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

1. Graphic Design for Lunch ™ - Fun with Scripts - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, Fun Designs made using Scripts in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teaches a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at working with scripts in Illustrator. We're going to start by looking at what scripts are and how you find and install them. Then we'll look at a few scripts from an online source and see how we might use them in our own designs. Now, 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. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who 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. Now if you're ready, let's get started working with scripts in Illustrator. 2. Fun with Scripts - Part 1: Before we get started actually looking at how to find scripts and what to do with them, let's just look and see what a script even is. I've created a rectangle here in Illustrator. It's in a brand new document, it's got a pink outside and a green middle. I've downloaded and installed a script called Fleurify. What that does is it twists and turns this shape when I run it. I'm going to select the shape with the selection tool. I'm going to choose "file" and then "scripts" and I'm going to go and get the fleurify script. I'm going to click it to run it and I'm asked what percentage I want to fleurify by. There's no indication here as to what any percentage is going to do, but I'm just going to type "50" and click "okay". And this is what I get. You can see that the script does a whole heap of things to this shape that would be a lot more difficult for me to do. Scripts can be as simple as this, they can be a whole lot more complex, they can do things that in illustrator would take you a lot more effort to do. Scripts are written in a language called JavaScript typically, and you can find them online and there are plenty of sites online for free scripts. What I'm going to do in this particular video is, I'm going to introduce you to a site that I really like and we're going to look at some of the scripts in that collection that this person has provided for us. We're going to download them, we're going to install them and I'm going to show you how you can not only run them, but also what they might do and how you might be able to benefit from them. 3. Fun with Scripts - Part 2: Now if you look at that script running and thought this is pretty exciting, well let's go and see where we can find some scripts that you can download, install, and use. We're going to the web. This is the site that we're going to use today and I'll give you the link to that site in the class project area. There are 36 groups in total on this site. Now we're not going to look at all of these by any means but we are going to look at a few. We're not only going to look at the scripts, but we're also going to look at some practical applications for using them. Now the script that we're going to start off using is the vary_hues scripts, it's down here. If I click on this link, it's going to open up the JavaScript code and that's just a little bit confusing. We're just going to press the back button there and think that that's not a really good idea at all. We can right-click here and choose Save Link As and that will download the script and that's exactly what we need to do. But if we scroll down the page and all the scripts are in alphabetical order so I'm heading to the bottom here for this one, you'll see that vary_hues and Randomize Colors is the script and then some information about it so you can learn a little bit about it. These pictures are really handy because that's exactly what we're going to do in a minute. We're told to right-click here and choose Save Link As and that will just save the file. Now I'm saving it to my downloads because Windows has some administrative privileges that might bite you at this point so it's better just to get the file downloaded and worry about where to put it in a minute. I'm just going to click Save and you'll do that on a Mac as well. You can read a little bit about the script. This side is fairly old so they only really go up as far as CS5 but I've tested the scripts that we're going to use today with Illustrator CC so it should be right with pretty much any version of Illustrator. Now that we've downloaded this script, let' go to our Downloads folder. Here's my Downloads folder and here's the script, vary_hues.js I have to put it in a place that illustrator can find it. I'm going to navigate to my illustrator program folder, I'm going here and I'm going to my computer. I'm going to double-click on my C drive. I'm going to Program Files, not x86 but program files. I'm going to double-click on that. I'm going to double-click on Adobe. I'm going to look for my version of Illustrator that I am using right now and that is illustrator CC 2015 so I'm going to double-click on that. Avoid scripting, that's not what you want because that's going to bite you if you click on that, you're going for presets, double-click on presets, en_Us that's just US English so I'm going to click on that. You also might say something different just click on whatever it says for your language version of Illustrator and then you're going to scripts. I've got a whole lot of scripts in here already and I'm going to take my vary_hues script and drag and drop it into here. I'm going to get this warning that I need to provide administrator permission. Well, I'm using this computer as administrator so I can just click continue and vary_hues is now installed into my scripting folder, I can close down this and I can close down this. If you happen to be working on a Mac, the situation is very similar. On a Mac, you'll go to your applications folder and then you'll select Adobe Illustrator, the version that you're using at the moment if you have multiple versions installed, it'll be the one that you are actually using. Then go to presets, English US or whatever language option you have here, scripts and then put it in here. It's pretty similar situation on the Mac as it is on the PC but this is where you want to save your script. I'll close down these windows, lets close Chrome for a minute. But what I need to do now is I need to re-start illustrator so that the scripts will show up in the scripting list. I'm going to do that now. Now that I've re-started Illustrate, we can go ahead and test the script. Well, to begin with, we can test to see if it's actually available. So I'm choosing File and then scripts and you'll see vary_hues is in the list here. We can't actually use because we have nothing to use it with, so let's set up a document to use it with. We'll choose File and New and I'm going to make a document that is a 1000 by 1000 pixels square. It doesn't really matter what size it is but that's the size that my documents going to be. I'm going to the rectangle tool, I'm going to drag out a small square in the bottom corner here by holding the Shift key as I drag out the rectangle. I'm removing the stroke from the shape and I'm going to fill it with a green color. Now we're going to fill this document with those shapes and we're going to do that really quickly with distort and transform. Effect, distort and transform. Turn preview on and move this shape horizontally until it appears alongside the original, and then start increasing the copies. All I'm doing is clicking in the copies box and pressing the up arrow key to increase the number until I fill the bottom part of my document with shapes and I'll click Okay, without deselecting anything, I'm going to keep this shape still selected and I'm going to do that all over again. Effect, distort and transform, transform. I'm going to click on apply new effect because that's exactly what I wanted to do, I'm going to enable preview. This time I'm going to move the shapes in a negative vertical direction. I want them to appear just above the original shape and now I'm going to start increasing my copies and when I fill my document, I'll click Okay. Now everything is still attached to this one shape here so if I move it everything moves. I want to expand this, so I'm going to click on that one shape that's controlling all of the shapes and choose Object, Expand Appearance and now we have a whole series of shapes. We're now going to run our vary_hues scripts. Everything selected, I'm going to choose File, Scripts, vary_hues. We're prompted to vary our fill colors, we're going to enter a number between 1 and 100, no idea what any of this does we're just going to test it. If we wanted to vary the stroke colors, we would enter a number between 1 and 100 followed by an 's' to indicate that we want to vary the stroke colors. If we want a very opacities, then we can enter a minimum and maximum values such as 3,100 and we'll get varying opacities. We're going to do fill colors. I'm going to type a number between 1 and 100, and I'm going to type 40, and click okay. What the script does is it uses that 40 percent value to re-color all of the shapes in this document. You can see if you needed an effect like this, the script would do it very very quickly for you and you can probably think of a few purposes that you might put this to. There is the first of the scripts that we are going to look at, and it's called vary_hues. 4. Fun with Scripts - Part 3: Now let's go and look at the downloads for the remainder of the scripts from this particular site that we're going to use in this class. So I'm going back to Chrome and we're going to have a look at the ones we're going to use. We're going to look at AddSwatchesLightsAndShadows. Let's right-click and save that one. We're also going to look at Fleurify. If you haven't already done so, go and save Fleurify. We're going to use allPoints. So here is allPoints, I'm just going to save that and I'm going to use TileWrapper. So these are the particular ones we're going to look at in this class. If you want to learn a little bit more about the ones that I've chosen, you can just scroll down and read about them. But I've got mine all selected, I'm going now to install them into Illustrator, restart Illustrator, and we're going to get to work with them. So here's my scripts folder and I'm going to grab the scripts that I want to install. TileWrapper, I'm not going to install fleurify because I already have that installed, but AddSwatchesLightAndShadow, I'm going to install and so am I going to install allPoints. And I'll restart Illustrator. The scripts are now going to be available. We can just double-check before we start to make sure that they're all here. So let's go now to start with add swatches, light, and shadow. So we're going to start with another new document. Again, it's going to be 1,000 by a 1,000 pixels in size, and I'm using RGB color mode. In this document, I'm going to click ellipse and I'm going to drag out a circle by holding the shift key as I drag it out. I want to move it before I finish drawing it, so I'm holding down the spacebar so I can move it around, then I'll let go of the spacebar and then let go the left mouse button so I have my circle in the right position. Now we're going to use the mesh tool which is up here and we're going to click on the mesh tool. I'm going to click to create a couple of meshes in this circle. All you have to do is click about here and about here, and you'll get mesh lines. I'm going to select over the entire shape here, I'm going to select the fill color, and I'm going to select pink, and that just fills it with pink. Now the script that I just added gives me highlights and shadows of the selected swatch colors. So I have my color selected here in the swatches palette. Now let's go and run the script. File, scripts, add swatches, light and shadow. I'm going to give my swatch a name. You don't have to, but I am going to give it a name. I'm just calling it pink and I'll click okay. And now look in the swatches palette and we've got my pink color, a darker one and a lighter one, and they're called pink highlight, pink shadow. So I'm actually going to add a new color group here, including the selected artwork color, and I'm just going to drag these two colors that the script gave me into this little color group and so now I've got a highlight and a shadow color of the color that I selected, to save me having to work out what colors I'm going to use myself. Now let's see what we can do with this gradient mesh because if you haven't used them before, it's pretty exciting stuff. So I'm going to my direct selection tool, I'm just going to click on this point here and now I'm going to go and click on my pink color. And the pink color is added as a gradient color at that point and it [inaudible] out into the original pink as it goes further away from that point. I'm going to do the same down here and add that light pink in and I'm going to click on this point and shift click on this one so that these are both selected, and I'm going to add the darker color to those, and I'll click away. That's just a really simple fun way to create a textured sphere with the gradient mesh and we're using the script that we downloaded to find the highlight and shadow colors that we can use for our sphere. 5. Fun with Scripts - Part 4: Next up, let's have a look at the Fleurify Script. Just going to choose File and then New, going to create a standard 1000 by 1000 pixel document. I'm going to this time select the Ellipse tool. I'm going to drag out a circle and I'm going to give it a pink fill, and I'm going to give it a different color stroke, say a green stroke. I'm going to wind up the stroke quite a bit so that we can see it. Now I've created my shape, we can run the Fleurify Script. So that we can make some comparisons, lets go and duplicate this shape a few times. So I'm going to select the shape and I'm going to Alt or Option Drag and duplicate away. I'm going to do the same thing so I get four shapes just so we can test the script on multiple shapes. So let's select the first one, File, Scripts, Fleurify, and we'll choose 25 percent for this one. That's what we get with 25 percent. Let's go and choose a higher percentage. We'll make this 40. Let's go and choose 60 for this, and we'll choose 90 for this. So you can see that from one single shape by using different values in the Fleurify Script, you can achieve different results. Now these shapes would be useful, for example, for making patterns. You could make a repeating pattern tile with these. This is one I want to have a look at just right now, because I want to show you something about it. So with it selected, you'll see that it has a fill and a stroke color. Not surprising, that's what we gave it in the first place. So if I change the fill color, the middle bit of this shape is going to change color. But what if we wanted to break out these little pieces inside the shapes so that we could make them different colors. Well, we're going to head to the Pathfinder palette for this. So with the shape selected, I'm going to click on the Pathfinder. One of the options that we could use here is Divide, and what Divide is going to do is break this thing up into its component parts. Now if I choose Object Ungroup, they're all going to be ungrouped into little pieces and they're all going to have a fill and a stroke. So if I go and select each of these little pieces here by clicking on one shift, clicking on the other, I can now go and change the fill color just for these and not affect the outside petals. I'm going to change the fill color of this middle piece as well. So here I've got quite a complex pattern piece, something that would take me a lot more effort to create, than creating a circle, running the Fleurify Script on it, and then using the Pathfinder to divide it into pieces, ungroup it, and then recolor it to suit. So you can see that a simple script like Fleurify has the ability to be a foundation piece for quite a complex pattern, a repeating pattern, perhaps in Illustrator. 6. Fun with Scripts - Part 5: Next up, let's go and have a look at the allPoints Script. I'm going to choose File and New, again, another 1000 by 1000 pixel document. I'm going to create a polygon here. I'm just going to click once to see what I've got. Well, I've got a six-sided polygon with a radius of 50. I'm going to settle for that. Actually, quite a bit smaller than I really want so I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag it out. Now let's create a duplicate of this. I'm going to choose Edit Copy, and then Edit Paste in Place, so I have duplicate right on top of the original. I'm going to hold the Shift and Alt case as I drag it out so I have a much larger shape outside. This is filled, so I'm going to turn its Fill off, and I'm also going to turn the Fill off of the middle one. I've got two six-sided shapes here, each with no Fill and a Stroke. I'm going to select this outer shape and I'm going to rotate it. I'm going to start rotating it around and I'm going to add the Shift key so that I'm rotating it 90 degrees. It's now offset from the original shape. I'm going to select over both of these shapes and I'm going to run the allPoints Script. File, Scripts, allPoints. What this does is it takes each of these shapes and it joins up the points inside the shapes. I'm just going to turn one of them off because it's probably a little bit easier to say if we just have a look at one of these. This was the original hexagon that we had and allPoints has just joined all the points on this hexagon to each other point. Then we do that for a second one so that we would have a way more complex shape. Well, one of the things that we can do with this, if you've watched some of my other videos, is we could use Live Paint with it. Let's see how we do that. I'm going to select over both of these shapes. I'm going to choose Object, Live Paint, Make. Now I'm going to the Live Paint Tool here, which shares a toolbar position with the Shape Builder Tool. I'm going to click on the Live Paint Bucket, and I'm also going to double-click on the Strokes because I want to make sure that the settings are correct. I want to Paint Fills not Strokes, so I'm going to make sure that Paint Fills is checked. I'm just going to click Okay. Now let's go to the Swatches Palette. I'm going to click on this Swatch here. You can see that as I'm hovering over these shapes, the individual triangles are being highlighted. What I can do is just click to drop my paint color into them. Now if I use the right arrow, I'm going to the next color in that little indicator that is above the Paint Bucket. It's also indicated over here. I can go and add a red color to these. Let's go and get the next color, which is a sort of pink. Let's go and drop this in here. You can see that I could continue to do this and re-color this shape. I'm not going to do that right now because a lot of you are going to be familiar with Live Paint from my other videos. If you're interested, you can go and watch the Kitchen Video, the Illustrator for Lunch. The Kitchen one is a Live Paint one and you'll see how to work with Live Paint there. But this is the allPoints Script that we've looked at. Here we get a chance to create an interesting piece of art by using it with a couple of shapes and then coloring it with Live Paint. 7. Fun with Scripts - Part 6: The final script we're going to look at in this particular class is the Tile Wrapper script. If you're using Illustrator CS6 or later you have the Pattern Make tool. Making patterns is pretty easy for you. If you're using earlier versions of Illustrator CS5, 5.1, 5.5, and earlier, then you don't have that pattern make tool. For you, this tile wrap-up will be a very interesting script to use. I'm going to start with a new document. I'm going to choose "File" and then "New". But this time I'm not going to make such a big document because I want my Artboard to be the size of the tile that I want to make. Right now I'm going to just make that 200 by 200. I'll click, ''Okay''. This is a much smaller document than I would traditionally be working with. I'm going to go to my Fleurify because I want to borrow this shape because I really like it. I'm just going to grab this and I'm going to copy it with edit copy. Then I'm going to my new document and I'm going to choose ''Edit Paste'' because I can move things from one Illustrator document to another. This is obviously way way big. I'm going to hold "Shift" as I make it a lot smaller. What's killing this shape right now is the stroke width. I'm just going to go and get my stroke. I'm going to bring down the stroke width so it looks a little bit more like it did in the other document. Let's go briefly back to that webpage because I just want to show you something about this tile wrapper script. The person who wrote this script said that you should create a crop area using Object>Crop Area>Make. If your version of Illustrator does not have that command, and later versions do not, you're just going to use your Artboard. We've already created a small Artboard that's going to be perfect. We need to draw some objects inside it. It's important that we overlap our objects to the bottom and right side of the crop area only or the Artboard only. Objects that extend beyond the top or left area of the Artboard will be ignored. What we need to do is to use the bottom and right side of the artboard. Let's go back to here. What I wanted to do now then is to move this either on to the right edge of the document. I'm just going to position it on the right edge of the document. I'm going to take a duplicate of this, hold the "Alt" or "Option" key as I drag a duplicate away. I'm going to put one down here. I've got these two paces in place. I'm going to test my script. First of all, I'm going to select everything. I'm going to select over the Artboard and the shapes. I'm going to choose "File" and then "Scripts" and I'm going to choose "Tile Wrapper". What Illustrator does is it copies these shapes to the other side of the tile to make my pattern piece Now I might want to put something in the middle. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this shape and use the Alt or Option key to drag it into position here. But I'm going to take some of the pieces out of it so I'm going to break it out of its group, I'm going to take out some of the pieces I don't want, and just leave this little flowery piece in its place. I need to make my pattern tile. If you're familiar with making pattern tiles in earlier versions of Illustrator, what you need to do is you need to create a rectangle the size of your pattern tile. My Artboard is 200 by 200 so I'm going to create a rectangle that is 200 by 200. Then click, "Okay". It's not going to have any stroke or any fill. I'm going to place it over the edge of the Artboard. I'm going to the alignment options which are down here. I'm going to make sure that the align to is set to align to Artboard. If you're not seeing these options at the bottom of this panel here, just click this little fly-out menu and choose "Show Options". It's saying hide options right now because mine's already showing. I'm going to grab my shape, which appears to have walked. Let's go and select it. Let's align it to the Artboard. With this shape still selected, I'm going to send it to the back. I'm going to choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send To Back". Now I'm going to select everything with Control or Command A. To create a pattern swatch, what I do is I drag and drop this into the Swatches Panel. There is our pattern swatch. I'm just going to move out of the way here. I'm going to create a new Artboard. I'm just going to click on the "Artboard Tool" and just drag out a new Artboard that we can work with. I'm going to make a rectangle pretty much the size of this Artboard. I'm going to click on its fill and I'm going to click on my pattern. Then I'm going to re-size it by choosing "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I don't want to transform the object but I do want to transform the pattern. I'm going to click "Preview On". I'm going to reduce this pattern to, say, around about 25 percent and click "Okay". The TileWrapper tool will be handy for people who are using earlier versions of Illustrator that do not have the Pattern Make tool that was first introduced in Illustrator CS6. If you're using one of those earlier versions, you may want to spend a little bit of time with the tile rapid tool. It's a very handy script to use. Your project for this class is going to be to go and get some of these scripts. You can use the scripts that I've shown you here today or you can go and get some other scripts that are interesting to you. But I suggest you at least try one or two of the ones that we've gone through just so that you can make sure that you can get them to work before you start exploring on your own. Once you've done that, posts some of the art that you've made or the illustrations that you've made using these scripts in the class project area. I'm going to be really interested to see what you come up with because it's going to be a lot of fun. I hope that you've enjoyed this course. I hope that you've learned a bit about working with scripts in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend the class to others, please do so. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I read and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.