Faux Tissue Paper Collage in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch tissue paper collage intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create a faux tissue paper collage in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that each teaches a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at making an abstract tissue paper collage. We're going to start by adding a photo to use as a template image. We'll draw the tissue paper shapes and color them, and then we'll texture them with a custom made brush and some additional shapes. Finally, we'll create a background effect to finish. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These thumbs up recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started, making a faux tissue paper collage in Illustrator. 2. Faux Tissue Paper Collage - Part 1: For our full tissue paper collage we are going to use a reference drawing, and I found this pair at unsplash.com. I'm going to give you the link to download it. Once you get to unsplash.com, you're going to click to "Download" and it's going to open in a window like this. You'll right-click and choose "Save image as", save it to some way that you can find it easily because we're going to add it to our Illustrator document. We're just going to close this down, I'm going to choose File and then New, and my document is 1,000 pixels by 750 pixels, RGB color mode. I'll click "Okay". Now the pair image we're going to add as a template layer. We do this by choosing File and then Place. We're going to go and get the image and click "Place". I'm going to drag out a position for it in the document. Don't worry too much about this at this stage because we're going to be clipping it first and then moving it into position. To clip it, I'm going to add a rectangle. I'm just going to Rectangle tool. I'm going to drag a rectangle over the area of the pair that I want to work with, which is this area here. I'll select both the photograph and the rectangle, right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask that just clips the bitmap image to this rectangular shape. Now, I'll hold the Shift key as I just enlarge it in the document and place it where I want it to be. Now, Illustrator has a feature for using images like this as template images. We're going to the last pallet and he will say that we have a layer with our clipping group. If we double-click on the layer here, we open the Layer Options palette and. I can click here on template and adjust this down to 40 percent and click "Okay". This is what a template layer looks like. It's locked down. It's got a very special icon here, and the photograph has been reduced to 40 percent opacity. We can still see it, but we'll be able to see our artwork on top. To work on our project of course, we're going to need a new layer because we can't work on the template layer. Now, we're going to use the pen tool here to make our art. But the good news is that it doesn't require you to be good at the pen tool. In fact, the worse you are, practically the better this is going to work. I'm going to the Pen tool and I'm going to make no fill and I'm going to make a colored stroke. We'll choose a blue color. I'm going to start by selecting and making a shape as if I were cutting out tissue paper that is going to be a part of this pair. I'm going to make this pace. When I get to the end, if I don't click exactly over the end, I'm just going to press the Escape key so that Illustrator stops drawing. Going to the last palette, I'm going to open the last pallet up and I'm going to lock down the pace I just drew. Anything I draw next is not going to impact this shape. I'm going to create a shape for this. What I'm trying to do is the same thing I would be doing if I were making this illustration by hand using real tissue paper, I'd just be cutting out pieces of tissue paper. I'm just making pen strokes that are equivalent of a tissue paper cutout. Now in here, I want to cut out a piece of tissue paper to use as a shadow area here or dark area. I want to paste in here too. You can see that I'm not being at all careful about my shapes. I want to paste in here, so I'm going to grab a piece that I might use as a shade area. We don't want to hide this pieces because that's going to mean we're going to spend a lot of time actually working with this piece, so we want it to be on the side of simplicity. I have a piece of highlight area here. I'm going to take this highlight areas as well, just a couple of little shapes to add some highlight to my pair, and didn't join this one together so I'm just going to complete it. For the leaf, I'm going to do that in three pieces. First of all, I'm going to do this side of the leaf. I'm just clicking and clicking and dragging, some pieces are going to be a little bit straighter than others. We're back over here on the other side of the leaf. If you make a really bad mistake, just press Control Z, Command Z on the Mac to undo it and go back and redraw it. Well, as I said, we really don't want this to be too accurate. When you're making your leaf, however, you may want to overlap the two sides of the leaf because that's going to give you a darker vein later on, so it's nice simple way of getting a vein in the leaf without having to cut out tissue paper to do it. Then we want the stem. I'm going to make this in two pieces. One for the stem, and one for the thing that attaches the leaf to the stem. There are our basic shapes. The next thing we're going to do is go ahead and color and texturize them. 3. Faux Tissue Paper Collage - Part 2: As I worked on these individual shapes using the pen tool, I locked everything down as I went. Now I'm going to the selection tool and I'm going to click and drag down this list because I want to unlock always pieces so I can work on them. Going to select the first piece I drew, which is this side of the pair. I don't want it to have a stroke any longer, so I'm going to disable the stroke. I'm going to the fill color. I'm making that at the foreground here. I'm going to select the I dropper tool. I'm going to click on the pair because that allows me to sample a color from the illustration below, from the photograph below. But this is a fully opaque color. If you've worked with tissue paper, you'll know that it's partially transparent. I'm going to the appearance panel with a shape still selected. I'm going to click on "Opacity" and I'm going to bring the opacity down to about 70 percent. I'm going to set the blend mode to multiply. This is going to darken when it's layered over the top of another piece of tissue paper. I'm going to click on the next piece of the pair, which is this piece down here. Now, it's going to have the exact same appearances of piece I just created. I still have my eye dropper tool in my hand, so I'm just going to click on it. That's colored it exactly the same way as this other pace. Let's go to the next pace. Well, that's this pace up here. I'd like to sample a little pace of the pair underneath. But if I click now, I'm just going to sample the pair that I've already created. I'm going to turn off that layer and now I'm going to click to get a pace of the actual pair here. Well, I think I made something a bit live and so that's a better color for me to use going back to the appearance panel because this now is not inheriting those same appearances, the lower opacity and the multiply blend mode that the other paces had. I'm just making sure that it is set up correctly. I can now make this pace of the pair re-appear. Let's keep going up the list here. Well, this one's supposed to have a shadow, I'm going to select the same shadow as I used before. Let's go down here. This is a shadow pace. Let's select the shadow pace. This is a highlight pace. I want to fill this with whites so no stroke. Let's go to fill and let's fill it with white. But I want to eat to have a lower opacity, probably down around 50 percent. This next pace is also a highlight, so I can just copy the previous one. Where up here in the leaf, I'm going to sample a pace of green getting it from this life. It doesn't matter where you get it provided you can see it, you can grab it by just clicking on it. I think that's a pretty good color. This, again, is a solid color, so I'm going to need to go and adjust down the opacity to about 70 percent, something like that. That's not rocket science. Just choose something that looks pretty good. This shape and other pace of leaf. Now you can see how by overlapping those two shapes that I create, I've actually created a vein through this leaf. This is a shadow area, but I'm just going to use the same color. I'm not going to actually make it any darker because it's pretty dark anyway. Now we've got the stems. We need to grab a color for the stem and we need to go and change the opacity. The blend mode for this, again, multiply both the opacity down to about 55 percent. Maybe it should be a little bit higher here. We've got one last pace to do, which is this pace here. So now we've colored our individual paces where going to use an effect later on that surrounds the entire finished object with a white area. What I need to do right now before I do anything else is to make a duplicate of where I I'm so far. I'm going to take this layer too, and I'm just going to drag and drop it on the New Layer icon and that makes an exact duplicate of my pear. I'm going to lock this second copy down and I'm going to turn it off. It's tucked out of the way if you like. But I've saved it so that I can work with it later on in a different context. At this point, probably not a bad idea to save your image. We'll come back in the next video. We're going to start texturising these paces. 4. Faux Tissue Paper Collage - Part 3: Now, for the texturizing of the pear, we're going to do a couple of things. Firstly, I'm just going to zoom into this shape here. I'm going to be working on the layer that I was working on earlier. If you've ever use tissue paper and tried to glue it to a sheet of paper, you'll know that it buckles. We're going to add a few elements that are going to be buckled tissue paper. I'm going to the Pen Tool and I'm just going to drag out a triangle area that's going in here on top of this yellow. I'm going to get the Eyedropper Tool and I'm just going to click on the underlying shape. If I press Control or Command Zero and come back out and move away from this selection, you'll see that we've got this enhanced area. Now, I think it's a little bit big. I think I took the buckling of paper approach a little bit too heavy. But I'm going to add in some paces like that to the illustration. Again by zooming in, drawing with the Pen Tool a few small shapes, being aware of the fact that I'm working with the tissue paper here and using its lines rather than the illustration underneath, I drop a tool, select the piece, Control Zero, check and make sure it's okay. But again, I've overestimated how big I wanted this to be. Now, sometimes the tissue paper will actually buckle in the middle, so I'm going to zoom in here this time and make a piece that is a overlap in the middle here. We'll continue around and make a few others. Once you've finished with doing that, and we don't want a lot of elements here, but just a few, we're ready to go ahead and to make a Brush to texture our shape with. I'm going to lock everything down because I don't want anything to be affected while I'm making my Brush. Then I click the New Layer icon to create a new layer on which I'm going to work with my Brush. Now, I'm going to use a Brush to create my Brush. I'm going to the Brushes panel here. I'm going to select the stroke color and I'm going to make my stroke pure black. Now, I don't think that's pure black and it's not. I'm just going to come in here and make it pure black by setting CMYK values all to 100 percent. Going to the Brushes panel, I'm going to click this Brush menu, choose Open Brush Library. I'm going to Vector Packs, Grunge Brush vector pack. The Brush I want is this one here. It's the one that has a long tail in it. I'm going to drag to create a brushstroke. We're going to zoom in because we need to borrow part of this brushstroke for our own Brush. I'm going to select the Stroke here and I'm going to choose Object, Expand Appearance, and then Object, Ungroup. I would do that repeatedly until Ungroup is not an option. In fact, this one only needs it done once. Now, this Brush has a rectangular shape all the way around it so I'm just going to select over that. I'm going to delete it because I don't want that. I'm going to the Lasso tool. I'm going to select over this end of the Brush. I'm going to make an irregular selection here because I want to get rid of this end of the Brush. I'll select over what I have left and I'm going to duplicate it, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste. I'm going to rotate it. I'm going to place that on top of the previous one and then start squashing it up and stretching it a little bit because I need to make something that is going to be a texture Brush. Now, I'm a little concerned that they appear to be some repeated elements here. I'm just going to double-click on this until I get this big wad of paint or shape, I'm just going to delete it. I'm in Isolation Mode, so I'll press escape to get back out. I can continue to work on this Brush a little bit until I get a good shape to use to grunge this thing up. Now I'm pretty happy with the way that this is looking as a Brush, so I'm going to select over it. But I don't want it to paint at 100 percent opacity, so I'm going here to the Appearance panel and I'm going to adjust the appearance of this compound path. I'm going to set its blend mode to multiply, so it's going to build up as it paints, and I'm going to reduce the Opacity to around about 60 percent. Now I'm going to open the Brushes panel and I'm going to drag and drop this into the Brushes panel. I'm going to make an Art Brush, I'll click Okay. I'm happy with that painting along this line, I want it to paint as a Tint and I want it to Scale Proportionately, so I'll click Okay. Now let's press Control or Command Zero to get back into illustration. I'm going to turn off the Brush Layer for now. I'm going to unlock the layer that we were working on and open it up. I don't need my Grunge Vector Pack anymore, so I'll close that down. I'm just going to bring my Layers up here where I can see them a little more clearly. I'm going to the very bottom path here, and I'm going to select my Brush. I'm going to the Paintbrush Tool and I'm going to click on the new Brush I created. This is going to happen and just ignore it, just press Control or Command Z because that's what's going to happen, and it's fine. Now we're going to click here, there are three little icons at the very bottom of this palette. One of them says Draw Inside, it is the rightmost one. We need to click on that. Now we're going to paint with our Brush. Now, Draw Inside just means that you're limited to drawing inside the shape. Even if you go over the edge, the brushstroke is only going to appear where it's actually inside this shape. You can texture the shape without running the risk of the Brush going over the edges. Once you've finished with this shape, click back on the Draw Normal. Click on the next shape and go and do the same thing. Draw Inside, apply some brushstrokes to texture it, click on Draw Normal and go to the next one. In each case, you'll find that the color is picked up automatically by the Brush so you don't actually have to do anything about selecting color, you can just focus on applying your brushstrokes back to Draw Normal, next shape. You can tell the ones that you've done and the ones that you haven't done. Because the ones that you've done, raid clipping group because this is effectively when you select Draw Inside it's creating a clipping mask for you automatically. We're just going to progress up the Layer Pallet here, doing each of these in turn, just making really sure and really careful that you're selecting this Draw Inside each time. You make a mistake and don't like the texture, just undo it and start over. Now, I'm not going to texture these two white areas, but I'm going to go back up and do the leaves now. Now I'm not going to texture the additional little triangle paces that I added so I'm done now with the texturing. I can close this layer down and I'll want to go ahead and save my image yet again. Now having saved the image, I no longer need the reference photo, so I can turn it off. I can also remove this layer from the image. This is going to give me a better chance of seeing how my image is actually looking. I'm pretty happy with what I have in terms of this texture collage. You might think that that's sufficient and if you're happy with that, that's fine. But I'm going to go ahead and show you a couple of other techniques that we can use with this image. Firstly, I'm going to get rid of the Brush Layer because I've got it saved it up here, but I don't need it any longer, so I'm just going to trash it. What I do have saved though, and I'm going to use now, is a duplicate of the image as it was when we first created it. I'm just going to turn off the one that we're happy with and turn on and unlock this one because this is the basic shapes for the layer below. I'm going to take all of these shapes and I'm going to unite them into a single path. Now I've got a little bit in the middle there that I want to get rid of so I'm just going to select over it and delete it, Control or Command Zero to come back out. Then I'll press Escape to get out of Isolation Mode. Let's turn our image back on and let's move this Layer behind the image. Now, because our paper is transparent, our tissue paper effect is transparent, we're seeing the brown color of this shape underneath. Going to fix that in just a minute, but I'm going to add a rectangle, the size of the artboard as a background before I do so. I'm going to add a new layer to the image and just drag it below everything else. Going to make a rectangle that is the same size as the artboard. My artboard was 1,000 by 750 pixels, that's the size of this. Now I'm going to fill this with a color but not brown. I'm not going to select my brown. I want turquoise color for this. A pile turquoise, I think that'll be fine. Now we've got our background, it's time to turn our attention to this middle layer. I'm going to lock everything else down and we're just going to open up this middle layer, which is just this compound shape here. I'm going to select on the shape and I'm going back to the Appearance panel here. You can say that it has a Multiply blend mode and the Opacity is 58 percent. Well, I'm going to set this to Normal and 100 percent. Now it's a solid color. Again, it's blocking out all the beautiful effects that we created, but it won't do so if we change the Fill to white. Now, I've got a white fill, but I've got no stroke at all, and I'd like to add a little bit of white surround to this image. I'm going to select on the Stroke option here, I'm going to add a white stroke and I'm going to increase the stroke size to about nine points. Now I'm going to open the Stroke panel up here and I want to set the stroke so that it is aligned to the outside. I'm just going to click here and align it to the outside, and to re-think about how wide I want it to be. I'm bringing it down to seven points aligned to the outside. Now I've got a slight problem down here, I'm just going to investigate what's going on here. I think that this point I don't want so I'm just going to go and select it. I'm going to the Pen Tool. I'm going to delete this anchor point because it's just adding a pointy bit onto this shape that I don't want. Let's go back out again, pretty happy with that. With this Compound Path here, I'm now going to expand it. I'm going to choose Object, Expand Appearance. That's created that as a group. We've got a object that goes all the way around the outside of the shape and then we've got the shape itself. I'm just going to take both of these and I'm going to unite them. I'm going to click on the Pathfinder and click Unite, and so now they're a single shape. Hence I've finished illustration, it's a faux tissue paper collage created in Illustrator. Your project for this class is to make your own faux tissue paper collage in Illustrator. Now you're welcome to go and get the pair of image that I've used and make a pair. Or you can make anything of your choice, post your completed project for us to all enjoy when you've done so. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned a lot about working in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they too might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 5. Faux Tissue Paper Collage - Addendum video for Illustrator CS4 users: This is an additional video which will help you if you're using Illustrator CS4 or earlier. In Illustrator CS4 and earlier version two, you don't have the drawer inside tool, so you're going to need to come up with another solution to the draw inside effect. What I'm going to do is start off with this piece of the pair and I'm going to texturize that. I have selected the same yellow color as is in the pair and I got to that by just selecting the pair. Now what I'm going to do is click away from the pair and make this my stroke color rather than my fill color. I'm going to the paintbrush tool and I'm going to select the paintbrush that I created following the instructions in the video. Everything about this paintbrush is going to be exactly the same in earlier versions of Illustrator. I'm going to click on the paintbrush, and now I'm going to paint my texture lines over this pair shape, and I'm also going to extend them beyond this piece of the pair because I'm going to clip that in a minute. I'm going to make sure that I get my texturize effect looking exactly the way I want it before I progress further. Now that I have my texturize effect in place, let's go to the Layers panel, and what we're going to need to do is to ascertain exactly which layers are involved in what we just did. Well, first of all, we've got the pear shaped that's down the bottom here. I'm actually going to move it right up to the very top of this layer, and then I know that these top elements are going to be the texture. I'm just going to work out, which is the last of the texture paces. Well that's it here, because below here we start into the green leaves. That means that everything from here up relates to this pace of pair. I have my path at the very top here, the pace of pair, but I actually want to texturize. What I'm going to do is make a duplicate of this. I'm going to click and drag it onto the New Layer icon down here. I have two versions of it, and one of them, it doesn't matter which of these two I am going to place at the very bottom of my stack of texture. Now I have a filled shape, all my texture brushes and a duplicate of that filled shapes. I've got also a sandwich, if you like. Filled shapes on either end and in the middle are all of my texture paces. What I'm going to do is make a clipping mask. I'm going to click here to select the topmost layer and then I'm going to hold the Shift key as I click on each subsequent layer all the way down to the last filled layer. I've got the whole of this sandwich if you like, selected. Now I'm going to right-click and choose, Make Clipping Mask. You can also get to that from the object menu by choosing clipping mask make. Now let's see what it is that we've done. He will say we have a clipping group and a clipping mask shape. The reason why we had to make two copies of this shape is that, when one is used as a clipping mask, it loses its fill, so we would have lost that yellow fill. The multiply effect wouldn't have looked the way it does now. It would have looked more like this, which is not satisfactory. In effect, what we're doing is exactly the same as Illustrator does for us when we do draw inside. It's just that drawer inside was created to save you having to do all this work yourself. I'm just going to collapse that group and let's have a look at another pace and we'll go ahead and do that. Let's just select on this and see what we're working with. Well, we're working with this piece of the green leaf. Now I know which piece I'm going to be working with. I'm just going to click away from it and I'm going to make its fill color, the new stroke color that I can use with my brush. I'm going to click on the brush tool and make sure that I have selected the brush that we created for this texture effect. Now I'm going to start brushing over here to add my texture. When I'm happy with this, I'm going to look at the Layers palette and just work out what I've got. Well, this is a piece of texture, and so is this. This appears to be nothing at all. I'm going to just trash it because it's not helping me here at all. Texture, texture and here's the leaf itself. I am going to move the leaf just above the clipping groups thoughts together with all these other pieces that create this textured leaf. I need another copy of this, so I'm going to drag it onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to move it to the very top so that we have this sandwich again, we have a version of the leaf, all the texture brushes and the second version of the leaf. Now I'm going to click here and then shift click on all the other pieces that go to make leaf shape. Once I've done that, I'm going to make a clipping group so I'll right-click and choose, Make Clipping Mask. That clips the textures to the shape, and it also ensures that at the very bottom of this stack here, we have the original leaves so that we have texture over the leaf instead of just texture over thin air. Now, if at any stage you look at this texture and think you want to alter it, you can do so. I'm just going to select here on the clipping group that makes this piece of pair and I'm going to open the clipping group selection of objects. I'm going to click on the bottom most objects so that it is selected. Now I'm going to go and get my brush, but I'm going to be really careful that I don't change these around until after I've made my brush stroke, click on, My Brush. There is our brush stroke and it's come in looking very ugly. That's exactly what we want to happen. I'm going to make sure that I click here on, No Stroke. Now I'll make a real brush stroke, one that I want to cape. You'll say that Illustrator has flipped these around so that the brush color is the fill color. That's exactly how it would happen in later versions of Illustrator. The only thing is that you can say that these two pass, these two textures that we just added have been placed in Illustrator just loosen the last pallet, not inside this clipping group. Well, we can solve that. We're just going to pick them up and place them somewhere inside the clipping group. In this way, you can achieve the exact same result in Illustrator CS4 and earlier that we have achieved with later versions of Illustrator. You just need to keep a really good eye on the last pallet and just have your wits about you as you work through this. It's not as easy to achieve, but it is possible. As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask them and I'll see what I can do to help you.