Floral Alphabet Character in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Floral Alphabet Character Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, create a floral alphabet character. Today, we're looking at creating an alphabet letter an A or B or C, and we're going to fill it with illustrative elements. Now, we're going to download those. I'm going to show you some places where you can find the content to download, and then we're going to color coordinate them and use them to fill our letter. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer, yes, that you would recommend the class. Secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating a floral alphabetical element in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Download the Vector Art: So that we can actually create our alphabet letter filled with elements, we're going to download the elements we're going to use because this class is all about actually filling the alphabet letters rather than creating the elements. But of course, if you wanted to, you could create those elements yourself. I've gone to Vecteezy and I've sourced a series of patterns that are all created by the one person. So thematically, they're all going to go together pretty well. So I'm going to give you the download links for all these three images in the class project area. You'll come to Vecteezy and you'll download them. They're going to come as a zip file, so you open that zip file inside there as an SVG file and an AI file. So you'll want the AI files and you want to open them in Illustrator. So you want all three of these images opened in Illustrator. In the next video, we're going to start pulling the pieces apart and assembling a color coordinated set of elements that we can then use for our floral alphabet. 3. Pt 2 Extract the Art: I've gone ahead now downloaded and opened each of these three AI files in Illustrator. Each of them has been designed by the same person, so that's going to help us a little bit in cleaning them up. I'm going to go to one of them and open up the last pallet because that will help us to say what it is that we've actually downloaded. Now in this instance, what we've got is a background here on this side and we've got a filled shapes. This is a rectangle that's been filled with the pattern, none of which we actually need. We really needed to get in this far into the document to say that what we've got is a pattern. What we're going to do is toss everything. We're going up to the swatches palette because that's where the patents watch is going to be, because if you use the patents, watch it in a document, then the patents which is going to appear in the swatches panel. This is the patents swatch, so what I'm going to do is just drag and drop it out of the swatches panel into my document and I'm just going to line it up here. What I need to do is to do that for each of the other documents. Let's just go to the next document. We know there's a patent's swatch in here, so I'm just going to drag and drop it just over here. While it's still selected, I'm going to choose edit copy. Of course, I could press control or Command C. I'm going back to the what's going to become my working document right now, and I'm going to paste it in with Control or Command V, but I could also choose edit paste. There's my second pattern swatch. In this one here is my pattern swatch just drag it out of the swatches panel, copy it, and put it into the document I'm working in. I'm just going to move it down into position. I won't be able to say everything clearly. At this point, I can go and close those other two documents as I no longer need them. Now for this document, if I wanted everything to be on the art board, I could adjust my art boards. I'm going to my art board tool and I'm just going to drag my art board down so it encompasses the full extent of this pattern pace, then I'll just click any other tool to disable that outboard tool. Now we're ready to look at the pattern swatches. Now each of those patents watches is going to be independent of each other. First of all, what I'm going to do is turn off all the others and just work with one of them so I'm going to work with this one up here. Right now just to help you, I'm going to enlarge my panel here. Lets make this 50. You can see a little bit more clearly what's going on. With this group here selected, we can say that it is a group. I'm going to choose object ungroup. That's breaking everything out into its individual component paces. Now if we scroll down to the very end, we're going to find a couple of things. We're going to find a compound path and a no feel, no strike rectangle because you need that to make a pattern swatch. What we're going to do is just select these two, alone. The two bits at the very bottom. I'm just going to press the backspace key to remove them because we don't need them any longer. Now, each of these paces is an individual pace and we want the element to remain elements. What I'm going to do is go to the selection tool. I'm going to select over an element like this flat here, press Control or Command J to group it. I'll just move it out of the way so that I can make sure that I have grouped all the places that should be groped and I haven't taken anything that shouldn't be in that group. Now that will be an element that I can use in my alphabet letter later on. I'm going to go through and make sure that each of these elements, that is an element like these leafs, it's actually made into a separate groped object, because otherwise you run the risk of taking part of a bird with you and leaving it's baked behind like I just did then. I'm just going to undo that and make sure that this time I get the bake into the bird. The process of actually moving it out of the way allows you that visual check that you got all the bits that you meant to get and none of the bits that you didn't mean to get. If you need to, you can move other elements out of the way just to get yourself a clear space around a group of shapes so that you can select them and group them. You'll find these flowers here, again, individual shapes. I'm going to make sure that they are grouped together. Everything else is just single shapes. At this point, I can now tidy things up a little bit by just moving them into position where I can find them again later on. Now we're going to do the same thing for the other two groups. I'm going to leave you to do this one yourself because it's pretty simple to do, but let's go to the bird cage one because that's a little bit more difficult. Let me just move these birds out of the way. This is a grouped object here. I'm going to select the group. I'm going to again choose object Ungroup. Now I'm going to scroll down because at the bottom of this series of ungrouped objects is a whole lot of stuff we just don't need. Here it is. It starts at the very bottom with a no feel, no strike rectangles, so you want to select that and remove that, but then there's a whole lot of pause here which are all no feel, no strike paths. When you select on them, you'll say that every single one of them is a no feel, no strike parts. What I'm going to do is select on the bottom-most one, I'm just going to roll up. Now these, very luckily for us end up at the very bottom of the group of objects that we've just ungrouped. That make it a little bit easier to find them. What I'm going to do is go all the way up to this compound path, which again we don't want. I'm going to drag and drop all of them onto the trash can. They will need to be cleaned up, leaving you only regular shapes here. Then you'll go ahead and do exactly the same thing here. Just selecting each of these objects in turn and just grouping it so that you'll make sure that when you come to use these objects, they already grouped and they're going to travel as a single set of elements. I'm going to leave you to do all of that. I'm going to go ahead and do that for my collection and just make sure that everything is ungrouped, cleaned up, and regrouped into a set of objects that make up a particular elements such as these flowers. Then we'll come back in the next video and start working with the colors. 4. Pt 3 Recolor the Art: I went ahead after the last video and how I've grouped all of these elements. These are from one of the collections over here. This is a set from the other collection, and this is from the first one. Now, I like this color scheme. I like the pink in the birds. I like all of these colors. I Actually quite like this blue. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select elements that have the colors that I want and nothing that doesn't. I'm going to select over these objects. I'm going to hold the shift key down as I select over these hearts and then select over the birds here. I've got all of these elements selected. That's going to be the color scheme I want to work with. Now, I need to create a color scheme for that. I'm going to the Swatches panel, and at the bottom of the swatches panel, I'm going to click here on "New Color Group". Then I'm going to select "Selected Artwork" and I'm just going to click "Okay". That's going to add a new color group here, with all the colors from the objects that I had selected. Now, I'm not really happy with this orange here, so I'm actually going to delete it. Obvious, I don't want to use that color. But I'm happy with all the other colors. Now, I need to re-color the elements that need recoloring. I'm going to select a few groups at a time. Let's just go to these and let's select all of these. I have all of these objects here selected. With them selected, I'm going to the re-color artwork tool. Over here is my color group. I'm just going to click on that to re-map these colors here into my new color group. You can see that everything now has changed color. It now is represented by the colors I've chosen to use, not the colors that these places were originally. I'm just going to click "Okay". Across the bottom here, I have a few elements that also need to be recolored. I'm going to select this, going to select all of this, again, holding the shift key as I do so. Will select this one half, and I'm going to select the little bird boxes here. Again, with everything selected, I'm going to click on the re-color artwork tool. I'm going to click on My colors here. I'm going to make sure that everything is nicely colored. Sometimes you might find that things re-map to white and things actually disappear. If that happens to you, you can click here on the randomly change color order option and that will randomly change the color order and it might end up making things look better than they did. I'm happy with everything except one of these birds. Right now, I'm going to click Okay. I'm not going to update my color groups, I'm just going to click "No" but the colors have been applied. Now, I'm going to select over this, but I'm going re-color him. Again, selecting re-color artwork, again, targeting my colors as the colors I wanted to use. Now, I'm going to start randomly changing colors to say if I can find a better combination of colors for the bird. When I do, I'll click "Okay", click "No", because I don't want to change the color group, but my bird is now re colored appropriately. I also don't really like this, so I'm going to select it, choose re-color artwork, again, target my art work colors here and just try and rotate these into a position that gives me some colors that I do like. Well, I like that blue, so I'm going to click "Okay" and then "No". I can continue with any individual elements that I want to re-color just to get a little bit more variety in what I'm using. Now, if I want to re-color something to a specific color, I can do so. Let's just select this and let's go to the re-color artwork dialogue, where using our color group colors here. But what we can do is we could say that, what was previously orange, which was these little ball balls on the end, we may want to make blue or some other color. I'm going to double-click on this color here, I'm going to color swatches. Here, at the end of the color swatches panel, are the colors that we are using. I can select a different colors from the swatches panel here. For example, let's make this pink and blue. I'm going to make the flowers blue, and let's make the stems a pink color from our color swatches. Click "Okay", I don't want to change these swatches. What you'll want to do is to first of all, create your color groups. You'll select elements so that the colors that you want to use, and you'll create a color group from that. Then you'll select all the other elements that are not currently colored with that set of colors, and you'll apply the colors to them. Then finally, you can just go through and paste mail, go and pick up anything that you think you want to change the colors of and then change them individually. That will allow you a little bit of variety. You can see that I kept too of this little bird house. As well, the reason why I did that, was I wanted two different colored bird houses. What I can do is just go through here and create different colored bird houses. Now, in this case, the white isn't being remapped, but I can force it to be remapped by clicking here. I'm going to add a new color to this color harmony. Now, the white elements, which were the little hut here, will be re-colored. Actually, like that combination of colors even with a white, so I'm going to leave that there. Once you've done that and once you have all your elements assembled and colored appropriately, you're ready to go ahead and to create your alphabet character. We're going to come back in the next video, and we're going to do just that. 5. Pt 4 Create and begin filling the character: I've gone ahead and grouped all my elements in Iceland gray colored. Everything's ready to go. They are a little bit on the big side though, so you can re-size them should you wish to do so, by just selecting over those that you want to re-size and hold the Shift key as you drag in on the corner handles. That'll just make sure that they're re sized in proportion. I'm just thinking some of these can be re-sized, not all of them, just the ones that I think are a little bit on the big side. Just grab this group too. Now to crack our document, we're actually going to create a second art board here. I'm going to click on the art board tool and just drag out an outboard alongside the first one. Click on any tool to just deselect the artboard tool. Now, organization is going to be critical for working with this project. Let's go to the last pallet and see what we have. Well, we have a single layer with all of these grouped objects and loose objects on it. There's quite a bit of objects here. There seemed to be a few empty parts. If you find a few empty parts that don't seem to have anything on them you can just delete them just to keep this nice and clean. But basically everything is on this one layer. What I'm going to do is close down that layer and I'm going to add a second layer to the document, going to place this one underneath this layer. Now that's underneath there for a reason. Because we're going to build an alphabet elements on top of the character. But we're going to do that on this layer, but put the letter here. Just be aware that getting the organization in layers right is going to be critical to making this an easier process than it would otherwise be. With this bottom empty last targeted, I'm going through the Text tool or Type tool, going to type the uppercase letter C. Now my character is really small, so I'm going to take it up to 900 points in size, press Escape because that gets me to the Selection tool. You can also drag on the corner holding the Shift key as I do to constrain the character's proportions. Now, it's a little bit on the thin side. I'm going to select either my character and let's find a thicker character in this font. We're going to apply a different style to it because I'm using Myriad Pro, which I'm pretty happy about. But I'm going to drop down this list of options and things I could use are for example, bold, condensed. I could also use bold, semi extended. I think I'm going to use that. What you want is a character that has quite a bit of thickness to it because it's that thickness that you are going to cover up with these elements over here. Now, the other thing that's a bit of a problem right now is the color of the character. It's really black. We're not going to see very clearly how our artwork is going to look over the top of it. What I'm going to do is fill this character with a very pale gray. Almost not visible at all. Now this pale gray would be sufficient to actually place underneath this artwork if we wanted to. I'm looking in terms of something that would be functioning for this character anyway. Perhaps I would go a bit lighter once I've finished with it, but that's looking pretty good right now. I'm going to lock this character C down the entire layer because I don't want to be working on this layer. That's going to be troublesome. What I do want to be working on is the layer that actually has this content on it. That's going to make things a whole a lot easier. What I need to do at this stage is to start filling in this letter C with the characters that I have over here. I'm just going to select one of them and I'm going to Alt or Option drag it into place. I want to line it up so it's just over the edge of the letter C. This is where it's really important that we lock down the letter C because we can't actually select it, which is really nice because that allows us to just move things into position. Alt or Option dragging these elements means that we are creating duplicates and we're not losing the originals because we're going to need quite a few of these characters or these elements. We're probably going to need each of them to be placed in the illustration multiple times. Alt or Option dragging just allows you to make duplicates as you go. You're going to start working around the letter and you're going to use the biggest elements first because you want to put down the biggest things that you have. You're just going to place them alongside the edges of the letter C, or whatever letter it is that you actually happen to be working with. Now you can rotate them if you've got a pace that you really like, but it's not in the right position. You're welcome to rotate it and just move it into position. You can say I can get very good value out of this leaf by positioning two of these elements along the edge of the letter C. Again, helping us to define this as the edges of the character. Now in terms of working with this character here, you will want to make sure that nothing is overlapping the edges. From time to time, just zoom into the edges and just make sure that everything is inside the edges of the letters C and not actually over the edge. But you again do want it to be pretty close, so if it's not quite close enough, you may want to just move them a little bit tighter into position. I'm just holding the Spacebar because that's allowing me to move the illustration around or the artboard around, so I can see how things lining up. I'll press Control zero to zoom back out and then I can just continue to bring these elements across again, selecting on them, making sure the Alt or Option dragging them into position. Now I'm going to continue to work. I'm going to speed up the video. A few things to watch out for is that sometimes you'll forget to Alt drag. It doesn't matter, I do that too. The element is still there so you can always grab a spare copy of it if you need to by Alt dragging it out of the letter C if it's been moved from the other side of the document. The other thing is that as I work, sometimes I'll say that I need more colors. I'll just Alt drag a element away, then recolor it. I'll go straight back up to that re-color tool and re-color it as I go. Just again, using the same colors that I've selected, but just giving me a bit more variety. I'm going to continue to work until the letter C is filled with big elements. I'm just focusing on the big elements for now and just trying to get it nice and full of these elements. In the next video, we're going to come back and work on the smaller elements. 6. Pt 5 Filling the gaps: Now that I've finished adding the larger elements to let us say, it's time to get working on the smaller ones. For this we're going to use these smaller elements here. First of all, I'm going to just move some of the larger elements out of the way because I don't need them anymore. That will allow me a little bit of room to move these smaller elements a little bit closer to the art board over here so I'm able to access them easily. Then we're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to select these elements, Alt or Option, Drag on them to make a duplicate and then just move them into position. Again we're going to be very careful to make sure that they are just on the edge of the letter or insider, and so I'm going to continue to work with these smaller elements. Now some of them might need to be resized, even a little bit more to work with and of course if you want additional colors, you can always just recolor them. Just making sure that you stay with the basic color scheme that you're using. Again, this is going to take a little bit of time to do because there are a lot of places that you want to be working on. You can zoom in to make sure that you're lining them up really well and where possible, just make sure that you get them on the edge of the letter because that will help mark out the letter in future. You don't want to be over the edge, but you will want to be on it with some of these elements to just help mark out the edge later on. That's pretty close, that's pretty good. I'm just looking for empty spaces into which I can place these additional little elements. Again, I'm going to continue to work on this. I'll speed up the video and we'll come back in the next video to put together the finishing touches for our character. 7. Pt 6 Making dots: Now I've done a lot of work in filling up the gaps with smaller elements, but as I was working, I didn't add any dots. Now the reason why I didn't add dots is because I can add the dots with the blob brush. I'm going to target the blob brush and double-click on it because there are a few settings that we need to change. Firstly I want to deselect Keep Selected because I don't want my shapes to be selected once I've created them, and I don't want to merge only with selection. I want to adjust the size in actual fact, I think about 11 or 12 is going to be quite good for this. I might leave this as it is, but if yours is much larger, then just change the size. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now I'll sample some of the colors that I've been working with. For example, this blue color, press "Shift" and Back to go back to the blob brush and now I can just add in little dots. This becomes much easier than copying and pasting things into the illustration by just putting the dots in by hand. If you want to enlarge the brush, you can do so just press the "Open and Close" square bracket case to make it larger or smaller. You can also press the "Okay" for the eyedropper tool sample or different color, Shift Back to go back to the blob brush and then just continue putting little dots in empty spaces. Again just varying the brush size so that you don't get lots of dots of the exact same size. The beauty of the blob brush is that these are actually individual dots. If you put something in the wrong place or if you need to move it, these are all selectable just as any other shape would be selectable. You're just going to continue around the, let us say just adding some extra dots using the blob brush tool. I'm going to keep doing that now and I'll come back in the next video for some more work on the background here. 8. Pt 7 Add a Background: Now once you've created the dots using the blob brush, you'll want to zoom into the shape really carefully in a large zoom, and just make sure that everything is inside or on the very edge of the letter C, if anything is over the edge now is the time to move It. Looks like mine's pretty Nate. Now we can have a look and see what we've got in terms of the letter C itself, I'm going to the layers panel and what I'm going to do is turn off visibility on the underlying letter. What I'm looking for here is to say if the letter stands alone, if there's enough content here to actually mark out the letter, so it's very clear that we have the alphabet letters C here. Now that's one of the ways that you can present this letter, the other way is to leave the letter C behind it. But in this case, I may want to make the background a little bit lighter. I'll open up this layer, unlock it. I'm going to target the letter C, I'm going back to the type tool because it is a type of character, and I'm going to double-click on its fill, and I'm going back to a even lighter color, this is almost not a color at all. So we just going to click Okay, and let's just click out of the way of this. You could go even a little bit lighter still if you wanted to, and that's a second way of presenting this alphabet characters. Now there is a different way as well, and we're going to look at that now and it involves the scatter brush. What I'm going to do is add a new layer in between the layer that has the content on it, and the layer that is the letter C, because I want everything to be behind these elements. More so going to lock down the topmost layer because I don't want to be able to select it, I want everything to go on this middle layer here. I'm going back to the blob brush and I'm going to make my color black. I'm going to make sure an actual fact that this is pure black. I'm not always getting pure black here. So I'm going to make this a 100 for C, M, Y, and K, and that is pure black. Now with the blob brush, I'm going to paint just a single blob. I'm going to select it, I'm going to make a scatter brush from it, from going to the brushes panel, I'm going to click on the new icon, I'm going to create a scatter brush and click Okay, and then I'll click Okay again. I'm going to remove the blob from the document and I'm going to paint with the paintbrush tool. Let's go and get the brush tool, I've got my dot selected and I'm just going to brush a line of dots. With that line selected, I'm now going to adjust my scatter brush so I'm going to double-click on the scatter brush. I'm going to set the first three of these options all to random. I want the size to vary so I want some little ones and some bigger ones, so electric crank up the size a little bit. I want the spacing to vary too, so I'm going to go for some little spacing and some biggest spacing. Then for scatter, we're going to scatter both sides of the line. That means we're going to scatter to the left and to the right. I'm going to set the colorization method to tints and click Okay. Now you can apply it to the strokes or not as you like, I'm actually going to remove the stroke because I don't actually want that particular stroke. I'm targeting this layer here in the middle, I'm going back to my brush tool. I'm going to sample a color from the colors that we're using, so I'm going to sample this blue color. With my brush tool, I'm going to draw with my scatter brush, so I'm going to be drawing heaps and heaps of little dots here. At this point, I'm not worried that I'm going outside the ambit of the let us say, this is the only time that I'm happy to do that. Now I can re-sample a different color. Let's go and get one of these pink colors. Again back to the brush. Let's paint on the pinks. Now you can do more colors if you like, I'm just going to settle for these two colors and you see that I'm getting quite a good coverage here. When I'm happy with what I've done, I'm going to open up the last pallet. I'm going to target this layer and I'm going to the appearance panel, I'm going to opacity because I want to reduce the opacity here. I think I want the opacity down to say something like about 25 percent. I can click away from the shape here and just say how it's looking, and you can see that this gives the letter just a soft background, and if we turn off just say behind it, this is the impression we're going to make. We're going to get rid of the excess, but this is giving it a little bit of a filled but not as darker fill as a solid color. If I'm happy with that one, I'm going to do is go to this layer that has the letter C on it, I'm going to make a duplicate. Just because I want the option of still using this filled, letter C if I need to. I'm going to take the duplicate and I'm going to drag and drop it up to the middle layer, and then I'm going to lock and close down the bottom most layer. Here is my letter C and it does have a fill color on it and right now it's blocking out the dots underneath. Now at this point, I'm actually going to make this a shape so I'm going to select the letter C, and I'm going to choose type and then create outlines. So it's now no longer an editable piece of texts, but it is a shape. I'm going to select the entire contents of the middle layer, click and choose make clipping mask. What that does is it clips the contents of the lab to that letter C. So the letter C is being used as a clipping mask. Again, it's giving us the appearance of a background for this letter C. This is without any background, this is with the dotted background, and then we have another option here with the letter. Let's just go make the letter visible. There are three possible ways of presenting this particular illustration, and we've created all three of them here in this class. 9. Project and Wrap up: Your project for this class will be to create an alphabet letter of your own. Go and download some content from vectors or you can use the ones that I've used, or you can choose your own elements to use. Create your type letter, the character that you want to use, and then go ahead and create this as a filled shape. Filled with those little vector shapes of your choice. You can display it with a background or not as you choose. Post an image of your completed alphabet letter as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned some things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. As you are watching this class, you will have seen a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class, and secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.