Easy Isometric Art in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ course

1. Intro to Isometric Drawing in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello and welcome to this course on the basics of isometric drawing in Illustrator. My name's Helen Bradley, and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 250 courses here on Skillshare and over 102,000 student enrollments. In this video, I'll show you how to get started with isometric drawing in Illustrator, and we're going to do it all without using a grid. We'll start with a quick explanation of what makes isometric drawing so special and then look at a quick and easy method for making basic boxy isometric art. Then we'll look at shapes such as angled roofs and cylinders, and then as we progress to more complex shapes still, you'll learn a second method that makes those projections easier to make. By the end of the class, you'll have a good foundation for drawing isometric art that you can use for drawings, creating logos, and infographic elements too. Enough from me if you're ready, let's get started creating isometric art in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 What is isometric drawing?: Before we start with this class, let's have a look and say what isometric drawings typically are used for. Over here is a set of infographic elements. They're all drawn as isometric shapes. Another popular use for isometric drawing is in buildings. This is another one from the vector EC stock site. You can also use them for building interiors. It's a really nice way of drawing building interiors. Other people use them for mock-ups, for website elements and all things. This is the thing that we're going to be creating in this class. But let's have a look and see how isometric art differs from perspective art. I've got a cube here that's been drawn in perspective. When I turn on these lines here that I've created, that I've drawn through the edges of these planes, you will see that they join up and they join up at a vanishing point. Now, the lines through these planes too would also join up, but just a long way away. In perspective drawing, if we were to measure this line here, it would be longer than this line here. Because this line would then gets smaller the further it was drawn towards the vanishing point. Now, isometric art is really very different to this. In isometric art, when you draw the lines through these planes none of them intersect, they just kept going until infinity and so the length of this line here and the length of this line here are identical and so too is the length of this line and this line and this line. When you draw an isometric projection, everything is a little bit more, even inside, it's a little perhaps more cartoony. But this is the style of drawing that we're going to be creating in this class. 3. Pt 2 Create a Set of Actions: The very first task that we have for isometric drawing is to create three actions that are going to speed things up for us enormously. But before we start these actions there's something I want to show you, and that is the correct scaling. If you're researching isometric drawing on the Internet you'll find that people are mentioning two scaling percentages, and these are the two percentages. The one that we're using is correct. When I create an isometric shape using this scaling everything joins together pixel perfectly. This one is not joining together as well. Let me just show you by selecting "View Outline". You'll see here that these two shapes are not intersecting neatly, whereas these three are intersecting perfectly. The isometric projection scaling that we're going to use is 86.602. We are going to be accurate to three decimal places because even though it looks like Illustrator isn't accurate to three decimal places, it is. We're not going to be using this scaling because it's not correct. I just thought we clarify that before we begin. I now have a document ready to go. I've just created a 500 by 500 pixel document, yours can be any size that you like. I have a green selected. I'm going to draw a square and it's going to be 100 by 100. It doesn't really matter how big your square is, it's just going to obviously need to fit in your document. I'm going to Alt or Option-Drag a duplicate away, and then also Option-Drag another one away, and I'm going to recolor this. I've already got some global colors setup here. I do have a class on creating global color schemes that you might like to look at if you're curious about how to do this, but basically right now you could use any colors you like. The important thing now is that we're going to create the actions that are going to convert these squares into the correct projected shapes. For this we need to be dead accurate, so we're going to do these one at a time. I'm going to select the first square here, and for this we're going to make the left projection. This is going to be the top, this is going to be the right. With this selected, I'm going to my Actions dialogue or my Actions palette by choosing Window and then Actions. I've cleared everything out of here for today except for the default actions, but we're going to create a new set and these are going to be isometric and I'll Just click "Okay". Then we're going to create our first actions, so we'll click "Create New Action," and this is going to be IsometricLeft. You can use spaces in these names, that's just fine. I'm not going to bother. You can also set a function key strike. I'm not going to do that either. I'm just going to assign a color to it, I'll click "Record." We need to do three things with each of these shapes: we need to do a scale, we need to do a shear, and we need to do a rotate and we're going to do them in order. The very first thing is our scale. With our shapes selected we'll choose Object, Transform, and then Scale. The scale is going to be non-uniform. We're going to set the horizontal to 100 percent and the vertical scale is going to be 86.602, that number that we talked about earlier. So 100 percent on horizontal, 86.602 on vertical make sure non-uniform is selected, and click "Okay." Then you'll end up with a slightly smashed rectangle, your square has now become a rectangle. The next thing we need to do is shear with Object, Transform, and then Shear. We're going to shear in a minus 30 degree direction. There's two angles here, it's the shear angle you want. Type in a negative sign and then 30 and you'll see that it'll shear in this direction, click "Okay". Next, we're going to rotate it. So with it selected we'll choose Object, Transform, and then Rotate. We're going to rotate through a negative 30. Again, minus and then 30 and you should end up with something that looks like this. If you don't end up with something that looks like this, you need to go back and start over again. I'll just click "Okay". We have now finished this, so I'm going to click here to stop playing or recording. If you want to for neatness sake you can at this point go and choose Object, Transform Reset Bounding Box, and that just puts the bounding box square over your shape. We're going to create our top projection. We're going to select the middle of our objects. We're going to click the Create New Action icon, and we're going to call this Isometric Top. Again, we'll give it a color. This one's going to be green, I'll click "Record". For the top view we're going to do the same scaling, so with our shape selected, Object, Transform, and then Scale. The scaling setting from last time is still selected, so all we need to do is to click "Okay". Next, we're going to do a shear, Object, Transform Shear, and for this we're going to do a 30 degree shear angle. It's going to be a positive 30 not a negative 30 this time. You should have something that looks like this, click "Okay". Then we're going to do our rotate with Object, Transform, and then Rotate. We're going to rotate minus 30, it's already set to minus 30. You should have a shape that looks like this diamond shape here, click "Okay". Again, you can reset your bounding box should you wish to do so. This doesn't actually get recorded in the action, and we'll just click "Stop Playing Recording". We now have two of our shapes and now we need to create this right-hand projection. Select the last of your squares, click on the Create New Action, this is going to be isometric right. Again, I'll assign a color to it and do violet this time, click "Record". Again, we're going to do that exact same scale. All of these objects are going to be scaled the exact same amount, Object, Transform Scale. Again, non-uniform. Horizontal 100 percent, vertical 86.602, click "Okay". We'll do our shearing, so Object, Transform, and then Shear. This is going to be sheared 30 degrees. This is already set up from the last time that we shared it, so we'll just click "Okay". Then we do our rotation Object, Transform, and then Rotate, and this is going to be rotated 30 degrees. You can see that this shape that we've now created is going to slot in perfectly there, so I'll click "Okay". I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Reset Bounding Box just to neaten it up, and I'm going to stop recording my action. I now have three actions, and what the actions do is that they're going to create these projections for us. Any shape that we pick up and run the action on is going to be converted to an isometric projection in that particular direction, either left, or right, or a top. We haven't actually created an action that makes these particular shapes, it's going to make any shape into an isometric projection. Well, pretty much more shapes anyway. I'm going to give you a document that's got all those rotations in it, in the Class Resources area if you're curious. At this point you should have your isometric left-top and right actions created. As in the slide the reason why we're doing it this way and we're not using the 3D effects although we are going to use them a bit later on in this course, is that this is a really simple way of creating shapes. If you use the 3D projections then we have to unscramble a lot of different elements to put everything back together again, and for simple shapes this is by far the easiest way to do them. Once you've got your actions, you've got everything you need for creating some basic illustrations. 4. Pt 3 Create a Basic Building: It's now time to build a basic building and also to test our new actions. I'm going to delete my cube and I'm going to re-create it, testing the actions as I do so. I'm starting off with a 100 by 100 pixel cube, and I'm going to associate one of the colors with it. I'll alter option drag two copies away and I'm going to re-color each of those. Now you can color yours any way that you like. You don't have to use global colors or teens or anything like that, doesn't matter. Let's go to the actions palette. Now couple of things here. These actions are persistent, so they will be available in the next document that you create. But If you want to be a 100 percent sure you can back them up, select the group, click the flyout menu and choose save actions, go and save them somewhere that makes sense to you. I've just dumped mine on my desktop for now. It is an aia file that is an action's file. Now that we're ready to use our actions, we're actually going into Button Mode. Hit the flyout menu and go and choose Button Mode because it makes your actions a little bit easier, not only to find, but also to run because you don't have to click a play button, as soon as you click the button here, the action's going to run. Let's select the first of our squares and we are going to make this isometric-left, so I'll just click on that. This is going to be top isometric-top and this is going to be right, isometric-right. All the actions are working just perfectly. I'll select over all of these. I want to reset the bounding boxes on each of them, so I'll just click "Reset Bounding Box". Now I'll go and put my cube back together again. I'm just looking for the intersection indicators here. To double-check that the cube is correct, we'll choose view and then outline. Now it's not correct, it's a little bit off right now. What I'll do is go back to my preview. I'm going to select the top pace and that's not going to move, we're going to set it so it doesn't move in just a minute. I'll shift click on this side. When I go to the last panel, you'll say that I've got two of the three elements selected. I'll go to the align panel, make sure that these aligned to options are visible, and you can do that by clicking this little indicator here that turns them on and off. I need to align to a key objects. I'm going to click this top one, to make it the key object and then we can set aligned to key object. What we want to do is line both of these up to the right. We'll click here on "Horizontal Align Right". Now you probably want to click it a couple of times just in case that doesn't work the first time. Now we'll do the same thing over here. Click on the top, shift click on the left-hand side, right-click on the top so it's the key object, it's not going to move. We already lined it up to this one, so we don't want it to move because it's our anchor point of view. We'll go back, make sure aligned to key object is selected this time we'll choose Horizontal Align Left. Now when we go back to our view outline, you can say that there's no double lines here, everything's lined up perfectly. For the proof that 86.602 scale is working perfectly. Let's choose view preview. Now I want to make my building much taller than it is, I don't want it to be a cube. I'm just going to drag it down here and let's go to the [inaudible]. Now with the [inaudible] , I'm going to drag sort of circle so I gather up and select all the anchor points at the top of this shape. I'll go to the direct selection tool that's really important and then just start dragging up. You can say that I'm just bringing these four anchor points with me and the base of the building is anchored down as it should be. If I hold the shift key, I can only drag in a perfectly vertical direction, so my building is going to be straight. Having done this, it's prudent to group these objects together so they don't move, we'll choose object and then group. The next thing we'll do is to build some windows up on this building. For that, I'm going to the group selection tool. I'm going to click here on this panel and choose edit copy, edit paste. When you choose edit copy, edit paste, you'll find that the pasted object jumps out of the group that decides it's having to get it back out of there in a minute. Let me just move it across here. Now we're going to create our windows from this shape because it is in the correct projection. It's just a simple way of doing it without having to do any fancy math. I'm going to select my shape and flip this so it has a outline or a stroke but no fill. Then I'm going to the direct selection tool, I got to click away from everything. What I wanted to do is to select just these two sides. When I drag over it and select that, I've actually got this line and this line selected, but not this one and not this one. I'm going to choose Edit Copy and then Edit Paste. While I've still got these selected, I'm just going to drag them somewhere where I can find them. Let me just enlarge my art board a little bit. It's getting a little bit short on space here. I've got these lines and these lines. I'm going to create two blends from them, but we're going to encounter a problem when we create our blends. Let's have a look at that. I'm going to select both of these objects and then choose "Object", "Blend" and then "Make". Here's the problem. Even if you don't see it straight away, if you double-click on the blend tool and set it to specified steps, and click preview and start increasing your steps, you're going to say that there is an issue with this blend. I'm just go click okay for a minute. The problem is that this line is going in this direction and this line is going in this direction because they were part of a square. Originally it was drawn with a direction and the lines have kept that direction. That's why we're getting the twist. I am going to choose "Object", then "Blend" and "Release" because that's going to take us back to where we were to begin with. What we need to do is to reverse one of these lines so it goes in the opposite direction and then that blend will be perfect. I'm going to select this one and choose object's path and then reverse path direction. Now nothing's changed visibly except everything has changed in the underlying line, because now when we create our blend, it's going to work perfectly. Now it's a really good idea to know and understand that that's going to happen and when you see that happen, you know how to fix it because it will happen in other circumstances. It's not just peculiar to this particular project, it has happened to me on a number of occasions. When you see something unexpected happening, you now know how to fix it and you know what the cause of it was. Now I'm going to work out just roughly how big I want my windows to be. My windows are going to fit in between these two lines. If you want big windows, make less lines, if you want little windows, make more lines. I think this is perfect, I'll click "Okay". Then I'll choose "Object", "Blend", "Expand", and that just expands my blend into the individual lines. Now let's go and make a blend with these two lines and of course we're going to have the exact same problem. Because we know we're going to have a problem, let's just reverse this line direction, "Object Path", and then "Reverse Path Direction". Now we'll select over both of these and choose "Object", "Blend", and then "Make". Now illustrator has gone clear overboard here in creating this blend. But it doesn't matter what you see there, you're just going to double-click on the blend tool, go to specified steps, turn preview on, and then adjusted to suit. Again, we're looking at a grid that's going to create our windows. I want my windows to be fairly narrow. Just click "Okay" and I'm going to choose "Object", "Blend" and then "Expand". Now we've got a series of vertical lines and a series of horizontal lines. I'm going to bring them back and put them together in a grid. Each of these is a group of lines and that's going to help us because what I want to do is to make sure they're lining up perfectly. I'm going to center them and I'm going to also adjust their tops. That means that they're aligned perfectly to each other. We're going to select over these lines, we're going to the pathfinder. If you don't see it, choose "Window" and then "Pathfinder", and we're going to choose divide. Now at this point everything turns off, that's just fine. If you want to see your lines, you can go in and apply a color to them. But these aren't the actual windows, what we have to do now is to create the windows and what we're going to do is do an offset so that we're actually picking up a shape that is inside every one of these boxes. So "Object", "Path", and we'll choose "Offset Path". Now you'll find that offset path is probably set to something like 10 on your computer. I was going click "Preview", it's probably going to look something like this. You need a negative value. So we're going to start with say negative one, and then just check and see what we've got. Well, these would be quite big windows. I'm going to bring mine down a little more, so I'm going to choose negative two. These would be the windows on my building, but it's in the middle, not the lines on the outside. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now don't do anything with your mouse at this point because you need this selected. Because what you're going to do is choose "Edit" and then "Cut". So you're going to cut all those little shapes out that you just created and then you'll choose "Edit", "Paste". These are the windows on your building and this is your grid, so you don't need your grid any longer, so I'm going to select it and delete it. But these are my building windows. If I want to have filled we knows rather than outlines then I can flip the stroke and the fill. But of course, since this came from this building face here, it's going to be the exact same color, so it's not going to show up. Let's just go and get a slightly lighter color for our windows and I am going to move them into position. There are the windows on one side of the building. Now the bad news about this is that each of those windows is an individual objects. What I'm going to do is just choose "Edit", "Undo", "Move". When I do, I'm taken back to the last move I made, but also all these windows are selected. What I'm gong to do at this point is choose "Object" and then "Group", and then finesse their position. Putting them in a group just means that they're easier to handle in the layers palette. It's also going to advantage me because what I want to do is to use these windows to populate this side of the building. When they're in a group, I can just reflect them, "Object", "Transform", "Reflect". I'm going to reflect over the vertical. You can say that this is now a projection. It's going to work perfectly on this side of the building. But we want the ones we had plus the new one, so I'll click "Copy". Then because they're already selected, I'm just going to move my windows into position on this side of the building. I can select both groups of objects and just click on the vertical aligned top to make sure that they're aligned perfectly. 5. Pt 4 Add some fine details: Now that we've got our building, it's time to stand it on something, so we're going to give it a ground. That's going to be a rounded rectangle. I'll just go to the rounded rectangle tool and we'll drag out a sort of square with rounded corners. I'm just holding the Shift key as I do that. Now I'm going to change its color. Just let me go and get a light color for it. Now for this shape to work with our building, we're going to need to project it as well, but we need to work out what projection to use. The projection that we use is going to be the top. Think in terms of your viewer, a bird sitting over the top of this building. You'll be seeing the top of the building and then you would be seeing the surface of the building is sitting on. That would tell you that this also has to be projected with a top projection. So select the shape and go to your Actions and run your top projection action on it. I'll choose "Object", and then "Transform", "Reset Bounding box" and then I'm going to move it into position. But of course, I drew it last thoughts going over the top of the building. Back in the last pallet, I'm just going to drag it underneath everything. If I need to center it, I can select the base and the basic building, but don't select the windows because you don't want to center those. Then make sure that the building is the object, that is the key objects. Click on it a second time. That means that the base is going to move the building won't. You don't want the building to move because if the building moves, the windows are going to be out. I'm just going to Center this. Now, I'll just move it down the illustration a bit, so it looks a bit squarer in the document. The other thing I'd like to do is to add inbuilt here so that we've got a small amount of the building that is inset from the rest. Then we'll put a piece on the top of its outset. It's back to this same size. This will give us some practice in scaling these objects. What I need is a couple of copies of my building. I'll select my building layer, and also option Drag a copy away. I'm going to do that for a second copy. Now the second copy I'm just going to hide for now, lock down and hide and we're going to focus on this one. We'll go back to our Lasso tool. I'm going to Lasso over the top elements in this drawing, go to the Direct Selection tool, and holding the Shift key, just drag this all the way down to create a very small element here. Now we want this to be inset, so I'm going to scale it. I'll hold Alt and Shift on a PC that's option Shift on a Mac and just scale it in a little bit. Then we'll go and select the object and move it up here on top of the building. We'll go and unlock and make visible a second copy of the building. Again we go back to the Lasso tool again Lasso just these top elements. Go back to the direct selection tool and drag them down holding the Shift key as we do so it's constrained. This piece is going to be a little bit bigger. Now we need the whole of this paste so we will move it back up on top of the building. Now it's in the wrong order. In the last pallet is should be on top of the inset pace. So we'll just move it on top so that now when we move things into position we are saying everything that we should be saying. Now I don't think that these pieces are lined up correctly. So what I'm going to do is select all of the three objects for building and the two inset paces. Make sure that the building is set to be the key objects. We don't want everything else to move and click the Center icon. Once I've got this in position, I can just hit the upper arrow case if I want to move it upwards a little bit. Now, I think that would work better if this middle one were colored a bit, so I am going to locate it. This is this pace here. I'm going to select it and I'm going to the Recolor Artwork tool, because that will allow me to re-color this path a little bit. Let me choose "Edit". I'm just going to adjust the brightness of this. I think if I make it a little bit brighter, it's going to be a bit more visible, maybe a little bit less saturated. So I've got a sort of change of color happening in here that's making this inset pace a little bit more obvious. So I'll click "OK". 6. Pt 5 Make a pointy roof: Now that we've got a handle on creating basic shapes, let's have a look at a different approach. I'm going to pull the roof off this building, so I'm just going to delete that piece. On this piece, I'm going to put angled top. Now for the angled top, we're going to need a triangle so I'm going here to the Polygon Tool. I'm going to click once in the document and set the number of sides to three. Because I don't know how why this needs to be, I'm just going to set it to say, something like 200, and I'll click "Okay". Now this gives me a nice equilateral triangle. We need to divide this in two, so first of all, let me just lock the building down so nothing there is going to be affected by what we're about to do. I'm going to get the Line Segment Tool, and I'm going to draw a line through the middle of my triangle. I'm holding the "Shift" key as I do, so it's a perfectly vertical line. Now my line has no stroke color, so let me just deal with that. We're going to select the line and the triangle and just make sure that they're centered. They need to be centered perfectly. Then we'll go back and just select the line, not the triangle just the line, and choose "Object", "Path", and "Divide Objects Below". That just divides the triangle into two pieces, so we've got a left side and a right side. We're going to change the color on one of these sides, so it's just a bit easier to see what we're working with. Now we're going to do our projections on these two triangles. This one's going to be a left projection; this one's going to be a right projection. Select the leftmost triangle, go to "Window" and then "Actions", and then run your isometric left on that triangle. Select the second one and run your isometric right on it. You'll see that you'd get two shapes that are going to butter up perfectly together and that are going to form the roof of our building. Before we do that, let's just turn our Bounding Box into a square Bounding Box. Now that we've got that, we can align these two perfectly by selecting over both of them. Go to the Align panel. Make sure that you've got just one selected again as a key object, and then you'll click in here, in the "Distribute Spacing" area. You want to reduce the spacing between these two objects to zero, so we've got zero selected. I'll just click "Horizontal Distribute Space". I can also adjust the vertical align top just to make sure that they are perfectly aligned to each other. I'll select over both of them and I'm going to choose "Object", "Group" so they're going to travel together. Now you can say it's way too big for my building, so I'm just going to hold "Alt" and "Shift", that's "Option", "Shift" on a Mac, and just scale it down. Now at this point, I can finesse its size a little bit more accurately. What I'm going to do is select this top piece of the building, so that's this piece here. When I do, I can read off its width, so its width is a 144.337. I'll grab this group and I'm going to adjust its width to 144.337. Because this icon is selected, the width and height are going to be constrained so when I tab away, both the width and height of this shape are going to be adjusted together. Now it's going to sit perfectly on the shape that we already had created. As I look now, it's not properly centered, so let me just unlock the building for a minute. I'm going to select my top, and I'm going to "Shift" click on my building, and then re-select my building so it's the key object. Then I'll go to the "Align" panel. I'm going to click on "Horizontal Align Center", and that just makes sure that the roof of the building is perfectly centered on top of the building. 7. Pt 6 Stacked Objects Two Ways: Let's look now at how we would create objects like this. Here we've got a set of stacked objects and there's some transparency going on between them. Here we've got a series of objects that are getting smaller as they're stacking on top of each other. The method we'll use to create these objects is pretty much what we've been doing so far. This method is very different. We'll start with a brand new document. It's going to be 500 pixels by 500 pixels in size and I am using RGB color mode. We'll go back and create our 100 by 100 pixels square. It's going to have a fill but no stroke. I'm going to give it a fill color that is a sort of turquoise blue. I'll make two more copies of this by holding all to all option as I drag duplicates away. Each of these is going to be colored a different color, or at least a different tone of the base color. Then we'll go back and access our isometric actions, which is in Window and then Actions. I'll make sure that I have Button mode selected and select this one. It'll be isometric left, isometric top, and then isometric right. We don't need our actions any longer. I'm going to put these into position and then I'm going to double-check it the way that we did when we first created it. This is going to be pretty important because we're actually going to save this one so we can use it over and over again. Again, I'm going to my appearance panel. I'm going to use this key object setting and I'm going to make sure that this is all nicely lined up. I'll double-check by choosing View and then outline and make sure I don't have any double lines which I don't. We're going to save this so that we can use it over and over again. I'll select it and go to the symbols palette. If you don't see your symbols palette choose Window and then symbols. Click the "New Symbol Icon". You can give your symbol a name and then just click "Okay". You don't need any other settings. Now if you wanted to save this so you can reuse it, you're going to get rid of all the other symbol. Click on the first shift, click on the last and just delete those. So the only symbol is this isometric cube goes to the flyout menu. Save symbol Library, and then give it a name. You can say I've been saving this, so I'm just going to call this I cube this time. I'll click "Save". Now in future, in any document in Illustrator, you can access your symbol by going to the flyout menu, choose open symbol Library, and then go to user-defined. Now right now the only one I can get access to is the cube because I haven't closed and reopened illustrator since I created those other two symbol files. But as soon as you close down Illustrator and reopen it, all, the symbol files that you have created in that location, which is special to Illustrator, will appear in that list. Let's see how we could create that basic stacked set of cubes using this cube as the basis for it. But let's do it with the symbol so we can see how we would work with symbols. You'll open up your symbols document, drag your cube into your document. Now, right now this is a symbol, it's got a little symbol marker on it. You'll click here on break link to symbol. You can make changes to this cube without affecting this one. If you go to the last pallet, you'll see that we have a group here. In fact, it's a group inside a group. It's a little bit annoying that symbols work this way because we didn't even group that object, but we ended up with groups inside groups as a result. What we need to do is to break these out at this point, object ungroup and object ungroup. Because I want access to these individual shapes right now. I'll go to the Lasso Tool and I'm going to lass it with the top of this object so we can get access to these anchor points that are controlling the height of the object. Go to the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool, start dragging down, and add the "Shift" key as you do. Now this is going to mark out how big the filled-in area of this illustration is going to be. You can have equal sizes for the filled-in pieces or you could have a larger piece that's filled-in and a smaller piece that's transparent. It's up to you. You're going to select either all of these and regroup them. Now we'll make a duplicate of this group, Alt or Option drag a duplicate away. I'm just going to place it into position. You can say that we're not seeing it very well because it is fully opaque, so at this point we could make this semi-transparent. I'll go to the opacity up here with my shape selected, and I'll just reduce the opacity. Now we can sort of see through this. I'm thinking about 50 percent opacity is going to look pretty good. We'll select over both of these Alt or Option drag a duplicate away. If you hold the "Shift" key as you do it, you're going to move in a perfectly vertical direction. Let's go and do that again. Just make sure that when we do that we're only copying the top two shapes. Hold down the "Alt" or "Option" key and hold the "Shift" key so it's constrained to a perfectly vertical direction. We actually don't want the transparent one at the top, so I'm just going to remove that. I'm left with three layers of opaque objects and two layers that are semi-transparent. As I suggested, you could make these semi-transparent ones a different height. You would just have created a second one from the original symbol Cube that was a different height. I'm going group these so that they don't move. I'll just choose object and then group. Let's do the cast shadow for this. Now we know that this basic shape was 100 by 100 because that's how we created it. When we dragged it out of the symbols palette, we didn't change its size. 100 by 100 is going to be perfect for our cast shadow. Now we want our shadow to appear out here. It's going to have the shape of the top of this illustration. It's exactly the same as the top. If we put it out here, it's going to be a perfect shadow. We're going to need to do an isometric top transformation. Window and then Actions. I'll select my object and select isometric top and that's going to fit perfectly alongside the edge of our mini building, if you like, but it doesn't look like a shadow yet. With its selected, I'll select a gradient for its fill. We'll work on how we need to rotate this gradient, so it's going to look right and something like 120 is probably going to be best. So 120 is working really nicely. It's dark along this edge, light along this edge. We'll re-select the shape that's going to be our gradient and we're going to change the color. I'll double-click here on the gradient slider, and I want to sample a color from the object itself. I'll go down to the eyedropper and let's select this as my color. I want the end of the shadow here to be transparent. I'll click here on the white stop and I'm going to set its opacity to zero. That means it's transparent. It looks white because it's on a white background. But if it was on a different color, it would be fully transparent at this point, at this edge, and it would be decreasing in transparency, increasing on opacity. The closer it got to the actual building could manipulate your gradient to get the effect that you want. You could even decrease the opacity of the starting stop of the gradient to say something like 75. It's not fully opaque. Do whatever you like. I would however, make sure to put the path that is the gradient inside the group that has the object in it because you're going to want those two to travel together so that when you move the building, its shadow goes with it. Before we make our set of stacked objects, let's have a look and increase some contrast in this object. I'll select over it and click the "Recolor Artwork" tool. There are only three colors in this object in the gradient and in all of faces, some of them are transparent or partially transparent, others are opaque, but there're only basically three colors. I'll double-click this one because it's the darkest and I'm going to make it darker, so I'll choose a darker color for it. I've got recolor artwork selected so we can see the result on the image itself. Let's just go and darken up these colors as well, and perhaps lighten this one a little bit. This is a better rendition for our illustration but if you wanted, for example, this side to be lighter and this side to be darker, it would be easy to do as well. You could just change the colors, but you could also drag these down and up so that you're reversing the color. You can drag any of these long bars into different positions and that's going to change the colors that are applied to that portion of the image. Let's have a look at our stacked objects for this, we're going to use a series of rectangles, but they're going to be solid filled rectangles. Let's just go and pick a stacking color to use here. I'll click in the document, height of our rectangle is going to be 25 and our width is going to be 150. The next rectangle is going to be shorter, so I'm going to make that 125, but the height is going to remain the same. Then, the next one will be a 100 and the one after that will be 75. They're just decreasing in size as they go up. I'll select over all four of these and I'm going to line them up so that their centers are horizontally aligned. Then we're going to space them so that they're all tucked in against each other. We do that from the Align panel. We'll select one object so that it is the key object because unless you have a key object selected, you don't get access to distribute spacing and what we want is a distributed spacing value of zero and we'll click here "Vertical Distribute Space". That just bursts all four shapes up alongside each other so that there are no spaces between them. The feature that we'll use to create that stack set of objects successfully is that we're going to take each of these objects and we're going to turn them into 3D objects using Illustrator 3D. Now we can't do that with all four at once, we have to do them individually, but it's pretty quick. I'll select the bottom most one and choose "Effect", "3D" and then "Extrude and Bevel". We'll turn preview on so we can see what we're doing, and I'm going to select an isometric projection. This I'll use isometric right but it could be isometric left. Right now, you'll see that the sides are not equal and we want them to be equal. We want this side to be equal to whatever this is. We know what the length of this shape was because we drew it ourselves, it was a 150. We're going to make our extrude depth 150, and when I tab away it becomes this nice even shape. That's all I need to do. I'll click "Okay". Then we'll go to the next shape, without moving anything we'll choose "Effect", "3D", "Extrude and Bevel" and go and do the exact same thing. We'll choose "Isometric Right" and for this, we need to make its extrude depth, whatever the length of this side was. That side was a 125, so we're going to make the extrude depth 125 and click "Okay". We'll go to the next one, "Effect", "3D", "Extrude and Bevel", set it to "Isometric Right", turn preview on, its length of this side was a 100, so we're going to set its extrude depth to 100. Tab away, double-check that everything looks fine, click "Okay" and then do that for the very last one, "Effect", "3D", "Extrude and Bevel", turn it on to isometric right, turn preview on and this was a 75 pixel length on this side so we're going to extrude it 75 pixels, click "Okay". The basic principle for creating this particular set of shapes is to make sure that you have a known length on the shapes before you do it and you'll obviously want to step them up in a nice even series if you want this result from them. Now, we've got a few issues we need to deal with before we leave this, because this is not actually a multisided shape. If we have a look in the Appearance panel and select the shape, it is actually just a filled rectangle that's got a 3D Extrude and Bevel on it. What we need to do with all of these is to expand their appearance, so we'll select over all of them and choose "Object," "Expand Appearance". With them still selected, we are going to choose "Object", Ungroup", and we're going to continue to do that until we get everything out of its groups. So this set of stacked objects is now just a series of shapes. At this point we can choose "Object" and then "Group" so that they're just a single set of objects. Again, if you don't like the contrast in this, select over the object, go to the "Recolor Artwork" tool and here we'll just change the color, so we'll take the lightest color, double-click on it and make it lighter still. You can also select "Edit" here in the recolor artwork tool. Here is the lock for these colors so if you want to lock everything down, just click on it and move everything into a different color, so all the shading will come with you. If you want to split them up and change the colors, then unlock everything and you can change the lightness and the darkness of the colors, but you can also change the colors themselves so you could make a shape that was actually multicolored. By creating this as a set of objects that are stacked on top of each other and then doing a 3D extrusion on it, we've been able to very easily get a nice evenly spaced stack set of objects that would be a lot more difficult to do it any other way in Illustrator. 8. Pt 7 Make a Circular Building: Another shape that you may want to work on as a building or perhaps also as an infographic element is a cylinder. We're going to see how to create that isometrically. I'm going to select the Ellipse tool. This time, I'm going to click in the "Document", I'm going to make an ellipse that is a 100 pixels by a 100 pixel. I just click "Okay". Of course that is a circle. It has no stroke, but it does have a fill. I'm going to move it a little bit further up the document. We'll distort this so that we can create a cylinder from it. This is going to be the top of the shapes, so we're going to apply an asymmetric top prediction to it, so I'll select it and click isometric top. I'm going to just rotates it the way it needs to be. We're going to have a look and see how wide this is because it is a 122.474. I'm going to lock the width and height, I'm just going to make this an even value. It's just going to make life a little bit easier. I'll make it 125 pixels wide. I'm not worried about the height, I'm worried about the width. It's going to make things easier. I'll come now and create a rectangle and the rectangle is going to be a 125 pixels wide because that is the width of our circle or what is now an oval, but was a circle. I need to make the height of my object, so I'm going to make this about 200. You can make it any size that you want. We're going to line this up with the edges of this oval, but we're going to give it a different color before we do that, because we want to be able to see what is circle and what was rectangle. Let's just move it up here and we should get an indication when it's in position, the smart guides are telling me that the rectangle is now immediately over the top of the oval. Now, I want another copy of the oval, now that I've got my rectangle in place, I'm going to bring my other copy of the oval down here, but this is a time where if he didn't like the length of your cylinder, what it's going to be, you could adjust it. I'll select over the bottom two nodes here, and just drag down holding the Shift key as I do. This is going to be the height of my building. I just need a curve for the bottom of it, and the curve for the bottom of it is the curve from the top. I'll hold the Alt or Option key as I drag down, I'm adding the shift key, so I'm dragging in a perfectly vertical direction. I'm looking for those smart guides to tell me when I'm in the right position. We can double-check this, I think it's slightly outside, so I'm just going to select over all of these shapes. I'm just going to align their left edges. So if I click on that, that should make sure that their left edges are aligned. They were aligned well vertically, but I think they were just slightly out. Now, let's create our cylinder. For this we're going to select either all of these objects and we're going to the shape builder tool. It's just the easiest tool for this job, so I'll click on the shape builder tool. What I want to do is join these two pieces together, so I get my circle back again. But I'm going to join these bits altogether, so I'll click and drag just pointing to the areas that I want to join together and so that's joined those into this shape. I'll just click and drag over these, and that's created the top of my cylinder. Now, I have a cylinder, we've just lost that coloring, it's a little bit difficult to say what everything looks like. Now, once we've got a cylinder, we can do all sorts of things and we'll just use the same skills that we've been using all along. We could add a smallest cylinder on top. I'll grab this cylinder, I'll Alt or Option, drag a duplicate of it away. I'm going to select over the top anchor point, so I'll use the Lasso tool to make sure that I've only got these top anchor points selected. I'll drag down holding the Shift key as I do to constrain this to a perfectly vertical direction. I'll select over all of the shapes, I'm going to make them a bit smaller. For this, I'll hold Shift and Alt, that would be Shift and Option on a Mac so they're scaled perfectly. I'll group this with object and then group, and then I'll just pop them on top of my building. To add windows, we're going to use the exact same process as we used to create windows on the rectangular building. I'll use the selection tool, select over this shape and Alt or Option drag a duplicate away. I'm going to lock down, we'll group and lock down this object just because it's going to be easier to do that. I'll just hide it for now. Now, I seem to have one, two copies of this, so let me just delete one. I don't need it. Now, we need to split this, so for this I'm going to turn it so that it has a stroke and I feel it will be a bit easier to say what we're doing here. We'll go to the direct selection tool, I'm going to select over this line here, Shift and drag over this line. Then I'll choose "Edit cut". We should see this as the result, you should be left with just the two semi ovals, then choose "Edit", "Paste". Before you let go, just press the letter V for the selection tool so you can move it out of the way. Now, if we're going to create a blend from these, we already know that they're going in the wrong direction, well one of them is going in the wrong direction. We need to reverse this path, Object, Path, and then Reverse Path Direction. Now we can create a blend from this with object blend and then Make. Double-click on the blend tool, set it to specified steps. Click "Preview" so you can see what you're doing and start reducing the numbers, so that you can decide how big you want your windows to be. Now, I want pretty long windows and I want them to be about that number would be pretty good, maybe a bit less. I'll expand this with object and then blend and then expand. These are all ready to go, except that because this came from this side and from this side, these lines are not going to fit all the way over these shapes. Before I let go of anything, I'm just going to drag down on those to make my lines a little bit longer. They need to be longer to work with our cylindrical shape. That's not a problem that we had when we were doing it with a rectangle. Again, one of these paths is going to be going the wrong way. Object, Path, Reverse Path Direction. We'll select either both the shapes and choose Object Blend and then Make. Our blends looking really good, double-click on it and choose Specified steps and Preview and then adjust the height of your windows. Now, I want windows to be tall and thin. I think that's pretty good setting, so I'll choose Object and then Blend and expand. I'm going to move these lines over the top of this object, so let's just move it into position. Looking here in the last pallet, I've got a group for the lines and a group for the bendy lines. We can select over both sets of objects and just sent to them, so everything's nicely arranged. I'll select over everything and we're going to use the pathfinder palette again and use divide. That of course loses all our lines, but we can put our lines back by selecting the stroke and just clicking on the color. Of course these aren't windows, this is just a grid for our windows. Our windows are going to appear within these areas, so I'll choose Object and then Path and choose Offset Path. We want an offset value that is a negative number, so I'll choose minus one and just say what that looks like. Well, it's perfect for me. It's giving me quite large windows, so I'll just click "Okay". Then with my selection still in place, I'm going to choose Edit and then Cut. That just cuts the windows away from my temporary grid. I'll choose Edit and then Paste and these are my windows. Of course, the windows are individual shapes so that if you want them to be grouped, do that now before you lose them. I'll choose Object and then Group. I want my windows to be filled shapes, not hollow shapes. I'm going to click here to flip the stroke and the fill. These are my windows and this is my grid. I don't need my grid, I'll just delete it. Let's bring the building back again, so I'll just bring it back and my windows are on top. But of course they're the same color as the building, so they're not going to be easy to see. I'll double-click on the color, I'm going to make them lighter. Now I can just move them into position on my building. Now, because they're in a group, we can also select over the windows and just make sure that they are horizontally aligned center. We know that the windows are in position right over the top of the building. At this point, what I like to do is to go to the group selection tool and just select a few random windows. Now, there's a script called random select that you could use to randomly select a few of these objects. Then we'll click on the Fill Color and we're going to adjust it just slightly. And this is going to give us a little bit of variation in this building, so you could go and do that to some additional windows just to get a little bit more visual interest. As I said, this is a really good way of making shapes that you can use for circular buildings. But of course, you could also use it for an infographic element. 9. Pt 8 Draw an Isometric Shop Part 1: Before we finish up, we're going to draw a simple shop illustration, and what we're going to be doing as we're doing that is dealing with a few things that we haven't covered yet. We're going to look at the situation where we're using some unusual shapes. We will look at adding text, we'll look at what happens when your shapes aren't the right size, how you can scale them, how to work with curved surfaces, things like roads and groups, and 3D, so let me just turn off my notes to myself and let's get started. We're going to start with the cube that we created earlier. Let's just go and open up our symbol library, down in user-defined are cubes. I'm going to grab my ice cube, and just drag it into the document. Now, this is a symbol and it's attached to the symbol, so to unattach it, let's just break the link. Just to remind yourself, we created this from a 100 weigh 100 pixels square and we haven't scaled it, so this is what's something that is drawn using our 100 by 100 pixels square looks like when it's converted to an isometric shape using the actions that we created. Just be clear about that because things are going to go haywire really quickly. I'm just going to select over these top nodes with the Lasso Tool, go to the Direct Selection Tool, hold the Shift key down so that we're constrained to vertical movement, and it's going to move the top down a little bit, so it looks a little bit less like a cube. Let's just pop it up here for the moment. This is the basic shape for my building, but what I want to do is to put a sort of edge around the top here, so for that we're going to need something that's hollow. We're going to start with the 100 by 100 pixel rectangle, because that should fit on the top. It's not going to, but it should. I'm going to explain to you why it doesn't. Then I'm going to create the edge effect, and to do that, I'm going to create a rectangle that's smaller than this one. Now, I want a edge that is about four pixels, so double that because it's going all around both sides, so that means that a shape that is eight pixels smaller is going to leave me four pixels all around. Let me just create that shape, let's fill it with a different color, and let's place it on top of this one. Now if center everything up nicely using our align tools. This edge around the shape is still going to be four pixels wide, it's going to look good on top of the building. But I need to make this hollow because we want a flat roof on the building, but we want to sort of edge around the top, so I need to remove the middle. The simplest way to do this, so that you could do it with the shape builder tool, is probably to go to your pathfinder and just click minus front. That removes the front piece, which is the smaller piece from the back piece, which is the larger piece. I'm going to color this the same as my building to get a fighting chance at the colors working together. Because this needs to go around the top of the building, and because it needs to have some dimension to it, we're going to need to use the 3D tools, so I'm going to select this shape. I'm going to effect and then 3D and choose, Extrude and Bevel. We're going to turn preview on and then we're going to ask ourselves, what projection do we want? Well, because it's going around the top of the building, it needs to be the same projection as the top of the building, which would be isometric top, so let's just go and make an asymmetric top. They extrude depth here is way too big, you can see extra depth 10 to 15 and that is this depth here. Well, we don't want it anywhere near that, I'm thinking something like about 10 would be pretty good. You could say that my colors are out and little bit, I can probably do a better match for the building in just a minute. I'll click "Okay," but there is another problem with this, and that is way too small, so what's happened? Why does a 100 by 100 pixel rectangle look like this when we use our actions, but like this in terms of size when we use the 3D projection through the 3D tools? Well, the reason is the scaling factor. The 3D tools here in illustrator have a reduced scaling factor, they're not scaled the same way as we did when we shared and rotated and scaled days. But it's fine because we can size this up to match this one. First of all, let's re-color this and expand. Right now it's just a shape that has a 3D effect applied to it, so we can try and just lighten this up a little bit. Now I'm going to expand this with object Expand Appearance, and then object Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option, and that's just getting all those little pieces that make the top of the building out of their successive groups, so they're just simple objects, and we choose object groups so that we're putting it back together again so it travels as a single object. Now, the issue is it's too small. Let's go to the group selection tool because this shape here is a group, so we need to select the top of the building so we can see how big it is, so we can scale this one up to match. You could choose the width or the height, it doesn't matter. I'm going to make my adjustment based on the width, so I'm reading off the width here of this particular shape, and it's 173.205. If you want to set these Transform tools on your toolbar, go to Window and then Transform, and you can write them off in this dialogue here. Now I'm going to my grouped shape here, and I need to make it the same width as this piece here. But I also need to make the height adjust at the same time so we need to make sure that this icon here is selected, otherwise, you're going to distort it and it's not going to fit properly. We need to make its width the same width as this shape over here, which is 173.205. When I tab away it's sized up, now we can put those two pieces together, and they're going to fit perfectly, so there is the border, if you like, around the top of our building, and we're seeing in down through it, to the flat roof on the building. Let's put a base on our building, so let's have it sitting on something. I'm going to the rectangle tool, I'm going to make this 150 pixels by 150 pixels. Remember the building was a 100 by a 100 or based on a 100 by 100 pixels square, so this should be pretty good for the base of the building. Ask yourself what isometric projection you're going to need to do. Well, it's going to be a top because if we were a bird flying over this, we would say the top of the building and then we would see the ground underneath it, so we're going to use the same projection for the ground as we did to the top of the building, or go to our actions palette with window and then actions, is just make sure everything's working in button mode, and I'm just going to select my eyes symmetric top. If you can use your own actions, you're going to find that they're quicker and easier than trying to expand everything from having to use the 3D effect, but you will want to use the 3D effect if you want some dimension, if you want to use that extrude depth, for example, let's go to allows palette, and let's just leave that open for now, and we're just going to drag this base underneath the building. In terms of talking about unusual shapes, let's go and put a road along the front of this building. Now we know that the projected length of this was 150, so we're going to need a rectangle that is at least a 150 pixels wide. Well, I'm going to make it a 150 because I want it to work and line up exactly here but I need to think in terms of my height, and I want my road to be about sort of this big. In terms of how much of this size I need, I need about a quarter of it. Roughly a quarter of this is about 45, it's a little bit less, but 45 is going to be fine. I'll just click "Okay", so this is going to be my road way. I'm going to make it gray. I'm going to put some dashes along it, so let's just zoom into it so that we can add our dashes. For this I'm going to the Rectangle Tool. I'm just going to drag out a narrow rectangle here. I'm going to fill it with white, and then I'll use a transform on this. I'll choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform" and then transform. Will turn "Preview" on so we can see what we're doing. I'm going to add probably an extra four copies of this and then start moving it in a horizontal direction. Now, about this point, I'm thinking that that's a really nice spacing. Instead of increasing the spacing, let's just add another copy. I'll click "Okay". Now this is just a dash that has a transform effect applied to it, so we're going to choose object and expand appearance to bake in that transformation affects. Now we have a group that's got groups and groups and groups inside it, so let's choose "Object Ungroup". We want to get this out to individual paths and then we're going to join together the paths and the road way into a single group. These are going to be manipulated as a single group. Let's go back out with "Control" or "Command zero". We need to ask ourselves what projection do we need to use for the road. Well the road is going to have the exact same issues as the top of the building and the ground so we're going to need to use a top projection on it. If you thought because it was going along the front of the building here it would be isometric right, that's not correct and let's have a look why. Just going to apply isometric right to this, and when I move it into position,you can say that it's forming this 3D look to the building. It's not a road, it's like a front phase. Let's just undo that and let's go back and select isometric top. This is much better, it would line up perfectly along exactly the wrong side of the building. We've got the right sort of projection, but it's not in the right place. What we need to do is just flip this. With the select I'll choose "Object" and then "Transform" and "Reflect". We're going to reflect this across the horizontal. You can see here that that line is now going to align perfectly to this phase of the ground, so I'm just going to click "Okay" and move it into position. That can be a little bit tricky but if you think in terms of yourself being a bird flying over the top of the building, then it will be easier to say that this is a top projection that you need to use. Now I'm not really happy with the color of my road, so let me just go and grab my road and just make it a bit darker. Of the things that we wanted to look at in this video, text is another thing, so let's just go and give our building a name. I'm going to call this Soul Cafe. I'm going to click here and just type out the word Soul Cafe, and you can go ahead and find a really nice font for this. I'm less worried about that, I'm more worried about how we're going to get it on the front of the building. Let me just scale this down a little bit so it's a bit smaller and let's choose a better color for it. Before we put it on our building, we have to ask ourselves do we want a bit of dimensions? Do you want these letters to look like they're stuck on the building rather than being painted on so they have a bit of dimension? I would like some dimension, sorry for that, we're going to choose the 3D effects, will choose "Effect 3D". Then of course, we need to use "Extrude and Bevel" because we want a bevel on this. Now the bevel is huge, obviously way too big, and we don't have the right projection. Because this is going on the front of the building over here, it needs to be isometric right. Let's go and select "Isometric Right". That's just matching the isometric projection for the front of the building and for the extrude depth, probably something like two or three would be sufficient, maybe will pump that up to three points. I'll click "Okay". Now this is fully editable text, and you can do this using fully editable text so you don't have to convert your text into, for example, outlines to be able to do this. I'm just going to position this roughly in position, if you want to change the color, you can at this point. For example, we could make it lighter it's going to stand out a little bit better on our building. You can also adjust the light. Let's just imagine that we are not a 100 percent happy with this, let's go back with the text selected to the appearance panel. Let's click on "Extrude and Bevel" window to turn preview on because we've lost that. At this point you could add some lights. I'm just clicking here on the "New Icon" and that's going to allow me to add some lighting to draw attention to this text a little bit better. Just by adjusting these lights on, we could add more we can have a third light if we want to. I think that's probably raged overkill nearly. You can add these lights and just light this elements so that you can see it more clearly. Let's just go and say how that's looking at this stage, it's looking pretty good. Now we've dealt with text, let's add a couple of windows to our building, and when we've done that, we're going to add some awnings over the top of the windows. Now this length is a 100 pixels so if we want a window and then length potentially for a door and then another window, these windows need to be pretty small. I'm thinking about 30 pixels wide would be sufficient. We'll make a rectangle that is about 30 pixels wide, but we can make it about 45 high, so it's going to have some height in it. Let's just go and put this over here while we build it up. This is going to be the outer frame of my window, so I am going to select it and make it a darker color. I'm going to put an inside piece of glass, so I'm going to the Rectangle Tool. I'm just going to eyeball this and just create a shape on the inside that is a little bit smaller, and I'm going to fill that with a lighter blue so it can be glass color. I'm going to select over these and line them up so they're nicely centered. At this stage, I'm going to lock down my window frame because I don't want to be able to select that. I want to everything I'm about to do to affect the inside of the window the glass only. I'm not really happy with the height right now, so let me just make that a bit bigger. We're going to the "Pen Tool". This is really simple stuff. You can do it even if you hate the Pen Tool. What you're going to do is create a couple of elements that are going to be reflections in the glass. I'm going to click here, click here, click here, and click back over this and make this filled with white. White is going to be up in the top corner here. We've got a white shape here. I'm going to alter option drag a second one of these down, and these are going to bake the reflection in the glass. I'm going to select over everything and I need to remove these outside bits. The simplest tool to do that if you've got access to it, is the shape builder tool. Click on the "Shape Builder Tool", hold down the "Alter Option Key" and just run through these pieces that you don't want. That leaves behind the pieces that you do want, but you had to have locked them window frame down when you did that because you didn't want to have the window frame selected. Let's unlock the window frame, let's group all of this together because we want it to travel and behave as a group. Then we're going to apply a transformation to it. Now if it's going on the front of the building, it needs to be an isometric right. For this if we don't want it to have any dimension, if we want it just to sit flat against the building, we can use our own actions. I'm going to choose isometric right and pull our window down into position. Alter option, drag a duplicate away and I've got a window for the other part of the building. Let's zoom in here and just say how things are lining up. Now if you get into trouble with trying to align things up accurately, you may want to disable this option here, which is "Align Art to the Pixel Grid". If you have that turned on, sometimes it's hard to get things to line up perfectly and without it, sometimes they line up a whole lot better. Just be aware that you might have to disable that option. I'm going to call these good for now you could be a bit more accurate. I'm just concerned at showing you how you would create things like windows, and now how we can create an awning that goes over the top of these windows. 10. Pt 9 Finishing the Shop - Part 2: For our awning, it's going to be a curved awning. I want a square and I want a circle. I want a very small square, I'm thinking something like about 30 by 30 will be big enough for my square. I'll just click "Okay" to create that. Let's fill it with a color that we can work out. Let's zoom in to this area so we can build this up, so that we can use it. Now what I want for this awning is a curve here that is effectively one quarter of a circle. Let's go to the Ellipse tool and let's create a circle that is twice as big as this square. The square with 30 by 30, let's make this 60 by 60. With this circle, we can carve things off to make a quarter circle. What we're going do to do that is to drag out a rectangle over the part of the circle that we don't want. I don't want this side of the circle. Now that I've got the rectangle that's going to carve it off and the circle underneath, let's just go here and select over both of these objects. Here in the Pathfinder, I'm going to click on "Minus Front". Because that removes the area that was covered up by that rectangle. Let's go and get a second rectangle. This time, let's put it over the bottom part of the circle here. Let's make it clear what you're seeing, you've got two shapes here. Again, we're going to use Minus Front, because that's going to leave us with just the bit that we want. You could of course do this with the Shape Builder if you wanted to. Let's go and put this into position up here. I want these two shapes to be connected. I'm going to join them with Unite. If Unite does not work and it may not, you can always use the Shape Builder. It seems to be a little bit more forgiving. If you think that this is going to be too big at this stage, you can go with the direct selection tool, just select over this edge, and just move it in a little bit. I want the curve, I definitely want the curve for my window awnings. We can adjust its size in a minute if it's too big, but let's do a 3D effect on this. With it selected, we want it to have some depth. We're going to use our 3D Extrude and Bevel. Effect 3D Extrude and Bevel. Logic is probably saying to you because it's going on the window over here, that it needs to be Isometric right. Nothing could be further from the truth, it doesn't need to be Isometric right. In fact, that needs to be isometric Left, but it's going to be one of the true. If you get the wrong one, don't worry, just do the right one. Now I'm going to make the depth about 30 points. Because I think that's going to cover my window pretty well, but we can adjust that in a minute if not. I'm going to click "Okay" and let's go and test it in position. It's looking pretty good in position, except that it's way too big for the building itself. But we can solve that, because we've got the projection, or what we don't have is the right size. With it selected, I'm going to the appearance panel. For now I'm going to turn off the Extrude and Bevel because that gets me back to my original shape. Make sure I have the selection tool selected. I'm going to just scale this down, I'll hold Shift and Alt as I scale it down to make it considerably smaller. Turn back on my Extrude and Bevel so we can check and say how it's looking. I still think it's probably sticking out too far, so let's just go and make some adjustments to the side of it. As soon as I've got it resized, I can try again with my Extrude and Bevel. Just apply it back onto the shape, and let's go and position it in position. Now we can copy this to make the awnings for this window over here. But what if our awnings were to be striped instead of just plain? Let's go and do that. For this, we're going to need some stripes to use. I'm going to drag out a very narrow blue stripe. I'm going to copy this with the selection tool, just Alt or Option Drag, a duplicate away. I'm going to color this with a different color. I'm going to use a really light blue, it's going to be a little bit easier for you to see this. Now I'm going to select over both of these and Alt or Option Drag a duplicate away and line it up, and do that again. Now I have six stripes, I'm going to do it once more. I've got eight stripes, but I don't want to finish on a light one. I'm going to select the end one and remove it. These are going to be the stripes that are going on this awning. Going to select over everything and let's add it to the symbols palate. It's important to add it to the symbols palette. You don't have to give it a name, you don't have to make any selections here at all. You just need to click "Okay." The reason that we're doing this is because of the 3D effect that we've used here can use a symbol to map onto the surface. That's exactly what we're going to do here. I'm going to make my extrusion depth and little bit bigger so that it stretches over the window while I'm here. I have to go back and access the Extrude and Bevel through the appearance panel. You can't apply it again, or you're going to end up with really weird shapes and silly things happening. You have to make an edit to the one you already have in place. Let's click on this, turn preview on. My extrude depth, I think because I sized my shape down has been reduced. I think 30 is better. Now we're going to go and map this art, so we're going to click on "Map Art". We have seven surfaces here, you can see it says one of seven. Anything that is light is a surface that we can see right now. Right now we're seeing this surface here that's not visible because it's dark. This is visible because it's light, this is not visible because it's dark. It's very easy to see which surfaces you can apply your Map Art to. Now this is not going to work, and I'm going to show you why. I'm going to click on here because this is a symbol we're going to apply and add new symbol. The problem is that the symbol here is going the wrong way across the awning. I don't want it to look like that on the awning, I want it to be a stripe the other way. Let's go and turn our symbol around. This is the simplest way of doing, is actually to flip your symbol around and recreate your symbol. Then go back to your shape, go back to your extrusion. Go back to the Map Art, go back to the surface that you are working on, which is this surface here. We're going to click "Clear" because that's going to remove the symbol from that surface. Let's go and get a new symbol, which is the one that looks like it's going in the wrong direction, but in actual fact, there ends up going in the right direction. We've got that part of it. We've got a pace at the back here, which if we want to, we can also apply the pattern too. This is the piece that goes across the back, let's go and get our symbol. There we have our owning, and we can just make a duplicate of it. Just drag it holding the Alt or Option key, and then position at either the second window. Now you can make a door exactly the same way as we made the window. I'm going to leave you to do that. But what I do want to do, is to create a sign that's going to go out the front of the building. For this we're going to look at grouping objects in 3D. My sign is going to be really, really simple. It's going to be a little box and, I'm going to make it purple. It's going to have a couple of legs. Again, we'll go to the Rectangle tool, and I'm just going to drag out a leg and I'm going to make a duplicate of that, and just line it up over here. Now it's going to be easier for me right now to just put the legs on the very edge of the shape, you can be really a little bit more creative and make your sign look however you want it to look. I am going to make a little circle on the top of it though. I'm going to drag out an Ellipse, and just drag it down here. My sign is got a little bit of visual interest to it. I'm going to join all those together. I do that using the Unite option here on the Pathfinder, but you could also use the Shape Builder tool. Now I've got an element that I want to put on the front of this. I went and got a coffee icon from Vector Easy, Vector Easy is a really good site for downloadable vectors. I grabbed a set of icons, I've just removed everything I don't need. This is the icon I'm going to use. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command C," come back into my document, "Control" or "Command V." You can see that it's absolutely huge, but that's solvable because I'm just going to scale it down. I'm going to place it on top of my sign. We're going to zoom in, so that we can see how things are looking. I think my sign could be a little bit lighter. I think it's going to be a bit easier to see what's about to happen if we have a lighter sign. Let's have a look at in the last pallet, because this point is crucial. I've got a group, that is my coffee cup icon. I've got an element which is the sign. If I want the coffee cup to look like it's painted on the sign, I need to group these two objects together. But if I want a coffee cup that looks like it has some dimension on top of a sign, that also has dimension, so that the coffee cup is sticking out even further, I'm not going to group these two objects. I'm not going do that. We're going to see what happens when we don't group objects, and we apply a 3D extrusion. I'm selecting both the coffee cup and the sign, they're not grouped. Effect 3D, Extrude and Bevel. I want this to be an IsometricLeft projection so that it will be a sign at the front of the building. Let's just make it IsometricLeft. Let's bring down the extrude depth to about four. Now you can see what I was talking about earlier. The sign has some dimension, but the coffee cup icon also has dimension, and it is placed on the sign, so its dimension starts at the surface of the sign and comes forward. It's just a different result. I'm going to add some extra lighting here because I think my sign is way too dark. I'm thinking the coffee cup is not in a perfect position, but we can adjust that in a minute, once we know what our sign is actually going to look like. If I'm happy with that, I'll just click "Okay." But what I will do at this point is, go back to my coffee cup, select it and just nudge it better onto the sign. While it was pretty well positioned on the sign when the sign was flat in the rotated version, it needed to be positioned a little bit better. Now that I've got these in the correct isometric projection, I can group them, and I should group them because I want them to travel together. But just be aware that the Extrude and Bevel has been separately applied to each of them. That's really important because it gives us this different look, if you like, Let's go and place this into position. Now before we finish up with this image, there's one more thing I just want to show you, and I want to add a little bit of texture to this wall over here. I'm going to do it with the Rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag out and create a very small rectangle. It's not going to have any outline, any stroke, but it is going to be a pretty similar color to the building itself. Let me just go and get this green and maybe make it a little bit darker. I'm going to select this Alt or Option Drag a duplicate away. I'm going to make a few of these. I want this to look random. You could even make some of those a little bit shorter if you wanted to, so you could drag them in to make them shorter, I'm going to leave these all at the same size. I'm going to select over them, I'm going to choose object and then group. I'm going to apply an isometric projection to this so that has exactly the same as this side of the building, which of course is IsometricLeft. I'm going to click on IsometricLeft. Now I can move these into position over the top of the building. I'm just going to scale them down a little bit, holding the Shift and Alt key so that they're scaled in proportion. I think the color is not quite dark enough, so let's make it a little bit darker, so that we can see that these are like bricks on the wall. If I Alt or Option Drag a few copies of this, or if I had made it bigger, or if I had made two or three sets of these, these would add some dimension to the building. Of course, this last one has been layered on top of the sign which is incorrect. Let's go to Window and then Layers. I just want to select and drag all of these under the sign, so that the texture on the building wall is actually attached to the building wall and not over the top of the sign. There are a number of additional tools that you now have in terms of your isometric toolkit. You can create things like awnings, you can add text to an object. You know the difference between grouping objects and not grouping objects and the effect that produces, when you use your 3D Extrude and Bevel. You also know a trick for making your road going the right direction when it seems like the projection that you're about to use is going fail. 11. Project and wrapup: We've now finished the video content for this course and I know that there's a lot of things that we've covered here. I hope that you've really enjoyed it. Your project for this class will be of course, to create an isometric building or two, or even an object that could be used as an infographic element. Post an image of your completed isometric art as your class project. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you recommend the class and secondly, write even in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, that's because you're not following me yet. Click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Until next time, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Illustrator for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.