From Sketch to Vector Illustration - Fairy Tale

1. Introduction: Do you want to get good at creating awesome vector illustrations using Adobe Illustrator? Well, you came to the right place. I wanted to make an illustration for this course that could be used for the cover of a book. I decided to go with a fairy tale, and I chose little red writing code. My aim was to utilize negative space and the figure ground principle. These are both terms I cover in great detail in our graphic design theory series. If you are interested to learn more about them. But in a nutshell, using these methods can help you to make your illustrations more compelling and intriguing. I ended up using the head of the wolf as a background framing device and align its nose with the hood of the little girl. This is the figure ground detail, which can be seen as two different things, depending on how you are looking at it. I wanted the style of the illustration to be reminiscent of woodcut or linocut art, and also to have a Japanese asthetic. Whether you are an aspiring illustrator, digital artist, graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply someone with a passion for visual or 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 Adobe 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 Perine, 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, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Leveraging this extensive experience. I have carefully crafted this course to help you navigate OB Illustrator like a seasoned professional. I am not just teaching Illustrator. I am empowering you to express yourself. Tell your story and create illustrations that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along and replicate my illustrations or you can use the work flows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and 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. Little Red Riding Hood's cape and hood: First of all, I am going to focus on drawing the little red riding hood character. So it's obviously a very important detail, and I like to have it already in place. So when we start working on the wolf silhouette in the background, it's going to work well together, since her head is describing or showing the detail for the nose of the wolf. So this is a fairly simple illustration detail, but still I am going to apply a couple of interesting techniques here. First, I am going to start with the pen tool to draw the cape. Now, for the cape, I'm going to draw something very simple here, starting with a straight line coming up here, and at this point, I'm already going to apply red stroke just so we can see what we are doing. And then let me just come up here, click and drag, just like that. Come down on the side, click and drag, and then another straight line. And then to create these folds or something that looks like folds on the cape. I'm going to draw a curved line, then click, and then go up a bit. Then curve the other direction. Click, come down a bit, curve the other direction again. Click, go up, curve the other direction. Click go up a bit curve the other direction, and then one more time, other direction. So as you can see, I created this alternating pattern, and it's going to make more sense once we turn this into a fiel. So now that we have it set up as a fiel, we can select it and switch to draw inside mode. So that way, this shape turns into a clipping mask. But this time I'm going to use the pencil tool. So I have the white color selected for the stroke, and I'm just going to draw the lines here. Let's just draw up first line and the second one. I'm just going to redraw this more here and the one there, then one last one. Okay. Yeah. That looks good. Let me turn off the sketch just so we can see better what we created. Now, these lines should be perfectly aligned with those folds in the cape. So I'm going to make sure that's the case. I'm going to select them, and in this case, drag it here. That looks good. We have another one here. Again, we have to just make sure it's aligned. Looking good. That one's already good. And once again, we make sure this is aligned here. We can also adjust the direction handle, just so it curves better. And then we can just align this one as well right there. Okay, so that is looking good. But let's select these again. So I'm just going to select all that's command A, then shift click on that square next to the clipping path, just so making sure that on these lines are selected. Or of course, at this point, we can also use the magic W selection tool and just tap on these lines that should only select them. And I want to change them from being uniform. To probably use this width profile five. So just adds a little bit more interest to it, or we could even try the width profile four. That's probably even better. And since I was drawing them from bottom to top, this already works quite well. So it's like a transition from a thick line to a thin line in the end. We just have to make sure that they are aligned better. So like here, that's the better alignment. Again, this one should be a little bit more out there. And I feel like the rest is looking already good. Okay, so that's a nice little detail there. Now, let's switch back to our sketch, and I'm going to turn off the draw inside mode. You can just do this by simply clicking somewhere outside or go back to normal mode. So draw normal. And then let's draw the hood. So for this one, again, I'm going to switch back to the pent tool, and I'm just going to draw shape that I believe is going to work well for both the hood and the nose. So we have to remember that this acts as two different things here. So it serves two purposes. Both needs to look like the hood, and also as the nose. I will set it to red fill and nose draw. So let's take a look at this. Yeah. I feel like it looks good. If we turn off the sketch, obviously, that's not going to tell us much. But to be able to separate this better from the cape, we will also need some shading. And I think on the cape, we could use some shading. And for this, we are going to use an interesting technique. I like to use noise brush. For this particular illustration, that's the style that I would like to go for. And in the file that I created, you will already find this if you go to the brushes spanel. But if you drag and drop this onto your artboard, you will see how it's been created. So it's a brush that just has simple little specks. They are irregular, so they are not round. They are all just irregular shapes, but they all are rounded down. There are some sharp corners in them, but generally they are more smooth. And there is also a randomness in how they are spread out. But generally, there are more of these shapes towards the center of the brush, and that they start to disappear or be less dense towards the edges. So that is the brush pre set. But if I double tap on the icon for it, we can also see the settings for it. So most important thing that this brush was saved with a black color. And when the colorization is set to tints, that will allow us to apply any color on it, whatever we want to use with it. The settings that we will see here is that there is a maximum amount of randomness assigned to the rotation. So each time this is used on our brush strokes, there will be always a rotation applied, so that's going to create a really good randomness for these little specks. And we will be able to control the size and the spacing later on, but these are the default settings that are used. And I actually don't use any scattering on this, even though this is a scatter brush. So if I click okay, I can just demonstrate how this looks. If I use the brush tool and have that selected, I can just draw with whatever color I choose, and this is how it looks. So it's looking really interesting, and it's going to work really well for shading. Now, how will I use this for shading? Well, I'm going to go back to my original shape, the cape, have that selected, and go back into draw inside mode. Then I use the brush tool. And I'm just going to use yellow for now just so we can see how it looks. And as you can see, when I start applying these colors here, it's going to create that shading effect. So we are drawing inside, and we can build this up really nicely. Now, here I actually would like to use a darker color. So I would like to create something like a shadow effect. So I'm going to add a new swatch. And this is going to be based on the red color that we had, so I'm just going to select that first new swatch and then set this to HSB, make it darker bit, and maybe drag the hue value and the saturation value around as well. You can use the same settings 860. And then with this selected, I'm just going to place that here on the left. I can start adding the shading and build it up. So I'm doing a couple of brush strokes. I'm concentrating the brush strokes closer to the hood, and then I can go maybe down as well on the sides a bit. So that creates a nice little effect. We can also maybe add a bit more at the bottom, like so. 3. Little Red Riding Hood's legs: Now we can repeat the same thing with the hood. I'm just going to select that, turn the drawing mode back to normal and then draw inside. So we switch the clipping onto this shape. And then here again, I'm going to use the dark color that we just created and just add a few little specks here. Now, one thing that you can do is if you want to draw smaller specks, you can actually change the stroke settings. So I'm going to draw the first line just so you can see what happens. If I select this path with the direct selection tool, I can go on the stroke settings and reduce the thickness of it. And immediately, you can see that we get smaller specs. So this looks great, and if I draw now, it's going to remember that setting. And I'm just going to apply a bit more around here. Once again, remember that this is going to work both as the nose and the hood. Just trying to make it feel a bit like there are nostrils here on the left and the right. So I'm keeping that in mind. If I have the sketch, we can see that will work quite well as the nostrils or the nose, but still looks like it's also the hood. And since we have this setting, I am also going to use a brighter orange for our strokes. So let me just select the stroke, brighter orange and just draw a little bit over here on the top as well. That's more like highlights that I would like to have there. Okay. That's looking quite nice. Now let's switch back to the other shape as well, and add some highlights there too. So I switch back to draw normal and then draw inside. Just make sure that this shape is selected. You can, by the way, use shift D on the keyboard to switch between these two modes. And I'm making sure that we are using the same orange color. And again, maybe we can reduce the thickness of these lines to 0.5 points. And now we can just draw a little bit more of it. Here on the right, and then some more down along the cape as well. Okay, so there's some nice texturing going on here already. But I want to make sure that these white lines are actually on the top. So for that, I'm going to find the lines. There's one, two, three, four, five. I group them together just to make it easier to select them later on, commando Control G, and then drag them all the way to the top of this clipping group. Right there, I would just call them white lines. That's it. Then the rest is shading in here, and we can call this one the cape, and that's the hood. It's always good to name our layers and objects that we are using. Now, if I'm not happy with the shape that I created here, I can always go back and redraw the edges with the pencil tool, just make sure that with the pencil tool, the settings that you're using, we'll have the keep selected option on and also the edit selected parts on. If you want more accuracy, you can drag it closer to that side, or if you want to have more smoother details, you can bring it more towards on the right side. And so, for instance, here, if I wanted to add a little bit more detail on the top, I can do that, also on the side, just make it a little bit less sharp. Generally, I just want to have a little bit more interest to this, make it less geometric, more organic. Yeah, I feel like that is looking good. The only detail that I'm not 100% sure about is this part here. The way there is an empty part on the hood here. I actually want that to be also a bit darker, so I'm just going to go back, select the clipping path. Use draw inside once more. Select the brush tool, choose the darker color and just paint over it there. Again, I'm going to use the thinner brush and then draw one more time. By the way, these settings are easier to reuse if you use the graphic style panel and create a graphic style, like for this one, I can create one and just call it shading. That way, I can easily come back to it and reapply it. Okay. That looks a little bit better, so we build it up a little bit more shading there. Let's just take a look at this from a distance. I'm going to go back to draw normal. Okay. That's looking a bit better. Let's see our sketch, how it's going to work in context for with the rest of the details. Yeah. I like the way this looks. Okay? Now we need to draw the boots and the legs. So for this, I'm going to keep my sketch on quickly. I will actually use the blob brush tool here with black as my main color, and I will use the draw behind option. So that way I can start drawing, and it will automatically go behind the cape. And I'm just going to draw it down. And we will be using the blob brush tool quite a lot in this project because I'm planning to use it for also the trees. And by the way, I'm using the stylus here. But of course, you can also work with the mouse. It's just a little bit more intuitive to draw, especially with the blob brush tool when I use the stylus. That's why I prefer to use it. So that's 1 ft, and then the other one. It's more similar to painting the way I build up these details or inking, and then we have the other foot. I want to make it look like there are some folds on the boots she's wearing, and we can even make it look like there is actually the edge of the boots here, the edge there. So we create a little detail there just to indicate that there's the boots. And I'm not using a different color for the trousers. I think it works well with being black both of them. Now, the advantage of the blob brush tool is that it also creates two simple shapes in this case, so we can just very easily find the things that we created here in the layer spanel. So there's one and there's another one. And I'm just going to make sure that they don't have any gaps in them. And like here, I can see a little gap. Yep. And then also, I will select both of them and use the eraser tool that's shift E, just to erase a little bit from the bottom to keep the bottom more straight. Yes, that looks good. And then select both of them and then go to object path and simplify. I have a custom keyboard shortcut for that. F five. I recommend setting that up because we will be using that quite a lot in this project. So we can see that with this, we can simplify the amount of shapes that we used here or anchor points that's been created. And that looks quite good. So let's see before and after. I like it. Maybe we can also apply smoothing path. Smooth. Again, that's something I have a keyboard shortcut for a very minimal amount here, maybe 3%. Let's see before and after. I feel like that looks good. Now, that's actually all we needed for little red riding hood, so we can see without the sketch. This is what we achieved so far, and obviously we have still a lot to add, but one of the main details is already in place. 4. Wolf head silhouette and shading: Now it's time to work on the wolf head silhouette that we will have in the background. And in this case, maybe we can save some time by drawing in symmetry. This is a very simple technique. All you have to do is to start drawing with whatever tool you want. In this case, I'm going to use the pen tool, and I will use this bright gray color and no feel. So if I start drawing maybe with an increased thickness on the stroke, I will probably just start drawing down here. What you can do is while you are drawing with the tool, go up to the object menu and choose repeat mirror. Once you do that, you can set up where you want the center point to be, so you can drag the center of symmetry. Let's say here, and then we can continue drawing. Let's just continue drawing these details. Going to already start adding corners here. Like so making it look like there's fur and going up, curving the ear a bit and down, and then can just finish here in the center. Now, if you go over the center point. I'm just going to drag this over just so you can see what happens. I'm using the direct selection tool on that last point. If I drag it over the center point is going to perfectly align it. So there's already a mask applied to the shape, so it doesn't go over the center line or the center of symmetry. I'm just going to keep it somewhere there, and I'm going to do the same thing at the bottom. So here we can use the pento to continue this point. I'm going to go around and come up here and click and drag. Okay. So that is looking like a nice silhouette. And we can probably keep everything the way it is. Yes, I think it looks good. And what I will do is to double click outside. So we disable temporarily the repeat function. But by the way, whenever I want to come back to it, you can see it is a single object here in the layers panel. And all I have to do to go back to it is to double click on it. So it's a type of isolation in this case as well. And then you can continue drawing. So of course, we can draw additional lines. We can even use different tools like the pencil tool, and everything will be added in that same special group. So we won't be able to see the objects unless we open that little line there. And as you can see, everything is created within that mirror repeat group, which is a special group. Now if I double click outside again, I can get out of the drawing mode. And what I wanted to do here is to change the stroke to a fiel. So I will select this and press shift X. And what I will actually also do is to take off the color from the stroke, so we don't need the stroke. And let's turn off the sketch. Okay, so we have this outline, and it looks quite good. But maybe we can go back and just select it one more time, and then also use the same techniques as before. The path simplify, I think is going to help here a bit. That looks better. So closer, so that was before and after. Definitely simplified it a bit more. Now, what I want to also do here is to draw inside this shape, similarly to what we've done with a little red. But unfortunately, the repeat feature cannot be combined with the drawing side technique. You can see it's disabled there. You will also not be able to use it as a clipping mask. So what you need to do is to expand this drawing mode. So if I choose expand, click Okay, then now we will have a group with these couple of objects here. To further simplify this, I like to press command or control shift the G a couple of times until we have less objects visible, and it's starting to look a little bit better already. But I am going to also delete these clipping parts. There's one there, select that, delete it and another one there. Now we can again, remove the unnecessary groups and just see these two objects next to each other. So there's one, and there's the other one. I select these two, I can go to the pathfinder panel and just unite them. So now we have a single object. That's just to simplify things. So drawing in symmetry using the mirror repeat technique can save you time. But later on, it's just easier to work with a solid shape like this. And I might actually need these a couple of times, so I'm going to make a duplicate of it already. So Command or Control C, command or Control F to create the duplicate. I will turn of this silhouette. I just call it Wolf, and I will call this one Warf as well. Okay, so we have the duplicate available in case we need it. But for now, I have my outline here. And what I would like to do is to add some interest to it. Again, I would like to introduce some textures for this. Now, first of all, I am going to add the shading on it. So I will use the draw inside mode. I switch to my brush, which still uses the same scatter brush that we used before. But this time I'm going to use it with a darker gray. So let's see how that looks. Yeah, and that looks good. But to be able to see what we are doing, I will also turn on the sketch. So that will help me to see where the eyes will go. And that's obviously important because there we want to introduce darker details. So I'm just going to draw over that section a couple of times like that, a bit more here, then down next to the nose. We can also add some shading, then we can also add the shading here, around the edges. And actually, for this, I can even turn off the sketch. So yeah, it looks good. Maybe around here. I want this to be quite subtle so I don't want it to be too much. I wouldn't use black, for instance, for this. Okay? That's looking quite good already. Let's turn the sketch back on again. I want some glow around the eyes. So for this, I'm going to use a red, and I'm just going to actually, instead of red, I will use a brighter color like this orange. I will just draw a little bit around the eyes there. Again, without overdoing it, it can go and extend out a bit to the sides like that. And then I think that is going to be enough of this color. 5. Adding details on the wolf head: And now what I would like to do is to utilize this brush also for masking the shape or the silhouette, because I want the silhouette to be a little bit more interesting. So what I will do is to go back to draw normal. And we will need the transparency panel. If you don't see this, go to the window menu and then choose transparency. What we will need to do here is to select this clip group that we created, and I'm going to apply a mask on it, so make mask. Then turn off the clip option and then click on the opacity mask, which is this one right here. It's important you have to go inside it, and you will see that you are inside this once the opacity mask shows up here in the tab. Now I'm going to switch back to the brush tool. And this time, I'm going to use black as my color. And what happens if I start drawing with this is that it's actually going to start eating away from this object or this group because it's hiding those details. So let me show this without the sketch. I'm going to switch back temporarily in the transparency panel to the normal check, the object itself. Here I can turn off the sketch, then come back to the opacity mask, and again, continue drawing with the same brush. As you can see, we can start to introduce this fact, which is taking away from the silhouette. Now, what I want to do here is to actually increase the stroke size. So just like before, we have to do this after we already do one line. And as you can see, this is creating bigger specks, and I can draw around the edges. Now, the good thing about this technique is that even if I decide to use a different background color later, this is not actually white spots or dots that we create. This is transparency. So I can maybe reduce the size a bit around the edges and a bit smaller specs there. And just to demonstrate this to you, I'm going to show this quickly. Once we have all the details in place, I feel like that looks good, and we could even apply a bit more over the whole thing just to have some interest. Just going to try this. It's a little bit too intense. Let's see what happens if I increase the brush size. Almost would feel like snow. I think it's quite good, but maybe the settings that I'm using are a little bit too strong. Yeah, I'm not going to change these settings for now. I'm happy with the way they look, so I'm going to say leave strokes. Instead, I'm just going to show you, like I mentioned before, what happens if we put something behind this? It's important to switch back to again drawing in the actual object mode, not in the mask anymore. So here if I create a rectangle as a backdrop and fill this in with yellow fill, for instance, and place it below the details we created. You can tell this is what we created, so there is that effect being able to see through the shape that we drew. So that's quite cool. For instance, if we had this as a black fill, this is how it would look and so and so forth. So, I like to use this brushing both for texturing, but also to create a textured outline or mask. And one other thing that I feel like we could do here is to go back to the main shape, which is our clipping mask, by the way, that silhouette, and apply an effect as well. I like to use this distort effect called roughen. So I would choose that one. And of course, I want to reduce the intensity of this. So I will increase the detail actually. Reduce the size down to 1%. And even 1% is a bit too much. Maybe if we also reduce the detail to something smaller. Yeah, I feel like that's getting better. Maybe we can do 0.1%. And then increase the detail a bit 0.5%. Yeah, that's a good one. Let's click. Click away. So you can see around the edges, instead of having that very like solid line. Now we have a more interesting outline. Again, more organic. I feel like that works really well for the wolf. Now, we still need to have the eyes. I intentionally didn't draw that inside this shape because I didn't want to overlap it with any of the noise or texture that we created. So I'm going to draw this separately. I will use the pantle, And actually start drawing from here. By the way, for this, I'm going to use the red color as my fill and no stroke, like that. Let's also use the repeat option for this, so we go to object, repeat mirror, and then we can just drag this in the center. Just make sense to keep this also symmetrical. We might also add a few additional lines using this new repeat object. So that is looking quite good. However, I'm going to smooth it out a bit. So you use the path smooth option and then also simplify. I use F four and F five, the two function keys, so I can very quickly apply these every time I draw something, and that is looking much better already. But I would like to also have some outlines here. So for this, I'm going to use the blob brush tool with black color, and I will draw some outline here for the eyes. This is like the eye lid. By the way, we are still in the dro symmetrical mode. So this is going to show up on both sides. Let's see how this looks. Let's to come down a bit further that way. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Maybe we can just create a little extra detail here like that. And then I think we can also do just a little bit more detail further than there as well. Just to define the eye better, and maybe just one small line here as well. Okay these look good. Maybe that one little detail can go up a bit higher like that. I'm going to select all of these together and then use the smooth option first. Smooth out the details and also probably merge these. Use the pathfinder unite, and then I will also use a bit of the simplify. Maybe something like that. Mm hmm. That's looks better. I'm just going to refine a little bit this using the block brush tool, smaller brush, fill in that gap. What we need to do here is to simplify this a bit because there's two points. One of these is unnecessary. We can just use the minus tool. So let's delete anchor point tool and click on one of those. And then this other one, we can maybe just turn it into a smooth point. So go up here, convert selected anchor point to smooth, and that's looking already much better. Yeah. I like how this looks. So let's zoom out, see on both sides. And then if we double click outside, we can go back to seeing everything together. Let's just turn off the sketch for now just so we can judge what we created and look at this from a distance. Now, one thing that I feel at this moment is that the wolf head is a bit too dark. So I am going to go back to the main shape, and I will change the field color. So I used the one that I saved in the swatch, but I feel like it needs to be a bit brighter. So I will shift click on this arrow here and drag the brightness up. And I feel like something like this works already a bit better. Yeah. I want the eyes to really stand out, so maybe even even brighter, something like that. Now, one other thing that might need to change now that I'm seeing, this is the shading. Since I increase the brightness of this, we might need to change the shading as well. So one quick way of doing that would be to use the magic one tool and click on one of those lines. And then we can go to the recolor artwork option here on the top and choose advanced options, which is going to show us the different brush strokes we use with the same brush. This is the color I would like to change. I want this to be brighter. Instead of CMYK, I will use hue saturation brightness, and let's just increase the brightness on them. We're toning down the shading to something like this. I feel like this is nice and subtle. I don't want it to be too intense. That works. Let's click Okay, double click outside. And I just realized that the duplicate layer that we created for the original silhuette of the wolf is still turned on. I'm just going to turn that off. And this way, we can see the masking effect that we created earlier. So that obviously needs to be turned off to be able to see this. So we have the white dots that are the mask details. So if I just move this again to the side outside of the artboard, we can see how that works, whatever is behind it is showing. And then we have our shading details at it. We have the eye in place, and I think it's coming together really nicely. So let's just take a look at the sketch. Once we have the strong black lines of the trees and also some of the nice orange details on the trees that I planned, I think it's going to come together really nicely. And in the end, we will also add some type in the middle, which again, brings everything together nicely. At least that's what I'm hoping for. 6. Drawing the forest: Time to draw the trees. And for this, I'm going to use the blob brush tool. So we will just start drawing here, maybe a little bit thicker brush size. I'm using the square bracket keys to increase this density or the thickness of the brush. And I'm going to start drawing this first tree here in the foreground. And the way I imagine this is that it's going to create a very strong contrast and hide certain parts of the wolf head. So I want the wolf head not to be as obvious as it is right now. I want it to be disappearing in the background, something that's lurking in the forest. A menace that is there, but right now it's not visible completely. And one thing that I want to achieve here is that some of these trees will go and extend beyond the silhouette of the wolf head, while some others will actually end exactly at the same place. Now, for this, I'm going to probably use a clipping mass, but for now, I'm just going to concentrate on creating the tree shapes. So I want a nice randomness to them, but still we have to keep in mind that plants grow and try to reach for the sky always. So all of these branches need to go upward, and let's just create another one here. And one good thing about the blob brush is that it's going to connect these together, even if I'm starting drawing them separately, once they reach each other, it will join it into a single path. Let's just create that line a little bit longer. Of course, I can increase, decrease my brush size as I'm drawing these details. So I'm just going to reduce the brush size now since I'm reaching the smaller details, just I think some more varied brand sizes here, maybe another one here this way. Come out. Again, I'm not following exactly the sketch that I created. That's just a guideline. But this is looking quite good. I will use the smooth option and the simplify as well. Simplify it down to something like that. That looks really good. I like the way this looks. Now, this te, for instance, I already wanted to end exactly where the outline of the wolf head is. But remember that we used this roughen effect around the edges, so it's not just that simple clean outline that we originally had there. So I'm going to have to use exactly the same effect. And the easiest way to achieve this is to really use the same object. So I'm going to copy that clipping mask that we have here, copy it and paste it on top of everything else. So that was commando Control C, and then Commando Control F. So here we have the same exact thing. If I turn it on and off, we can see it's exactly the same outline that we need. And now that this is on top, I can just select the tree that we created the two together. So both this new outline or silhouette of the wolf head and the tree, and then press commando Control seven. And that way, we have the tree inside that outline. However, because this is an effect, the clipping mask is not actually cutting it out properly. If I press command or Control y, we can see it's actually following the original edge, the edge without the roughen effect. So that is a problem. What we need to do is to go back one step. So before we apply the clipping mask, and we actually have to expand the effect. So I'm going to select that duplicate shape of the valve outline, and then go to object menu and choose expand appearance. So what this is going to do is that from the appearance panel, the rough and effect will disappear. And now we can check the outline is actually using that rough outline. That's Comando Control y to switch between this view and the other. And now if I select these two shapes again, the wolf head that has been expanded and the tree, now we can press Commando Control seven. And although we are going to get this warning, that this is a little bit too complex. We can just go ahead, and it's doing exactly what we wanted. So we can zoom out. And see how this is now clipped inside that outline. Now, one thing that we need to fix though is that I don't want these details to be clipped at the bottom. I only want them to be clipped here on the top. So what we need to do is to go back to the actual shape that is used as the clipping mask and draw a big rectangle at the bottom. Something like that, and then select this and the clipping mask together, and then unite them using the path finder panel. But when you do this, the clipping mask is released. So we have to turn this back into a clipping mask. Select these two shapes again and then press commando Control seven. And now, as you can see, we achieved what we wanted to. So if I move this tree around, we can see that it's going to be clipping on the top, using that nice rough edge that we created. But whenever I move it down, like here, these details obviously are still showing. So this is exactly what I wanted, and I can align this tree back to where my sketch had the original tree like that. Now I noticed that some of the branches are also being clipped, but that's not a problem. Yeah, something like that works well. And now if I want to draw inside this clipping mask, I just have to select it and then choose draw inside. So now, going back to my block brush, I can start drawing here on the top again with a thick brush, and you can see it's already drawing only inside the outline. But when I come down this way, I can go and extend out the details from the outline because at the bottom, we have the mask extended as well. I am going to probably speed this part of the tutorial up because I'm just going to draw a couple of trees here and using the same techniques and methods. So I draw them with the blob brush tool, and then when I'm happy with the details, I use the simplify and the smooth effects on it, and then just going to keep building these up until I have enough details here the way I imagined it. And you can see that some details I'm trying to keep symmetrical, like these two branches without being too obvious. But I will also try to make them still look different, so this one can go out a bit more. So yeah, I'm just going to select this and apply smooth and then simplify. And then if there's any details that I left out, like this one here in the middle, I'm just going to fill it up. There's actually one important thing worth mentioning here. If you don't want to accidentally join up multiple trees when you are using the blob brush tool, which can easily happen. For instance, here, if I just draw this line, immediately, these two became a single object. We can see it here in the layer spanel. So even though they were two separate objects, now they became one. And that is because I'm using the same color. Two black objects connected with the blob brush tool automatically unite, similar to what you would get with the path finder panel. And normally, it wouldn't be an issue if it's a single tree. We want to keep things tidy in the layer panel. But to be able to move these trees around independently, we don't want multiple trees to be merged together. So to avoid this happening, just remember to lock your trees once they are ready. Before moving on to draw new ones. So, for instance, now, if I draw another line these objects, you can see it's not going to merge them together. It's going to start as a new shape, and if I draw another shape, this is going to still be the same path, and still it's not going to affect the existing trees. But now that we discussed this, let me speed things up a bit. Let me draw some more of these trees, and then we can discuss what to do next. Okay, so let's just take a quick look at what we created here. We have these trees that we added and some details at the bottom. I'm just going to rename this dirt or rocks, some additional details there. And then obviously, we have the trees that are clipped to the outline. I will actually name this trees clipped. And then I'll just this one more trees. Turn that on as well. Nice and dense. And then behind this, we have these two additional trees, which I will put into the same group, and I will call these orange trees. Actually, let's just call them red trees. I'm using a gradient on them. Nice transition on the top, it's more orange and the bottom, it's more red. So that's just add some depth to the illustration. I didn't want everything to be too dense. So if I were to use black on these, just going to show this quickly, it would be too dense. It would be hard to see what's going on. While with this more softer color that is obviously in harmony with the rest of the colors used in the illustration, it looks already much more interesting. Now, what we still have to do is to add some additional final touches and refinements mainly on the Wolf's head, but also maybe some additional details in the foreground. And finally, we will also add the text or the title, since this is a book cover, and I kept this part here in the middle free for that. 7. Adding the title and final touches: First of all, I'm going to add some additional details on the wolf head. And I'm going to use the object that we created for the eyes that's still in symmetry mode or mirror repeat. And if I double click on one side, we can enter the drawing mode, and then we can continue drawing. I'm going to use the pencil tool, and I am going to draw a line for this detail here, and I'm going to assign white stroke on it. And I actually will use that style that we used earlier on the cape. So down here, you might recall, we use these lines. I'm using the same style here, so that's this width profile up here. I had it saved as a graphic style. I think that is working quite nicely. And we can use the pencil tool and just draw this a little bit further down. It can come all the way down here. I feel like that looks good. Then let's draw another line. Coming up this way. Again, I'm going to choose the graphic style, and then one more here. These are for the nose. And then I want to also have some detail for the ears. So for the ears, I'm just going to draw a few lines here. And I'm going to make sure that these also have the same style assigned to them. That's looking good. And then one more detail under the eyes, I would like to have this area filled with white. So I'm just going to fill that in with white. Like that. By the way, this automatically went under the eye because I still had to draw behind option selected. And let's just see how this looks if I double click outside. We can go back seeing the whole illustration together. And I feel like that is looking really good. I am not 100% sure about the highlight under the eye. It might feel a little bit too strong. So I'm just going to go back select that. So if we just select this one, maybe I can reduce the opacity on that. Make it a little bit see through or maybe we can use a gray color instead, or even can introduce an even brighter gray. So instead of completely white, I'm just going to use maybe just a very subtle gray color there with 100% opacity. So let's see now, yes, I feel like that works better. Felt like white was a little bit too strong, but this works better. And those few lines that we added are just very subtle additional details, but it helps to bring everything together. And finally, I would like to add the type tool. So I'm going to use the vertical type tool this time. I'm going to click here in the middle and type in little red. Let's just select this. And for the font, I'm going to use something very thick and solid for now, like Azo San looks good for what I have in mind. I'm going to increase the size. And we'll make sure that this goes all the way on the top. Let's align it here in the middle. Could even overlap the nose, but I think it's going to work better if we drag it up here. Yeah, that's a good alignment. Maybe this tree detail can come a little bit further in. I'm just going to use the eraser to erase from that just so it doesn't overlap. That looks already better. And then the word red, I definitely want to use the same red color as the rest of the design like that, or it could even be using the darker red. Let's see which one stands out better. I think darker red is better. But there is one thing I don't like about this one is that the width of the characters quite different. It varies quite a lot. So it's better to find a different font, where that's not going to be an issue. And here's a font called Spirit, which already looks more interesting. So we have the width of the characters very similar. And I also like the serifs on this. So let's just move this up a bit, maybe make it a little bit smaller, something like that, line it in the center. Feel like it needs to go a bit to the left, and it can come down a bit more this way. And I feel like this has a good connection to the way the trees look like. And maybe with this one, I would also change the font to have the other red used on it instead of the dark red. So the brighter red might look better. And one additional thing that I feel like would work well is if we added a stroke. On this and set it to white. That's just increase the thickness. And here's a useful technique. If you drag the stroke below the characters in the appearance panel. So under the characters, then the stroke can be sitting behind the text. So then it will only show up outside of it. So the original characters will be still fully visible. And I feel like that creates a really nice style. Let's just oom out. We can potentially make this a little bit bigger now that it has the white outline around it. And again, I feel like it needs to go slightly to the left to be more aligned to the center. And then taking a look at this from the distance, I feel like maybe it can go up a bit more this way. Just thought of one additional thing that I think would help. Again, looking at the artwork from a distance, it's always good to zoom out and have a better understanding how it looks in this thumbnail size. You can judge certain details better. And I feel like the bottom part of the illustration is a little bit too dense. There's too much dark details there because of all the trunks of the trees. So to break that What I thought of doing is to utilize the masking technique that we used on the wolf head. So for this, I'm going to select the trees that are without the clipping. So there's a group of them here. There's also the other trees behind them, and there's also the red trees behind all of them. Those can actually come all the way to the top here. And then let's select these three groups of trees together and group them together once more. That's mano Control G. So they are in one large group. S like that. We could potentially even put the rocks in this group. So I just drag that in there, and then we can call this one trees and rocks. And the reason why I group them together is to be able to assign to this whole group an opacity mask. So from the transparency panel, I click on M Mask, and then here I'm going to turn off the clip option. Select the mask itself. And then using the brush with that scatter brush, the stroke color set to black. I can start drawing over these. And you can see, essentially what I want to achieve here is make it look like there's some snow on the trees. So normally you would have a little bit more snow built up closer to the bottom of the trees, where the trunks are larger. And I feel like that is going to help us to make the composition in general more balanced. But instead of using one point, let's just see how it looks with two point. I think that looks better. So thicker and bigger brush strokes will help. And maybe we can go a little bit even higher. Let's just see what happens if we go higher, like that. I don't have to be worried about drawing over a little red in the middle because she's not in this group, so I can paint over the center easily. Yeah, that is looking quite good. I'm just thinking maybe further up, I can use a smaller brush. So let's just go down to one point and maybe apply that more around the edges like that on the top and here. Yeah, I'm not sure if I should use it on top of the trees. I feel like it works better at the bottom. Going to use some smaller brush strokes here at the bottom, build it up even more, make the snow feel a bit heavier there. Maybe add some here on these trees as well. And yeah, I feel like this is quite an effective addition. So if I shift click on the opacity mask, we can see without it. And we can see it together with it. I feel like that really helped to add some more definition and interest to the illustration. Yeah, I feel like that looks really good. So I'm going to click back on the normal view in the transparency panel. And then we can see how everything is built up. We have obviously our original sketch. Which is right there. And this is our final version. But to see how everything's built up, there's the little red, the wolf head, some details for the wolf head, and then the trees, and then the title. And the reason I like to look at all the components independently is because there's also something that I just spotted. The details on the eyes and these lines that we have here are just very rigid compared to all the other details. So I'm going to have all of those selected, and then I will apply the same effect that we used before from this sort Ruffin. And I'm going to use 0.5% just like before. Maybe even 1% on these details would work. Yeah, I think that's good. The detail level can be increased a bit, and let's just go down to 0.8 or 0.5. Let's try. Yeah, that's good. And detail level can go up a little bit higher. So that's great. Let's see before and after. Yeah, it was just too refined. Now it works much better. Yeah, I like how that looks. So let's zoom out. Once again, we have a finished illustration. 8. 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.