From Sketch to Vector Illustration - Dinosaur

1. Introduction Dinosaur : Do you want to get good at creating awesome vector illustrations using Adobe Illustrator? Well, you came to the right place. For this project, I decided to draw a dinosaur made up of aboriginal patterns and decorations. I wanted the creature to be highly stylized, featuring geometric shapes and perhaps even the forms of a DG two. Just to further emphasize the Australian theme. I decided not to introduce any texture to this illustration, and I also kept shading to a minimal level as I wanted the patterns to describe the forms and shapes instead. I imagine this illustration to be part of a kid's book. And if you like this style, maybe you can create a whole series of dinosaurs based on my artwork. Whether 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 dV Illustrator's incredible tools and features. This course is perfect for you if you are new to illustrator, or if you are self taught and aiming to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Para, a certified LOB 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, Nilodeon, 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 roll now and let the fun begin. Your creative adventure with Illustrator starts here. 2. Hind leg outline: To establish the main shapes for this illustration. I am going to start working with the lip tool. First, let's do one of these shapes, maybe the leg here in the back. Now, notice that I am using already one of the colors that I establish for this illustration, this orange color. But whenever I'm drawing, I like to draw with an outline instead of a field shape. So I'm going to press shift X, and I'm going to set up this shape with no fiel. And the stroke thickness, I'm going to set to three points, just so you can see it better. Maybe even four points, just to make it really visible. Now that I have this first shape ready, I'm going to align it to the shape of the lack here. I will also zoom a little bit closer so we can see it better on the sketch. So I can stretch this shape around and move it around until I'm happy with the placement of it. And then I'm going to draw S square. So I press M on the keyboard and draw the square for this part of the lag. Then I use the direct selection tool and just create this angle here on the right side that is looking already quite good. Now I'm going to use the lips tool again. I press L on the keyboard and draw this other shape here. I'm holding down the space bar while I'm repositioning the shape. And when I let go the space bar, I can continue adjusting the shape, and I quite like this angle here. So that is looking quite good. I think we can probably use the direct selection tool and just drag this point up a little bit, just so we get that angle a bit more stretched out towards the tail. So now we have a fairly good starting point here, just simply creating these three shapes. I select all three of them, and then I use the shape builder tool, which is shift M, then hold down the old key or option key to remove everything that we don't need. So I just drew over those parts there. And then I drew over the remaining shapes without holding down any keep or shortcuts, and this is going to combine them into a single shape. So that is looking already quite good. And at this point, I can decide whether I want to keep this as a sharp corner or want to smooth it out, like in my original sketch. I'm not 100% sure which one would work better. So at this point, I can use the direct selection tool, move this down, maybe here and adjust the anchor slightly to have a look at it. And I actually quite like that. So instead of smoothing it out, I'm going to keep it like this. And I don't always want to stay completely true to the sketch. It's more like a guideline, so you should also feel free to adjust things and just be free whenever you are creating your curve. So, like I said, it's more like a guide than something that you need to strictly follow. So I think this shape is already looking quite good. We can move this point further in maybe around here, and then we can just adjust this a little bit even further down that way. Okay. So we have a really good starting point with this shape. We can move on maybe onto the tail. So for the tail, I'm actually going to use a triangle. I will draw this with the pen tool. So I will create the tip here. Now hold down the shift key and click there, and then we come down here. And then we can actually join it into this point here, since we already have this shape. So let's just create that right there. And then we could turn it into a triangle like this, but I'm actually going to go here overlapping this other shape, and then we can close it off. Maybe up here. So instead of a triangle, it's more like a polygon that we created here, like a trapezoid shape, and we actually don't need most of it here on the left side. But to be able to do that, we can do a couple of different things. We can use, for instance, the curvature tool. So that's the tool right here. I actually use Shift P as a keyboard shortcut for it, which you can set in the keyboard shortcuts. So just go in the edit menu, keyboard shortcuts, and then you will find the curvature tool there. So if you don't have a keyboard shortcut assigned already, you can do it. This one, I am going to click and start dragging these points around. So I drag a point here. I drag a point there, then I drag a point down here. And you can see already we created exactly the shape that we needed. Was that simple? We can drag this around a little bit. Here. Maybe that one can come a bit further down that way. And then we can drag this further up here as well. So the good thing about the curvature tool is that when you use it without any keyboard shortcuts, it will always try to create perfectly smooth curve segments. So this one here, this one, this one, and this one, these four segments will perfectly transition into each other. So you won't have any interruptions in there. So if I select this with the direct selection tool, we can see the handles are really nicely leading into each other. So there is no interruption here, like I said before. Yeah, that is looking really good. I actually noticed that the color of my layer highlight is very similar to the color I'm using to draw. And to be able to differentiate between the handles and the path outline itself, I just double clicked on the layer's name, and I'm going to change this color. So now, let's just change it maybe to can, just to check it out. This way, we can see it better. Maybe it's a little bit too bright color on a white background. So I would change it to green. I think that's going to be better, or if we want to maybe make it darker, we can use this medium blue. And yeah, I think that stands out better already. So now if I select these anchor points, I can see how they look. Now, there is actually a setting to be able to see all the handles and anchor points at the same time. So if I select multiple points, you can see that the handles are disappearing. If you go into the settings, that's in illustrator settings, I believe it's under selection and anchor display. The same options, I believe you can find on PC under the edit menu settings, or just press commando Control K on the keyboard to get to it. And the feature I was telling you about is under selection and anchor display category. And here it is, show handles when multiple anchors are selected. So when you enable this, you can see even when multiple anchor points are selected, we can still see the handles. So the direction handles, essentially, you don't want these to be tangled up. That way, you can see that they are forming perfect smooth curves. So this is a great example. For instance, if I select this anchor point here, and I start dragging this handle, and the handle is crossing over the curve, That's when there will be not consistent transition between the two. While if I go back, now you can see that the handles are not tangled. That's what I mean. This is the same thing that applies when I select multiple points here. So the handles are not crossing over the curve. And this looks really good. Now, for the other section here on the right, we could do two different things. We could create an ellipse, and we could align it to this, so we could create the ellipse like that and then join the shapes together. Or we could just do the following. We can say, we have this shape already here, and I know where I want it to end. So I'm using the Panol when I see the little plus sign, that means that I'm going to add an anchor point directly on this path, so I'm going to define a stop here, and then I want another stop maybe down here. To be honest, it could already start all the way down there. We will probably have to merge these two shapes anyway. So I'm just going to create that stop here just so I can demonstrate this to you. So now we have these two points here, and of course, we still have the original point up here. But that one can be deleted. So let's see what happens. If I use the direct selection tool, the wide arrow, and I press delete on the keyboard, that's just going to completely delete that segment. That's not good because it breaks up this shape. So instead, what you can do is to use the pen tool, and just the way we created new anchor points, we can also remove anchor points. So when I hover over this, if I remove it, it's going to keep this shape still being closed. But now, because there is no point there, it's going to define the shortest distance between the two remaining neighboring anchor points. So it created this closed shape here. Now, there is a very useful shortcut to access the reshaped tool when you are using the pen tool. If you hold down the old key, you can hover over this existing path, and we can just drag and move it into place right there. Now, look at what I'm doing here, with the handles, I am trying to achieve a nice flow, again, a transition from the neighboring anchor or neighboring path segment, leading into the distance there. And then I'm going to hold down the old key again to adjust this side independently. Now, if I wanted this to lead up here, of course, in this case, that's not going to work. So here I have to move in slightly following the shape of this curve. Now, this is obviously an issue because here we have, if I select all of the points in this shape, here we have an interruption. So that's something that we will have to fix. And I can actually do this already while I'm combining these two shapes together. So what we can do here is select the two and then use the shape builder tool and just quickly get rid of things that we don't need and then join these remaining shapes together. So that is looking already really nice, and it's joined up the way I wanted it to be. Now, the only point here, like I said, is this one that I need to fix. So what can we do here? Let me zoom out a bit, and let's just analyze what we can do. So I don't want to disturb this part of the path. And ideally, I also don't want to disturb this part here. So the fix needs to be done around here only. Now, for this to work, we could use the pen tool again and hold down the old key and reshape this segment here to then have a better flow in between these shapes. But that's still not doing a perfect job. What we could do instead is to use the curvature tool. My custom shortcut for is Shift P. And then notice that these circles here. So when I have the curvature tool selected, these points have sharp corners in them. Whenever a circle is just completely empty, that means they are perfectly smooth on both directions. While wherever you see the little dot inside, that means there is an interruption in the curve. So, for instance, here, if I double click on this, I can fix that by doing that double click. So there was a little bit of interruption there, which I could smooth out. The same thing goes here as well. I can remove that, or I can just select it and delete it. And in case of the curvature tool when you press delete on the keyboard, it doesn't actually break up the shape, it just removes that smooth point from there. And by removing this, we only very slightly adjusted this path here, as you can see, but we can just try to move this point very slightly to the right. What happens with curvature tool is that if you start moving things around, notice how neighboring shapes are also affected, so it's the same thing in all of these points. So you have to be very careful moving things around and adjusting them. But in case of these two points here on the right, where we identified the problem that we have an interruption in the path, we can try double clicking on it and double clicking on it again. And now we have a perfectly smooth result. So if I select this path once again and I select the curvature tool, now, these two points are white, so they have no point inside them, meaning that there is a perfect seamless transition there. And we can double check this as well. If I have these points selected and zoom a little bit closer, can see that these handles are not crossing over the path. So they are not tangled up, which means that we have a very nice, smooth result here. I'm not 100% sure about this part here. This doesn't look that good. So we have these handles overlapping a bit that's causing the problem here. So I can see that this point probably is the one that we should remove. Let me try removing this with the pano. That's already improving the path a bit. So let's just see again, what we have here, maybe this handle, we can drag out a bit, just to smooth this out a bit more. Like, so Yeah. Feel like that's already better without interrupting the other side. So yeah, you have to be careful using the curvature tool. It can mess up details that you created before if you are not careful enough. But in certain places, like in this case here on the right, it created a perfect transition from the curve that we created on the top and the curve that we established earlier on. So now we have this really nice shape, and if I select it and press Shift X, we can see how it looks once it's filled in. And I am very happy with it. And to be honest, not all of these shapes will be visible in the final result anyway, because I am actually planning to only show this shape up to probably around this point here, like it shows in my original sketch. So if I turn this off, you can see that there actually won't be any visible line up there. I still like to have this as a solid shape that I can work with. So we'll be able to use this as a clipping mask and do additional shapes inside it, which we'll show up here later on. But that's going to happen in the detailing part. 3. Other legs and body outlines: But now it's time to move on to create more shapes here. So since we started with the legs, let's just continue with the legs. They are actually quite simple to do. I'm going to do the next one, which is pretty much a rectangle. So I'm going to draw this right here. And then I'm going to hold down the command key and maybe select the bottom two points. So Commando Control key can select those individual anchor points. And using the direct selection tool, we can drag these to the left. Maybe we can select the top two as well and drag it to the right, something like that. Now, I intentionally want to keep this as a geometric shape. I'm not going to add any curves on it. I think it's going to work quite nicely the way it is. Maybe, if anything, we can use the reshape tool here on the left side. So using the pen tool, I'm holding down the old key and dragging this part in a little bit, and maybe dragging this point just with the direct selection tool to the left, and just having a very mild curve that created on the left side. So, yeah, I think that looks good. In this case, I didn't even need this to be outlined first. I already drew it in a field color. Now, I'm going to use a different color for the legs in the background, and I will press shift X to swap the color. So I drew with a stroke instead of a field color. And you can see I adjusted the stroke thickness to three points as well. Now, for this here in the back, I am going to draw, I think just a very simple shape here. I'm going to draw one point here, another point, then hold down the shift key to keep the bottom two points straight, then come up here and then finish it off, and then hold down the old or option key and add a curve on this side here. Now I can just move this with the direct selection tool further out a bit, and I'm already happy with the way this looks. So it was very simple. We can do the same thing on the left side. Going to press with the pen tool, create the first point, come up here and then come down and just join these two points together. Now, if you want to make sure that these points are exactly aligned with these other points. What you can do is to select all of these anchor points at the bottom, since we have all of the points defining the bottom of all the feet. And then we can just use the align option, which is up here on top, so align all of them to the furest detail to the bottom. And I think that's going to work quite well. Maybe we can just press up on the keyboard a couple of times if we want to move it a little bit higher. Okay. That's a bit closer to the sketch. And now I can come back to this shape here that we created. I press the P on the keyboard to have the pen tool selected and then hold down alter option key and curve this detail up. And then using the direct selection tool. We can drag this further out a bit and just adjust that a little bit more down there. Okay, I'm happy with that detail. Now we can select these two shapes, shift key to select multiple shapes, and then shift X to switch the colors on them. If you want them to be set behind the other shapes, you can select them and use commando control left square bracket until they go all the way to the back. So this way we have already established foreground and background. Well, of course, we will have a lot of additional shapes coming here. First of all, the body itself. And like before, I like to start with geometric shape, so I'm going to try to define the closest possible ellipse that we can use, and I'm using the space bar, moving this around, adjusting the bottom and the top, And the main curve that I'm interested in here to capture is this one, and also this curve here on the top. And I feel like that is a good shape for it. Now we can switch to maybe using this other color. I'm going to remove the fill color. And for the stroke, I'm going to use this other orange color. Something like that. Let's just increase the thickness a little bit more. Yeah, I think that looks good. Now what we can do is to use the direct selection tool and just bring this detail in. So it's kept inside. And then we can also start dragging this around a bit here. So even though I start with a circle or ellipse, in this case, I am obviously morphing and shaping it. You can think of this as sculpting. When you work with clay or pla Do, you're sculpting the shape that you need. But it's still always good to start from that simple geometric form to begin with. So instead of drawing the whole silhouette manually with the penol or the pencil tool, this will give you a more organic, believable shape, and something that is just more relatable to. That's why I like to work with geometric shapes. So I think this is looking really good all around. I think what we need to do, maybe move this point out a little bit further. Like, so, I think that's going to work well here. And let me just double check if I need any additional angles there. I feel like this is going to work. Maybe if we just drag it out a little bit more, something like that. And now here on the top, I'm going to use the pen tool and just add an additional point here on the curve and then hold down the old key, and then add another point here in the middle. And then if I start moving this point around with the commando control key, you can see that I create a dip in here without affecting the other details in the shape. So if you use the curvature tool for this, it would mess up the other curves all around. But this way, I managed to create a nice continuous flow without messing up any other details around. But I can still smoothen this out more by using the command or control key, and drag these points around a bit. Maybe this handle here as well can be adjusted slightly. And now I'm starting to affect that other side there as well. If I switch to the curvature tool now, we can try to move these around just very slightly without messing up too much the other curves around. I feel like this is looking good. I'm happy with this. So we can zoom out a bit, select this press shift X to fill it in, and then we can use command left square bracket until it moves behind the shape. So it's in the middle in front of the legs further away from us, but behind the other two legs that are closer to us. So we have that potato shape ready for the body, and I feel like it looks good. Maybe this segment here can be adjusted a little bit further. So if I use the curvature tool, let's just see what we can do, drag this out a bit maybe this way and then this one up or maybe even delete this one. Let's see if we can simplify this. Yeah, I think that curve looks good. Here, we don't want to extend beyond the leg. So I will have to just drag this in a little bit. Myb we can go higher. That. Let's just drag this one in as well. And I feel like the rest is good. Yeah. That looks nice. Now, what you can also do is to turn off the sketch layer whenever you want to just really judge the shapes that you created. And, of course, at this point, it doesn't say much, but still it's a good way to understand what you created. So, for instance, here, I'm still not happy with this little detail that will need to be fixed, so there needs to be a nice transition there. I wanted that to be curve instead of having, like a dip. So that will need to be fixed. That's actually something that I will have to think about. Probably, I will have to use another shape, combine it with this potato shape to create that transition, because I would like to keep this leg as a separate element or separate object. Especially once I start adding the decoration will be important, and I want the body to also be its own shape. So to create that transition there, we can already do this to be honest. What we can do is either create a new shape and the merge them together, or we can just add a couple of additional points here. So instead of creating a new shape, I am going to just add to this shape. So I will create that point or define the point which I don't want to adjust. So this segment of the curve looks good already. Instead, I want to add another point here and use commando control key to drag this up. I want it to come up here, and then still holding down the command key. I can start dragging this in the direction I needed. And then I just align it to this point up there. And then, essentially, I want my handles, so these direction handles to almost look like they are forming this transition to this other curve. So the handles shouldn't overlap that. Instead, they should be tangent to it. Something like this and that one as well there. So, yeah, this is looking really good. I can just keep the rest like this. It doesn't really matter how this shape looks because it's covered up anyway by this other shape. So yeah, we won't really see this anywhere. But yeah, what I wanted to make sure is that we have that nice transition there. We can also press commando control hy at this stage, just to see how the transition looks like in outline view. And I'm quite happy with that. I think it's going to work quite nicely. So let's just go back. Press Commando Control by again. And then now we can move on to the last larger shape, which is the head. 4. Head and horns outlines: Now, for this, I am going to start drawing with the pen tool. And let me start drawing here, so I will define this point another 0.1 more point. And then I press shift x just to swap the stroke and the field colors. I don't want to see a field color. And you can see I intentionally create just sharp angled corners. So I'm not click and dragging to create curved segments because I feel like the head should be this more angular shape. And then later I can introduce the subtle curves that I wanted to add. So I'm going to define this as one single shape. I would just come up here maybe up to this point that. And then here I actually want to have a curve. So I'm going to define that. Yeah, something like this. It's not really visible in my sketch, but I know what I wanted to achieve here, and I even move this a bit out that way. Okay, that looks quite good. Now, for this shape, we could use an ellipse, but I can also just come up here and click and drag and define this or at least attempt to define this with a single path. So then we just use the command key and drag this out a little bit this way. And then we can come back on that side. I'm just using the command key, trying to move that anchor. Okay. So it is tricky to fit this path with just two points perfectly to the sketch, but I feel like we are quite close or close enough. I think that's close enough. Yeah. The only thing that we'll have to adjust this here at the bottom that will need to be updated. We can actually put a stop to it here, so an additional anchor point, and I can move that in maybe down there. Let's just drag this out a bit more back to where it was. Yeah, is looking good. Okay. And then this point here can be fixed as well. Something like that looks quite good. Mm hmm. Now we will use maybe a thicker structure so we can see what we are doing. And then going back here, I will continue this by drawing with the pen tool, and I can actually just join this up to that point there and the hold down alter option key to create a one single curve that's connects the top to this tip of the head, which is like the nose area. And I think that is looking good. However, this path, I just realized needs to be a little bit higher, so we have to drag it up here. Not so sure. Maybe just this point here, or we can just define this point here to be closed. So I add a point there, and I holding down alter option key, we can adjust this part without affecting that section too much. I can adjust that and adjust this a little bit further. That one needs to come out a little bit higher like that. Okay. That's looking quite good. Now we can introduce additional angles, just very subtle ones using the panal steel. We can add maybe a little bit of angle here. Smooth that out. And I like to use this reshape technique where the corner points will stay intact, so they stay in place, and I'm only introducing curves in between them. I like sometimes with shapes to alternate between corner points which are sharp to then move into a nice smooth curve, just like here between this point and this point, they are very sharp and solid, but then we have a nice, subtle curve there. The same thing here, we can drag this up, and maybe even drag this one down. So almost forming an S curve here, very subtle one. And then we can also add a little bit of curve. Here, and I feel like that is enough. So we have a very good shape for the head here already. We can press shift x to switch these around. And I'm going to use it with the same color that I use for these details that are close to us. So I believe it works well for the head. And now, really, the last main details that are still quite big and important are the horns. So we have to do the three horns for the triceratops. For this, I will actually attempt to use just ellipses. So let's do the first horn. I'm going to use a different color. Maybe we can use one of these colors. I'm just going to remove the field color for now. So I set that to none, and I will keep the stroke color but make it thicker. So we have this shape here and we can move it into place, drag it down a bit, turn this into a nice elliptical shape that will fit to what we need here. So yeah, that's a good fit there. Then I hold down altar option key and duplicate this ellipse, and I'm going to rotate it, try to align it here on the other side. I also noticed this in illustrations that if I use the same shape, same exact ellipse twice and try to create something out of it, it usually creates a more interesting end result or more organic end result again. So instead of two completely independent shapes, there is some kind of harmony in this object. So the two ellipses that define this shape work well together. And we could even attempt to do this bottom shape here again with the same ellipse. Although I don't think that is necessary, but we can do it like that. And then I select these three ellipses together, and then press shift for the shape builder tool, hold down the old key and quickly remove the details that we don't need. And then we end up with the final shape, which we can turn into a field shape by pressing Shift X. And it is looking really good. And now maybe if I use the direct selection tool and just click on this shape, we can maybe add the very subtle curving on the corners. Just maybe that much. Let's just try this again. There it is. It looks good. Let's just see this in outline view as well. I like what I see. This is looking good. Now, we can try to duplicate this and then reuse it. So let's see what happens. If I duplicate this and just scale it up. I can try to fit this on this other detail up here. Maybe just do some very minor tweaks on it. Using the pen tool, maybe I can just reshape this segment here. Because I already used the corner points, the direct selection points, it's not perfectly continuous here. So it already has a little bit of messed up detail there. So I actually prefer to again, just be really precise. And to be honest, most of the time, if possible, I avoid duplicating details, especially quite big details like these. So let's just do the same technique again that I've done using the ellipses. So I drew my first ellipse trying to fit and align here on the left side, and that is looking good. And I'm just going to switch the fill and the stroke with the shift x shortcut and then duplicate that shape again, using old or option key dragging that shape up. So there's our duplicate, and then rotate it around until it fits the illustration. And that looks really nice. Now we can just fit this to the bottom as well. Yeah, something like that. And again, there is a beauty in creating these shapes simply by using just the ellipses. I find this quite fascinating. The end result looks always just a little bit better than compared to using like the pen tool to draw it. So now we can use the direct selection tool add a little bit of the corners on it, very subtle, like that. And then I feel like that's already looking quite good. Maybe the bottom needs to be curved a bit more so before I introduce the corner here on the top, I will use the pen tool, hold down the old or option key and create a bit more definition here. I will also remove that anchor point. I was an extra anchor point. And I feel like there's an extra shape as well. I'll just deleted that quickly. So let's just select this again. Using the pen tool, holding down old or option key. We can add a more dominant curve here, just like that. Yeah. That looks much better already. And then selecting this top point here, we can add our little curve there. Now, if this doesn't want to curve more, that is because of the angle of this curve. So it was created in a way that we can't curve it further down. In these cases, what you can do is to manually reposition this. So you can have that point moved down. Or in this case, I can see what the problem is here. There is an additional point here which needs to be removed. Now, if you just remove that, simply by clicking on it with the pen tool, that is going to obviously affect the curve. Let me just change this color just so you can see what I'm doing. So you can see there's two anchor points there next to each other. This one needs to be removed. And this is a very useful shortcut. If you switch to the minus tool or delete anchor point tool, and hold down the shift key while you are removing this point, is going to attempt to retain the original curvature of this part segment. So let me do this from a distance. If I do it without the shift key, it's going to mess up that detail. But if I hold down the shift key with this tool, it's going to look exactly the same. So that's a magical result. So now we have a perfect detail up here, and it will allow us to curve this as much as we want with the smooth widget. So we can smooth it out all the way down here if we wanted to, and I think that's quite nice result there. Yeah, removing anchor points with the pen tool. So whenever you have a shape selected and using the pen tool to remove a point is always going to affect the shape, so it's going to mess up the shape that you had there. So instead of this, I recommend using the delete anchor point tool in these cases. And again, don't just click on it like that, hold down the shift key and click on it. And see, again, we managed to remove a point, which was just in the way. It wasn't necessary for this path. And it already is just so much easier to work with it. So there's literally three points. So if I were to draw this with the pen tool, I would have originally only created these three anchor points. But I still like the fact that I created this from ellipses and not only random ellipses, but duplicates of the same ellipse. So the whole thing was defined by those three ellipses. And I'm just going to use the same field color and then set this up the same way as the other horn. And then let's just duplicate this. I think this can be duplicated for that other horn behind it. Since we are not going to see a lot of that shape, I can just set it up like this and maybe just use a darker color for it just so we can differentiate it, and then with the command left square bracket, I can move it further back in the distance. Let's just turn it around a little bit more and use the arrow keys on the keyboard to align it. And then this point here, we can just move down ever so slightly. So it's hidden away behind that other shape. Looks good. All right. So the good news is that we actually managed to create all the most important elements. So we have to head, the horns, the legs, and the tail all defined in these curves. We can see it in outline view as well. We can also see it without the sketch. And, yeah, so very simple, the least amount of anchor points that was necessary to create this, a good transition between curved details and sharp angles to have interest in the composition. And already, obviously, I'm thinking of making things as easy as possible for me. To then later add all of these details and refinements that we will introduce in the following lessons. So I hope you enjoyed this workflow so far, and don't worry if you don't have the exact same result that you see here. I will have this file ready for you to continue working with if you want to or if you choose to, but don't worry if your result is slightly different. The most important thing is to have fun with the process. 5. Refinements and details for legs: Before we start adding some details, I would like to make one minor change to these main shapes that we created so far. So remember how we created the tail connected to the leg. That point it made sense, but the more I think about the decoration and details that I would like to add later, the more I feel like it would make more sense to have the tail connected to the body. So the potato shape that we have here in the middle. So to be able to do this, there is a very quick and easy fix. We have to divide or split this shape in the front into two. First, I'm going to use the pen tool and define a point here where I would like to cut it. So let's create that point there. And then choose the scissor stool. The shortcut for this is C. And then click on that anchor point right there, and then maybe use this other anchor point here. To create the cut. And now we have two objects. What we can do is to have this one on the top selected and then shift click on the body and use the shape builder tool as Shift M, and then just paint over these details to join them together into one shape. I'm just going to change the color back to yellow just so we can see it better. So we can now see clearly that there is one shape, the tail and the body, and this leg is separated. One thing you have to be careful about when you are using the Scissors tool is that it can create open pods. So in this case, these two points are not a quick fix for this is to use the direct selection tool and select one of these anchor points on the part where we have it opened up, and then shift click on the other anchor point. And then from the control bar, you just click on this option here. That way you can join these two details. And now it's connected with that path, and now this is a nice closed shape. So it's worth taking a look at all the anchor points that we have here. If I zoom closer, I can actually see that there is an unnecessary anchor point right there. I'm going to use the pano for this to remove it. We'll just use Pentool and click on it, and that's removed. And doesn't really matter what we have here behind the lag, but if you really want to create smooth points, you can just adjust this as well a bit. But this way, we have these two perfect shapes now, the body and the leg in front of it. At this point, I really like to focus on one element first. Completely add all the details on it before I move on to another one. And just to keep things easier, I'm going to start with probably the smallest or simplest shape in this case, and that's going to be this leg here in the front. What I will do first is to draw the clothes or nails. For this, I'm going to use the Pen tool. Let's just draw the first one. I will hold down the shift key, so I keep the bottom detail straight and go up there and then go down here and click and drag to create a nice curve on this side. Looks good. Now I'm going to use the direct selection tool to get the corner igits and just add a little bit of corner on all of these corners and then drag this down somewhere here. Let's see this without the sketch. I think that is looking good. We have to duplicate this one time, and I also stretch it a bit and then another time. Okay. Yeah. Something like that. So let's see compared to the sketch. Yeah, that is looking good. I think it's a good detail to begin with. Now, I would like to use this actual shape that we created as a clipping mask. And I am actually considering to have a curve here created similar to the sketch. So what we had here. To be able to do that, I might use an ellipse. So let's draw the ellipse and draw this detail here. So instead of just a solid shape on the top, I'm going to actually follow that shape there. Select these two together and then use the shape builder tool. Let's shift M. An old or option draw over the details that we don't need and just merge the other two without holding down any keys to create this unified shape. But whenever you use the shape builder tool, remember that you have these unnecessary anchor points that remain there, and to be able to remove these without affecting the curves, remember we use the minus tool or delete anchor point tool with the shift key held down. So that's what I'm going to do here. I fixed it quickly, and maybe we can also use the same method. By the way, minus on the keyboard shortcut will get you to this tool quickly. And again, holding down shift key, I could fix it very quickly there. So, yeah, instead of having seven anchor points, now we just have four, and it's exactly the shape that I wanted. And this is going to be used as a clipping mask because I would like to have a couple of additional shapes placed inside this. So, what I'm going to do is to draw another shape. In this case, I'm just going to draw another ellipse. Let me just draw this ellipse down here. Just like that, let me try to follow the curve as close as I can. Yeah, I think that's good enough. And I'm going to use these two shapes now. But what I need to make sure, and for now, I'm just going to change the color of this shape just so we can see it better is that if this is going to be my clipping mask, so the container or holding device, then this needs to be placed on top of everything else for this. You can right click and choose a range bring to front or use the shortcut, commando Control Shift close square bracket. So if I do that, comes to the front, now shift click on the other shape to have these two selected, and then go to Object, Clipping mask make, or Comando Control seven is the shortcut that you can use for this. So now, as you can see, we have that invisible boundary created by the original shape that we had for the leg. And inside it, we have this circle. So to be able to see what's happening in the layers panel, we can see there is the clipping group created. There is the ellipse, which I can still move freely around inside this other shape. But I'm going to keep it down there. But what's best is I can start duplicating these shapes, and I can even add an actual color for the leg itself. So even though it's a clipping mask, it can still have its own field color. So I'm going to use this dark blue as the base color. Then I select that ellipse inside the clipping mask, and I'm going to duplicate it, so I just click and drag up there, and then I'm going to change the color, and I will move it below the other shape. Like this. And then we can duplicate this again. Once again, we change the color, this time, the same orange color. But then again, I move it below the other shape. So I'm basically building it up. Now we have one ellipse at the bottom, another one on top, another one on top, and that's the base color of the shape. So now we created these colors, and we can have this group moved below the other shapes, which are the little nails we created here. To keep things organized, I will already start putting things together into a group. So in this case, I'm going to select all of this together, and I'm going to group it. So once it's selected, I press commando Control G, and I'm going to call it front left leg. That's it. And then we can start adding these additional small details, the circles. And if you want to make sure these circles end up within the group that you just created, for this, it's best to use isolation mode, which is a simple double click. So double click takes you inside that group, so you can see now we are working inside this group. So we still have our clipping mask, which is that main shape, and then we have the little nails that we created. The only issue whenever you are using isolation mode is that you might not see your original sketch. So in this case, I have to turn off temporarily the clipping mask that already has those field details. So then I can use the ellipse tool and start drawing these additional small details. So I'm going to use this with this color. And then I'm going to use another ellipse here. I will use this bright color on it. And I'm going to just duplicate it once and one more time. And then let me just duplicate this circle, but this time I will use the dark color on it. And again, I'm going to place them down there. Now we can turn back the clipping mask, and we can adjust these a little bit just to have them align the way I imagined it. And that is looking good, by the way. The inspiration for these little dots is coming from the aboriginal illustrations and paintings on things like Dig dos. Feel like that is what I had in mind when I drew this sketch. So I'm trying to stay true to that. And if I double click outside, I can exit the isolation mode, and now we can see how it looks without the sketch. And I think it looks really good. So that's the level of detail and the type of detail that I would like to see on all of the rest of the illustration. But since we started working on the legs, let's move on and apply the details on the other legs. I'm going to move on these legs that are further away from us, so the right legs. And this will be fairly easy to do. I'm just going to have this detail selected using the direct selection tool. You can pick something even though it's inside the group already. Copy it, and then press commando Control F to paste it in front. And the good thing about this is that it automatically places it outside of the original group. So we can now move this here to the side, move it slightly higher than the other leg and I actually will select these legs and just move them up with the arrow key. Just to add a little bit more depth. So having them not perfectly aligned, is going to create a little bit more depth in the illustration, so it won't feel so flat. I think that's going to help us. Now, this color, I want it to be dark like that. And the nails, I'm going to set for this darker orange, just to have some nice contrast, and I will actually make this nail slightly smaller, something like that. And I'll just have space for one more here. Okay. And that is looking quite good already. I'm going to use the same color here as on the other lag, and I'm going to duplicate these shapes here. I'm actually going to use three in this case. I start with duplicating this holding down old key. There's one here. Another one there. And then this one, we can even use the send backwards command shift squared bracket or arrange send to back option and then have it placed completely behind. Maybe something like that, and then these can come ale bit closer. Again, I'm changing the way it was in the original sketch, but I'm making these decisions along the way, and that's completely fine. You don't have to stick to your sketch. It just makes more sense to me the way this looks now, and even this one, I can just move a little bit higher somewhere there. All right. Now I'm going to have all of these selected together and shift, select these other details and actually group them all of these together into a single group. Again, I just feel like it makes sense like that, and I'm going to call these right legs. So that's both the front and the back. There won't be much detail on these. So that's why it doesn't really require a separate group 6. Details for hind leg: Now, this lag in the back is going to be a little bit more detailed. For this once again, I'm going to copy one of these nails with the same method, direct selion tool to select it, and then command or Control C and command or Control F to paste in front. So we have this path in a separate space, not inside a group. And then here, we have, again, the nails set up like that. We have three of them. And then we can actually have one more duplicate this, and maybe reflect this around, press all on the keyboard, which is the reflect tool, you can find here in the toolbar, and then just click and drag will reflect it, and you can also rotate it around. Reflect tool is like a special type of special version of the rotate tool. So it can rotate and reflect at the same time. I can place it up here. Now, whether this should be in front or behind the other shape, I'm 100% sure. And I just noticed that we lost one of the nails. Going to recreate that quickly, like that. I feel like this probably would make sense to be behind the leg. I'm just going to place it behind it. Yeah. I think that looks better already. And the base color of this lag will be defined inside the clipping mask again. So at the moment, it doesn't really matter what color it has because it's going to lose that color. But what I'm going to do is to draw another ellipse here. So I will turn on my sketch. Like before, I'm going to draw one of these cores or ellipses that I will be using here like that. And I'm actually going to use a stroke for this, and I will use this darker green color with a thicker stroke. Something like that. Now I want this to be only visible inside this shape here. So for this, once again, what we need to do is to create that clipping mask, which will set this holding device or boundary within which we can work. For this, remember that you always have to have the shape, which you use as your silhouette on top of everything else. So you need to place this on top. I use the keyboard shortcut, but you can also just use the layer spanel if you want and drag it all the way to the top to make sure that these two shapes are selected. Or the leg detail and or silhouette and this little circle that we created. And then the shortcut for clipping mask again is Comando Control seven. Now, once you have your clipping group created, within that, the actual silhouette itself can now have a field color. So I select the field color. And I'm going to use this green color, which is going to be the base color for our triceratops, that's going to be the original color or skin color. And all the rest of the details will be different colors. So those will be the decorations. But, yeah, this is going to be the base color. Now, if I turn off my sketch, you can already see that little detail there is something that we can easily move around. If I selected from the layer spanel just like before. We only see that circle inside the clipping mask. So that's the way this works. And the good news is that we can easily reuse that detail. So I'm just going to turn back the sketch. And I can see that ellipse right there. I can just duplicate it, change it a little bit around the angle of it, and then apply for the stroke yellow. Color this time. And then I would like to have some additional details added here. So for this, I'm going to start drawing outside of this clipping mask and just draw this shape quickly. Like so. But then I can just drag and drop this into the clipping group. And that way, it will be added inside it. So that's also a useful technique. You can easily draw outside. You don't have to always enter isolation mode, because you can just drag and drop things in and out of a clipping mass. And for this shape, I would like to use this color, but as a field color. So I press shift X. So I swap that around. Then I would like to have this section here at the bottom set in different colors again. Now, here is another thing that you can do. You can actually have clipping masks inside clipping masks. So what if I want to then further break up this shape into other details? Well, one thing that I can do is to draw these two shapes. So, in this case, I'm going to draw a rectangle. Maybe like that, and then use the pen tool just add another point there and then another point below, and then use the Cisors tool to break this up into two shapes. So now we have one on the right, which can be this darker blue, and then we can have this one maybe yellow. But if I want these two shapes to be only visible within that the shape that we created earlier. All we have to do is to make sure that they are turned into a clipping mask. So I'm just going to drag that shape out from the original place where I want it to be. And as you can see, I have them all together. Now if I select them all and I press command seven, I just have to go back and reapply the color on the clipping mask. So I'm just going to use that orange color. So now, just so you can see what we have here. We have this shape within which we have those two additional rectangles. But don't forget that we wanted this to be inside that other shape, which is the leg. So if I just drag and drop this inside the other clipping group, then we have exactly what we wanted to achieve. So now that we have this shape ready, we can just drag it underneath the nails, select them all together, and also don't forget about that shape there, and then group them together. So now we have this shape ready, so the whole foot, can drag that around, and then we can put it back here. And one thing to notice is that sometimes if you have a clipping mask, clicking inside the clipping mask might not make a selection. You might not be able to move the object around. So it's good to always try to click and drag it from the path or outline of it or another detail that is not inside a clipping mask. That's just one of those things in Illustrator you have to pay attention to. But this lag is starting to look good. There's only a few more details that we need. Those are these dots here. So for this again, I can reuse one of these other dots I created earlier just so it's the same size. I use the copy and pasting front technique that I've done before, and then I'm just going to place it here, then duplicate it. Actually before we duplicate it, let's just also draw this other shape that we have here. To create this shape, I'm actually going to draw this on the side here just so you can see better. There's again, several ways of doing this, but I like to do it with the Ellipse tool. So I will just draw a long ellipse like this, which will have four anchor points. And then using the pen tool, we can hold down the altar option key and convert one of the points into a sharp corner. And there you go. That's how quick and easy it was. And then we can just use the direct selection tool. And move these two points higher. So we can't actually see it properly, what's happening until I let go. And I think it doesn't need to go any higher than that. In case you want to move it any closer, you will have to drag these handles down a bit. So holding down the shift key, I drag them down to make sure that they are still straight. That. Now if I move them higher, we can create that tear drop shape that I had originally mined for this. And I think that looks good, so now we can just reduce the size and drag it in here, and then align it. Like so. Now if we want to duplicate these quickly, we can just select these two together and group them, commando Control G. And then using the rotate tool, which is R on the keyboard, you can just define the center point for the rotation. And start dragging them, but also hold down the older option key. So there's the first, and then again, do the same one more time, and then do one more time there. So this way we know that they are perfectly aligned to each other, and maybe they don't have the same distance between them, but that's not that relevant for this illustration anyway. So I feel like this is looking quite good. Of course, we can always further refine this later on. But one thing that I forgot to change is the color for these shapes here, so I use the direct selection tool. Select them, and I'm going to use this darker blue color on them. I'm just thinking which one would work better. Yeah, I think we can use this darker blue color. Okay. And I feel like that is looking good. Let's just see the sketch again. I actually had in mind now, I remember that these points were supposed to follow the original line of the foot. So that's something that I can try to replicate here. So I can move these a little bit further out. And have that original curve in mind as I place them down. Yeah. So this is something that we can further refine later. But for now, I am happy with how this is coming together. And let's not forget combining these into a single group. So I'm going to select these together with the shift key, have that foot detail as well. Group all of these together with command or Control G, and then let's call it hind left leg. Okay, so we have the front hind leg, and then we have the right legs, which are in the background. Okay, so we're done with the legs. Now we will be able to move on to the body and the tail. 7. Details for the tail and back: Make our life easier. I'm going to turn off these details in the foreground and maybe even turn off the head, which I'm going to quickly just group together for now, so group all of this together. Hide that as well, so we can see the potato shape better. And I'm going to turn back the sketch because that shows us some of the details that we will need here. First of all, we will want to turn the body into a clipping mask. It's going to be a big clipping mask with lots of elements inside it. But a shape on its own doesn't really work as a clipping mask, so you need something that will go inside it. And in this case, just to make things easier, I'm going to just draw a square here on the top or rectangle, I set it to a color. And then I'm going to make sure that this body shape is above it. So I just move the rectangle underneath from the layer spanel. And then select these two together. I make sure the sketch layer is locked, so it doesn't accidentally get selected. So I have these two selected and then press commando Control seven to create the clipping mask. Now, the base color of the body, as I explained in the previous lessons, is going to be this green color and brighter green or teal. And I think that is going to work quite well. Now we have our clipping mask ready. We can continue to work inside this. And there is another technique that you can use whenever you want to draw inside a clipping group. So there is this feature called draw inside, and it even has a shortcut Shift D. But as you can see at the moment, that is not accessible. And the reason for that is that you actually have to highlight the clipping mask or the shape that was created inside the clipping group, and then you will be able to enable this. So when you use draw inside, you will notice these little dash lines appearing around the object. And now, even though we are not in isolation mode, we will still be able to draw new shapes, and they will automatically end up appearing inside the clipping group. So let's just test this out with a shape that I wanted to create up here, and we're going to use the pantle and draw around this part. Up here, and then I'm going to set this color to yellow. There you go. You can see even though we didn't have a specific selection of anything, we still ended up creating this shape automatically inside of the clipping group that we established. Now, the good thing about draw inside is that you can use this even before creating a clipping mask. So just to show you this again, if I go back a couple of steps, we get back to this point where we had our original shape, which is just this simple path that we have here. I choose draw inside why this is selected. It's automatically going to turn into a clipping group the first time I add something. So if I now use the rectangle tool and draw something like this detail. Notice how immediately that is added, and the original body outline is turned into the clipping mask. And of course, I can still select that and change the color of it, and then I can continue drawing. Again, I can draw this detail here, like I've done before, and then just assign the color on it, and so on and so forth. So yeah, draw inside is probably a more convenient way of creating clipping masks, but I still wanted to teach you how to do it without it. So the commando Control seven shortcut when you have two objects, one that is used as your container or mask and the other shape that is going to be used inside it. Placed on top of each other. Turned into a clipping mask is the original, or we can say standard way of creating clipping group. But this draw inside technique is something that I really like to use. So that's why I wanted to highlight and show it here. So I'm just going to draw a couple of lines now. I'm going to draw a line here, and I will use this bright color, and I am actually going to remove the stroke or the feel. For the stroke, I would like to use that bright color and increase the thickness, something like that. And I actually going to turn off my sketch just to see that. Yeah, that looks good. Maybe I can make this even thicker. So let's just increase the thickness on this up to nine points, that looks good. And I'm going to duplicate this. Let's click and drag duplicate. I'll turn it around a bit. One more time duplicate. That looks good. And then maybe one more time duplicate. Just have to make sure I select the right thing. There it is. And then rotate. This time I'm going to use this dark color on it. Now, let's just use this dark stroke and move it up here, can rotate it around, keep it straight. I can have one here, maybe. I will have another one maybe a bit thicker, this one. If you hold down the shift key when you're in or decreasing the thickness of your path, it can go faster or slower, and I feel like that one, the thicker one can go a bit further to the left. I just noticed that we lost one of the lines that I established here earlier, so I'm just going to duplicate it again, place it down there. Okay. So that is starting to look closer to what I had in mind. I'm going to continue adding some more of these, one more, going to add here. This can be a little bit higher. Just around the edge of that other shape. And by the way, I just noticed that these two shapes, the one that I just created here, and that other shape there can easily be replaced by using a stroke directly on that other shape that I created. So I'm just going to simplify things and add the stroke around that because those are the only visible edges of the shape, and why not use it for that? It just makes more sense. Now, I am going to draw another shape here, so using the pen tool, I'm going to click and drag and try to define this outline, and then come up here, maybe click on that point. Come up here and then click and drag again, using the space bar, I can reposition this. Click and close. So we have another cool shape here. I'm just going to change the colors on this. So the feel color should be this darker orange. And the stroke can be the brighter orange color. And let me just turn off the sketch so I can see what we are doing. Yeah. This is looking interesting. And then what I'm going to do is to just have two more of these lines added. So let's just rotate this around. One here. This one is going to be this darker blue. And then one more once again. Rotate it around. Just maybe adjust this a little bit more rotate it and move it down, or something like that. Now I'm going to add a few circles as well here. I'm going to add a circle here with a white or bright fill color. So let's just choose fill. There it is. And then I'm going to just duplicate this, so I come closer. We put one more here. Another one there. For now, these three will be enough. And then maybe just for good measure, we can put one more here just for some interest. Okay. Now let's turn back the sketch. Let's see where we are. So the tail is close to what I had in mind. Obviously, we have the legs. Don't forget. We already edit those details. But I want to concentrate on the back here now. So we need this decoration. For this, I'm going to start with the larger shape that's going to go at the bottom. And don't forget we're still using the draw inside. So whatever I'm going to draw is going to appear there. So first of all, I'm going to draw from up here. I'm actually just using the pentel for this, and I'm following my sketch very closely. It doesn't have to be perfect. I want this to feel quite organic and loose. So yeah, I'm just following it like that. And then I think I would just come up here straight, like that. Maybe a bit higher. And then close it up there. Now, this can be this orange color. Then we will have other shapes overlapping this on the left. But first, I'm going to draw these other shapes. So we have this one. Let's click and drag. Then click again with the pen tool to turn that into a corner point. Then click and drag here, holding down the space bar. I can reposition this anchor point. And then I just have to close this up again outside. Like so, this one is going to be this orange color. And then we can just duplicate this if we wanted to. So select that shape the last one that we just created and duplicate it. Now I moved it off, but we can't really see what this is doing until I actually changed the color on it. So that looks close enough. Maybe we can adjust it slightly, like that. Yeah, that looks good. Then once again, we can duplicate this shape. I'm going to use the dark orange again. Let's align it and then just adjust the shape a bit. And then one last one. I'm going to drag this up, change it to the original base color and line it up there. Okay, so that's close to what I wanted. Now, we, of course, re need some of these little circles here as well. I'm going to use this yellow color on it. And let's just try to create a few more of these. So I will duplicate few of them. I'm not following exactly the drawing. Slightly different places compared to that. And let's take a look at this without the sketch, and also maybe have all the additional details add it back. Yeah, that's looking good. Now, one thing that I notice is here, the lag is overlapping that detail. So what we actually need to do here is to reduce the outline of the leg, but we just get out of the draw inside mode temporarily. So I will go back to draw normal. You can also press Shift D on the keyboard to deactivate it. So we can come back here, use the direct selection tool and just drag this down until it doesn't interfere with those details up there. So now that I drag it down, I can click away, and it is looking already better. And at this point, I can always come back and just adjust these anchor points a bit. Once again. You don't have to stick to using the same exact details that you had in your sketch. If you feel like they need to be updated, you can always go back and make those refinements. Even here, I can come back just these parts a bit until I'm happy with the way it looks. It just feels a bit more balanced now. I feel like this needs to come down a bit as well. Like that. 8. Details for the belly: Now we actually have a few details, if you recall in the sketch. These pikes on the back that should be added. So for this, I'm just going to use the pen tool, click and drag to draw this first one, and click and drag and finish the shape. And I'm just going to add a corner on this. Actually, I only need the corner on this particular point up here, not the other two. Yeah, like this. I just then copy this, try to align it to that. Larger shape that we have on the sketch. I can, of course, adjust these points, so it doesn't have to be just relying on the transformed feature. I can make this one a little bit smaller. Adjust it a bit more. And just that handle as well. Okay. So yeah, these look good. Now, this just needs to be placed in a group command G and make sure that it's underneath the body. Now we don't want to put it in the group of the body because that's a clipping group that we created. These should be behind it because it extends beyond the original outline of the body. And that is looking good. Now, we need some additional details further down, so we will need to add some details here at the bottom. Go back to the body, which we worked with before. I go back into draw inside, and then using the pen tool and my sketch, I can just trace along these details here. I'm just going to draw a curve that comes down and follows the body here, and then just goes around like that. And then I am going to fill this one with the darker orange color. So that's detail for the belly. And then we can maybe duplicate this detail and use the other color, this brighter orange further down somewhere like that. Let's see, without the sketch. Yeah. It might get a little bit confusing, so I'm not sure about this detail. We'll probably have it something like that. But now I'm also conscious about one detail. If I use the same orange color on the leg and the belly, it might clash and make it hard to read what is happening here. So maybe this color that we used here could be changed to this darker blue. Think that makes it better. So it reads better. There's a better separation between the details, and it actually makes more sense to have a darker color there on the belly. So I think that works quite nicely. And then still within the same shape. What I can still do is maybe use this same shape, duplicate it one more time and just have the instead of a feel, I'm going to have a stroke with this brighter color assigned to it, and then maybe just align it to here. Let me just drag this out a bit. Yeah. Have maybe a line running through there at the bottom, which again, creates a nice continuity between the front and the back, and we could potentially even apply this to this shape. So if I use the same color, use the same thickness as well. Might be a little bit overkill. I actually preferred it just with a single version of it like that. And instead, maybe let's just use a few of these dots. So I'm going to use direct selection tool, copy, and paste. And I'm going to actually paste this already inside this clipping group, and then just place it here, maybe make it a little bit smaller as well. Something like that. Okay. And then let's zoom in. By the way, if the corner points are getting in the way, whenever you work with small objects like this, you can go to the view menu and choose hide bounding box. That way, you can still work with the object, but you don't have to worry about all of those tiny little details affecting your selections. So I can just click and drag, Old click and drag and continue doing this. But here's another technique that's worth mentioning. If you have lots of these little circles that you would like to place down on a specific path, instead of creating the circles individually like this, what you can do is to draw a path with the pen tool. So I'm just going to draw a path here. It's a simple curve. Like that. And instead of using the circles individually, what we will do is to have a stroke setup, so increasing the thickness of it, and then go into the stroke settings from the appearance panel and turn on dashed line then make sure that the cap is set to round cap, and the actual dashes, you want to set to zero point. But then you want to increase the gap, and depending on the size or weight of the points, this will need to be different depending on what you want to achieve, but you can see we can adjust the gaps, maybe have 20 points in this case, and that looks already quite nice. So yeah, that makes it much easier to work with the dots. So all I have to do now, let's not forget to turn the bounding box back so we can see the path when I select it. But yeah, so if I select this path, can just move these anchor points around and notice how the circles are created as I'm moving it around. So that just makes it so much easier to work with. I'm just going to set it up. Here. And we could even continue this, so it could even go all the way here. I could even add additional anchor points on it. So we can add a nice little curve in there. And I quite like the fact that it is even hiding behind the leg. So some of those points feel like they are actually placed behind the leg. But if you want to make sure the points are fully visible, then of course, you can also do that just two separate lines. So I draw another line here. So that way, I have a perfect control over where they start and where they end. And yet, this way, we could create a nice line there as well. And at this point, I'm not even entirely sure whether we need this line here, so I can even just delete that. If I wanted to, and we can come back and add more details later if we feel like it. Maybe let's just add one more little detail with the same style. Just going to add one more here. Again, following the foot. Adjust these points a little bit like that. So let's see how this looks from a distance. Yeah, I think that looks quite nice. We can move this a little bit higher, maybe. Yeah, I think that created a bit more interest here in this region. Now, remember that we had these dots added one by one. If you want to have more control and you want them to feel more equally spaced out, you can also recreate these. So just going back to those dots, I can have these selected and delete them. I will just delete those. These direct selection tool, delete that one as well, and then just use the same technique as before. We can even just duplicate this, place it up here, and drag it down, adjust it a bit. Like that. And by the way, if you want to make it easier to reuse certain styles, you can even save graphic styles. So this one could be called small white spots. And I just used the pen tool to continue adding another segment to it. So now we have two. We can adjust These points a bit drag it up like that. But now what I'm going to do is to go into the stroke settings. I will increase the weight because we wanted these to be bigger, but we also are going to increase the gap size. So yeah, maybe something like that. And then we will also change the color of the stroke. In this case, I believe we were using this orange color, so we can now save this also as a new style and call it large orange spots. The cool thing is once you save graphic styles, you can easily switch between the two like that. So you can easily update them. By the way, if you don't see the graphic styles panel, it's from the window menu graphic styles, that's where it is. Anything that you create and you quickly want to reuse, and it has a little bit more advanced settings than just a fill and a stroke. Then graphic styles is always going to make it easier to reapply it. Now I just noticed that there is one detail here that we need to fix. I believe that's one of these shapes that's overlapping. So I'm just going to move that point down there. That way, it doesn't overlap the tail. And yes, the good news is that we pretty much are done with most of the little details that I wanted to add on the body and the tail. So now we can move on to add the refinements and details on the head. 9. Details for the head: Time to work on the head and add details here. So first of all, there's a small little shape here that we will have in the background, which is for the mouth. I'm just using the panel very quickly to define this. I'm going to use the darkest color for this detail, and I'll make sure it's behind the head. Or we can already put it in this group, which we started creating earlier. So that's just going to help to define the depth for this detail. And then we can start adding additional details like the eye. So let's just create that quickly one ellipse here, then another ellipse on top, which is going to be this bright color. And then we can have one more. I'm just duplicating the other shape and using that darker color I like so the eye is, of course, very important, so we can refine this later. For now, I'm going to just keep it like that. I think that looks quite nice. And then we can have maybe this additional shape around it. I'm going to use the ptol and I will use only a stroke color for this, increase the thickness of the stroke and set it to white. Now, if you don't want the stroke to run around, all the way. You can use the scissors and cut it off, let's say here and there. That's one way to do it. And maybe we can even reuse this shape and just place it here on the right. You can maybe make it slightly bigger. And, maybe angle it a little bit differently like that. Or we can just use the pen tool and draw another curve here might be easier. But whenever you crop or cut into a path, it's also worth adjusting the styling on it. So in this case, what I will do is to sure in the stroke settings, we have round cap, which is going to turn the caps from this sharp angle that we have here to round details like this. I think that's quite important in this case. So let's take a look at this without the sketch, and that is looking good. So around the eyes, we have some good details already. Let's draw the nostril, this hole here at the front. I'm using the pano for this. Just draw around it, create the curve, and then feel color, we will make this dark. And then we will also add some roundness to this, so the round joints. The stroke, just as important as the round caps. So round joins instead of having these sharp corners. Now we have them nicely rounded down. So you don't have to use the corner vigi for this. If you just want the stroke to be nicely rounded, then you can use the attribute from the appearance panel on the stroke. And that is looking much better already. Now, I am going to select the main shape. So that's the head detail that we have here, this silhouette. And what I'm going to do is to press or use the draw inside feature. I can start working inside this once again. This is creating a clipping mask. So what I will do is change the color first of all, the field color of this shape. So that's our head shape. I'll change it to the base color, this teal, and then I can start adding the details that I wanted. So first, let's just draw here something. I'm going to draw from this point. Yeah, we can start drawing from that point and maybe align it to this point here, create a curve and then start coming down. And we can actually go all the way around here the mouth. And then I will choose the field color to be yellow. Then, let's draw another shape. Once again, from the same point up there, let's come down, and go around, and then this one will be the darker orange. So that is looking really good. And the cool thing about this technique is that if I ever change my mind about the outline, of, let's say, the mouth. I can always come back to the starting point, which is the outline shape, the main shape that we have here for the head, which I can still find here and select it. And for instance, if I wanted this point to be curved down, I can just adjust that, and you can see already the details are updating, or if I do something more drastic change, you can see I can move this point around as well. And the details I dit for those additional colors will continue updating. Thanks to the fact that everything is connected. So yeah, this is a really nice little technique, the draw inside mode. And yeah, it's coming together nicely. What I wanted for the head. Now, let me go back and make sure that we can see the outline here. So I'm going to just make sure that the draw inside mode is still highlighted. All right, so next up, let me just draw another shape here as well, maybe coming down to there. And then again, I don't want to be going into the bottom part of the mouth, something like that, that looks really nice. Then we can move on to draw additional details up here. So I'm going to use the pen tool and start drawing this curve here, one shape, and then let's draw the next one. Just like that. Then draw up here. And then we just go outside to finish it off and then come back here and maybe start coming in from that angle and then close it off. Like that. Okay. So let's see this shape we just created. I think I will use yellow for this, just to really nicely separate it from the rest of the body. And the most important thing I wanted to make sure that this has a nice flow here at the bottom. So it needs to be adjusted a little bit. I want this to have a really nice flow from one shape to the next. Of course, in this case, the outline of that detail might need to be updated as well. I'm just checking where it leads. It actually comes down here. I might make sense to have this all connected like this. This is actually quite nice way of doing it. So I'm going to use that point that I defined here just to see where it leads. So the original outline, the way I did it is actually quite nice. I like the way this looks. Okay. Slightly different to my sketch. I like it. And I'm going to just draw another ellipse here like that. Using the darker color. I can turn off the sketch now just so we can see how this looks, and then maybe have another shape here. This one even can be slightly adjusted. T more into an ellipse. Yeah. And then draw one more shape or even duplicate this. Use the darker orange on it. Yeah. I like the way that looks. And then if I just turn off this head shape for a second, I can see that a few details are already not grouped together. That's something that we have to think about, make sure that they end up in the same group. But what I also want to make sure is that we are going to have a good separation between the head and the body. So what I will do temporarily is to go back to the body and select the main clipping mask, which is the silhouette, and then choose the draw inside on that. Then use the shape tool. And this time I'm using this darker blue and just add that separation here. So I will just row that shape in there, and then I will even just duplicate this ellipse, bring it up, and then set up another shape. It's almost like a drop shadow that I'm creating here like that. And maybe I can even have these two combined together. So now that I have them roughly where I want them to be, I can combine the two shapes together. So let's move this down. There. For some reason, it doesn't want to stay there. Let me just use the shift arrows and put it in place. So now I can select these two shapes together. And there is actually a useful panel, the pathfinder, where you can just quickly join or unite shapes together. So window menu pathfinder is where you will find this. And then the first option, unite. It's like the shape builder, but sometimes it's just faster to use this feature. Now that I have them together, I can just use this point using the direct selection tool. I just make sure that's the only one selected, and then I can round that detail down like so. So this is a nice little detail that I wanted to make sure is added, and it helps to separate the head from the body. So just again, without it, and with it. It's almost like a drop shadow. We can obviously make this even softer by having this color. It might actually work better. I'm not 100% sure yet. For now I'm going to keep it on this one, but I might change this later on. For now, I quite like the way this looks. 10. Creating a Pattern Brush: I will actually draw a few details behind the head now. And this is also a mode that you can actually use. It's called draw behind. Same shortcut, shifty, or selecting it from the toolbar. This is going to help you to be able to draw everything behind a specific object. So in this case, when I am drawing, let's just say triangle, one of these pikes here, I can just draw it. And you can see automatically it goes behind the other one. So there's one created there. I can draw the next one. And I could draw these one by one, but I would actually prefer these all to be a single shape. So what I'm going to do here, as you will see, is that I am going to just set the color to what I want and just continue creating this zigzag. So let me go down, down. I can even have a bit of curve on them like I have in the original sketch. They don't all feel so rigid like that. This is where it's starting to go behind everything else, so it's not ending up in the right place. So I'm just going to fix this quickly. Of course. But yes, so that is looking good. I can just come up quickly around here and then draw the last one, go up there. Curving it a bit. Curving it a bit there as well, and then close it up. Because we like closed shapes. Now, let's take a look at where this ended up being. It ended up being all the way at the bottom, but we actually want this to be under the head. So the head group that we created, and it actually can go inside that. So if I drop it in there, just not inside the clip group, but we have this other group for the head. And let's see it without the sketch. That's a really nice little detail. It was very important, looking already much more interesting. And I can just move this point in a bit. That was a little bit too long. I felt like, and, yes, it's looking already much better. Now, coming back to this detail here I created for that separation. I will probably bring it out a bit just so we have a better separation between the decorations that we have here and the head. I don't want those details to overlap. So yeah, that creates a nice separation there. Then now we can move on to adding some additional details here in the front. So for this, we will be using one of our styles that we already created earlier for these little dots. We will add one of them here. Feel like it would be a good one. So I will click and drag. And click and drag one more time. Trying to follow that shape nicely. And let's just add the little dots. Make sure that this is above the head for now, but then later we will join it together into a group. So let's see how this looks. We can obviously refine the curve itself. And I love this when it's updating live. I can see exactly where those little dots are leading. I can make sure that this is angled a bit. Like that. No 100% sure whether this should be the same style as on the rest of the body, but for now, I am just going to use it like that. Now, I would like to also have a few thicker lines here. So I am going to draw one of the lines starting maybe from here, and I will have it go all the way up there. So that's one line, and this is just going to be above the head again. But we need to make sure that this is not dash line. So I will remove the dash line option from it, and I want to make sure that is visible on top of the head. It's going behind because I'm still in the draw behind mode, so just don't forget to get out of that. I just went back to the draw normal option. So we have now a straight line running up on here. It can reduce the thickness a bit. Thing like that. That's looking better. This can actually be part of this clipping group. So if I place it in here, it's going to work better. I feel like that's a good place for it. And then we can have the silhouette of the head selected and choose draw inside. Just for all the additional lines that we will draw, will end up inside there. I actually want to have different shape add it in here. We'll use the lips tool, draw an additional shape. And I will set this to be the darker feel color. We don't need a stroke. And then this needs to be behind those other details like that. And I'm going to select this shape that I created earlier and use the pen tool and just draw another line running from here to there. I want this to be in the same spot as the other one. And then I will use the pen tool and once again, draw another shape, starting from here, running up to there. I probably need to do two anchor points here, so first one. And one more. Again, just adjusting this nicely. In this case. I want to make sure that this extends into it, so there's no gap between the two. Same thing on the other edge, which is looking good. Yes, that looks nice. Now, I would like to have maybe a few little details inside here. And for this, we can use these shapes that we established earlier. I'm just going to copy and paste that in front, paste it and move it over here. I'm going to turn this around. Like so. And I'm going to use this yellow color on it. So these are the tear drop shapes that again, we used earlier. Now, in this case, I'm actually thinking I might round this corner down instead of having it so sharp, and I probably will do the same on the other shapes. And now I can align these and create some additional shapes for it. But this can take long, and again, similar to what we've done before with the little dots. There is a technique to simplify this process. Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy way to do this with graphic style. Instead, we will have to create a pattern brush. So let me show you how this works. I'm going to move this object up here and then set it up like that. And then from the window menu, we have to open the brush spanel and simply drag and drop this in there. Now, when the option comes up, make sure you choose pattern brush, and then we can call this tier drop. And all you have to do is to increase the spacing here. So you will see a preview, and you can decide how much space you want. For now, I'm going to use 100% space, which means it's the exact space in between each of these tiles or elements as their original width or thickness. And I'm going to click for now. The next thing you need to do is to use the pan tool or any other tools with which you can create the shape or the path that you wish to apply this on. And there it is. I'm just going to set it to a stroke just so we can see it better. And then simply click on the tear drop brush. And, we have the tear drop nicely following the curve as well. And if we need to adjust the shape, we can easily do it with the direct selection tool, you can see how easily we can do that. It's working really nicely. Can align it up here, drag it down a bit. And of course, if we double click on the brush option here, so the one that we just created, As long as the preview is turned on, you can also adjust the size of this, so you can just simply drag this down. If you want to make them smaller. Don't forget, you can also adjust the spacing easily. I wish there was a slider here for spacing instead of percentages. But yeah, we can just use the shift up and down arrows when we click on spacing to adjust this fairly quickly. We can even flip these shapes around. So if you use this, you can have them facing the other way. I actually prefer it like this, so I will probably keep it like that. Then I'll click Okay, and I'll choose apply to strokes. And then we can close the brush panel. So yeah, that's a really nice little detail. And of course, this is again something that we can reuse in the rest of the illustration. I might add some more of this on the legs, maybe even on the belly. Since we have that quite empty at the moment, let's just reuse this there. I just duplicate it, bring it down there. I could even just turn this into a single line. Like that and adjust it until it follows the shape perfectly. Yeah. I don't mind it being slightly overlapping this leg, but of course, once it goes into the right place, so this is the front leg that we are working with just has to go behind that. It should be in the body. So I just drop it in the body group, and it already looks much better. If you don't want to end up having these tiny little details like this one hanging out here and that one hanging out there, you can just use the scissors tool and chop off the path in these two sections. And then using the outline view, I can just highlight that section and delete it. So we can go back and now we have the two outlines of the one that we created here and the other one there. So there's no overlap issues. And yeah, that is looking really nice. I really like this brush, and it's worth keeping this brush visible. If you need to ever come back and make changes to it. I'm just going to drop it here together with the appearance panel, so we can easily access it whenever we need it. I think we are pretty much done with the head. So in the next segment, we can move on to detailing the horns. 11. Details for the horns: Pared to the other details, the horns shouldn't take too long, especially now that we practice all of these techniques. So I'm going to start straight with using the drawing side feature, and I'm going to change the base color of the shape that we currently have here to this bright color. So I'm just going to remove the stroke. Yeah, we have that bright detail there. And I'm going to use the pan tool zoom a little bit closer and just draw a shape. And this is going to be more like shading. So I will close up this shape here, and I will make sure the field color is set to this darker detail. So, yeah, that's already looking quite nice. Now we can draw over this with the eps tool. Or actually, I'm going to use the pen tool. I will just draw a shape here and just go around it like that. I'm going to use the orange shape. Like that. And if I go inside this shape that we are working on right now, so this should be in the head group and inside it, there it is. So there's that detail that we use for shading. If I keep this on top of everything else like that, I can actually change the blend mode of this to multiply And that way, it's going to also add the shading on every other detail that I create here. So, as you can see, this was before, there was no effect on the orange detail. But now because it's set to multiply, it's blending itself with all the other details. And if I then select that shape that I created earlier, and I duplicate it and maybe use this orange color or the other yellow color, can just adjust it a bit, the position of it. But yeah, you can see already there's that nice blending and transition created. I think that's already good, the way this horn is set up. And of course, I can always come back and adjust that shape. If I want the shading to be a bit more subtle like this. Let's do the same thing with this other horn. Again, the base color should be this. And then we have the drawing side mode turned off and then turned on again. So this way it changes from the previous horn to this new one. And just like before, I'm going to draw the detail that I want to use for shading, like that, nicely wrapping around this other object. Show it's closed, and then set it to the darker color, set the blend mode from the transparency panel to multiply. And then now we can just add the additional details. So I'm going to use the pen tool, draw this shape at the bottom. Like that, and set this to the darker orange and just make sure that it goes in the right place. So it needs to go under the shading. The shading detail has to be on top for the blending to work. And then I have this selected. I can just duplicate it, change the color once again, just move it around until I'm happy with the curvature. And yes, that is looking really nice. I feel like that works well. Maybe these details need to be adjusted a bit. So the detail around the eye, I can probably move this a bit further down. Like, so I felt like it was just a little bit too close, and then this one can also curve down a bit. This way away from the horn. Yeah, it feels a little bit more natural now, the way it follows it. And I feel like that's all I wanted to do with the horns. So let's just turn off the draw inside mode. Maybe this horn in the background, so this one could be the darker color just to match the details on the legs, to make it look like it's further back. I think that is probably going to work better. And I actually changed my mind about this detail here. I feel like it should be not this dark color. So if I just come back to the front lag, and within that, it's that silhouette that we have here, probably we can use this darker blue because there's nothing else around it that uses that color. So it actually works quite nicely and still stands out. So, yeah, we can use that there. 12. Final refinements and fixes: I am not sure about this detail here. I am not fond of how it turned out because it doesn't really follow the shape of the leg. So I'm actually going to remove this shape here. And I come back to this silhouette that we used here, and I will use the draw inside mode and try to add a few of these details here. So we just duplicate these circles or lines. Let's see what happens. So I feel like if I set them up following the shape of the lag, it's going to create an interesting and more unique look for us. So I'm just adjusting the size of the ellipse as well. Maybe one more. Going up all the way here. And then what we could do is to have an alternating pattern between these. So have different colors alternating. So one blue, one yellow, and then blue again, then blue again up here. And then of course, the only detail that doesn't work now is that this overlaps the other detail. But actually, again, I don't really like these black details that I edit here. So I'm going to delete them. And I'm going to update this with the design that we created earlier. So I am going to stay inside this area. So I still have this hind leg selected. I'm going to double click on it, so we work in the isolation technique, and then use the pen tool click and drag to follow the shape of the leg, and then go into brushes and select that detail. So that's already more interesting. We can have that while moving up a bit this way. And maybe curved a little bit even more. So even though we don't have a continuous line showing the curvature or the curve of this foot, it still represents it. And then we can just move these points away, they don't have to come out this much. Can even move the whole shape up a bit like that, so it doesn't take up that much space. This point can go up as well, and then let's see how this feels. Now, in case you want to change the color as well of these little dashes. So instead of keeping them the same as on the head, And on the belly, let's say here, we want them to use one of these other colors. Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to update the brush. So once again, I'm just going to show you that the duplicate is the one that we use for the smaller ones, is the bottom one from the brushes panel. And if I double click on this, there is a colorization option. And we can experiment with these settings, the, tints and shades, and hue shift, but they don't really do much, or it's not as accurate as what you would expect. So if you want the specific color to be used, unfortunately, the quickest and easiest way to do is to update the definition of the brush. And the quick and easy technique is to drag the brush thumbnail onto your Canvas. And since we only use this shape here, you don't have to worry about the rest. Select that and update it to the color you want to use, let's say this darker blue color like that. And then just simply use the direct selection tool and holding down the old key, drag it back onto this section here. So alter option key, drag it back, and then say, Okay, and apply to strokes. And, it's updated. So there it is. Now it's using these blue colors. And obviously, if you want to have different colors, it actually makes sense to duplicate the brush again, and that way you will be able to easily switch between them. So if I select this one, I can just duplicate the brush again. And then for this path that we have here, once again, let me select that. Now if I select the third option, I can once again, drag this out here on the artboard, use the direct selection tool to select that detail. Maybe I will use this white color now and then drag it back holding down the old key or option key targeting this section. Say, and apply to strokes. And now, as you can see, we have three options or variations. We can switch between this, this or this. And because there are three different brush templates or settings, you can have variation even in the orientation of these tear drop shapes. So if I go back in the settings, I can flip them around like that, which is also quite nice, or I can again switch back to the other direction. Is a quite cool little technique. And it's worth having multiple settings just so it doesn't feel so repetitive, the designs that you create. And I actually feel like it would make sense to have more variation in some of these areas. So we could have maybe a few more details at it here as well. Just to fill in these details, I'm just going to draw one more line here. Again, following the shape of the lag, and these dots already work quite nicely. Maybe we can just turn them around a bit more. Like that. I think that looks quite nice. Maybe we can have some more of these here at the front as well, the same dots. Just to have a bit more consistency or connection between the different parts of the design. Let's just drag this down here. Could even go a bit further like that. Could even overlap that detail there. So yeah, you can continue to experiment with these elements, the ones that we created and see what works best. I think in this case, it's probably better not to overlap that area. So I'm just going to drag this up here and create that angle around there. Yeah, I feel like that works better. And let's not forget to organize our layers because it's now I feel like ending up a little bit of a mess. So let's just take a look at it. Essentially, we only want to have a few groups inside here. So, for instance, these details that we just added should fall in the right place. So this should go in the hind leg. This should go in the head. And then, let's see, this one, I believe should be also on the head. Yeah. So let's just drop that in there. Then we have another detail here, which should be also in the head. Then we have a few details which we use on the eye. Let's just group these together. Maybe even those two additional details, which should be for the eye. I can even just call this y and drop it in the head group. And then that's the nose or nostril. And also drop this in the head section. Now, if I turn off the head, it takes off the whole detail there, front leg, hind leg, body, and the spikes could actually be inside the body group. But we have to make sure that they go all the way at the bottom. And by the way, here we have to group this differently because the whole body group is a big clipping mask with that main clipping path sitting inside it. So what we need to do is to actually have the body selected together with the spikes like this. So shift click on the little circles in layer spanel and then press Command G or Control G, and then rename this one again, body with spikes, maybe, just so it makes sense. Now inside it, we still have access to the body and the spikes separately, but now we also have them grouped together like that. And then we have also the right legs, which are in the back. So now it's much more organized, much easier to make changes to everything. And of course, the whole thing can be also put into a large group, and just call it tricera tops. So this way, of course, it's easier to move it around. If we were to move this into another illustration, it just keeps everything together, but will also allow us to easily separate and move elements around. If this was created for animation, I already have things set up for the animation, so you can see it would be so easy to move the head around, I could also move the leg, like the front leg around for making some walk cycles. The only thing that is not easy to move around at this point is the tail because I connected the tail to the body, but that could be separated as well. Of course, whenever you want to create an illustration for animation, that's important to decide at the beginning, so that way you can set things up accordingly. And you have to talk to the animator, make sure that you know exactly what they are planning to animate. So yeah, in this case, a lot of things been set up correctly already for animation, even though I wasn't planning to use this character for that. 13. 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.