Fun Effects with Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Fun with Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch ™ Class : Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create Fun Effects with Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach us a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working with applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at working with graphic styles in Illustrator. We're going to see how to use them, how to find download, and work with other people's graphic styles and how to make our own. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started on working with graphic styles in Illustrator. 2. Graphic Styles - Part 1: In illustrated graphic, styles gives you the ability to apply a look to a shape or to text without having to create it all from scratch. I'm going to select this circle here, which right now has a green border. When I click on the Graphic Styles panel here, you'll see the default graphic styles. I'm going to click here on the Neon one and what happens is that the entire shape is changed and it now has a neon style applied to it. We can say what that involves by opening up the Appearance panel, and here's the appearance panel, you can say that what has been applied is a whole series of stroke effects to this object, and they're part of the graphic style. When you apply a graphic style to an object and just click on that graphic style, like I'm doing here with this heart, you'll say that all the current attributes of the heart have been removed. I'm going to undo that with Ctrl or Command + Z and this time I'm going to Alt and click on the Graphic Style. What happens is the graphic style this time is added to the object and it doesn't replace the current style that the object has. It's wise to be aware of this because sometimes you do want to remove every characteristic about an object and replace it in total, in which case you would just click on the graphic style and sometimes you just want to add it to it. I'm just going to take off this neon effect here and here's another place where you may want to just add the graphic style to the object. This is a drop shadow graphic style, I'll Alt click on it and it adds a drop shadow to this shape. If I just wind back and if I were just to click on this Drop shadow, obviously we're getting nothing at all, we've removed the entire style from this object and the drop shadow isn't even showing. Sometimes it makes sense to Alt and click on a Graphic Style to add it to the existing look of your shape and sometimes you just want to replace that entirely. When you're looking at the graphic styles panel, that is a Flyout menu here and it allows you to use square for preview, but also to use text for preview. That's important because it shows you what a text character might look like if you were to apply the graphic style to it. At anytime you can right-click on a Graphic Style on the pay, say you'll Ctrl click on the Mac to save a larger version of it. When it comes to applying this to text, you want to make sure that you don't do this. If you select the text itself, you're going to get a very different result when you apply the graphic style, then you're going to get, if you just click on the text, I'm just going to wind that back. Let's go back and select the text this time with the selection tool and apply the graphic style. The effect is different. Whenever you are doing it to text, make sure that you use the Selection tool and not this Type tool, it's the wrong one to use. There are other graphic styles that are shipped with illustrated, to get to them, you're going to click here on the Flyout menu and choose Open Graphic Style Library. Let's go and select Autistic Effects. This open up in a separate little panel here. As you use any of them, let's just go and use one here. They'll be added to the graphic styles panel for this document. This is a graphic styles panel for the document and it will always include any graphic styles that you have used already in your document. Even if you stopped using them, they're still going to appear there. You can experiment with the kind of graphic styles that are shipped with Illustrator and just a hint, once you get one of these graphic styles panels open, you can click here on the Next button and you can go through and get the next lot of graphic style. You can just peruse them very easily by just using these Next and Back buttons here in Illustrator. Before we finish up with the built in graphic styles, I want to go and get a special set, so I'm going to change documents here, and I have my little dot down the bottom here selected and I'm going to open up the Additive Styles. The additive styles allow you to do things with a shape, so I'm going to Alt click on this one and you can say that it takes the shape and it rotates it around in a circle. If we look in the appearance panel, we can always understand from the appearance panel exactly what that style is doing and this is its secret, the Transform command. I'm going to click once to open the Transform dialogue and you can see what's happening is that the object is being moved minus 100 in a vertical direction and it's being rotated and there are nine copies of it. Let's see what we can do it by decreasing the value here. I'm going to turn preview on so we can see what's happening. By decreasing the value of the vertical movement, we're able to shrink the style down, so it's moving less and we're getting a type of circle. All of these graphic styles can be adjusted once you've applied them to a shape by just going into the Appearance panel and seeing what they apply and making changes to it. In the next video, we're going to look at creating our own graphic styles and in the last video I've got some awesome graphic styles that I've found online for you to download and play with and guarantee you're going to be amazed of what you can do with graphic styles. 3. Graphic Styles - Part 2: Let's look now at how we could create inside our own graphic styles. I've got a green filled circle here, we can test what it's looks like by opening the Appearance Panel up. If you can't get to the Appearance Panel choose, Window and then Appearance. This panel is really critical when you're working with graphic styles because it's telling you what this object has applied to it. Right now it has no stroke and it just has a solid grain fill. Just going to close off both of the stroke and fill areas, I'm going to add a new fill. Click here to add new fill. I'm going to set that to white. Now we have a white fill over the top of a green fill so [inaudible] is saying the white fill right now. It's really critical for the next step that you have this white fill selected, otherwise it's not going to work. Then we're going to choose Effect, Stylize, Scribble. I'm going to from the settings drop down list, select swash and this is giving me the beginnings of the swash that I want to create. It's just handy to use some of these settings if they are very close to what you want because it saves you from having to do all the work. I'm going to increase the curviness here because I want mine to be quiet a bit curvier. I'm going to go up to around 70. I want my stroke- width to be a little bit larger. I'm going to take that up to 4 pixels. I don't want any variation at this stage on any of these options that allows variation as an option. I'm just going to take that out. I am going to increase my spacing because I want to see there is lovely little loops here. At this stage I could change the angle and I could also decrease the path overlap, which would bring this into the center of the shape. I don't want to actually do that, I'm just going to set that to 0. I'm happy with 0 being my angle as well. Now I'm going to call that good and click okay. Now I want to add some brush effect around my shape. I'm going to my stroke panel because I already have a stroke here that I'm not using and for the stroke I'm going to select the exact same color as I'm using for my shape. It's going to be; I stroke around the edge, it's going to be the same. I'm going through the brushes panel here and I'm going to open up the brush flyout menu, choose open brush library and I'm looking here for the hand drawn brushes vector pack. I'm going to click on that. There's some interesting brushes here, this is the one I'm going to test out on this shape because it adds interesting effect around the edge of the shape. Am pretty happy with that. I'm going to just close it down. Now I just want to show you in the appearance panel how you could get a different effect with this brush and probably an effect that you wouldn't want. What I'm going to do is just move the stroke above the white filled path. Now when I click away, you can say that the stroke is cutting off the loops here. If that's the effect that you want, then pull your stroke above your fill but if you don't want the stroke to broadcast your swirly inside effect, then make sure that the stroke appears underneath the fill here. Well, it didn't appear underneath, I think I didn't have my shape selected but let's just go and put it there. You can see that this is a slightly different look for the same combination of appearances just in a different order. I really like this, I'm going to save it as a graphic style. I'm selecting my object here and I'm opening my graphic styles panel. I'm going to drag and drop the object into the panel. I'm going to double-click on this and I'm going to call this swirly green. Click okay. Now I'm going to borrow this heart for a minute; I'm going to all drag it down over here. I've got a duplicate all of it, I'm going to select off my heart and let's just click on my swirly green style and it's now being applied to this shape. You can save these graphic styles and re-use them to apply to any shape in the future. I also want to look at this heart because I found something when I was looking at this video that was a little bit disappointing and I want to show you how to fix the problem. What I'm going to do is put a pink stroke on this; same pink stroke as I've got on the rest of the heart. I'm going to brushes panel and I really like this brush, it's a charcoal-pencil brush. I just applied it to this shape. I'm going to enlarge it quite a bit. When I click a way, you can probably say the problem here is; that the charcoal-brushes gone in as a different pink to the pink I've got in the center of the circle. I wanted to use this brush to give me a nice little fluffy edge heart and it's just not working. Here's how to solve the problem; I really do want to look at brushes right now because in the next video, when we look at other people's graphic styles, brushes are going to be important there too. I'm just going to drag this brush out of the brushes panel into the document. I'm going to zoom in here. I'm going to select over this brush and I'm going to expand that object, expand. I'm going to ungroup it object, ungroup. If I go to the layers panel here, I've got a group which is my brush and it contains the contents of the brush, which is this bushy bit. There's also a little bit around the outside and this is box here. I'm just locating the box because I want to delete that. I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the trash can. What I'm left with when I turn the visibility back on again, is this thing which is the brush. Let's go and have a look at it's fill color there. I'm going to double-click, to open the fill color; the color picker here. This is the problem with this brush, although it looks as if it's black, it is not black and this has been a continuing same throughout a lot of the tutorials that I've been doing is; things are falling over when we're not using pure black. At this point I'm selecting the fill color and I'm going to make it pure black and I do that by setting the CMYK values of this color all to 100. You can probably see in here, is really quite obvious that the new black is much blacker than the original black. It's just really hard to tell that this wasn't black until you've got something to compare with. I'm going to click okay. Now this brush is black, I'm going to grab it and I'm going to open up the brushes panel and I'm going to put it in as a different brush. I'm just going to drag and drop it in here. It's an art brush and I'm going to click art brush and click okay. I'm going to set it to tints because I want to be able to recolor it. Only the other options I can just leave as they are, I'll click okay and I can now delete this thing because I don't need it any longer. Let's press control or command "0". Now I'm going to this shape and while I like all of the things that have been applied to it, I just don't like this brush. Let's go and get the brush we made. It's always going to be further down in the brushes panel. This is the one that I just made; when I click on it, you can see the color is just perfect. I've got a surrounding roughed up edge that is the exact same color as the color I've used in the middle of the shape, that's what I want. I think the stroke is a little bit big but I just made it big so that you could see the effect. Now I'm making it where I want it to be. Let's select this; let's go into the graphic styles panel, let's drag and drop it in here. It's now a graphic style and it's going to be rough edge pink, I'll click okay. Let's go on borrow this circle. Because I want to replace all of the effects here with the effects I'm using on this pink heart, I'm going to click on this graphic style and not going to alt-click on it, I want to click on it because I want these to have all the same attributes as this pink heart does. Now before you finish up here, you may want to save your graphic styles so you could use them again in future. To do that, first of all you'll want to remove the graphic styles that it had shipped with illustrated, since you don't need to have those with you. You won't be able to delete the default graphic style but that's fine. Now we're going to save this by clicking the flyout menu choose save graphic style library. I'm going to call this Helen. You can call it whatever you like, I'll click save. In future we can open that from either the flyout menu by choosing open graphic style library; user defined or we can also get to it from this little library button here and just go to user defined Helen and when we open it, you can see that the default graphic style just got left out. All we've got is a graphic style panel that has at two graphic styles in it. They look different to these because this one has been set to show text for preview. If we set it to show square for preview, you'll see that they just look exactly the same. 4. Graphic Styles - Part 3: When it comes to finding graphic styles online, the pickings appear at first glance to be a little bit thin. But the secret is that a lot of the graphic styles that you can download for free and some of the best are at DeviantArt. I've actually gone and done a search for DeviantArt graphic styles simply because when I went looking for graphic styles, these were where the best of them. Now, there are a lot of groups of graphic styles like these but I want to introduce you to these because this person makes the most fantastic graphic styles. Not only because they're just awesome graphic styles but because they will help you understand exactly what you can do with graphic styles and you might be surprised. I'm going to give you the links to download these three free sets. One of the ones we're going to look at is cream soda because it is just an exceptional graphic style. We're also going to have a look at super fizzy but these are just the most amazing groups of graphic styles. Once you've downloaded them, you can open them because they're really large, I suggest opening only one at a time. If you see that little message, just click ''Continue,'' I'm pressing Control Command 0 just to see the image more clearly. This is the one we're going to use. I'm going to click on it to select it and what you want to do here is look over here at what the developer has told you about it. They've told you the style that they're using but also the font that I've used there. That's really handy information. I'm going to copy this with Edit Copy. I'm going to create a brand new document and just paste it in there with Edit, Paste. You don't need this other document open so I'm actually going to close it right now. As soon as you copy and paste something that has a graphic style applied to it into a document in Illustrator, you'll see that the graphic style appears here in the Graphic Style panel. You can use it on your own text or object by just creating an object or text and then just clicking on the style to apply to it. You can say that this style is a really true style. Everything that is showing here is actually in the style and it will work the same way if we applied it to a piece of text. In that case, we would just type our text, we would size it. I'm going to make this a bit heavier, so I'm going to choose a Semibold Semiextended. Then I can apply my effect to it by selecting the text with the selection tool and then just clicking on the graphic style. Now again, this title, I just want to delete that because I don't want a lot of things hugging my computer. I'm just going to focus on this shape here because it's going to show us everything that we need to know about this graphic style. The way to learn about this graphic style is to open the Appearance panel and have a look and see what's in it. I'm going to select my shape because that's going to show the Appearance panel at the same time and I can turn things on and off to see what is happening here. Well, there's this stroke here which is called pink blobs and it controls the little dots that are over the top of the shape. You could enable or disable this by turning on the eyeball icon here. There are some white dots and pink dots that are appearing outside the edge of the shape and you can see that those dots are being controlled by these two strokes here. There's also a fill here and this is a gradient. If we wanted to alter it, we could go to the Gradient panel. I'm going to click here and choose a different color for this end of the gradient. When I do you can see that the blue is now appearing on this side of the shape. Now, anything that has been created using a white dots or pink dots brush or a blobs brush, you will find those brushes over here in the Brushes panel. I'm just going to click away from this shape, I'm going to open up the Brushes panel and here are the brushes that come with this gradient style and they're actually installed into this document as brushes. We can see what they look like. I'm just going to drag pink blobs out of the way here, you can see it's a really small brush. If I double-click on the brush, you can see what the brush settings are. You can see that this is a scatter brush and it has got random settings, it has got random spacing settings, it has got random scatter setting. There are a lot of settings that are applied with this brush. What you could do is look at all these settings and just write them down. Then you could go to this brush over here which we've actually extracted from the brushes palette and you could for example, re-color this. I'm just going to select it, I'm going to expand it and then ungroup it. I'm going to go and pull this outside box from around it and then you can go to the shapes and you can change their color. Having done that, you could then grab these pieces and bring them back into the Brushes panel as a new scatter brush. Then you would just apply the same settings as you had in that other dialog or something similar if you want it to behave the same way as this person in developing the graphic style has made their brush behave. You're getting a lot when you're getting a graphic style. Not only are you getting all the appearances that go to make up that style but you're also getting the brushes that were used if they were used in making that style. They're all accessible to you through the regular panels here in Illustrator. Now, say you looked at this because I've made a few changes to it, and you said I actually like this better than I like the original graphic style. Well, go to the Flyout panel for the appearance here and click ''Redefine graphic style, cream soda.'' The cream soda graphic style is now redefined. It looks like a changed version. Let's create another circle here, let's click on the graphic style and it's going to have this blue look because we've totally redefined the graphic style. If we didn't want to redefine it, if we just wanted to save the second version of it then we could do so. We just treat it as if it was a brand new graphic style and drag and drop it into the Graphic Style panel. There is the first of the two that I want to look at because there's a second one that I just want to show you because I just think there's so much in it that is so interesting. 5. Graphic Styles - Part 4: The second graphic style that we're going to look at is from the art collection. That's the one that's called Super Fizzy. I have the object copied and pasted from the original document. Now when you go to scale these graphic styles, you want to make sure that you have some settings set in Illustrator. On a Mac, you go to the AI button and you'll find your preferences there. On a PC, you go to Edit Preferences, and we're going to General. You want to make sure that these two options are selected, Scale Strokes and Effects, and Transform Pattern Tiles. These two need to be selected for you to be able to easily scale these objects. They are going to scale through to the original style. I'm going to hold the Alt and Shift key as I just size this up. Now, this is all a single graphic style. The really interesting thing I thought about this one is these little sparkles that are all around the edge. Since you saw the previous style with those little bubble brushes, you're probably now aware of what this person has used to make this little sparkles. If you thought it was a brush, you're dead right. Let's open up the Brushes panel here and you can see that there's a sparkle brush, it's a star brush. This is what's been used to create these stars throughout this object. Let's select over it and let's open up the Appearance panel which has disappeared on me. Let's just go and open it. We've got strokes around here. This is the stroke, you see this at the very outside of the shape. Then there are inside strokes. There's going to be a gradient here between this green color and this pink color at the top. In the list here you're going to find a fill that is this gradient. Of course you're going to find the brushes too. There's going to be something that's controlling these star brushes, and here it is. There's a stroke here and there's a stroke here. They're just different color versions of the star brush. If you take those off, you lose your stars. But there's another brush too, and that's applying this spatter effect in the background. Let's select back over this shape and here is the spatter brush that's doing that. Of course we can see the spatter brush here in our Brushes palette because that's been installed into this document because we've got the style. Now the person who created these styles very kindly encouraged you to do whatever you like with these. They wanted you to have a go at deconstructing them, rebuilding them, and making them your own. I encourage you to do so. There's just so much that you can learn from combining your knowledge now of working through the appearance panel with these amazing graphic styles that should give you some food for thought for creating your own graphic styles. Your project for this class, of course, is going to be to go and experiment with these graphic styles and to alter one of these to suit yourself or to build your own graphic style from scratch. Post the results in the class projects so we can see what you've done. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about working with graphic styles in Illustrator. As you work through this class, you will have seen a prompt to recommend it to others. Please, if you did enjoy it, give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment or question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.