Vetores simples e fabulosos no Affinity Designer | 4 métodos de textura para criar ilustrações realistas

1. Hello and Welcome to Class!: [MUSIC] Working in a vector hub has advantages when it comes to creating illustrations. You can quickly create and adjust shapes. The majority of your work is non-destructive and you can easily change colors and tweak individual aspects of your design without impacting others. More importantly, if you need to be able to scale something infinitely for large projects, flat vectors are your go-to. The problem with flat vectors is that when you don't need infinite scaling, sometimes they can feel a little flat, and there's a common misconception that it's impossible to create realistic textural illustrations using vectors, but in this class I'm going to show you otherwise. Hi there, I'm artist and teacher Tracey Capone and welcome to class where I'm going to show you four effective approaches that I take adding texture and effects to my own flat illustrations so that you can easily create realism in your own designs. I've been a full-time working artist for over a decade, but a creative my entire life. My work has been featured in popular publications and TV shows, and I've had the privilege of having select work at home decor stores like Ikea and Pottery Barn. I bring a wealth of experience and knowledge on creating textural illustrations in the digital arena, especially in Affinity Designer and I can't wait to share that knowledge with you here in class, where we're going to create Scandi-inspired felt ornament illustrations. We're going to begin class by talking about five key tips that you should always consider before using texture in your designs. Not just in Designer, but any illustration app. I'm also going to give you a bonus tip about working with neutral textures, which allow you to add texture to your work without shifting the color of the objects they are being added to. Next, I'll walk you step-by-step through four methods for adding texture to your flat vectors. I'll explain the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and when you should use them. I'll also show you how to combine methods to make the process even more efficient. Next, we'll add final touches of realism to our illustrations using a combination of non-destructive effects, edits, and fun tools that I created just for the class. When you've completed the class, not only will you have a set of five fun Scandi-inspired felt ornaments, you'll have four approaches that alone or in combination with one another, can be used in future textural illustration and best of all, everything that I show you in class can easily be adapted for use in all illustration apps, not just Designer. Now, while this class is designed with beginners in mind, it does assume some level of familiarity with Affinity Designer. If you're brand new to the app, I recommend beginning with my class, Textured Florals in Affinity Designer, where I take you through the entire app, show you all the tools and how to use them. I'll be using the iPad version of the app along with an Apple pencil, but if you're using the desktop version of Designer, you can easily follow along if you know where the tools are located. As a student in the class, you're going to receive everything that you need to jump right in and start creating your project. My Scandi ornament assets pack, a set of vector embroidery brushes that I've created from real embroidery stitches and a seamless felt pixel brush. I'm also including a set of over 30 high resolution, colorful, seamless felt textures that are going to take our Scandi ornaments from flat to fabulous. If you love working with vectors, but you have been struggling with adding texture and realism to make them feel less vectory, then this is the class for you. Grab your Apple pencil and iPad, and let's get started. 2. Downloads & Resources: The link to the downloads for the class can be located at the top of the projects and resources section of the class itself. You're going to need to access this through a browser, whether on your iPad or on a computer, not through the Skillshare app. You're going to need a password to access the downloads, which I'll put up on the screen right now. Once you're inside the downloads page, you can either scroll down or simply tap jump to downloads, and it'll take you directly to the four download links. There are two links for the brushes I created for the class. One for the assets pack, and then finally, one for the felt texture pack that I provided. These are all automatic downloads, which means if you have Dropbox on your system, they'll automatically go there. If not, they'll go to the downloads folder on either your iPad or your computer. The brush and assets pack need to be imported from inside designer, and we're going to go through that in a moment. Just be sure that if you move the file, you put it in a spot that you're going to be able to access from designer, whether it's Dropbox on other Cloud file, or directly on your system. Then finally, I want to mention that the felt texture pack includes a ton of high resolution felt images, which makes it rather large. I recommend keeping it either in Dropbox, or in a Cloud file, and only pulling in the felt textures that you need for your illustration, unless you know that your system can handle a relatively large file. Let's go ahead into designer and we're going to import the two brush packs and the assets pack. I'm here in designer, and we're going to start by importing the assets pack first. Now, I do want to mention before we get started that my screen is flipped for a left-handed person. The tools work exactly the same. They're just flipped opposite of one another. Go ahead and locate the asset studio. If you ever have a hard time finding an icon, just tap and hold the question mark here at the bottom and these labels will pop up. The asset studio looks like nine little squares here, and I'll go ahead and open that. Now, I already have the assets pack imported into my system, so I'm not going to pull it in again, but you'll go up to the burger menu at the top of the asset studio. Choose import category. Locate the file. Remember save it somewhere where you can access it from within designer. Click the file and it will automatically import. Now, it may take a second or two, but once it does, you should see it pop up here on the screen. You can use the "Back" and "Forward" arrow buttons to get between your assets pack, or tap on the middle here for the flywheel. Let's go ahead and while we're in the designer side, will import the vector brush set. I'm still on the designer persona because we're going to import the vector embroidery brushes that I provided with the class. Again, I already have them in my system. But you'll go up to the burger menu at the top, select import brushes, locate the file, and it will automatically import. Just like with the asset studio, you should see it pop up here. You can use the arrows to get back and forth between your brush sets, as well as tap the middle to get the flywheel selector. Let's head on over to the pixel side and finally import the felt brush. I'm over here in the pixel persona and it's important to note that the full felt brush is strictly a pixel-based brush, it's not vector. You need to make sure that you're in the pixel persona to import it. It works exactly like the other brushes. Go to the brush studio, tap on the burger menu at the top, choose import brushes and find the file. Once you tap it, it should automatically import it. At this point, you should have the assets pack as well as both brush sets, the vector, and pixel brush set imported into your system. If you run into any questions, please feel free to reach out to me in the discussion below. Next up, let's talk about the class project. 3. The Class Project: The project for this class will be to create your own scandy-inspired felt illustrations using the texture and effect techniques that you're going to learn in the class. You're going to start by creating a group of flat objects, and then taking a look at your final flat illustration and determining which method or methods to add texture and effects will work best for your illustration. Just a hint, you're going to learn you can potentially approach and illustration with more than one method. In the assets pack that I provided with the class, under Buttons and Things, you're going to see a number of complete flat illustrations that you're welcome to use for practice. I just ask that if you do use them and share them to social media that you provide credit to me, and please do not use them in any commercial projects. It's always helpful for perspective students to see what they're going to learn when they take the class. I would love it if you consider sharing your project, the Projects and Resources section of the class itself. The easiest way do that is to take a screenshot of your work and upload it using the Create Project button here. Now, once you've created a project, you can continuously add projects to it. If you haven't completed all of your illustrations, share what you've completed and you can always upload more along the way. If you run into any issues creating your project, please feel free to ask me any questions in the Discussion section of the class, or at the email that I provide in the About section. Next up, we're going to talk about five tips for using texture effectively in affinity designer. I'll see you there. 4. Tracey's Top Five Texture Tips: In this lesson, we're going to talk about five tips that you should always consider whenever you're going to use texture in your designs. Not just in designer, but any illustration app. Let's get started. Tip number 1. If you've taken any of my classes you've heard this one before. Whenever you're going to add texture to your work, make sure that you think ahead to the final output so that you can size your original document accordingly. If you plan to print your illustration, you want to set your dpi to at least 300 and make sure that the actual size of the document is the largest size that you plan to print. This is going to help you avoid any pixelation and moneyness of textures. Tip number 2, just because it's a vector, doesn't mean it's infinitely scalable. A vector is a shape that's created from mathematical equations and commands that tell designer or whatever vector app that you're working in, what you want your shape to look like. That shape is made up of a series of lines and curves between nodes. While most of the time you're starting out with a flat, infinitely scalable object, that's not always the case. When you're working in designer on the vector side, you need to be careful because not every tool is going to give you a flat vector right out of the gate. Let's go into designer and take a closer look. I'm here on the vector side of designer, the designer persona. I wanted to touch on a few of the tools that you would use to create shapes to talk about, which you're going to give you a flat, infinitely scalable object right out of the gate versus those that you have to wary of because you may or may not get an infinitely scalable object. If you use the pen or pencil tools to create your shapes, you're immediately going to have a flat, infinitely scalable object. I can zoom in to something like 40,000 percent over the original size of my document, and you're not going to see any pixelation because there's no pixel information attached to them. The same goes for the shapes within the rectangle tool. I can drag out a shape, and while this isn't immediately a curve, it's actually a shape layer until I convert it to a curve. It's still a flat, infinitely scalable object. I can zoom in just like I did with the one that I created with the pencil tool, and I'm not going to run into any pixelation because there's no pixels attached to it. Now it's important to note that once you decide to add pixel information to it, either in the form of a texture image file or with your pixel brushes, you lose that infinite scalability and that's where you need to think ahead to how you plan to use your document and if whether you're going to print it or not. What about the vector brush tool? It has vector built right into the name. Logically speaking, you would think that you would get a flat, infinitely scalable object right out of the gate. Well, it's not always the case. But the majority of the time it's not. Let's take a closer look at the Brush Studio, and I'll show you what I mean. I'm here in the Brush Studio, and I'm going to go up to the hamburger menu at the top. At the bottom of the list here you'll see three types of brushes that you can create in the vector persona and designer; New Solid Brush, Textured Intensity Brush, and Textured Image Brush. Textured intensity and textured image brushes have texture right in the name, and that texture comes from what's called a nozzle. Those nozzles are pixel-based. They're typically scans of brushstrokes or other objects that are used to create the brush. In the case, for example, of the ornament brush pack that I provided. This is a textured image brush. If I tap and hit edit on one of the brushes, you can see at the bottom that there's a nozzle. This is an image of an embroidery stitches that I created, and then I use that to create the brush. If I grab my vector brush tool, and I drag out shape here, you can see the image of that embroidery stitch. But if I start to zoom in, it pixelates really quickly because I've blown this up well over the original size of my document. I've moved over to the acrylics category, and this is one of the built-in brushes in designer. One of my favorite brushes to use to add texture to shapes that I create is this textured acrylic to glazing brush. I'm going to go ahead and drag out a shape. Let's actually make that a little bit bigger so you can see it. I have the ability to use nodes with this because ultimately it is a vector brush. But you can see that there's a lot of texture. If I tap and hold on the brush and hit "Edit", at the bottom, you're going to see that nozzle. Again, this is a scanned image of the brushstroke that's used to create the brush, which means pixels are attached. Even though I have the flexibility of using my node tools, if I zoom in, it pixelates really quickly. The majority of the brushes that are built into designer are pixel based. There's one category that's not, and that is the basic brush set. Let me go ahead and delete this guy here, and select one of these brushes. If I draw out a shape with my vector brush tool, just like the shapes that I created with a pen or pencil tool, as well as the shape tool, I can zoom in to this infinitely because there's no pixel information attached to it. I know that because if I tap and hold and hit "Edit", there's no nozzle at the bottom and you can see that it says solid brush. This is create with this solid flat vector shape. Therefore, it's independently scalable until I decide to add something to it. To wrap this tip up, it is important to keep in mind which tool you're using, because some tools are going to give you infinitely scalable objects until you make them otherwise, but others won't. When you're using any vector brush, be aware of what you're using. If you see texture, there's going to be a nozzle attached to it. If it looks like a solid brush, it probably is. Again, you can just go into the brush itself and see if there's a nozzle at the bottom. Tip number 3. The more raster elements that you add, in other words, the more pixels, the larger your final document. If size is an issue, you want to take steps to consolidate the textures that you add to your illustration. In this class, I'm going to show you ways that you can use texture more efficiently without losing its effectiveness. Tip number 4, always use high-quality, high-resolution textures, whether it's a texture image file or in brush form. No matter how well you plan ahead when sizing your document, if the textures that you're using are low resolution, you're going to run into issues with your final illustration. Whether you purchase them, create your own, or get them from a class, make sure that the tools that you're using are made with high-resolution source files. Finally, tip number 5. There are tons of places that you can purchase textures, but don't forget free texture is everywhere. Consider making your own. You can create amazing textures simply by taking a photograph while you're out on a walk, or by using paint, ink, and a scanner. There are also numerous sources for free use images on the web and places like Pixabay and Pexels. When it comes to designer, there's a treasure trove of free textures built right into the app, whether it's built-in brushes or the stock studio where you can pull free use images from Pexels and Pixabay directly without ever having to leave the app. Next up, I'm going to give you a bonus tip all about the benefits of working with neutral textures. I'll see you there. 5. Bonus Tip: Using Neutral Textures: In this last thing, I'm going to give you a bonus tip in addition to their previous five that we talked about. I'm bringing this one out separately for a few reasons. One, it's a little bit more involved than the other tips, but more importantly, it's something that I use all the time. Not just here in Designer but in other digital illustration apps as well, because the process that I'm going to show you here is easily adaptable to those other apps. Then finally, we're going to be using the concepts from this tip in one of the upcoming lessons as a way of adding texture efficiently. Let's get started. I have two identical boxes here. There are the exact same color and have the exact same texture image file attached to them. I pulled this from the Stock studio here in Designer. Now, what I want to talk about are those occasions when you want the texture from an image file without impacting the color of the object that you're adding it to. In other words, you don't want any color shift. Keep in mind that when you use blend modes to combine a texture into an object, which is typically how you approach adding texture, the blend modes that you choose are going to force the color from the texture you're adding to interact with the color beneath it. Sometimes it's not very significant, but other times you're going to see a significant color shift to the object that you're adding the texture to. Well, what about those occasions you don't want that to happen? The easiest way to avoid that is to use a desaturated texture, whether you pull it in that way or you desaturate it within the app before you shift your color. Let's take a look at how you can do that here in Designer. With this second square, I'm going to go to my layer studio, and I'm going to add a black and white adjustment from the adjustments studio. Let's tap, and I'll change some of my values here just to get some of that contrast back. I've removed all color. I no longer have those oranges and gold tones. It's completely black and white. If I go up to that layer and I change my blend mode to soft light, which is a typical blend mode for texture, if I zoom in, what you'll see is while I'm getting various shades of blue, I haven't actually shifted away from the original color of the object. The various shades are to be expected because the highlights and the texture, that's how you provide the texture. What you're not seeing, though, are some of these orange tones. To further understand that, let's go ahead and try to do the same thing with that texture without changing the saturation value. I'll go back to this texture, and I'm going to again change it to soft light with the exact same blend mode. What you can see is I'm getting some blue shades in there, but I'm also getting some of those warm tones. Now, if this is what you're aiming for, that's fine. But again, if there's an occasion where you just want the texture and non of the color shift, then consider using a desaturated texture, again, whether you pull it in that way or you adjust it using some sort layer in whatever digital app you're using. In the next video, we're going to begin creating our scandi inspired felt ornaments so that we can start taking some flat objects from flat to fabulous, adding texture. I'll see you there. 6. Texture WIth Clipping Masks Part 1: In this first lesson, we're going to approach adding texture in a rather standard way. We're going to add different texture to every layer, and then rely on clipping masks so that whatever texture we add to one layer doesn't impact the others. I'm also going to show you a really easy way to add additional effects and embellishments like the stitches and shadowing using copies of your original shapes. Let's get started. I have a 10 by 10, a 300 dpi document set up here. Go ahead and set yours up to whatever size you would like. I've also pulled in this wood texture for the background, and I've brought that in from the Stock Studio and I locked it into place, so I don't accidentally move it around. It's entirely an aesthetic choice on my part. Go ahead and do that, or you can work on the simple plain background. It's totally up to you. Now, since the class itself isn't about creating the shapes, but rather adding texture and effects to those shapes, I'm going to use the full flat illustrations that you can find in the Assets Pack I provided. You can certainly follow along using those same shapes, or you can create your own. There are advantages and disadvantages to adding texture to every layer. The advantage is that because you're working with clipping masks, you can use a different texture for every layer. One texture that you add to one layer isn't going to impact the others because of those clipping masks. The disadvantage is if you're already working with a rather complex flat illustration that has a lot of layers, when you add texture to every single layer, you're effectively doubling the number of layers that you need to manage. You're also increasing your file size. What you're going to find over the next four lessons is that there's multiple ways to approach adding texture, and it's always a good idea to think ahead to how you want your final output to look. In other words, what do you want your illustration to look like? Because you may find that one approach is more efficient than another, and it's always a good idea to keep efficiency in mind, not just so that you don't end up with an unruly number of layers or a large file size, but also to save yourself time in the long run. Let's take a look at the illustration we're going to create here. I've pulled in the pair, and I pulled in one that I've already completed because I want you to see what the final output is going to look like, so we can talk about our approach to creating it. Of course, we are going to be adding texture, and as I mentioned, I want the color of my textures to create the color for my final illustration. So I've pulled in different color, felt textures for each layer here. We're also going to be using a combination of duplicates of our existing shapes, as well as the Effects Studio to add our shading and our embroidery stitches. Now let's take a closer look at some of the effects because it's going to go a long way in helping you understand why I'm approaching something the way that I'm. If I were actually creating a real felt ornament in real life, it would be stitched around the edge but it would be stuffed, so it would curve up. Where it is stitched it would be slightly flat. You'd get a slight shadow around the edge. Then as it goes up, it would be highlighted in the middle, and that's what's going to help drive home the idea that this is a stuffed object that is sitting up from the table, it's not flat. We're going to create the shadows using copies of the existing fills that we have here, these two shapes. I'll show you what I mean in a moment. Once we've done that, we're going to use the duplicates not only to create those shadows, but we're also going to use an additional duplicate to create our embroidery stitches along with the vector brushes that I provided. Then finally, we use a combination of the pencil tool and the vector brushes to create the additional elements here. I've turned off the completed one, and I have my flat one here from the Asset Studio. Now, if you recall, I mentioned that we're going to be using duplicates of our shapes to create some of our effects down the road. Now, even though we're not going to be doing that right at this moment, I want you to create my duplicates now because if I add my texture first and then create my duplicates, I'm just going to have to go back and delete the texture, which adds time on to how I'm creating. Again, it's always about approaching it efficiently. I know that I want both shadows and embroidery stitches on my two shapes here. I'll go into my layers studio and I'm going to duplicate the teal shape twice, once for the shadow, once for the embroidery stitch. I'm going to do the same thing with the orange, one it's for the embroidery stitch, one it's for the shadow. I don't need any duplicates of my stem or my leaf, but I do need a duplicate of this center off-white piece because I want a stitch around the edge of it. I'll go ahead and duplicate that. Now, one thing I want to do, I have my little seed shapes here broken out in individual layers, and I actually don't need that in this particular case. I'm going to go ahead and ungroup these. It's going to automatically select all of them. I'll go up to Edit, and I'm going to create one large curve. They're all going to get the same texture, a black felt texture, so I don't need them broken out separately, and I'm fine with their placements, so I don't need to manipulate them individually. It makes it a lot easier to convert them into one large curve rather than working with a group. I have all the duplicates that I need in place. I'm actually going to turn them off for right now, and I'll turn them on as I need them. At this point, I'm going to add my texture. You can add it now or later, it's totally up to you. In this particular case, I'm going to go ahead and pull in my felt textures, and then will add the effects. The first thing I want to do is select my teal shape here. I'll go to my Documents menu, Place Image, and I want to locate my teal felt texture. I keep mine in a Cloud file again because they are relatively large. I'll do teal here. I'm going to tap to place it. When you tap like that, it places it in the exact size it was created in. I'll release it just so that it completely places it, and it doesn't reduce its size. I want to select it again, and I'm just going to hold my three fingers down, so it reduces from the center. I just want it to be just large enough to cover the teal shape itself. That's going to help reduce the size of the file a little bit. I'll go ahead and clip it into place, I'm staying to the right on the layer and clipping it. I'm not making it a vector mask. I'll release. Now I have both the teal color and the felt texture, it is pulled into place. I'm going to do that again with the orange, Documents menu, Place Image. I'll use this golden rod. Again, I'll tap to place it. I'll release it, so I don't reduce it by accident. Then I'll just size it down, clip it into place. I'm going to do that with the rest of the shapes and I'm going to speed it up, so I'll see you on the other side. [MUSIC] I have all of my felt textures in place. I have the duplicates I made previously. At this point, I'm ready to start using those duplicates to create some of my effects and my shadowing and embroidery stitches so let's do that next. One of the beautiful things about working with vectors is that you can use the shapes that you create to easily create effects that are just the right size for the shapes you're trying to add them to. I'm going to start with the edge shading that I showed you earlier. I'm going to turn on one of my teal shapes here. Now, the reason that I'm using a duplicate of my shape is because I want the shading to follow the exact edge of the original shape that was in place. By using a duplicate, I can easily accomplish that. I don't have to draw it out. It's in place for me already. But I want this fill to be a stroke. With it selected I'll go up to the top here, the color studio, and I'm just going to switch this over. Now, I know that's really big. Let's just go ahead and drop the size of that a little bit. Now, one additional thing is, it's not dark enough to be a shadow. I want to darken that up a little bit so it's a little darker than this teal. I'll go back to that stroke and I'm going to drag down with my pencil just to darken it up a touch. One final step is I want this stroke to be aligned inside my shape. I want to inside that blue line. I'll go to my stroke studio. I'll go to a line and I'm going to tap the second one, and you can see that it moved inside the blue line. Now, that made the stroke a little bit too big, so I'm going to back that up a little bit. This doesn't quite look like a shadow. It looks like a stroke sitting on top of a shape. What I want to do is with that selected, go to my FX Studio and I'm going to blur it. I'm going to use a Gaussian blur. I'll tap to turn it on, tap the name to get the contextual menu at the bottom, and I'm just going to start dragging up until it's blurred to where I want it. I don't want it so blurred you can't see it. But I also don't want it to be too solid. I'm going to tap this and I'm going to put in, let's try 15 and see what it looks like. I'll just keep moving up. There we go. I think 25 will work. Now, when I blurred it it took some of that shadow and moved it outside of my shape and I don't want that. I want it to be clipped inside that teal blue, pear shape. I'm going to take this layer, I'm going to drag it down and I'm going to clip it inside that teal blue shape. I also want to change my blend mode to something more suitable for a shadow which is multiply. Again, I'll select that layer, go up to my Layers option, change this to multiply. You can see it darkens it significantly, but I'm going to drop the opacity. I want to do the same exact thing for the orange layer now. Let's follow those same steps. I'm going to take the duplicate of that orange shape, I want to flip it to a stroke. I'll make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to drag down so it's darker, then I want to make sure it's aligned inside. Go to my FX Studio, add a Gaussian blur. Again, I'll just type in 25. I think I'm going to make it a little bit larger for this one. Let's try 30. I want a little less of a shadow for this one, than I do the other. I want to play around with the alignment just to see. I think I'm going to keep the alignment to the outside because I was getting a little bit of a line there and I'm just going to clip this in place. If you ever feel like it doesn't look exactly the way you want, just play around with the alignment of your stroke because you're going to see a big difference between them. I have my two edge shadows in place and those are the only two shapes I'm going to add that to. The reason I'm adding that as again, they're going to have stitches around them. If you are working on a real felt ornament, wherever it stitch it would be slightly flat because your too felt pieces are being pushed together and then stitched. It's going to have a touch of shadow around the edge if you're looking at it straight down. The center, we're eventually going to add a highlight too just again to drive home that curved stuffed impression. I have my edge shadowing in place. I use my first two duplicates. Now I want to use the rest of my duplicates to add the embroidery stitching. Let's do that next. I'm in my Layer studio and I'm going to turn on that second duplicate shape. Now I want my stitch to be off white and again, I need this to be a stroke, so I've got it selected. I'll go up to my Color Studio. I'm going to flip this over. I'll change that to off white. Make sure you're changing the stroke. Select the stroke, change the stroke, not the fill. Now I want to go to my Vector Brushes, the embroidery pack I provided. I'll go ahead and open my brush studio, locate that pack. In the case of a pear, I want to use a straight stitch. Now when you open this pack, what you're going to notice is that there's a light and a dark version of every brush. This brush is a texture image brush. When it comes to using the colors the easiest approach is to create two versions of the brush. Whenever you use the light colors like off white or light yellow, use the light version of the brush. If you're using dark ones, dark teal, dark red, whatever it is, use the darker version of the brush. I know I want the 2 Hole straight stitch here, so I'll go ahead and select that. Now it's sitting outside of the shape. I actually want it to be sitting on top of the teal. Again, the reason I used a duplicate is so I get the exact shape that I want. I don't have to draw that out, it creates it automatically for me. I'm going to go ahead and use my move tool. I'm going to hold three fingers down so it sizes in from the center and I'll just size down a little bit so that it moves it just inside my shape there. I'm also going to bring the width up to 25 just because I know that's going to look exactly the way I want it. If I zoom in here you can see I have my nice embroidery stitch sitting inside the teal piece. It's the exact proportions, exact shape I want because I used a duplicate of my original shape. Let's do the same thing with the orange. I'll turn on my shape, change it to a stroke, I'm going to use off white again, change my stitch and I'm just going to bring this in. I'll change this to 25. You can change yours to whatever you'd like. I just know that I like how 25 looks. The reason that I can do that is because these are strokes. You can change any stroke in designer to any brush in your brush studio. If it's still a stroke, if you don't change it to a fill, you have the ability to change the width of the stroke and things like that. That's why I'm keeping it the way that I am because I have that flexibility. Additionally, I can also go in and use my node tool if I wanted. But I like where these are placed, so I'm going to leave these exactly as is. When we get into some of the other illustrations, you're going to see where the node tool is going to come in handy. I have one final shape that I need to add my stitches to and that's this awful white one here. I'm going to change it to a stroke. Now in this case, I actually want to use a bit of a darker color so that you see the stitch. I'm going to choose, I think this rusty brown here and I'll go to my Vector Brush. I'm going to use a different brush as well. Let me zoom in here. I'm going to use this X stitch. I'm choosing the X stitch dark color and I'm using the 4 hole one because it's on the inside. The ones that you see here that I created they are a 1 Hole stitch. It's supposed to give the impression that it's wrapping around the edge so you really only see one hole. I'm going to use multiple holes because it's on top of something. I'll go ahead and just choose this 4 hole stitch. Now the alignment of the stroke is inside. I actually need to change that. With it selected, I'll go to my Stroke Studio and I'm just going to change my alignment and now everything is sitting outside and I actually like the size of that. I'm not going to change it. Let's just back up a moment. I have my edge shadows in place. I have my embroidery stitches, but this isn't quite what I wanted. I want to add some additional drop shadows as well as some additional embroidery stitches, just to really give it that sense of realism. We'll do that next. Coming up in the next video, we're going to complete our pear illustration, adding our final effects and textures. I'll see you there. 7. Texture With Clipping Masks Part 2: We're in the final stretch on this one. We just want to add some additional shading as well as some more embroidery stitches just to the face of the pair just to give it a little bit more realism. I'm going to start with the shadows. There's two ways we're going to approach this. The first is going to use the FX Studio and some drop shadows and then we're going to do some spot shading using the felt brush that I provided. Let's start with a drop shadows. Before you do anything, what you want to think about is where you want the majority of your shadow to sit. Now on these two, I'm not worried about this because this shadow is in place, so that is if you're looking down, you can see those shadows. For the rest of my drop shadow though, I want to determine where I want my light source to come from. I want my light source to be as if it's coming from the left at the top, which means the majority of my shadows would be down to the right. You're going to see shadowing around all edges. But you always want to make sure that one side, the side that's opposite of your light source has a heavier shadow. Let's start with our leaf shape. I'll go ahead and select the curve that makes my leaf. I'm going to tap the FX Studio. Turn on outer shadow, which is the drop shadow. I'll tap to get the contextual menu. Again, ultimately I do want shading around the entire thing, but I want it to be slightly more to the bottom right. I'm just going to bring the radius up a little bit. If I zoom in here, you can see there is in fact shading around the whole thing, but there's a concentration of it down here and to the right. I think I'm going to bring the intensity up a little bit to you. Now, I could select each layer, go into my FX Studio and start a fresh with each one. But I can actually just use a copy of this to do anything else. I'm not going to add a shadow to my little seeds here because they're black and you're not going to see them. But I do want to add one to this shape here. Now, even though it's sitting on the top of the pear and there's nothing hanging off like you have here, I'm still going to add a shadow to it because if you were actually creating a felt ornament, you're talking about felt sitting on top of felt, which means there is going to be a shadow because felt is at least two millimeters thick. I want at least a little bit of a shadow here just to give the impression of taking a white piece of felt sitting on top of the orange and stitching it in place. I go back to my layers studio. I am going to select that ellipse. Actually, I'm going to start by copying my green layer. Selecting my "Ellipse", I'll go to Edit and Paste FX. That's going to paste the effect I put here into place here. Now it's a bit too much, so I want to back it off a little bit. The beautiful thing about everything in the FX Studio is that they're non-destructive, which means I can go back in and make adjustments whenever I like. I'm going to tap the effects on this layer. I'm going to tap to make sure the contextual menu is up. I'm just going to drag up a little bit and I'm going to bring the radius down. I don't want it to be as graduated, I don't want so much of a blur. I want it to be a little bit more sharp because again, I'm just trying to give the impression of a piece of felt sitting on top of another one. I think I'm going to drop the opacity just a bit. I like how that's looking. Again, I'm not going to add anything under these seeds because you're not going to see it because of color of them. However, one final drop shadow that I wanted to add using FX Studio is under the entire pear. Now this one is actually going to be much more intense and deeper than the rest because I want to give the impression this is a raised object that's curved both underneath and on top because it's tough. I'll go up and select my overall "Group", go to my FX tap, "Outer Shadow", tap to get the contextual menu. Again, I'm going to bring this down into the right. I'm not going to worry so much about seeing it around the edge, but I'll bring their radius up. You can see a little bit there, but the concentration of my shadow is down into the right here, both on the leaf. It's adding a little more to the leaf where it hangs over, as well as the bottom here and my stem. I'm going to bring the intensity up a little bit. Just play around with your settings until you like it. Again, these are non-destructive, you can always go back in and adjust it if you don't like it. I want to add a little bit of spot shadowing to the teal and the orange shape here. Let's go through those sections shapes here. I'll start with the teal. I'm going to add a pixel layer within this shape because I don't want it to be outside. I just want it to be clipped into this shape. I'll select one of the layers in here and just tap "Pixel Layer". I'll make sure my brush is selected and I want to make sure that I'm working with a version of the teal color I have here because again, I want it to be realistic looking. I'll go up to my colors studio and I want to sample this color specifically the darker part where the shadow is. You can see it changed that dot. I'll tap so that it changes it there. Make sure my brush is relatively large. You want to bring the flow down just a little bit. I'm just going to start adding some additional shadowing on this bottom right curve. Let's do the same thing with the orange. Again, I'll tap, I'll add a pixel layer. I'm going to sample the dark rust color I used for the shadowing. Tap to change it and I'm going to go a little bit darker. Make sure my brush is selected and I'll just add a bit of shading here to the bottom edge. I don't want a lot. Just a little bit. I know this looks a little bit. It'll go a little bit too much, but we're about to change the opacity too. I want to change both blend modes of those pixel layers to multiply again there are shadows. Now change them significantly to darken them up a lot. I'm going to drop my opacity. If you find that it's not quite looking the way you want, you can also go into your FX Studio and add a bit of a blur to it and I think I'm going to do that. That's the only area I'm going to do that to. The next step I want to take though is I want to add a highlight down the middle here, because again, I want to give the impression that this is stuffed and curved upwards and you would have the highest point with a highlight. I want to add that to my orange layer specifically. You're not really going to see it on the white. I'm going to add another pixel layer to my orange layer here and I'm adding a separate one because we're going to use a different blend mode. I'll just grab this off-white color here, make sure I have my felt brush selected and I'm just going to draw down the middle here. I know this looks rather silly, but we're going to change the blend mode and the opacity. I'm going to change this to screen. You can try screen or add. What this allows to happen is the texture comes through, but you still get that nice lightness. I'll just drop the opacity here. I just want a hint of a highlighted the very top middle. One final thing I'm going to do is go back to my designers studio or designer persona and I'm going to grab my pencil tool. I want to add some embroidery stitches here to the leaf, as well as here along the top of my orange. Let's go to the leaf shape here. I'm going to go ahead and get myself a vector layer to work in. Now, I'm going to start by using the pencil tool because that's going to allow me to control a drawing as if I'm working with a pencil. Then I'm going to convert the stroke that I create to an embroidery stitch, just like we did here. I know that I want my stitches to be, I think I'm going to use the off-white. Let's start with that. I'll go up to my leaf shape. Make sure my pencil tool is selected. I'll just bring the width up just slightly. I'm just going to start drawing my veins. This is going to give me a separate curve for each one. I can go in and use my node tool to adjust them. I just want this sitting over the top of this one, pull that one in and I can just use for the one side, change them to embroidery stitches. Let's go to our layers studio. I'm going to select all of these layers. Go to my vector brushes again, I want my embroidery stitches. I'm going to use a light straight stitch again. So I'll just tap and it's going to change those to stitches. I'm just going to bring those up to 25, just like the others. Let me go ahead and remove that. Again, I just want this to be subtle. I don't want it to be too dark. I am going to then use my node tool and where I feel like I need to, I'm going to just move it around. I'm just going to drag my nodes. Let me pull this down. I can pull this one in, and what I want to do is I want to pull the dark part of this one over the dark part of another one, so that it looks like I'm coming up through an existing hole hole in a stitch. Again, I'll just pull this one down here. This is the fun thing about working with vectors, is that you can use your nodes and your handles to manipulate things that they don't look exactly the way you want them. Let's just step back. I like how that one's looking. Now, I want to go ahead and draw out some basic leaf shapes that I'm going to turn into a stitch. Now, one thing I am finding, I feel like this embroidery stitch is in the way a little bit too much. I'm going to go ahead and locate that. It would be on my orange layer right here. I'm just going to drag it out a little bit. I'm going to drag it down and maybe out that way. I might do the same with this one. I'm going to drag it down and maybe a touch out. It's given me a little bit more room to work with here as well. Again, I'll go ahead and give myself a vector layer and I'm going to bring it into the orange layer here, because it's going to be sitting on top of that. I'll grab my pencil tool and I'm going to do the same thing I did here. I'll just make sure I have the color that I want, and I want it to be a little smaller when I'm using it as a pencil. We draw out a shape. I'm going to make that a little more narrow. If you have a hard time getting a curve, you can always turn on your stabilizer here just by tapping this right arrow. I'll just go ahead and draw my leaf shapes. Whenever you use the pencil tool, you're not getting a closed object, so you need to close it yourself. It's going to make it easier to work with. Let's go ahead and put this in place. I'm just going to two-finger tap and drag to duplicate this around the rest of my shape. I'll just two-finger tap and drag. That way I don't have to start fresh each time. Going to a select all of those layers. I'll tap on the first layer, two-finger tap on the last. I'm going to make this slightly smaller so it fits into place a little bit better. I'll move it right about there and now I want to convert it to a stitch. Again, I'm using the light color, two hole stitch here. Now, instead of starting all over again, I know that I want the same shape. I'm just going to grab this layer, two-finger tap and drag and just move it where I want it. I'm just duplicating it that way. Now, you can adjust the colors of these. I'm wondering if I should use a darker color there since I have a highlight, I actually like it because I think if I made this in real life, I wouldn't want something too dark on the face of the pear, so I'm going to leave it as is. But again, because all of these are still vectors, you can adjust their color and their size and things like that. I'm going to call this done. I like how this is looking. Let's take a quick look back on how we approached this. I knew that I wanted my texture to inform the final color of my illustration, not the shapes themselves. I knew that I would need to approach it by adding texture on every level and using clipping masks so that one layer doesn't impact the others. I also knew that I was going to be creating some effects and embellishments using duplicates of my existing shapes. Before I started anything else, I went ahead and made the duplicates so that I didn't have to go back and remove textures or other effects which would just add time onto creating my illustration. Next, I added my textures. I pulled in a felt texture for every layer and clipped it into place again so that one layer didn't impact others. Then I went ahead and created my edge shadow by using one of the duplicates of the teal and the orange shapes here, converting them to strokes, making them a touch darker and then adding a blur to them. I went ahead and created the embroidery stitches in a similar manner. I turned on the other duplicates for the teal orange and the white shapes. I changed them to strokes, changed them to the color that I wanted my stitch to be, and then chose whichever stitch I wanted in the vector brush pack. Again, you can adjust those shapes using the node tools. In this case, because it was pretty simple, I could simply use my move tool and drag in. Finally, I went ahead and added some additional shadowing using a combination of the effect studio with drop-shadow, as well as some spot shadowing using the felt brush. I also added a highlight down the middle, again, just to drive home that feeling that it was curved and it was sitting up from the table. Finally, we added our final stitches here using a combination of the pencil tool as well as the vector brush pack. In the next lesson, we're going to cover using a texture overlay with a vector mask. I'll see you there. 8. Texture Overlay with a Vector Mask Part 1: In this lesson, we're going to take a more simplistic approach to adding texture to our illustration. We're going to use a combination of a neutral texture overlay like we discussed in a previous lesson, combined with a vector mask to add a single layer of texture to our entire illustration all at once. Let's get started. Once again, I have a 10 by 10 at 300 DPI document set up, and I've placed a wood texture in the background. Go ahead and set your document to whatever size you'd like and use whatever background you'd like. Now, again, since the class isn't focused on creating the shapes themselves, but rather adding the texture and effects, I'm going to use one of the complete flat illustrations from the assets pack. I've pulled in a completed illustration of the bird that I'm going to create in this lesson, so that you can have a look at what I want it to look like when I'm done. Since we're going to be using a texture overlay, the color for my final illustration is going to come from the colors in the original shapes. The texture's going to come from the neutral gray felt texture that I'm going to pull in. We're going to create a vector mask, just to clip away any texture outside the bird. Just like with the pair, we're going to add some additional embellishments and effects in the form of stitching as well as edge shading. I'm also going to use the pixel felt brush to add a little bit of spot shadowing here and there. Then we'll add some additional elements from the assets pack. I have my flat bird illustration, again, I pulled in from the Assets Studio, and the color for my final illustration, as I mentioned, is going to come from the shapes that I created. The texture is going to come from the neutral texture overlay that we're going to put in place a little bit later. Before we do that though, we want to take a look at our shapes and determine what we need to duplicate. Whether it's for the embroidery stitches, the edge shadow or in the case of this lesson, the vector mask. Let's do that next. I'm here in the layers studio, I'm going to create the vector mask first. The mask is going to clip away any texture outside of the bird shape, which means that I need to make the mask using any of the shapes in this layer stack that are part of the outer edge of the bird. In this case the wing, the body, and the beak. I've selected all three, I'll go to Edit and Duplicate. I want to move this up and out of the group because it's going to be its own separate element. While they're still selected, I'll go back up to Edit and do an add under Geometry. I changed it to yellow because of where the beak was in the layer stack, don't worry about that. The color of the vector mass doesn't matter at all. I'm going to go ahead and change the name of this just so I can keep track. I don't need this right now, so I'm just going to turn it off. Again, I'm just creating this now so that I don't have to go back and remove any texture or effects that we add to it later. The next thing I want to do is to create my duplicates for my edge shadow and my embroidery stitches. I know I'm going to do embroidery stitches around the body of my bird as well as the wing. I'll go ahead and duplicate the wing, and I'm going to duplicate the body. I don't need this extra curve here because the stitch is going to be the same color all the way around, so I'm just going to remove that curve. All I need is the overall shape of the body. That's for the stitches. I need another duplicate of that same shape for the edge shadow. Then with the wing, I'm actually not going to add an edge shadow, I might add a little bit of shading with the pixel brush. But I actually want this to look more like it's a flat piece that's glued on top that has some stitching in it. I'm going to turn those shapes off for right now. I'm going to step back and just see if there's any other duplicates I need to create, and I think I'm good to go. At this point we can begin using those duplicates to add our stitching as well as our edge shadows. Let's start with the embroidery stitches. I'm going to turn on one of my duplicates for my bird, and just like with the pair, I'll go in to the color studio and flip this over to a stroke. I want to make sure that stroke isn't set to brush because I had just previously used this with the vector brush because it's set there. I want this to be a regular stroke, so I'm going to go ahead and tap that. I'm going to bring the width up a little bit. Right now it's gray, I actually want that to be off white. I'm fine with the alignment of the stitch. Right now it's aligned here, so part of it is outside the blue line, part of is within, and that's perfect. I'll go back to my vector pack here. In this case, I don't want to use the sideway stitch like I did with the pair, I actually want to use one of my upright stitches here. I want it to have the impression of it being stitched and wrap around the edge, like a blanket stitch in embroidery. I'm going to choose my upright one whole light color. That's a bit small, I'm going to bring that up a little bit. I'm just going to step back for a second. Now, it's a little bit messy here and I'm going to show you how to correct that in a moment. But first I want to move my embroidery stitches into place a little better. I'm going to start out by using the Move tool. All three fingers down, and just drag in so it maintains its proportions and sizes from the center. What I'm aiming for, is to have just the very edge of the stage hanging over the edge of the bird. I want it to have the impression that it's wrapped around the bird. I can get that there, but the Move tool is not going to get me all the way. I actually need to use my Node tool. Since this is a stroke, I can easily do that, I can just switch to the Node tool and start manipulating individual nodes. I'm going to pull this down to pull this up here. I can also use individual handles. If I hold one finger down while I use the handle, I can adjust one handle at a time. The side looks fine. I'm going to bring this node in here. Now it's giving me a little trouble there, but that's okay, I'm going to show you how to fix that in a moment. I'm going to grab this handle and just drag that in. We're about as far as we can go without fixing that. Let me zoom in here. Vector brushes are notorious for creating little shapes like this and either that or gaps, and one of the ways around those gaps or these little funny spots, is to break the node and give yourself two nodes to work with instead of one. I'm going to make sure that node is selected, and with my node tool selected, I'm going to hit "Break". What that's going to do is give me two separate nodes to work with. That way I can manipulate it a little bit better. Now because this tail is so pointed, I'm actually just going to stop with my stitches here. If you really wanted to, you could manipulate the nodes on the bird's tail itself and make it more square and just bring the whole thing out but I'm going to go ahead and leave it like this. The reason it's now together is if I move one node closer to the other, it's going to snap back into place. I temporarily broke it just so that I could get it where it was, where I needed it and then I can snap the two together. So I like how that's looking. I just want to go back now and make sure that nothing else got bumped out of place. I'm just going to use this node here and this handle. Maybe bring this up a little bit. I like how that's looking. Now I want to go ahead and add my stitching to my wings. I'm going to follow the same steps. I'll go into my layers, turn that on, switch it to a stroke, change it off white. This time I'm actually going to use the sideways stitch. I'm going to do it a little bit differently than the edge of the bird. I want to make it a little bit bigger and right now it's sitting at the very edge. Just like with the pair, I'm going to use my move tool, three fingers down to get it to size from the center, and I'm just going to pull it in. Let's just step back and take a look at that. This is just an aesthetic choice on my part where I did one stitch that's different than the other. You could certainly do the same stitch. You would end up following the same process here with the edge of the wing as you did here where you need to break the node. So whenever you're dealing with something pointy like that, sometimes breaking the node helps to move the stroke to where you need it. My stitching is done. At this point, I'm ready to begin adding my edge shading with the other duplicate of the body shape. I want to turn on the duplicate body shape. I'll flip this over to stroke. Again, I want to make sure that my stroke is set to an actual stroke and not the brush because I just use that vector pack. I'm going to drop the color or the light value by using the Apple pencil to draw down from the dot, and I'll just make this thicker. Now, unlike the embroidery stitch in this case, I actually want the alignment inside. I'll go ahead and change that. I want to make the stroke width just inside the edge of the stroke because again, this is supposed to be a shadow that's created by the stitches, so I don't want it to go too far outside of the edge of this edge. I'm just keeping it right about there. Now of course we need to add our blur to that. I'll go up to the FX Studio, turn on Gaussian Blur, and I'm going to bring this to about 30. Now, the one thing you'll see is one, I made that way too dark. I'm going to make sure it's selected. I'm just going to bring it up a little bit. I don't want it to be overwhelming. The other thing is, this color doesn't work with the orange. I'm going to take this and I'm going to clip it inside the body, underneath that curve. I'll take that edge shadow, bring it down, and I'm going to drag it beneath the curve that's in place for the orange breast. Now it's just on the outside of the gray areas. But now that leaves me without an edge stitch here. Instead of creating with a duplicate, I'm going to create an orange line using the pen tool, so let's do that next. I know that a lot of people, when they hear the pen tool, it sends shivers down their spine because it can be such a indoor width and you're right, that's every app, not just designer, but once you understand how it works, it's actually a lot easier to use. Now, I'm not going to go into great detail here, but I do have other classes out there where I go into much finer detail on the pen tool. This one's actually relatively simple. We just need a few points. I'm going to grab my pen tool and I'll adjust the color once I'm done, but I'm going to pick this rust color for right now, and I just happened to have that there. I will go to my breast here, and tap and drag. I'm dragging in the direction that I want to go. I know I want to go this way, so I'm dragging my way and it doesn't look perfect, and I'm actually okay with that, because the beautiful thing about working with nodes is that you can always fix these. I'm done with the pen tool. I'm going to go into my node tool and I'm just going to adjust these and use my handles to smooth them out. Drag them where I need it, and select the one, just drag it out and bring my handle here, and that's smooth out the curve. Now, this needs to actually be inside of the curve shape here. I'm going to drag that down and clip it to the breast shape. Now, obviously, that cut away a lot of it. Let's just go ahead and manipulate the nodes again and drag that in. Again, use my handy handles there. It doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to be blurring this. I just wanted to be at the edge and that's fine. Now I'm going to go ahead and add my effect. I'm just going to use the same effect as I used for the body. Go up to Edit, Copy, tap to select this orange curve, Edit and Paste FX. Now that's a little bit too much for the orange. Let's go ahead and tap into that Gaussian Blur again and bring that to about 45, maybe a little bit lower. I also don't like the color. It's not quite working the way I want it to. I'm going to go a little bit lighter. Again, I'm not looking for anything harsh. I just wanted to be a subtle shadow around the edge. I'm going to change the blend mode on both of these to multiply, which is going to play with the colors underneath, and I like how that's looking and I'm just going to drop the opacity or touch. In the next video, let's go ahead and complete our bird ornaments by adding our final texture and effects. I'll see you there. 9. Texture Overlay with a Vector Mask Part 2: All right, I'm going to start with my smaller shapes here and this red cut out. Again, I want to give the impression that these are cut outs of felt which have depth to them and therefore create shadows on top of whatever they're glued to. So, I'm going to select these top four layers here. I'll go to my FX Studio and I'm going to choose outer shadow. I want it to be subtle. I don't want it to be too much. Just going to bring that down slightly and I'll bring the radius up a bit. Play around with it. You can play around with them individually if you'd like as well. For example, I don't exactly like how those flowers are looking, so I'm going to select both of those and adjust the radius separately for those. Again, I'm following the same direction with my offset so that the majority of the shadow is all one direction. I need something under my wing as well. I'll go to the main wing layer, effects studio, outer shadow. You bring that down into the right and just change my radius. I also want something under the orange. Now on a real bird, obviously it just moves from one color into the other, which is one set of feathers moving into the other but since this is a felt ornament, this is actually technically supposed to be a felt piece sitting on top of felt piece. I want to take that curve, go to my FX Studio, again, outer shadow. Now in this case, I want my shadow to go up and it's not going to be a lot, It's not going to be as much as here. I just want it to be a subtle so that it looks like if I were looking at it straight on, you would still see the shadow. I've moved it up slightly and I'm just going to drag my radius up a touch just to break it up a little bit. I think I'll bring the opacity down slightly. Now, I'm not getting any shadow over here because this shape is clipped inside of the bird and that's exactly what I want because I'm going to be adding a separate shadow under the entire bird that's also going to include the beak. Let's go ahead and select the body and the beak and we'll add the same shadow. Again, add our shadow down into the right and the shadow underneath the bird is going to be a lot deeper than the shadow on top of the bird because we want it to look like it's raised up from the table and curved. I'll go ahead and change the radius just to feather that out a little bit. Now I'm not going to put a shadow under the black of the eye but I am going to put one under the white of the eye. I'm just going to select one of the shadows from my flowers and hit Copy. I'll go to that bottom Ellipse, Edit and Paste effect so that it gives a little bit of a shadow under the eye. I'm not doing an under the black for the same reason I didn't do it under the seas of the pair because you're not really going to see it. At this point, I want to add my texture because I want to add a little bit more spot shading somewhere, but I want the texture in place first. To that I have an idea of where you need to add it. Next up we're going to go ahead and turn our vector mass back on and pull our texture overlay in. If you recall from one of the previous lessons, we talked about pulling in a neutral or desaturated texture. Now, there's only one in the felt pack. There's a heather gray that's a very neutral gray texture. I'm going to go to the top of the layer stack here, go to My Documents menu, place image, and find that heather gray seamless felt. I'll tap to place it and I'm just going to leave it the size it is just so that I have the ability to move it around if I want. Now, I want to turn my vector mask back on. This vector mask is going to be clicked into place so that it knocks out all of the texture outside of the shape of the bird. Now this is not a clipping mask, the vector mask is different. What you want to do in this case is select the Vector Mask, drag it up and over the icon for the texture layer. You'll see the icon light up in blue and release and it's going to clip away everything outside of that bird shape. At this point, I can select this entire layer and change the blend mode so that my colors of my shapes come through, but the texture remains. With it selected, I'll go into my layer option and a tab, and I'm going to use overlay. Now, that's way too harsh, it's way too felty if that's a word. I'm going to drop the opacity. When it comes to texture, most of the time subtlety works best so play around with your opacity and blend modes. I like the light values that overlay gives, but it can be really harsh in the beginning. I'm just going to drop that down. Now you can see that we very easily added texture to our entire illustration using one texture layer and a vector mask. The reason that this worked is because we were adding the same texture to every layer. It also means that we have a lot less texture layers in our layer stack that we have to manage and it's not going to increase our file size a lot. Let's go ahead and round this out and put some of our final touches on it. I mentioned I wanted to add some additional shading and I specifically want to focus down here under the wing and maybe over here by the tail. Again, I want my strongest shadows to be down into the right. I am going to go into my pixel persona. I'll select the faux felt brush. Let's start with the orange. I already have the orange I used here and I'm going to go ahead and stick with that because I like how that looks. I want to go to that curve and with it open, I'm going to add a pixel layer here. I'll use my brush and just start adding some shading. We'll make this a little bit darker right here underneath the bird. It's sort of on his belly at the bottom. Let's change the blend mode of that to multiply and it's going to change it to red. Now that's really harsh, but don't worry, we're going to drop the opacity. We want to do the same thing, but this time with the gray color. I'll backup. I'm going to go to my body shape and I'll go ahead and add a pixel layer above the other shape here, the edge shading. I want it beneath the curve because I don't want the gray to show up on here. Let's go into our color studio. I'm going to pick that same brownish gray that I used for the edge shading. Again, grab my brush and I'm just going to start adding a little bit of additional shading here. Again, I'll change my blend mode. Sometimes it helps to change your blend mode before you start adding it so that you can really see how it's showing up. I think I might want to do a little bit more. I might add a little bit to the wing here. Let's go back to the wing, I'll add a pixel layer that I'm going to clip into place. I want it to be clipped only to that wing shape. I'm going to use the same color to hit this with a little bit of color. I want to make sure that both of these layers are set to multiply. The one already is but we just need to change the other. Change to multiply and just drop the opacity. Now if you felt like you needed to, you could take those brushes and go around the edges to add a little bit more, it's totally up to you. I actually like how this looks, I'm going to leave it as is. I like my shadowing at this point, I'm ready to add my final touches of my embroidery stitches to my wing and I'm going to add something to the chest using the pencil tool and the vector brushes. I'm adding a vector layer just above this red cut out here. I'll go back to my designer persona and choose my pencil tool and I'm going to do these in off-white. I'll go ahead and select the off-white. Again, I want to make sure I have a regular stitch and I'm just going to bring the width up to about two or so. I'll just draw out my lines that I want and I know I want one coming from here, I want one twirling here. This is why I like doing this with the pencil tool because it gives me a little bit more control than the pen tool to make the little swirls here and there. Now these are nodes, so if I need to, I can manipulate them. I'll just go in and I'm going to make an adjustment to this just so that it's a little bit more rounded that way. I'll fix these once I get everything in place with the stitches, I'm going to select all four of these layers, go to my vector brushes, find my ornaments pack, and I'm going to use that straight stitch. I just want to bring it up to again about 20 or 25 and de-select, see how I like it. I just need to move this layer down. Even though I added one up here, it actually moved it up. I'm going to bring it down so that it's just above the red wing but that's below these elements. I just want to go in and make some adjustments to the bottom here. I want to pull all of these together. I'm going to use my node tool and I'm just going to bring this down and maybe straighten that out of it. I'll select this one and I'm going to match up all of the dark holes there, so it looks like all of the stitches you're going into the same place. I think I'll bring this one out to touch and then finally adjust this one as well. Let's back up. I like how that's looking. I'll be adding a little bit more to this in a moment but first, I want to add some leaf shapes to this one here. Again, it's going to end up above my curve shape here, just going to use my pencil tool to draw a leaf. Now it's a lot bigger than I want it to be, so with it selected, I'm going to bring it down. Just like I did with the pair, I'm going to create a leaf shape that I'll go ahead and connect to make the leaf and then I'm just going to bring this down. I'm going to turn my snapping off, sometimes that helps. I might make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to two-finger tap and drag to duplicate it. I want to select all of these so I tapped on the first one, two-finger tap on the last. Again, I'm going to change this to a sideways stitch there, just bring up the size to about 20 and I'm going to group those together and make it a touch smaller. I like how my stitches look. What I want to do is add a few final elements here using some of the assets. I'm going to pull in one of my sequence here and make it a lot smaller. I also want to change the shadowing because when I made it smaller, the shadow didn't scale with it, so I'll just go into the shadow. I'm going to change my radius and then change the offset just to make it look a little bit better there. I'm going to bring this into my heart shape and just make a few duplicates of it. I just want it to be a little cluster of sequence. Then I'll grab one of the buttons and I'm going to bring those to the flowers. I'm two-finger tapping and dragging and then sizing down for this flower. I'll take one last look. Now one final touch I could do is get him a little mouth on his beak so he can do some chirping. Let's go ahead and find his beak layer. I'm going to use my pen tool this time because I want a nice straight line. I'll tap and then tap again to get a straight line and I'm going to change that to a straight stitch, make it a little bit bigger, you get little smaller actually. I think I'm going to use a darker color there. Let's use this orange, so I want to change my stitch to the dark version and I'll just move this into place. Again because you're working with vectors and you're working with strokes, everything is adjustable. That's one of the beautiful things about working with vectors, is that you can go back in and change things. Just to recap, instead of adding texture to all layers, we went ahead and used a single texture overlay and clicked away anything outside of the bird shape using a vector mask that we created using some of the shapes we already had in place. The colorfully illustrations coming from the color of the original objects and the textures coming from the texture overlay. Then we went ahead and approached the same way that we did with the pair to add our shading and our stitches, as well as our other embellishments. In the next lesson we're going to talk about consolidating like shapes so that we can add a single layer of texture to one large curve versus multiple like textures to multiple like layers. I'll see you there. 10. Texture with Consolidated Curves: In this lesson, we're going to talk about consolidating contiguous like shapes into single curves so that we can add one layer of texture to one curve versus multiple layers of light texture to multiple curves, so let's get started. This approach can potentially work on its own if the illustration allows for it, but more likely than not, you're going to find that you'll use it in conjunction with the first method of adding texture to every layer. If you think back to that lesson, one of the disadvantages of adding texture to every layer is that you effectively doubled the number of layers that you're going to need to manage, and also potentially increase your file size. By consolidating your contiguous like objects wherever you can, you're potentially reducing the number of layers that you need to manage and also reducing your file size. Now, while file size and layer management are an advantage of this approach, the disadvantage of this approach is that by combining your like objects into a single curve, you're losing the flexibility of being able to manipulate smaller objects. Now of course, these are vectors. You'll always have the ability to make changes to the nodes. But sometimes it's easier to work on a smaller object versus a larger one. I've pulled in a flat heart illustration from the assets pack, and a once walk through what I mean by contiguous like objects. Let me go into the layer stack here. My leaf shapes here and my flower shapes are contiguous like objects because my two leaves are exactly the same shape that are going to get the same texture. They're contiguous in the layer stack because they're back-to-back with no layers in between them. The same thing goes for my flowers. Where I have seven total layers that I could potentially add texture to, by combining the two leaves and combining the three flowers, I can reduce my file size from seven layers to four. Now I've adjusted the flat illustration a little bit and you don't need to do this, just follow along. I wanted to do this so that you can see where this method wouldn't necessarily work or you need to adjust it. While I have seven total flowers here that are technically like objects and can receive the same texture. If I were to combine these four flowers here with these three up here, they would cause an issue for the red layer here that's going to need shadowing as well as pull them out of my clipping mask, which means they're going to be hanging over the edge. Let me show you what I mean. I'll select these four and these three, go to Edit and Add to create one large curve. Now I could go ahead and add texture to this layer and I would be done. The problem with that is, this is no longer sitting on top. Even if I pull this one down, then I lose those flowers. I can't add my shadowing here where it should normally sit on this flower. Additionally, those original four are unclipped from my blue, so now they're hanging over the heart and that's not what I want. Now I could adjust my approach and simply add these four together and add these three together, and then I add yellow felt texture to this one and yellow felt texture to this one, and that would be fine. Just keep in mind that whenever you're trying to consolidate, you need to look ahead to whether that consolidation is going to impact any of the other shapes and your ability to add effects to it. I'm back to the original illustration, and I want to go ahead and consolidate my contiguous like shapes. We'll start to add our texture and other effects to complete the ornament. I'll go into my layer stack and I'm going to select my two green leaves here, do an add. Now there are one large curve versus two separate layers, and I'll select my three flowers and do the same thing. Now again, as I mentioned earlier, the disadvantage of this approach is that now I have to work with nodes on one large curve versus nodes on an individual layer. If I had wanted to move an individual flower around, I could do that while they're separate. But as one large curve, I need to adjust my approach to doing that. Now that we have our like objects consolidated, we only have four layers to add texture to as opposed to seven. Now, in this case, that doesn't seem like a lot and it's not, because really three additional layers of texture are going to add that much to your file size. But again, if you're using this approach in conjunction with option number 1 and you're consolidating any like contiguous shapes where you can, you're potentially reducing your file size and the number of layers you manage by a lot. Now that we have our like contiguous shapes combined wherever we can, let's go ahead and finish our ornaments. As we did with the previous two lessons, I'm going to duplicate the shapes where I need you before I get started again, so I don't have to backtrack and remove any texture or other elements. I'm going to duplicate my blue heart twice, once for the stitches and once for my shadows. Now, since there's such a wide gap here between the very edge of my heart and this red one, I'm only going to add stitches to this one. I'm not going to add the edge shadow because it wouldn't really make sense. I'll go up to my Edit menu and hit Duplicate. I don't need to duplicate these two objects, but I will be adding dropped shadowing to them later. Let's go ahead and start adding our embroidery stitches. I'll select my first duplicate here. Now one thing I want to note is, this is a shape layer. It's not a curve, which means I can't use any nodes. Knowing that I'm probably going to have to make some adjustments to this, I'm going to go ahead and while it's selected, tap to curves. What that's going to do is give me the nodes that I'm going to need to adjust the embroidery stitches. I left it the way that I did because I want you to see that if you ever use the shape tool to create any tournament, you need to make sure that you convert it to a curve so that you can use the nodes wherever you need to. Now that that's done, I'm going to flip this over to a stroke, and again, I'm going to turn this into an off white. Actually, I think I might go darker this time. Let's go with this dark blue. I'll go into my vector pack here and I'm going to choose the one whole stitch dark. I want to make my such a little bit bigger. That's so big though. Here we go. I want to take a look at my stroke studio, right now it's aligned inside and I want to make sure it's aligned outside. Again, I want it to hang over the edge of it slightly. With my move tool, and three fingers down, I'm going to drag this in slightly. Again. I just want the very edge of my stitch to be over the edge of the heart, so that it looks like it's wrapping around. How much you do that is totally up to you. Now I'm running into two issues. Here, it's giving me a wonky stitch because of the point, it's also giving me a crossover here. I'm going to go to my Node tool and I'm going to break both of these nodes so that I'm working now with two separate nodes rather than multiple. I'm going to go ahead and break and break, and you can see in the layer now I have two curves versus one. Let's drag this one up here and this one here, and then go up to the top, drag this one up and this one up. Then I just want to take a look at the rest to make sure I didn't accidentally move any of those, so I'll just use my handle is just to adjust the rest and get them back into place. Let's go ahead and do the same thing with the duplicate red heart. Now again, I want to convert this to occur because I know I'm going to need to use my nodes to move my embroidery stitches around. I've converted it. Now I'm going to flip this over to his stroke, and I'll choose that same blue. This time, I'm going to use the two-hole stitch dark, and the reason I'm doing that is because this is actually sitting on top, so if this were a real ornament, it wouldn't be wrapped around the edge, you would see one stitch coming up through and one going down. I'll show you a little closer view here. I want to make sure my alignment is correct, so I'm moving it so that it's sitting both inside and outside. If you take a look, you can see there's two dark spots. There's a hole on this side and a hole on that side. I want to use my Move tool and Node tool just to move this in a little bit. I can already see I'm going to need to use the Node tool and break some nodes. They pull this in and I think that one's okay, but I'm going to break this one here so that I can move this up and this up, and I'm trying not to impact those as well. Let's use our handle to move these down a little bit. Same here. Just again, take a look and make sure that they're where you want them to be and you can use your handles or paths to adjust. Now that I have my stitching in place, I'm going to take care of the edge shadow on the blue heart. I've got my layer stack, and again, I want to convert this to a curve so that I can use nodes if I need to. I'll go up to my Color studio, flip this over, and I'm just going to bring the light value down. Again, by dragging my pencil down from the color dot, I want to make sure I have a regular stroke selected, and I'm just going to bring this in. I'm stopping at the edge of my stitch, and now I just want to add the Gaussian blur. My alignment is already fine, it's within, so I'll go to my Effects Studio, turn on the Gaussian blur, and I just want to clip this into my heart so that none of the shadow is going outside of the heart shape. My red one doesn't need an edge shadow, but now I can add my drop shadow to these four shapes. I'll start with my leaves, I'll go ahead and turn on outer shadow, and I'm just going to bring these down. Now even though these are supposed to be glued on top of the heart, they're still going to have a shadow again because there is a thickness to it felt, so I felt was sitting on top of felt, you'd get a slight shadow. Let's change the radius slightly, and I like how that's looking. I'm going to copy that layer and then select my other two, the red heart and the flowers, and do paste FX. Now I have shadowing under the red heart, I have it under my flowers and under my leaf shape. At this point, I can go ahead and add my texture. Again, I'm going to add it to the four layers, and I'm going to use the color from the felt texture to provide the color for my final illustration. I'll select my blue heart, go to my documents menu, and place image, and I think I'll use this light teal blue. I'll tap to place it, release it, and it's going to move it where I want it, drag it down, and clip it in place. Now I want to pull it beneath the edge shadow, just so that that shadow is sitting on top. Now, one thing I failed to do, so let's go ahead and do that now, is I need to change this particular shadow to multiply. Right now it's just on normal, so I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode and drop my opacity. Again, putting it on multiply rather than normal allows the texture to come through, but still provides you with that nice shadow. Let's go ahead and select the red heart, go to my document's menu, place image, and I think I'm going to use this salmon color instead of orange. Then I'll just complete it by adding the yellow and the green. I have all of my textures in place, we have our stitching in place and our drop shadows where we need them. At this point, I'm just going to add those final embellishments by using my pencil tool to create some additional stitches and then pull some things in from the asset studio. I'm going to go ahead and speed up the rest of this video since you've seen me do this a couple of times before, and I'll see you on the other side. [MUSIC] One final thing I wanted to add is the drop shadow underneath the entire heart. I'm up at the group level here, I'll go ahead and turn on my Effects studio, turn on outer shadow, tap to get the contextual menu, and I'm going to bring this down into the right so you can see that it's bringing the leaf shape out as well as the heart shape, which is exactly what I want. I'll bring the radius up. Now, in this particular case, I'm not going to add a highlight in the middle because this heart shape would actually be very flat. It wouldn't be so much of a curve as it would curve on the very edges and then flatten out, and I'd have these shapes sitting on top. Again, here's the completed illustration. We consolidated contiguous-like shapes wherever we could so that we were working with one single curve versus multiple like curves, and therefore we only had add texture to that single curve. Again, this particular approach doesn't necessarily need to be done on its own, but it can work in conjunction with Option 1, so it can help you really reduce the number of layers that you're going to have to manage as well as your file size. But again, the disadvantage of this particular approach is that when you're combining those like shapes, you're losing the flexibility of being able to manipulate the smaller shapes. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about adding texture using empty mask layers. It's going to be a way of consolidating our like shapes but doing it in such a way where we don't lose the flexibility of working with our individual's smaller shapes. I'll see you there. 11. Texture With Empty Mask Layers: In this lesson, we're going to create this Dala horse illustration by adding texture using empty mask layers. This is going to allow us to consolidate our contiguous like shapes. But the advantage this has over the previous lesson is that you maintain the flexibility of working with your smaller shapes, because we don't have to create one large curve out of them. Let's get started. Just like with the previous exercise, you may find that you can use this on its own if the illustration allows for it. But more often than not, you're going to find yourself using it in conjunction with option number 1 as a way of reducing the number of texture files that you need to pull in. Now the advantage of that again is that you'll have less files to work with, less layers and therefore the file size is lower. This particular approach has an additional benefit that you do not have to combine your like contiguous shapes into one large curve, which means you maintain flexibility and the ability to work with your smaller objects. The disadvantage of this approach is similar to the previous exercise. Your layers have to be contiguous. If by consolidating your layers, you're going to impact the ability to add any effects like shading and other things to objects that are still stuck in between them, that approach isn't going to work. But again, if you're using it in conjunction with option number 1, it can potentially reduce the number of layers you work with by a lot. I've gone ahead and pulled in the flat illustration of the Dala horse from the assets pack. Now just like with the pair as well as the heart from the last lesson, I want the color for my final illustration to come from the felt textures that I'm pulling in, not from the shapes that I've already created. Now, if I were to approach it just with option number 1 and add texture to every single layer. I'm going to go ahead and open up my layer stack, you can see I have a lot of like contiguous layers, which means I would be adding a lot of extraneous texture and therefore a lot of extra pixel information that I don't need to add. I could also use the approach from the last lesson, but again, that's a more destructive way to approach it because I'm creating one large curve rather than maintaining the individual single layers. What I want to do instead is approach this using empty mask layers. I'm going to start with my flower and leaf shapes here. I'll go up to my documents menu and I want to place the texture that I want to use. I'm going to use the cream seamless fault, so I'll tap to place it. I want to make sure that it's covering the entire horse, because my shapes here are all over the place. If I make the texture too small to begin with it's harder to correct that later. Just make sure that the texture covers all of your shapes. I'm going to select that layer and I want to add an empty mask layer to it. I'll go up to the plus sign, Empty Mask Layer. Now, one thing to remember when it comes to masks is that white reveals and black conceals. If I open up this layer here, you can see that it's added a black mask to that texture layer, which made it disappear. But I want to pull that texture back wherever I have these shapes. I'm going to use these shapes as a clipping mask for that mask. I'll select the three shapes and I'm going to drag them up and over the mask layer, I make sure it's the mask layer and not the texture layer. I'm going to stay to the right because I'm creating a clipping mask not a vector mask. I'll release. You can see that the texture came back wherever I have those shapes, because it's effectively clipped away the mask wherever I don't need it. Let's do that with the teardrops here. I'll go back to My Documents menu, Place Image. I'm going to use the golden yellow on top to place it. I want to make sure it's covering the entire horse. With it selected, I'll add my empty mask layer, so there it is. Again, I'm going to select these shapes, drag it up, create the clipping mask and it's pulled the felt shaping in all of those teardrops. Let's go ahead and do the rest of them. I've added an empty mask layer wherever I can. There's one final texture layer that I want to add and I want to add it to the horse's body. But before I do that, I want to make duplicates of that shape because I need a duplicate for the embroidery stitches as well as my edge shading. I'm going to go up here to my curve and I'm going to duplicate it once. I'm going to select everything beneath the curve layer and delete it, because I don't need it I just need the curve itself. I'm going to duplicate it one more time. Again, I need one for the stitches and one for the shadow. I'm just going to turn that off temporarily. Now that I have the duplicates in place, I can go ahead and add that and not have to worry about backtracking. Go to My Documents menu, Place Image. I'm going to grab this red orange color, so I'll tap to place it. Again, I'm covering the entire horse and I'm just going to clip it into the horse. Now, it's sitting on top of everything else. I'm going to close these groups first it makes it easier to drag things down. I want to drag this down beneath all of my empty mask layers. Perfect. My texture is clipped inside the horse, but everything else is sitting on top of it. At this point I have all of my textures in place and I'm ready to begin adding all of my other effects like the embroidery stitches, edge shadowing, the drop shadowing, and then finally my additional embroidery stitches. Let's do that next. I have my Faux Felt Brush selected. I'm going to go into the layer studio and I'm going to start with the green shapes here. What I want to do is add a pixel layer to that texture image file, so that texture layer. With it selected, I'm going to go up to the plus sign, hit "Pixel Layer." I just want to drag it down and clip it into place. Now it's automatically going to put it beneath the mask layer which is fine. Because remember that these layers here are acting as a clipping mask for that empty mask layer, which means that anything I add to that pixel layer is going to show up here. I have my brush selected, I'm going to sample that green color again with my eyedropper. I'll tap to change the swatch and I'm going to drag it down to make it a little darker. With the brush selected, I want to make sure the size is where I want it. I'm just going to start drawing in to that shape. It's only staying within the green because again, I'm working with a clipping mask. I don't need anything under this one just here. I actually like the amount of blur. I'm not going to add any Gaussian blur to it but I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. Let's do the same thing for the yellow and the teal shapes up here. Again, I'm going to find that shape, I'll add a pixel layer. I'm going to clip the pixel layer into that teal shape. I'll sample the color, tap to change it, make it a little bit darker, and I'm just going to run my brush along the edge here. I might go ahead with a little bit darker though. Let's see. I'm going to change my blend mode to multiply and drop the opacity. This one I might add a bit of a blur too, but let me just add a little more here. I'll go up to the Gaussian Blur and just blur it out a little. Then finally I'm going to do the same thing to my teardrop layer here. Again, I want to clip it to the texture layer. I want to sample my color, make it a little darker. Make sure I have my pencil selected and then just run along the top of those shapes. I'll change my blend mode to multiply and there I'm done. I have my edge shading in place on both the horse as well as where all of my empty mask layers. The next thing I'm going to do is go ahead and add my embroidery stitch. I'll go back up to my layers studio, I'm going to turn on that other duplicate. I want to make sure it's selected. Turn off the fill and change the stroke to an off-white color. I'll check my alignment, it's inside so I actually want it outside. I want to go back to my designer persona because I want to use my vector brushes. I'm going to use the one whole stitch for light colors. Now I just need to make my adjustments where I need them. I'll start with my move tool. I'll use my node tool where I need it. Now, if you ever run into a spot where you have two nodes sitting on top of one another or really close to one another and you want to move them simultaneously, with your node tool selected, just drag across all of those nodes and then you can pull everything up together. [MUSIC] I like how it looks. I can always go back in and adjust it if I need to. But at this point I have all of my shading done that I want to do. I have the stitching done as well as the drop shadows under my smaller elements. At this point, all that's left to do is add those final stitch embellishments. I'm going to do that using a combination of the pen, pencil, as well as the shape tool and my vector brush set. [MUSIC] We're almost done. One final thing that I want to with my horse after I group these sequence and move them under here, is that I want to select the entire group shape, go to my FX Studio and I'm going to add my outer shadow here. Again, I want this to be a lot deeper than the others, because again, I want this to look rounded. I'll bring the radius up then play with the intensity. I'll step back and take a look. I like how this is looking, so I'm going to call my Dala illustration here done. Now that we've covered four ways to add texture, we're going to put it to the test. In the next lesson, we're going to have a pop quiz where I'm going to have you pull in a flat illustration, take a look at how I've set it up and decide for yourself which way or ways you would add texture to it. I'll see you there. 12. Wrapping Things Up: [MUSIC] We're at the end of class, and I thank you for trusting me with your time and creativity. I hope that you've enjoyed learning a few of the approaches that I take, adding texture to my work and that you'll have fun using them when you're creating your own textural illustration. Again, I'd love to see what you create. Remember, when you complete a project for the class, share to the class projects section. Sharing your project and leaving a review, not only helps prospective students decide if they want to take the class, but it helps other students discover the class. If you're on Instagram, let's connect. If you share an illustration that you created here in class or use some of the tools that I provided, tag me at the handle on the screen because I'd love to share your work with my own feed. I have tons of other classes on my Skillshare channel with lots more in the works. If you aren't already, hit ''Follow" on my profile so you'll always know when a new class is added. Finally, if you love digital texture and illustration or photography as much as I do, come join my Facebook group which is dedicated to all things digital texture. It's a friendly group where you can share your work, ask a question, or share your own tips and tricks. You'll find a link in my profile. Again, thank you for joining me here in class. I look forward to seeing you in the next one, but for now, happy creating. [MUSIC]