control Zero" to go back to the main image. Now with this loop selected, I'm going to add some more loops. So I'm going to add 1,2,3,4 more loop's. I'm going to do that with effect distort and transform, transform. Set preview on, click "4" because I want four copies, I'm going to start moving this horizontal value out until this appear exactly in position at 127 points and I'll click "Okay". Now I'll choose "Object", "Expand Appearance". Now we're ready to put the detailing on these loops, and we're going to do that with a brush. So we're going to create our own brush. Again, I'm holding the shift key down as I use the Ellipse tool to draw a circle. Let's zoom into this general area with the direct selection tool. I'm going to click on the topmost node because I want to delete it. Now with the pen tool, I'm just going to join these two anchors together. So I have this closed shape. Now with this shape selected, I'm going to extend it a little ways just to get my pattern effect distort and transform, transform. Turn preview on, I probably want about eight copies should be sufficient. Now I'm just going to increase the horizontal value here until I get a pattern that I like. So I'm going to use a pattern something like this. So I'll click "Okay" and then "Object" "Expand Appearance". So I'm going to select it, then I'm going to open my brushes panel, which is here, and drag and drop it into my brushes panel. I'm going to make it a pattern brush. Now it's a pattern brush. I'll click "Okay". Let's get rid of this because I no longer need it. "Control 0" to go back to my balloon. Now I'm going to my last palette because I want to see what's going on here. This is a balloon, this is the shading, this is the anchor ropes, and this is the detailing. It's in here. So let's go and have a look at it. Now I'm going to select all of these paths by clicking on the first and shift, clicking on each of the other so that they're all selected. Now I'm going to add my brushstroke to them by just clicking on the brush. Now, it's got a few problems here. One, the looping is pointing upwards and it's a little bit wide. So I'm going to double-click my brush and make some changes to it. First of all, I'm going to bring down the size of my brush so I get more loops and then I'm going to flip it across the path so it's underneath instead of on top and I'll click "Okay". Illustrator is telling me that I'm about to change existing strokes and I'm really happy to do that. That's what I wanted to do. So I'll click "Apply to Strokes". Now I have my loops in place. Let's just zoom in and see what's going on in here. You can see that I've got a little bit of untidiness happening at the very top of each of these ropes. So what I'm going to do is create a mini object that I can use to cover it up. Again, I'm in here with the circle tool, the ellipse. I'm going to add three of these shapes. I'm going to select all of them. I'm just going to invert this so that they're filled shapes with no stroke. Now I'm going to move them into position so they form a clover. Then I'm going to give it a bit of a stroke. I'm going to give it a red stroke, increase the point size a little bit. Let's apply one of these brush profiles to it. This one is a good one. I'll press letter "V", rotate the shape through 180 degrees and just put it into position here. So this is the little object that I'm going to use on the top of each of these ropes. So I'm going to select it and I'm just going to use the Pathfinder with window Pathfinder. I want to create a single object, but before I do, I'm going to have to expand this stroke here. So I'll click on it and choose "Object" "Expand Appearance". So now it's a shape like the others. We're just going to click on the "Unite" to create the shape that I am going to use. Drag and drop it into position here. Then I can copy it all the way across the shape. Now I could do that manually or I could go ahead and use my transformation effect, distort and transform, transform. A hundred and twenty seven points did it last time, so I'm thinking that that's going to work again this time. But I'm going to need five copies. I was thinking that's pretty good. So maybe a 126.5. You might think that the sliders have to be set below 100. That's not true. You can put whatever value you like in here and you can also use half, and you can actually use 126.1 if you want to position it correctly. So I'll click "Okay". Again with this object selected, "Object" "Expand Appearance".
7. Balloon Part 5: In this next step, you'll create the balloon basket using a shape and the pattern fill. Now I'm going to grab these and I'm going to put them all in this group. I'm just going to grab them so that they're all nicely together because I don't really need multiple groups for these anymore. Let's just get rid of that. This is giving me all my rope elements. Go to blend here of these rope elements and my shading and my colors. Now we're ready to go ahead and make the balloon basket. But right now, my balloon is probably a little bit on the big side. Let's make it a bit smaller object transform scale. I'm going to make it about 85 percent of its existing size and I'll just click "Okay." Now it's a bit smaller and I can move it up the screen a little bit. Now we can create the balloon basket, which we're going to do with the rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle here. Now, actually wanted it to be filled with brown. So let's just bring the color to the full and we'll add a brown color to it. Let's go to the appearance panel because it wants to be a weaker basket. We're going to need a second fill. I'm going to click "add new fill" and this is going to be my brown layer and this is going to be here, the film that I'm going to put the basket weave in. I've turned off my top fill so I can see what's going on and let's just click this drop down here and go and add my new patterns watch. Now, I got this from the Internet and I'll give you a link to find that yourselves. Now, this is too big. So again, with this fill layer selected, I'm going to shrink down the pattern effect, distort and transform. Now here, I don't want to transform the object. It's a fine size. What I do want to do is scale the strokes, effects and patterns. I'm going to bring it down to say, around 50 percent of its original size and you can see that's only affected the fill here, the pattern fill. Now let's go and turn our brown back on. Because I want to fill this brown layer actually with a gradient and then add a blend mode to it so that I can see the fill behind it. Let's go and get the gradient tool here and let's actually apply the gradient fill. What I want to do here is to go and get my brown color from my swatch. I'm going to here to add another brown color and then I want to add another stop here. So I'm going to hold the ALT key as I drag this stop away and create a third stop here, double-click it and I'm going to use a orange color for it. Now this is too big of a gradient for me. I want it to be just like highlighted on the very edge. So I am bringing in these markers that mark where the gradient is at 50 percent. This is yellow, at 50 percent it's halfway now between yellow and brown and by moving it closer to the yellow, I'm going to get a very state transition here which is exactly what I want. Let's just close this panel and right now we've got our brown gradient and basket wave and we want to mix the two. I'm going to target my brown gradient. Open up the panel here, go to opacity and set the blend mode to multiply. All that does is just multiply blends this layer with the one below. So you're getting a general darkening effect, but the gradient is also giving us a bit of dimension here. It says click away from here. I think I would like my basket to be a little bit more of an interesting shape when I target it though, you'll see that right now we're working only on the top fill. We want to make the entire basket a different shape. I'm going to target the path in the appearance panel and that's going to affect everything to do with this basket effect, warp, bulge. Now I'm going to choose a horizontal bulge. I'm going to add a bit of a bend to it. Not that much though and I'm going to add a little bit of vertical distortion, but that's all. We're previewing it so that we've got a rounded top, slightly flared out edges and a rounded bottom and I'll click "Okay," and that's a much more interesting basket. But right now the ropes aren't quite working for me, so I'm just going to choose object expand appearance. I think now I can just enlarge the basket just a little bit. Normally I would use a transformation scale to do that, but I'm not losing a lot in terms of the scale of this object by doing so. Let's just Zoom in here and just going to grab this and just move it into position. Now because this is still part of a blend, it's just having an effect on all the blend objects, the bottom edge of the blend objects Control zero. Just check that it hasn't affected anything else. Now what I want to do next is to just add a bottom edge to the balloon. I'm just going to click on probably the blend group and add it to that. I'm going to make sure that my fill color is this red color and I'm going to choose a rounded rectangle. I'm just going to add it in here and I can Zoom in to make sure that it's in the right place and click away from it. I'm a little concerned of its positioning right now in the layers palette because I want it to be behind the blend. The problem would be as if I changed the rope color than the rope would appear otherwise behind the bottom edge of the balloon and that's going to look plain wrong. Rearranging these in the last pallet ensures that the color of the ropes are going to appear over the top of this object rather than behind it. Let's press Control zero, and here's my finished balloon. I can now go ahead and create the background for the image.
8. Balloon Part 6: In this video, you'll see how to create the image sky, the clouds, and the foreground. What's important right now is that we start working with some new layers. I'm going to add a new layer to the object, and I'm going to also just lock this balloon down. Any change we make now are not going to affect this balloon layer. I want a rectangle of size of the art board and I could go ahead and just drag out a rectangle, but I have a script that does that. I'm just going to run my script. You can look out for my video on scripting in Illustrator if you want to learn a bit more about scripts, or you can just hand draw your rectangle. I have my background selected. This is going to be my background. Now what I want to do is to fill it with a gradient. I already have a gradient prepared here that I'm going to use. I'm just going to click on it and let's go and see what this gradient looks like. It's a gradient from a yellow, or a green if you like, to a light blue. At one end it's a 100 percent opaque and at this end is partially transparent. Well, it's actually down to an opacity of only 30 percent. It's also a radial gradients. It's giving us something a little bit interesting in the background, more interesting than a solid color would be. Now I can also just move this a little out of the center so that the lightest edge here is actually where the lighter edge of my balloon is going to be. Let's just click away from this. This background now is at the top of the image, that's why it's showing over the top of the balloon. Let's just move it below the balloon layer. Now we're going to add some cloud. With this layer targeted, I'm going to turn the lock on, on the background so I don't get in the way of that. I'm going to start drawing some circles. I can draw those anywhere. I'm just going to start drawing them out here. I want three or four of them of different sizes. Let's just go and grab all of the shapes and let's create a new gradient for them. Go and grab this gradient and start working on it. I want this to be a little bit more white and blue rather than blue and yellow, so I'm just going to click here let's make this a white edge. We're going to keep the blue that we have. But for the white, I'm just going to increase the opacity to maybe around 70 percent. We have a gradient that's white on the inside and blue on the outside. Now let's position the circles into something of a cloud shape. Now we're going to add a base to it. So let's just go and grab a rounded rectangle and just add that to the shape. I'm going to make it into a single shape using the shape builder tool. First of all, I'm going to select over all of these objects here and then go and get the shape a builder a tool which shares a position with the live paint tools. But the shape builders that I want, going to start joining up the shapes that I want to be all one shape. As I do, the gradient is actually going to be reapplied to the shape rather than to the individual objects. Now this is the bit I don't want, so I'm going to press "Alt" as I drag into that to remove it. Press the letter "V" to go back to the selection tool. I want to work a little bit more on this gradient, I think I need it to be a little bit wider. Having done that, let's go and drop the cloud into the sky and see how it's working. Well, I'm still not happy with that. I think this is probably too opaque. Maybe even go for a linear gradient that might give me a bit more of the effect I'm looking for. Having done that, I'm just going to duplicate this. Hold the "Alt Key" as I drag the clouds away. I'm going to create a few of these clouds. Then do the same down here. A few clouds behind the balloon as well, and maybe one up here can always reverse this one too, just to get a slightly different effect. But for this one, I'll probably want to reverse its gradient. Now we've got our clouds and they're going to be here. This is going to lock those down as well. Any changes we make right now are not going to affect the clouds either. But I want to unlock this background layer because I just want to drag it onto the new layer icon so I can get two copies of it, going to lock the bottom one and I'm going to target this one, and just drag it down. Because I'm going to use this for the hills. It's just easier to do without having to drag out another shape since it's already been created for me. Now let's go and add or fix the gradient that's applied here. I'm going to click on this. I want it to be a linear gradient. I'm thinking a dark green to a lighter green. Let's just turn this to 90 degrees. Now we've got this color here at the top. Let's go and make this a green color. If it's too much of a green, we can always just adjust down it's opacity. Then at the bottom we're going to add another color. Again, let's add perhaps a lighter green still. Again, this time we might set its opacity to a 100, maybe 80. We can also adjust this so that instead of it being just a solid color, we can blended into layer underneath go and get this fill layer and change its opacity and perhaps set it to multiply or to another one of these blend modes, one of which is going to give us a different look to our illustrations, so you can work out which of these blend modes is going to work best for you, and you can also adjust the opacity. For now, I'm just going to call that good because I don't want to waste too much more time on it.
9. Balloon Part 7: In this video, we'll finish off the illustration. We're going to add some mountains and some trees, and we're going to create a second differently colored balloon, by copying the original and recoloring it. Now I'm going to go to the pen tool and click the add anchor point tool. I'm just going to click and add some anchor points here that I can use to create mountains. I have these created. Now I'm going to go to the direct selection tool and start creating just a few mountains here. Now if I click on the anchor tool, click on each of these anchors and click this option here. I can just round off the shapes without having to really do much work. If I want to make them look a little bit different I can, but this is just going to give me some rolling hills. Again, I think I'll work a bit at darkening this, but for now let's just lock that layer and we can go and add some trees now. I already had some trees created in my swatches, from the symbols panel here, and I'm just going to drag out a tree here, break the connection so we can just have a look at it. This tree has just been created in Illustrator from a range of shapes. All I did was use the stroke tool to drag out this stroke shape, expanded and then create the background for the tree or the tree elements. I had saved it to this symbol. I find it handy to create objects like this that I can use over and over again. That's basically the tree shape that we're going to use. I'm going to drag a new symbol out of there, the right size, break the link and just make it a little bit bigger. Now holding down the Alt or option key, I can drag trees into my landscape. I could resize this if I want to for appearing further away or closer to the viewer. I'm thinking just to finish off, I'll lock this entire background layer. Let's unlock the balloon layer. Let's select it and let's just rotate it so that the balloon is on an angle and looks a little bit more like it's flying through the air. At this point, I'll be locking everything down and saving my file. Now one of the other things that I might be wanting to consider right now is what this balloon might look like if it were a different color. I'm just going to unlock this layer and make a duplicate of it so that we have two balloons. I'm going to hide this one, lock it and hide it so that right now we're working on a duplicate of our original piece of art. In the swatches panel, I'm going to go here and create a new color group, and just click okay. I'm grabbing it from the selected artwork. With the object still selected, I'm going into the recolor options. I'm just going to click on that. Illustrator has set up all the colors that I have in my artwork. I'm just going to click edit. Here are the colors and I can remap them. I can just drag around to alter the colors in this artwork. I can experiment to say if I could get perhaps a more interesting balloon or a balloon that has some different colors in that it might be more of what I want to be using. The mere fact that I've chosen colors in the original, doesn't mean I have to actually stick with them. If I drag everything closer to the middle, you'll find I get a more pastel balloon. We can also unlink these colors. If I like everything except a particular color, I can unlink these colors, and this green is what I'm targeting right now. I can take it somewhere else in the colors, so I can do something different with it. Now if I like that, I'm just going to click okay, and yes, save the swatches to a new color group. We've now got a new color group for this particular balloon. We still got the original balloon because we saved a copy of it on its own layer. Let's take this one and let's resize it, object, transform, scale. Let's make it say about 45 percent of its original size. Click okay. We'll move it further out, and then we can go back and bring in our original because we're going to need to rearrange the layers so that the smaller balloon is behind the larger blown. Thinking also, I just might change its rotation and a little bit. There you have the possibilities of creating original art in Illustrator. One thing you've learned, you've seen how to use the 3D tools. You've also seen how to create a brush and a landscape look to an image.
10. Balloon Addendum Video - wicker basket pattern: Since I recorded this class on making a hot air balloon in illustrator, the basket wave pattern that I suggested you use in the video has disappeared from online, so it's not accessible any longer. Here is a solution to that issue. I've got my balloon here and I've got all the way up to the stage of adding this brown rectangle. Now I need the basket wave. I'm going to give you a link to download this particular set of basket textures. There are six of them here, and we're going to use this one here. This is how we're going to use this particular basket wave pattern for our balloon. First of all, we're going to select on each of the basket waves that we don't want and we'll press the "Delete" key. We're going to get rid of everything except the basket wave that we do want. We're going to select this, drag over to select it. Then I'm going to click here on the Artboard Tool. I'm going to double-click it. That's going to open the art board options. From the preset here, I want to select "Fit To Selected Art", and click "Okay". That shrinks the art board down to the exact size of this particular pattern. I'm going to select the selection talks. I don't want to have the art board tool selected any longer, and I'm going to save this for the web just as a JPEG file. It's going to be a bitmap image because the balloon basket is so small, it's not going to matter using a JPEG image as the texture. I'll choose "File" and then Save for Web. From the drop-down list here I'm going to save it as a JPEG image, I can save it at maximum or very high. That's just fine. I'm just going to click "Save". I'm going to save it at the size that is suggested. Now I've already done that once, but I'm going to call this basket texture jpg, just so you can see that this is going to work exactly as shown. This is being saved now as a JPEG image, I'm now going to close this basket wave textures file. I don't want to save it because I deleted all the other pieces out of it. I'm just going to discard it. Back in the balloon image, we need to get that particular texture and add it to our swatches, so I'll choose File and then Place. I'll navigate to where I stored the basket wave pattern. Here's the one that we created just a minute ago, and I'm going to disable the link option, because I want this to be embedded in the file. I'll click "Place" and I'm just going to drag out a small spot for it here in the document. Now this is only temporary, so I'm going to open the swatches panel. I'm going to drag and drop the basket wave pattern into the swatches panel. I now no longer need it in my documents. I'm just going to select it and press "Delete". Now let's see how we'd add it to the rectangle. I'm going to click on the rectangle and open up the Appearance panel. This is exactly the same as in the video. I'm going to add a new fill, so I'm just going to click "Add New Fill". But the fill that I used in the video is the underneath one. I'm going to select on this one, I can disable this top one for now, but I'm going to select on this underneath one and I'm going to fill it with my basket wave texture. I'll click the down pointing arrow here and go and select my new patent swatch. Here is the basket wave texture inside the basket. Now, if we want to re-size that, we can do that, Object, Transform, Scale. We don't want to scale the objects. I'm going to de-select transform objects and leave selected transform patterns. Make sure preview is set on. Now I can just adjust the size that I want for this basket wave pattern. I can select whatever I like, and click "Okay". Then following back with the tutorial, you're going to select on this topmost fill and go ahead and fill that with your gradient and then blend it back into the basket wave texture underneath. But hopefully this will just solve the problem with the missing basket wave texture.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
