From Sketch to Vector Illustration - Bear in Space

1. Introduction Bear in Space: Do you want to get good at creating awesome vector illustrations using Adobe Illustrator? Well, you came to the right place. When coming up with ideas for illustrations, I like to pair two or three completely unrelated things together. In this case, it was the aesthetic of propaganda posters, space travel, and the grizzly bear. Combining things together to create unusual results can help to make your illustration stand out and be more memorable. This is a really fun project, demonstrating a lot of useful and cool techniques, like half done effects, distress textures, using the warp tool for sculpting objects, and so much more. There you are an aspiring Illustrator, digital artist, graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply someone with a passion for visual storytelling, Mastering Illustrator provides you with the tools to turn your ideas into stunning vector art. I will be guiding you through every step of the process from the initial sketch to the final touches, giving you a comprehensive understanding of dov Illustrators incredible tools and features. This course is perfect for you if you're new to illustrator, or if you are self taught and aiming to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Perine, a certified OB professional and instructor with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I've collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Leveraging this extensive experience, I have carefully crafted this course to help you navigate OB Illustrator like a seasoned professional. I am not just teaching Illustrator. I am empowering you to express yourself. Tell your story and create illustrations that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along and replicate my illustrations, or you can use the work flows and techniques I show you and create something completely different than unique. There are at least two additional compositions you can choose besides the one I am using in my examples. And rule now and let the fun begin. Your creative adventure with Illustrator starts here. 2. Main shapes of the bear's head: Mentioned this in the other projects, I always like to start with the most exciting detail. And once I have that in place, it encourages me to keep on going and add all the additional details. So, in case of this illustration, I'm most excited about creating the head of the bear. So let me just zoom a little bit closer. And the way I imagine this is that it's going to be a very limited color palette, so we have only three colors. So I am going to have the details that are in the light yellow, and then everything else in the helmet will be black, since the background is also going to be black. So what I'm going to do first is to create the helmet itself. I use the ellip tool and draw out the shape that's closest to what we have in the background. And I'm just going to press shift X to switch or swap the stroke and the fiel. And let's increase this up to five points, something like that. Now, already at the beginning, I would like to make sure that these lines are not so crisp and sharp. So I'm going to add a bit of roughness to it. So I will use the distort effect. I go to distort and transform rough N, and then we can set the size maybe to 0.2%, and the detail can be also less maybe three. And then let's click. Yeah. That's looking already much better. So it's that small irregularities on it that I was after. And I'm going to duplicate this shape, command C or control C, and then commando Control F. And let's just drag it out, holding down the older option key. I can drag it from its center point. And I think that's looking already quite good. We can probably adjust a bit individual anchor points by using the direct selection tool. I can drag this a bit this way. Think maybe this direction and can go up a bit. So I stay closer to what I had in the sketch. Right. So now we have these in place. I am going to switch to the blob brush tool and I'm going to select the yellow color. And let's zoom a little bit closer here. So what I have in mind is to use this tool and start drawing these details. So let me just start here, and you will see what happens. So I'm going to basically paint these details in. And I want to keep things rough, and I will simplify it later. But essentially, I'm handling this as a painting, and I'm using the square brackets to increase and decrease these values while I'm drawing. I'll just fill that in as well. And by the way, if you don't feel in the center part of the drawing that you are doing, that can easily be done later as well. So you don't necessarily have to always fill in every detail. So I will have the yes here and here, which will be just a dark detail in this case. So I'm just going to go over here, fill in the edges, like that. Let's go on the other side as well. The reason I'm using the Blob Brush tool is because I already would like to have a bit of that roughness or randomness in the illustration established at this point. Instead of using the pen tool, this allows me to make it feel a bit more painterly. Let me go over this side here as well. And of course, I intentionally not I'm not using the symmetry or repeat mirror option. Because again, that would just defeat the purpose. It's already a quite simple illustration, so it doesn't have to be any faster than what it is already. I'm just going to fill in all of this area here on the top. I am going to focus on adding details later. Maybe I can leave a couple of details out like there, and then Let's just see. I think this one can be filled in. It looks a bit like we need the poo at the moment, but I am planning to make this look much more menacing. Let's see if we can achieve that. Okay. Let's do the other year as well. I quite like doing this type of painting in Illustrator. It's not your common way of drawing an illustrator, but I actually really enjoy it. It's almost like coloring like a coloring book. Then let's see, I think we are going down here, creating a little bit of an edge. Then I'm just going to draw these in quickly. But then obviously, I am going to make these details a bit sharper in the end. For now, I'm just going to follow them roughly. Yeah, something like that. Then here we have the year detail. Again, roughly following those shapes that I created there. We can also go up here at some fur details. Just so you can see if I turn off the sketch. This is how it's looking so far. It doesn't look promising at this point, but believe me, it's going to work. So let's keep going. I'm just going to paint in that part here on the top. And then add some further detail here as well. Very minimal and simple. Okay, can increase the brush size a bit, fill this big area in here. And we're almost done with the most important shape. Going down here, then go out of bit there. Then make my brush a bit smaller. I'm using a stylus, by the way. With this method, I always prefer to work with the stylus instead of the mouse, it's just more intuitive. But of course, you can do this technique without. It just makes it faster and easier, but of course, you can do it without it as well. I'm going to draw the mouth. It's just a simple shape like that. And then let's go around this shape, and I'll show you a technique here. So if you have a shape, that's closed. Like in this case, I wanted to be closed up. Maybe around the nose, we go. But, yeah, I want it to be closed up like that, what we can do is to use the direct selection tool, click on one of the inside anchor points, then delete that, and then delete again. So press backspace twice on the keyboard. That way, you can very quickly take away that path, and that way, it becomes a single path. So before it had two paths, which makes it a compound path, and you can see it in the layers panel as well. That's what it's called. So when there is a hole inside an object, it automatically turns into a compound path, and one side delete that path is going to be just a normal path. It's still called compound path here, but it's actually just a single path now, a closed object. But yeah, so we got rid of that detail there. Going to use the blob brush again and just paint in the nose, the holes for the nose. And pretty much that's all the main details that we needed. Just going to draw a little bit more in here. That's one thing I love about the block rush tool is that it doesn't make a big mess in the layer spanel. So it keeps things tidy in a way. So most of these shapes are connected already. But what we can do is to make it even simpler is to have those two shapes, the original two circles or ellipses locked. Then select everything, command or Control A. And then press Command eight. So that's going to create a compound path. So merges everything together. And from the pathfinder panel, we can also use the United option. So that way, any overlapping details will be merged together. One thing that I'd like to do is just to double check if there's any little gaps. Whenever I use this tool, that's a good thing to do. And the easiest way to spot them is to press command or control y, to go into outline view. Use the direct selection tool and just get rid of these packs. So it's just tiding them up. I can see two straight points here as well. I'm not sure if I can select those. That might just be something that is going to disappear. I'm just going to delete these quickly. There's some here. And then there's one more there. That's one thing about the blow brush tool that it can be messy. So it's good to clean these bits up before you move any further, because it's easy to forget about them. And I think we are done. So it's looking quite good already. I'm still not sure what those Xs are there. Let's just take a look at it. If I look at my parts, there are two lines here that are independent, so I can delete those for sure. That one. That one. And then let's see what else we have. There is a straight path there as well. Yeah, so we can, again, select all of this together. If it's already in a group, just press Command or Control Shift G, and then Commando Control eight to again merge them into a compound path. And let's take a look at this without the sketch. So this is what we achieved so far. Now what I'm going to do is to select this path, so the one inside. And I'm going to press shift X. So it swaps the feel and stroke colors. So we have the black color already the bear head looks much better. And then I select the circle outside, and I'm going to change the color to yellow and then press shift x again. But of course, this needs to go to the bottom, so press commando control left square bracket until it moves down, or you can also move it down here in the layer span. 3. Adding details: Moving on, we can draw a circle. This was meant to be just a black circle, I believe. Yeah, I wanted to do this as a black circle here. So let's change to fill black. And then copy this command or Control C, command or Control F. Make it a bit smaller. I'm holding down shift and alter option together. Fill this in with red, and select these two shapes, the two circles, and also apply roughen on them. Again, let's take a closer look. Looks better. Maybe in this case, I'm going to pump of the effect of roughen. Maybe the detail can be increased a bit. And also di can go up to 0.5. C one. I think that's okay. Let's take a look at it without the sketch. M. Yeah, it looks better. I'm going to also add two little details here. Again, I'm using the pencil tool. Draw one of the details, fill it in with red, and then draw another detail. Just a move it closer. Like that. Also set to red. This can come up a bit high. Now I'm actually going to use the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle out here. I'll just turn on the sketch so you can see what this is for. There is a rectangle I imagined here. And for this, I'm going to use no, just a black stroke. Again, probably the 40 points as we used before. The same thickness. I'm going to round these corners down like that. And now let's apply roughen on this as well. That looks good. Now, let's copy this, but the way I'm going to copy it is by using the object path offset path feature. This way I can make sure that it's perfectly reduced in size. And the radius on the one outside and inside is going to perfectly follow each other. So that looks good already -25 or 26, in this case, works. And then these points at the bottom, I'm just going to make sure that they don't appear, so I'm going to actually, it's okay. Let's just move it up a bit here. Okay. That looks good. But what I wanted to do with this is the second rectangle is to reduce the stroke size. And I actually want to go into the stroke settings and turn on dash line. And I want the dashes to be, let's say, 25, and the gaps to be 40. Maybe the dashes can be also 40. L et's try this. Yeah. That's basically a stitching. What we're doing here. Gaps can be maybe less 30. That looks good. Round caps will look good on this one. There's a stitching detail created. I also wanted to have something like a clasp here. So for that, I'm going to use the pencil tool again, and I will actually go back to our clipping path that we've been using, and it seems like I lost the drawing side mode on the way. I'm just going back there, selected the clipping mask from the leer spanel here, and then turned on the draw inside. And now I can just draw. I think I wanted the claps to be here. I will draw this down, come up and close the shape. And this is going to be the same color as the body. So what I can do is turn off the sketch and use the y dropper tool, which is i on the keyboard and sample that from the background. Maybe the stroke value can be smaller here like 20, and we can increase the size of this a bit, can go somewhere around here. It sits quite nicely there, and then I will also apply roughen on this one. Okay. Now the only issue is that the roughing was applied to the stroke. So if I just drag this underneath all the way at the bottom, so it's not on the stroke, but sits below the feel and the stroke, then it will be applied on the whole object together. So not individually to either attribute. That's a useful thing to remember as well to use whenever you use this feature or whenever you use any type of effects. And since we are still in this draw inside mode, let me just draw a few additional lines. Maybe one more line here, And then we can also draw a few lines here. Just a few straight lines one, two, three, add a bit of detail in there. You can maybe also add some detail on the clasp like one and two. We can also maybe add some here. Press shift x to swap it ad, shift x or select the field color. And let's just fix this a bit. I'm happy with the way this looks. Maybe we can just use simplify on them, that should fix it. Yeah. Still tangled up a bit, so I will use the minus tool there. And then maybe just connect these two shapes like that. Okay. Let's click away. All right. I think we are pretty much done. Maybe one last little detail. I'm just going to draw around this shape, create a crease here as well. Black feel for this. This can be refined just a bit more. Maybe adjusted in size. Okay. Let's take a look at this from a distance. So one detail that I noticed here is that this belt or strap. I thought that I originally planned to go under the helmet. So this detail, I'm just going to extend here a bit. And this can be filled with yellow. That's just a subtle little thing, but you can see without it. It feels like the strap is going over the helmet, but now it feels like it's going under it. So yeah, I feel like that's better. And we can turn off the draw inside. And let's just have a quick look at our sketch. I think we have all the details in place that I planned. Now we can just select some larger details like these. I'm using the shift click on them. And the tiny details I'm not going to select. But these ones, I think, should be selected and then apply roughen on all of them. Now, if it seems like it's not doing anything, that is because maybe some of these shapes that I selected are using fills, others are using strokes. So what we can do in this case, is since these shapes can all be combined into one, I'm just going to press command or Control eight, so that creates a single object out of them. That's just going to make it easier to handle them anyway. And now they are all using feel color or feel attribute. And on that field attribute, we can apply the Roughen. And immediately, it worked much better, so we can see it appearing on all of them. And the great thing is that we can have that one object selected, come back to the roughen settings and make adjustments if we need to. But I'm going to keep it as is, I think this looks really good. 4. Creating the text with custom letters: Now, you might recall that at the bottom, on our sketch, we had the title or the text Bar or note. And I could recreate this quickly with the type tool. I would probably be able to find something very similar to it. But what I thought we could do for this project is to do a completely custom type. So actually draw the letters. And that's what I'm going to do. So I'm going to keep the background layer turned off just so we can see our sketch. Let's start with this shape here in the middle. I'm just going to use the rectangle tool for this and round down this shape. Now, if you want to be accurate with your radius, you can just double click on the corner widget, and then you will see the radius used here. In my case, I'm just going to round this up to 15 points. And because the chain is logged in the middle and the transform panel, is going to keep all of these corners the same size. So that is looking already quite good, but the thickness, I think we need more maybe 60 points. I think that could work. I will turn off the field or just simply set the field to none. And then the stroke. For now, I'm going to just keep it maybe red. I believe that's going to be the color that we will be using. But since we have white background, it might be easier to judge what we are doing if we just keep things black. Okay. So now let me just align this more to the center, and maybe 70 points will work better on this text. By the way, I'm going to do this on a separate layer. Just makes it easier. I will call it type and put it there, and then I can just log the whole illustration. The illustration is simplified into three main objects, the helmet, the body, and the flames. So we can just lock that whole layer. And now we are working on the type layer. So everything else is locked. Okay, so this is essentially how I want the type to look like. So it's a mono line type. It's going to be the same thickness all around. And I will probably draw everything out on a straight line first, and then I'm going to turn them around. So I'm going to drag a line down here from the rulers, as commando Control R, and I drag one to the top. Like that. Okay. And it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned to the letter. I just want to roughly have it in place. And what I'm going to do is to use the pen tool and go up straight. Then you can do by holding down the Shift key. Then come down here, then shift click again on the top, just like that. Now, for these stroke settings, the limit here should be set to zero, and I want to use the corner set to this option. But with a thick outline, even when we are changing the corners, you might still have some details coming out around the edges like these ones. This is something that we will be able to fix later. But for now, I just wanted to show you that obviously this is something that should be straight. So we will just leave it at that for now, and I'm going to continue drawing the letters with the pen tool. So I will start the next one again holding that shift key. And down, again, holding down shift key. Command or Control click away. And then what we can do here is to select these two anchor points with the direct selection tool. And holding down the shift key, we can just drag them down. So they stay in the CAP height that we defined with our guides. And then let's use the pen tool again. Just connect these two with holding down the shift key. So there's our A. And in this case, I'm going to set the corner option back to this here and just increase the limit to two, so that works better already. And then we can just select these two parts and move them a little out doing the king. Now what we can do is for the U, we can just duplicate this shape that we created, Alt or Option click and drag, and then use the reflect tool that's on the keyboard and just drag it around, holding down the shift key, and then I can align it up here. Now, for the T, I'm going to use the pen tool again and draw the center line, go all the way up there, and then We can draw the other line holding down the shift key and just make sure this aligns to the guide. And then we can select these two shapes and align them in their center point. Okay. So let's see how this looks so far. I feel like it looks quite good already. Maybe this path can be extended a bit. So I'm just going to hold down the old or option key to drag it out symmetrically in both direction. Yeah, I feel like that's good. Now we need the other letters from the left side. But before I go there, I'm already going to fix this shape here. And one of the easiest ways to do it would be to draw another rectangle. Which is aligned to the guides, just like that. And I'm just going to remove the stroke from this. And then select these two shapes together, and then press commando Control seven. So that's going to turn it into a clipping mask. So we chopped off that detail from the top, already looks much more organized. And we can already start grouping things together, so any letters that has multiple parts, I can just select them and then use commando Control G, and then it will be easier to move them around. And of course, you could use the outline type option to make it easier to make adjustments. But at this point, I'm going to stay away from that because I still like to have the option to change the stroke size if I want to. I can see that this path needs to come down a bit. Doesn't actually have to go all the way up there because it's overlapping the other shape anyway. So I can group these two together as well. And yeah, now, I feel like we have that side of the text created well. We can reuse the A on the left side, so we have that already prepared. And then we can start drawing the other letters. So let's just do E, going to draw from the top down here. And then let's draw one of these lines, that other line can be adjusted. So it doesn't go all the way to the top, even the one all the way at the bottom doesn't have to go all the way since this is going to be a line there anyway. Like that. Let's just duplicate this alto option, click and drag, align it at the bottom, and also create one in the middle and reduce the length of it. Something like that. Okay. Now let's group these together into one, commando Control G, and then we can draw B and r. I'm actually going to start with R. So let's just draw these lines first. I intentionally didn't go all the way to the edges. And then for the next shape, I'm actually going to use the rectangle tool. Draw it out like that. Drag this down. And then what I'm going to do is to just select these two anchor points, this one, and this one with the direct selection tool and use the Corner Rigid tool on them to create the corners. We can probably use 5 millimeters here. Now, you probably recall me using much higher value on these. So let's just go back. It was actually 15 points. Not sure if it's going to work well on these two corners, but we can try it out. Double click, set it to 15 points. Yeah, actually it works fine. 15 points on this as well. Okay. Just to have the same roundness, be consistent. Then we can drag this point down here all the way to the edge and then use the pen tool and draw one more line from the center down there. Okay. Now this line needs to actually extend beyond the outline, and we will use the same technique as before. I will use a square that's aligned here has no stroke and then select that other shape and press commando Control seven. So it cuts perfectly into it. So it's still a stroke, but it's now created the letter that we needed, and we can select all of these together and then group them. We actually will need also very similar shape to this for the B. I'm just going to duplicate this whole thing. So we have the selected Alt or option, click and drag for the B. We can double click on this group, or we can even ungroup it temporarily, commando Control Shift G, and we need to just delete this shape. And then what we can do is to duplicate this alt or option, click and drag and drag it down. There and then drag it up. It's going to be a bit of a squeeze here. Let's just see if we can fit it in like that, and that other shape needs to go up as well. There. Okay. I'm not trying to be 100% accurate here. I feel like that looks good. Maybe the roundness here needs to be adjusted a bit. So I'm going to cheat a little bit and select these points. Let me just select these two points actually. And I will type in for both of them the same value of ten and ten. And then these two as well. That one and that one. I'm going to use ten and ten. Like that. Okay. So that's a very subtle little dent here, but I think it still works, so it's still visible as B. And now what we can do is to also group this together into one. So now we have the whole text ready. But maybe what I'm going to do is to select certain points like here. This one, double click on the corner rigid. Put 15 points on it. Also, let's do the same on this other A, 15 points. And then maybe we can do the same thing here on the on this point and this point. Let's put 15 points and 15 points. Okay. Actually, I might leave one side to be sharp. I think I'm going to leave the right side to be sharp, so I will just do like this. So that has a little bit of symmetry or resemblance to what's happening here with the A. So there's only one round corner, also one round corner here. All right. So we have the text ready. Now I'm just going to take a look at the urning of it, so I will move the letters around a bit. Let's move the t out. And I think here on the left side, we have a good urning going on. Maybe just not the alignment on this E. I can see some issue here. I'm going to select that and just select these anchor points and drag them in a bit and align them to the other shape behind. Okay, so I think that looks better now. I don't have issues on the other letters. I think they work well. 5. Distorting the text: So now what I wanted to do is to have this text follow the shape here above. So what we can do is to just select all of these letters, and it's going to be easier to edit them later in this format, the way I have them right now, even including the guides. I'm just going to select all of this together and group it as one, and then copy paste it. And we can even keep this duplicate outside of the canvas right there. And then the one here on the artboard, I'm going to group these together. And these together, like that. And then I'm going to turn these into feels by selecting all of them and go to the object menu and choose expand. And let's click. So now they are not strokes. I won't be able to adjust their thickness anymore, but it will be much easier to work with them. And it might make sense for some of these to be merged together as well with the unite and the pathfinder. So like these, we can join together as well. The R can also be joined together, but in this case, don't forget that we also have a clipping mask. And here's a useful technique. If you want to turn a clipping mask into something permanent. So in this case, there's our mask. What we can do is to drag it out. Select that shape. I'm just going to ungroup it a couple of times. So there's our clipping path and this shape. We can just use this option here in the pathfinder panel. So that's from pathfinders, it's the fourth icon. Once you select that, you will get this result, and we can delete the unnecessary paths, those remaining details there. And now it will be easier if you just select this shape, this shape, and this to unite them together. That's one, and then we can do the same thing here with A, unite them as well. E as well can be united all of those shapes together, and then the same thing with B, let's unite them all together. And I might actually have these points selected here. Using the direct selection tool, I'm going to select these, and then for the corners, we can just add a little bit of radius, a very subtle one like that. Okay, let's zoom out. All right. So now we have our text outlined. It will be much easier to work with it. Maybe just one more letter here, the N. I just remember that steel has a clipping group on it or clipping mask four. I'm going to remove the clipping group and select these two shapes. And then from the path finders, I use this fourth one to chop off the unnecessary details, and then we can remove all of these access objects. So now we have the N ready. Okay, so it's much neater. I can remove any unnecessary groups that we still have. And we could even just use these as compound parts, instead of groups. So I can ungroup these and press command or control eight. And then also this other one, instead of a group, I can just turn it into a compound path. But I still like to keep them separate, one on the left, one on the right. So now, before we start distorting anything, I'm going to again duplicate this. I'm just going to old or option, click and drag this down here. Maybe put it in a group. So that way we have a backup. Of the outlined version. So this is the original details that we crafted. Then we have the outlined version there at the bottom. And then now what I'm going to do is to select this one, use the free transform tool. And first, I'm going to use this second option, the perspective distortion, and I'm going to start dragging the end points this way. There's a skew on them, and I will do the same on this other shape here. Again, free transform perspective distort and drag it down. Now if I want to be very accurate, I could create guides again and align this distortion to that. But I'm just going to work a little bit faster here just to make it more interesting. I will use the free transform tool now, and I'm just going to drag this edge up here, and I can drag this up a little bit this way. And then I'll do the same on the right side, use the free transform tool and drag this one up. That way, align the top edge. And then I think we have a really good distortion and the fact going on here. Maybe what we can do is to have this shape selected and drag it out a little bit more further down like that just so it follows the angle of those two letters, maybe even further down. The only problem with distortions like this is that we end up distorting the thickness of the lines as well, so the letters are getting thinner further in the back and thicker here in the front. So that's something that we need to compensate by adding a stroke on this one here in the middle. Just going to add black stroke on it, and I'm just going to increase the value on it a bit just to make this the thickest one like that. And maybe now we can just reduce the height a bit, drag it down, and now it feels like there is a good transition. Let's just change the text color also. I'm going to set them all to red. And then the stroke on this one should also be red or this pink color. And then turn the background back on, and let's turn off the sketch layer. And let's take a look at this. This side definitely needs to be further adjusted, so I just go back, turn off the edges, so I can judge it better, drag it up that way. And even this one on the right can go a little bit higher. Just add a little bit more sharper angle on it like that. Now, if you notice any issues with your kerning, like, in this case, I feel like the U should have been a little bit further up. It's a little bit trickier to move it around now because obviously we will lose the angle. It won't be perfectly aligned if I move this around. But maybe we can just cheat a bit and move these two points to the right just gently, and that just helps with the urning slightly. But this is why it's good to have backup of different versions or stages of your text that you can fall back on and you can make changes to. So you can always come back to these and adjust them and then recreate the effects that we applied here. And one thing that I wanted to make sure that I don't forget at the end is to have the roughen effect applied on these as well. So I'm just going to select this one here in the middle because it has both outline and feel and expand it. Then use the pathfinder unite to turn it into a single shape. Now if we select these three, we can turn them into a single path, commando Control eight that created the compound path for us. And then let's go up to fat and choose apply Rugen. And this is obviously a live effect that we can always access from the appearance panel. But let's just take a look at this from a distance. That looks quite good. While I want this to be a little bit more subtle. So I go in here and reduce the amount of detail maybe to two and the size can go down to 0.1. Yeah. That looks good. Just a very subtle effect. Don't want to affect the legibility. I feel like that steel reads really well, and then now we can take a look at this from a distance. And now after this, we will just need to add a few final effects. 6. Adding distress and halftone effects: So to make things look more interesting, I wanted to add a couple of final effects on the illustration. First of all, I would like to add a texture. And the way we are going to use this is by first of all, putting everything into a single group, because I would like to use this on all of the objects. And so far, it made sense to have the type on a separate layer and all of these objects in individual groups. But now we will have to put them all together. So the text that I have here on a separate layer, I'm going to bring onto the same illustration layer. And then I select all of these four, so the flames, the body, the helmet, and the text, and group them together, command or Control G. Now we can create an opacity mask from the transparency panel, and we will turn off the clip option, and then click on the opacity mask thumbnail. This is currently empty, so it's not doing anything at the moment. But I would like you to open the file that's included in the exercise is folder called Distress texture. I'm going to copy this. It's just a lot of small points already set to black color. So copy all of this together. It should be a single group or compound path. And once you copied it, you can even close the original document. And just paste it into your artboard. And it's going to come in much smaller than what we need. So I'm going to hold down the altar option key and drag it up until it fits our illustration. That looks good already. And if I click outside, you can see the effect, so it was that simple. So the good thing about this is that we can zoom closer, and these are all vector details. So they will scale with the resolution of your print. So it will always look sharp and crisp. And I love the little details in this. And the cool thing is that you can, of course, move this around. If I hide the edges, I can just show you as I move this, it's going to keep updating. We can reflect it around, turn it upside down, check different angles for it and decide which one works best. I feel like this already looks good. And now I'm going to exit the opacity mask, so go back to the normal thumbnail in the transparency panel. And then one additional thing I would like to do is to add some half done effects on the text. So I'm going to select the text at the bottom. And this object currently has only a fill and the roughen effect, if you recall. But now we are going to add an additional effect by creating a second fill. And on this fill, I'm just going to use a linear gradient. And I will press G on the keyboard, drag the gradient up from the bottom to top. Something like that. And then while this fill is selected, I go to the effect menu, and from Pixelate, I will choose color half ton. The radius or the size of this can be adjusted depending on the scale that you work in, and also your document raster effect settings. I'm going to set it to maybe ten for now, and I make sure that all the channels are set to the same number. It could be 90 or 100 or whatever you want, but just make sure you have the same numbers. Then let's click. And we can already see the half ton effect generated here. If I go to the effect menu and go on the document roster effect settings, you can see that I'm using 150 PPI resolution. If I reduce this down to 72 PPI, it's going to affect the size and the quality of the half tones. So again, if I go up to 150, it's going to be more detailed and the higher the resolution, the more detailed it will be. Of course, because everything is created with a live effect. We can always go back, click on color half tone. And if I want these dots to be bigger, let's just say 25 pixels, then obviously they will be much bigger now. So let's just zoom out. Now, my main problem here is that it gets too dense around the top. So what we need to do is to extend the gradient out. I'm still using the gradient annotator, and I will actually reverse the gradients. So I want the dots to be stronger at the bottom, and then fade out on the top. And that makes sense because we have the largest letter at the bottom, which will still be eligible. I'm just going to adjust the midpoint as well. So I'll drag that down a bit. Feel like that is working quite well now. I don't want the fact to go on all of the letters. I feel like here in the center, it's the strongest, it looks good. And with these settings, I'm happy now. All I have to do is to change the opacity of the fiel, this gradient field to multiply. So I will choose multiply, and then it's going to be added on top of the text like this. So that is looking quite good. We can always go back to the document roster effect settings. Maybe increase this up to 300 PPI. We will get more detail. That looks much nicer now. And if I want to go back and make changes to this, I just have to select the text. Elect that fill, use the gradient tool, and then I can just adjust this and see the changes updating. And the cool thing is that we can even save this whole thing as a graphic style. So if I go to the graphic style panel, I can just add this, we can call it half tone. And then if I want to reuse it, maybe on the flames, I can just select the flames and click on the half tone effect. And there you go. It's already introduced there. Same as before, if I select my fiel, I can just move it up maybe a bit in this case. And it should update. And we can see the half ton effect there as well. So let's take a look at this from a distance. We have that distress effect created with the opacity mask and that texture that we used, and then we applied the half ton effect on the text and the flames. Feel like it looks really cool. Now, of course, we can always make changes to the colors. If you don't like the colors that I used here, you can easily just select everything going into recolor artwork. And since this is such a simple illustration, there's only two colors. We can very quickly move these around. We can just turn off the connection between the two of them. And that way, I can maybe drag this one out, make it more a stronger red. And you might just need to wait a little bit longer because there's lots of effects applied on the illustration. But yeah, as you can see, it is very quick and easy to make changes here. I'm just going to reset back everything the way it was because I like this color combination. And that's all I wanted to do for this illustration. I hope you had fun. 7. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.