Geometric Illustration: Drawing Your Favorite Foods

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Mike Deberden, the designer, illustrator. Today, we're going to illustrate one of my favorite subjects, which is food. The geometric style of doing this class, I think it is the style I started doing editorial illustration. It's a very simple form of illustrating because I can't illustrate that well with computer. So, I found my own sticker way of illustrating that looks very good, but it doesn't take a great skill level. The tools we'll be using today are your sketchbook, pencil, or pen, or whatever you want to use, Adobe Photoshop for a little bit of photo editing, but mainly we'll be using Adobe Illustrator. But, feel free to use whatever you want to. I think this is your opportunity to make early fine illustration. You could put as much time, or as little time as you want to that, tell a story like something from your hometown that it's really close to your heart, the memories you had growing up there, or it could just be take the style I do, and just take it for a test drive and see where it goes. No matter what you do, I just challenge you guys to get out there, and go eat something, and draw it. 2. Concepting: Everybody out there is probably eager to jump right on the computer right now and start illustrating your favorite foods. But anytime I start any project, small, large big client or just for me, I always start with a sketchbook. This one's from a while ago. I think this actually is my last, yeah, here's my last Skillshare class. Wherever I've been since then. Here's some fun food stuff I did for a little art show at a brewery, just some of my favorite foods. You got some eggs and a soda can. Just some goofy stuff there. Here is a page of coffee cups. This is something I did for The New Yorker. I think it's about the bento box themed for kids, sending these little bento boxes and their lunch. So, I can have these fun little illustrations there, which was another fun food project. This was for poop week. Yeah, these are all poop themed illustrations. Not really. I guess that's food in its later form which counts. Oh, this is funny. This was for this project never saw the light of day, but it was for the Great Meatball Smackdown. It was going to be a poster about a contest to make the best meatballs. You can see these goofy little meatball people doing different things. There was a beauty pageant and them playing tennis. If you really want to take this project in an interesting direction, you can make it about a Meatball Smackdown or a Pasta Party or whatever you want it to be, it can it can be. It doesn't have to be so literal about what you ate. It can have like a theme to it too. So, a great way to get started on this project is just doing a list. You don't always necessarily even know where it's going to go. A list sounds really boring because we just write a list of things, but it's weird when you start writing a list of things that always lead you to some other idea or always gives you some other memory. So, that's where we're gonna start today. I just moved to New York at the end of last year so we could do something like classic New York foods. I really like breakfast food. It could just be illustrating your favorite breakfast foods. So, if there is some kind of like trendy food that's going on at the moment, like the coconut or something, you can go try that food and then illustrate it in a fun way. That makes me, you can also think about things from your childhood, your favorite foods. I think a lot of memories are tied to food you had growing up. Team Meldrums is just like a classic greasy spoon diner. I am not sure if things in New York. So far, has been using seamless. It comes right to your door, it's amazing. I seem to be ordering a lot of bagel breakfast sandwiches, because you do a lot of drinking here. So, now I have a pretty good list here about half the page. So, I like the idea of the greasy spoon. So, I'm going to circle that one. I like the idea of my favorite New York food so far. Best road trip meals. So, I'll circle those three. So, thinking about some of the menus things I remember from there, I remember always getting two egg breakfasts, classic thing that every diner has, one of my favorite things to eat. Even at breakfast my mom and dad would always get Coke or diet Coke. My dad never liked coffee. In his whole life, he just absolutely love Coca-Cola. So, I'd get it at breakfast. This is a really gross thinking. I'm kind of sad to admit it, but there's this thing. At least two places I'd go to growing up, they would serve fries obviously, but then, it always had a pad of butter on them. I don't know. So, it was just something I remember from these different diners. So, fries with butter. If you make a list, and you're starting to remember a lot of stories from your childhood or something, that says something. I think there's a fun illustration to be started here. So, I'm just going to go for this one. 3. Sketching: So sometimes, when I start to sketch actual illustration stuff, I'll actually draw in pencil first. We'll have two-egg breakfast which I think will be the main part of the illustration. Obviously, it's got some slices of bacon in there, a piece of toast, and because it's got to be a little healthy, you got to throw a piece of orange in there, just one orange slice to fight scurvy. So usually when I'm doing this, I'll draw in pencil then you trace over it in pen, and I think this is the secret to a good sketchbook because then, you can erase the pencil and you look like a professional. People are like, "Why is your sketchbook so nice?" You're like, "Oh, just because I'm that good." One thing I always do when I keep a sketchbook, I don't think you necessarily have to do this, but it's something I always do that's always helpful. Sometimes, I'll have like the dimension, like I'm going to design this at a tabloid size. So I have the actual dimension and that scaled down version. It's also how I keep my sketchbook so organized. So, I'll have the dimension of 11-by-17. Some of the dimensions that are pretty standard, I'll just keep in the back of my sketchbook, a little pocket. I'll just pull them out when I need them. So I can just draw the dimension. Then there's no guess work there. So, thinking about my list and the things I want to illustrate. So, the two-egg breakfast. Let's do the Coke, the fries with butter, obviously. It's like you're putting an order. What do you want to eat? These are the things I want to eat. You know what? I really want to illustrate a burger. That wasn't on my list but I'm going to add it to my list. So maybe make like four little icons and one main illustration. Illustration with Coke. They're just rough sketches. Maybe I'll draw a cup of coffee next to it, too. A cheeseburger and a basket of fries. I should do the potato pancake, too. Pancakes are easy to illustrate, just a circle. Anybody can illustrate that and it has butter on it, too. So, we're going to have probably three items with butter which is great. Very Ohio. Remember, we'll organize these little icons on the side. So I think, there'll be some tight moments on here. Maybe I'll do, like any good diner serves breakfast all day. Now, I'm just trying to fill the gaps of what's going to be on here because I feel like that was the design theory behind most of these place mats which is just like filling in the real estate. So, let's put a fork and a knife. Maybe we have two little more buckets over here for more silly things. We're focusing on doing a very geometric illustration style. I'm probably picking things that maybe are a little bit more graphic in nature but it necessarily doesn't always have to be the case, I think. It's nice that these things are both graphic and fun to illustrate. Each one lines up with a memory I had, too, which is fun, and we'll just go over it with a pen. So, one thing to think about when you're sketching, and this works for me, if you have a different workflow or something, disregard this, but I find the tighter I keep my sketches here, the easier time I have when I get onto the computer and start illustrating there. Placements always have the scalloped funny edge. So let's just put one of these around the whole thing. When you look at the illustration style we're going to go for, this is still very loose, but it's still like making a very good road map of where I'm going to go. So many times when I do illustrations, sometimes you'll forget something from your sketch that's really important, not in a dramatic way for a client or something, just in the way that it is a witty idea, the funny memory for your own personal thing that you want to add in there. So the more you put into your sketch, the less you'll forget when you're illustrating, too. What do we want to put in these little boxes on the side? Maybe it's just like family restaurants because I know it's a family-owned restaurant. I think it's been there for four decades, so let's put that in there, too. Put a little shadow underneath the plate and stuff so it comes forward. Usually when I have a sketchbook page like this, I feel like I'm where I'm needed to be. But I don't like to see little blank spots. So, I just doodle dumb things into the areas or I'll just draw eggs. But I think there's something about when you start to draw little ideas just to fill out the page, you'll come up with some other idea which is nice. Forcing yourself to do that exercise, I think it just adds something else to the mix. Now, I feel really great. I filled one page of my sketchbook. I've exercised every idea I had about this project. The next step is to take this nice sketch that we've spent time to do, scan it in, and start illustrating on the computer, and that's what we're going to do next. 4. Illustrating Eggs & Toast: So, we did all our sketching. You guys did a great job. I'm so proud of you. Now, it's time to jump on the computer and start illustrating in this very geometric style. So, the first thing I do and you'll see I already have it placed in here, I'll take that sketch that I spent so much time on and place it in the background. Usually, what I like to do is you can see the sketch as I dim it down to about 10 percent here, so it's just there just so you know what it is and it just makes a very good road map of where you're illustrating and that will be a back layer. Then I'll usually have two other layers. One being a background layer and one being an art layer. So, we're going to be working in the art layer. That's about as in depth as layers go. It's only about three. So, we're going to be working on this art layer. I'm not going to use a ton of tools here and they're pretty simple. One of the major tools I use is the ellipse tool and the rectangular tool. So, this one and this one. So, the ellipse tool just makes a circle obviously and this one makes a rectangle or a square if you hold Shift. You guys all know this. If you've used Illustrator you got to understand this. The other tool I've got to use when I'm doing this, let's say we start with the ellipse tool, I use the cut tool which is the shortcut for that is just C. So, if you see me using the scissor tool I'm probably just pressing C to get there. So, I'll do a lot of cutting up shapes. I also use the Pathfinder pallet just to close shapes and make them a solid shape, so there's no. You can see the difference here. This one is not closed and this one is closed using the Pathfinder tool. You'll see me cutting up a lot of things. Closing them together and maybe using the pen tool and then I'll usually use the direct selection tool to drag them. So, let's start illustrating. The first thing I'm going to illustrate here is this big chunk in the middle which is the breakfast obviously. Now, if you start looking at the shapes here, it might look complex but they're pretty simple. This is a half a circle here. This is two. These are obviously just circles. A lot of these shapes are very similar. It will be pretty easy to start and then you can you use a lot of these shapes over again later. So, I want to make these eggs. So, how do I do that? I'm going to use the ellipse tool. If you're using shortcuts just L, and then, I'm going to use the scissors tool and just cut this, drag this over here. Then use the pen tool to close it up. Oops and there. See, you have basically the top of that egg. Maybe we'll make it a little smaller so it's a little more exact fit the sketch. How do you make bottom? You can just copy and paste, you're going to have the exact same shape down here. Maybe drag it out a little more. Another thing I always do is option drag which makes a copy. Now, how do we make that little, let's call it the egg nook, how do we make this little egg nook here to connect these two shapes? Well. that shape is the exact same shape as this shape, just inverted. So, let's get a copy of this. Cut off the bottom part of this. Drag out a copy of that and then take the pen tool and close off these paths and that's essentially the shape you want down there. I usually would like to have the smart guides on so you can see where these things connect. Then you're going to just make this right there. So, that's about the same size it's the exact size you need to fit these two pieces together. So then, you take all these things and you pathfind them together and it's the right shape. Who knew. So, we have that shape done. We want the eggs, obviously that's just a circle too. I want to retain the highlight that I drew in there. So, here's another shortcut that I find myself using a lot is paste in place. So, if you copy this and then Command+F, it'll paste it in the exact same place. So, but I want just want this part this quarter circle. So, I'm going to make this a little bit smaller and then just cut that out. So, that's exactly where I want that to be. If I want to get the other egg, you just copy it. Duh. So, we got eggs. So, we got these eggs. Now, I want to make a piece of toast. If you make these shapes, you can just leave them. You could just make this a shape so you have this light tube thing. You could just set this off screen a little bit so you always have that shape and you can use it later. Because a lot of these shapes repeat. So, let's say I want to take this and make this toast. I'm going to just repeat this piece so it looks pretty much what we want. So, I'm going to cut this piece here on these anchors, drag it down and then using the pen tool connect them again. Now, sometimes you'll get these little connecting points. You can leave those. For my illustrations, I always liked to turn on this little feature. It rounds off the corners. So, this piece of bread. How do you make that inner crust? Take this shape and copy it and paste it in place and we'll beef up the line weight and how it is working on how thick you want to make the crust so I want to make it a little bit thicker. That's seems all good. This is just the outline. You can take this and expand it and full stroke it. That's going to take that line that was a stroke and it's going to make it a solid and then I'm just going to delete the outside and then you have the inner bread. How do we make butter? Draw a square and then we're going to make it a little rounded because it's melting. How do you make the drips? You already made them. You didn't even know that. So, you take this egg piece and copy it, you got to rotate it and then you can take a Pathfinder tool just draw the square I don't know if it's subtracted I guess. I'm sorry. I don't know what it's called, this one. Using the direct selection tool which is the white arrow, you can select these and draw these out. With this one, I want to select these bottom nodes to pull this out holding shift. Because if you grab this part of the circle it's going to get all weird. It's going to get nice and drippy. Scale that. If you want this to align with this. If you option click, it's kind going to anchor it so then it'll align to the shape and it will move. So, this will all stay centered then. You can just use the eyedropper tool here to do that. When you start, you're going to start plating things, your fake vector food. You're going to start plating that. If you're going to start rotating things, sometimes it's good to just take these elements that you make and just copy them and put them like off the board, your art board, just so you have them in case you rotate something. See if I rotate it here and I want to get it back to center, it's going to be really dumb about it and not do that. So, you can just save that piece for later and come back to it. 5. Illustrating Bacon: We're getting along with this, all these shapes. Let's do the bacon. Now, the bacon thing seems like it's like a hard thing to make, but it's actually pretty easy. I'm going to take a line tool, draw like a line. Then, I'm going to go to Fffects, Distort and Transform, Zig Zag. Then, you're going to be able to make this line wobbly. Right now, it has corners on it. We don't want that. We're going to need the smooth tool. That's going to make a nice wiggly piece of bacon. You can control the wiggles in your bacon or how done your bacon is by moving these around. There's more segments, that's like very cooked bacon, and this is, basically, like uncooked bacon. We want to get our bacon that feels pretty good, right amount of cooked bacon. Consistency, I don't know. We're going to make the size of it just a little bit smaller, but you can play with this a lot. This tool is pretty fun and pretty easy to use. I think I want my bacon just about like that. When you make this, it's going to be an effect, it's not vector yet. You have to go to Object, Expand Appearance. Then, it turns it into a piece with editable piece of line work whatever. So I'm going to take this, drag it out, and then close this paths up. Actually, I'm going to do this too because I want to make the fat inside of the bacon. So actually, have four of these. You could also do this where you drag out one, Option, Shift, drag, so it makes a copy. Then, if you press D, it'll make the same thing. It'll do the same move in the same distance. This looks maybe like a little bit wide, so maybe we'll bump this up. Then, it's like off. These are not the same distance in between. You can go over to the Align palette, and use Distribute Spacing, and it will distribute that out for you again. So then, I'm going to close just the top two. So there's a back, there's a shape of the bacon, and then we also have a shape of the fat pieces. So put one of these up here. Oops, and rotate it. I'm going to rotate it again. Maybe I don't want it exactly at 45 degree angle, so it takes a little more room. I'm going to take this, make another one. So, come on along. Now, if you wanted to make sure these are all the same strip with them all these, you wanted to make sure it was the same. You could go over to Weight, and let's say, we want to make it three point, and I'll make all those things three points the same width. So, it keeps that mono line consistency throughout. There's a few other details we've got to put in here and then we'll be pretty much done with this. I have some pepper and, I guess, there'll be pepper on the plate and on the bread. It will all just be like wheat bread. So, you can do that with a lot of things. You could take an Ellipse tool and make like a little circle, or we can do the Blob tool. I like using the Blob tool because it's my buddy, and this will just make a circle. Just don't drag it because you'll get like a blobby mess then. Let's make all these pieces have a white background, so no color. We can send them to back and you can do that by Arrange, Send To Back, right here. Let's fill this too. Do the same thing, send at the back, another little tool I use a lot of. All these pieces you're going to illustrate, and you'll get them to a place, and then you'll move on to the next place, I actually probably put, you probably should work in broader strokes. I put all these little details in just because I know exactly what I want to do and I had a very thorough sketch. You can start here, illustrate the plate, and then come back, and put in all the little details. That's the way painter's work. That's how you're supposed to work, broad strokes, and then work in the fine detail. I just did that just to show you guys. 6. Illustrating Knife & Fork: So now we're going to do the fork and the knife, and they'll look pretty simple, but they're a little bit trickier, just because you want them to feel like a fork and a knife. So, I'm going to plot a circle again, I'm going to cut the top off that guy, combine this into a shape. I'm going to get the Marquee tool, pull that out. This is going to blow out a little bit so we can probably take put an extra piece there. So, you combine all the shapes you start to get a pixelated looking knife which is not what we want. So, I'm going to drag this out to get this I keep saying nooks because there's so many nooks but that's what it is right? I don't know. If you use the Direct Selection tool and you use these corner rounder things will make a nice smooth little transition there. I want to take a circle. I don't want it to be this round at the top. So, if I take a line tool and align it to the center of the circle if I bring the circle to front, which is the opposite of sending it to back and cut this piece we aligned with this so then I have this and that's what I want. Because I feel that's more of a natural curve there, were more like what the knife looks like. So, I'll just rotate that and then align it to here and maybe drag that out, so that's more what I want and then we can align that to that. Do the corner rounding thing it makes it a nice round knife. Now you want to select those points only these two points because if you're using this tool and you try to do that it's going to make everything it's going to round everything off but you just really want to round off these two. I'm going to copy and paste this in place and move this to the right a little bit so I can get a nice little highlight. So, that's the knife. Time to do the fork. I want to keep the bottom half of this, but I want to lose obviously the knife part punch that away with the Pathfinder tool. I'm going to drag up these points. I'm going to do the same thing really same shapes we've been using. Let's draw out Ellipse tool. Take the Marquee tool and that's pretty much a fork and if you take the line tool and drew out a couple things in it that would be a fork. For some reason that's not selling it for me, I want it to be a little more detailed than that it's like two geometric. There's a lot of nuance in a fork I think, this tapers off a little bit. It's thicker here it tapers off here. The top of it tapers in a little bit so let's do some of that. I'm going to take these two I'll make this no color in those, use the transform tool and with selecting these two points and use it pressing E to use the transform tool I'm going to scale those in a little bit, so it gets a little bit more tapered skill is in a little bit more holding shift. So, if you had a direct selection tool you select one point and you use the arrow tools the "up down, left right" buttons and you can really get in there and do some nice like finessing on those. If you hold shift you actually get a bigger jump but I just want to move it one in one on each side. So. I'm going to do this one, this one. Just remember if you want to keep it symmetrical and stay the same, just keep count one, two, three. One, two, three. I find myself doing that all the time. So, this is more of the shape I want. So, I'm going to take this and Pathfinder together maybe I want this to match like the character of the knife there. So, I'm going to use the direct selection tool and just tweak that a little bit so it's a little bit more round. So then it's starting to look like a fork. So, I'm going to do the same thing I did on the toast, make these little bigger, outline the stroke so it becomes a solid. Pathfind them together so they're one shape and then punch them out of this one then I'm going to use the direct selection tool, select the top of these and then just round them off. The same way I've been rounding off other things. All our shadows seem to be coming from this side or all of our highlights seem to be on the side not like I'm doing a lot of high-scale shadowing and highlighting here, but just so they're consistent we're going to make all these on the right. So, we'll do the same thing with the fork. 7. Illustrating Little Icons: This very well could be your final illustration. You could take this, add some color, and it could be done. But I'm going to take it a little further and I'm going to take everything I've showed you so far and take those same techniques and finalize all the four icons on the outside and some of the banners for the type that'll be in the next lesson. So, let's pick these icons. 8. Playing with Color: At this point, we have all our line work done. That's pretty much where we want. Mine has a few little tweaks here and there. I went through and adjusted some of the details. I added a little bit more, nuanced a lot of things, moved some things around. I added a little bit of drop shadow. But now, we're ready to go in and colorize the illustration which is the fun part. It's not rocket science. You just start plugging in color and see where it goes. Toast is going to be a color. The crust is going to be one color and the fill is going to be just a toast color like a bread color. This is wheat bread. So, it has a little bit of a value to it. Eggs are yellow, that's easy. These highlights the butter yellow, too. So, I'm going to do that. I want the melted butter to be a little bit transparent. So, I'll turn on the multiply. So, it gets a little bit more value in there. These lines will be highlights. So, I'm going to change those to white. You'll see that all line work is like a 0.3 line. I feel like white lines always appear a little bit thinner. So, it's okay to bump that up to maybe a 0.4 line, or just a four-point line versus the three-point line, just to give a little bit more weight. Let's just make the plate blue. We'll make the dropped part of the plate a darker blue. Bacon is red or could be brown if it was burnt. Let's keep it red, that's fine. These lines are going to be pink because the fat part of the bacon. So, we'll make them the same color as the bacon but then we'll adjust the colors a little bit in here, so we can see the color of the bacon. So, here's where you might have to cheat some of these things a little bit. You have these fatty bits of the bacon here, but you have this overlap. So, how do you fix that? You can always just copy the back bacon. Back bacon. You can always just copy the piece of bacon, paste it in place and bring it to front, and then you can just have no color in that. So, that's makes a little Band-Aid and we'll do the same thing for the other. Copy, paste in place, bring to front, and we'll turn off the color in there. So that way, you don't have to go and do a bunch of weird things. It's just a really simple solve. Yes, I would not get too hung up about what the exact colors are, I would just kind of like a broad stroke put everything in and then go back and tweak things, and you'll see me do that while I'm working here. Inside of this, actually, I'm not going to make this a black line. I'm going to make it yellow, similar to how we did the bacon piece. Then, I'm going to copy and paste this in place, bring it to front, and turn off that. So, that's starting to look pretty good. I'm not crazy about the yellow, but I think I'm just going to leave it for now and come back and fix it. Let's add color to the fork and the knife, a silver in here. Feels about right. Let's match these highlights. The other highlight, just using the eyedropper tool. So, that's the main illustration. Let's add some colors to these spots. I think I want them to each be on a field of color. Pancakes, make them the same color as the bread. We'll make this the same color as that. Maybe that outline's a little too harsh. So, maybe we'll just turn it off and make it more subtle just because of the spot. These are the same as this. Using the eyedropper tool, just selecting, saving ourselves some time. Maybe the shadow needs to be a little bit lower. You may notice that there's things you want to change in your illustration, this is the time to do it. I mean, you could work on Illustrations indefinitely. You could just work on it forever and ever and that's just how it works, tweaking little details, but this is a good point in time to do that. For the burger, it's going to be the same color as these two things. But maybe when I'm looking at these colors, maybe this kind of a beige color, needs to have a little bit more to it. So I can already see it. It needs that. So, I can do this and select same fill and stroke and I'll select all those same pieces, and then I can go ahead and just add a little bit more value to it so it's a little bit more rich. Well, this is obviously green. Cheese could be an orange, but it's probably yellow. The burger is brown. Sauce is probably red. Do we need that hotline on there? Maybe not. I'm going to keep that line there. It feels good. Now, I'm questioning those yellow. It feels a little bit too yellow. Maybe it needs a little bit of red in it. So, I'm going to select the same fill color and I'm just going to move the magenta a little bit in here just to really make it feel a little bit better. As I go into the type section, even I might change the colors of the icons again, just the backgrounds to add something to it. It's a living illustration. It's never quite done. You can always adjust and change things a little bit, but that's what makes it fun, too. 9. Adding Type: Okay. So now we're going to add the type. Now is your chance to go back into your sketchbook and maybe look at some of the interesting sayings you might have written down about the restaurant. In this case, I have a couple of things that I remember from the restaurant like they serve breakfast all day. So, I might going to add that in there, along with some other details. Yes, let's add some typography. Why not? I'm going to illustrate it, but I did go to design school, so I know a little bit about typography, not a ton though. So, we're going to pull out the type tool, and up here it's going to say breakfast. Okay. Breakfast served. I adjust in whatever default font or typefaces in the program, looks like myriad. Sorry myriad, we don't want to use you. I use FontExplorer Pro. You don't have to do that, I just like how it happens to organize the programs here. So, I opened FontExplorer, and that's where I keep most of my typefaces, and you can see this little folder I have here, it says round for illustration. I wouldn't say most of these are my go-tos, but there are a few in here, got them rounded as definitely want to use a lot gravur, I don't know if I'm saying that right. Another one of those is, I've some gothic faces I use here too, trade gothic being one, knockout, just because it has so many different sizes and weights which is nice, and then Franklin Gothic too, which is nice. I also have a script inherently like which is like a monoline script called Handsome Pro. That looks really bad, case all caps, but pretty nice save this. So those are some of my gotos. Let's try out a few in the illustration now. So, I think I like the way this feels, the gravur, G-R-A-V-U-R. Let's bring it up. Doesn't quite feel the banner the way I want it to, but let's see what it looks like down here. So that's, I don't think that's going to be right for this case. So, let's maybe try a gotham rounded. That seems to be working on a little bit better. That feels pretty good. So, now with these side pieces here, I think this one's going to say family restaurant, so let's just move this down here. Type that in, resize a little bit. I think I want this to be a little bit more fit that square a little bit better. So I'm going to actually switch this over to the other font, for the other typeface we were talking about which was gravur, maybe it won't. So, that starts to fit that. Type style and going with, is thinking about these old placemats and some of them and things being like very symmetrical, and very centered in spaces, that's the static I'm trying to portray here, and trying to make all the line weights similar. So they feel it, even the type feels like illustrated in a way, I guess not just like, it just fills integrated in that way to the illustration, because it feels like, almost like I drew it. It has the same quirky characteristics as the other things do. Like and how that feels. Maybe I'll just add some decoration in there too. So, it even fills that gap even more. I'm just try to make it feel like very justified in the space. Going back to the way like, these things would be setup if there were printed on like a letterpress or something, you're just filling each little area. So, definitely like a justified type. This is, I looked it up and it's a, they've been around for four generations. So let's make that part of the menu too. You. When you using type, you can use, I'm using these two because they feel rounded, and they feel similar, like I think it feels nice for the illustration. I wouldn't go crazy and use like a bunch of typefaces, like maybe just stick to two or three and max. So, I'm going to bring up the weight of this, I guess my goal is to make it, I know that these are a little bit bolder than the actual lines, but it starts to feel to feel like it's drawn by the same hand in a way. Where it's all speaking the same language. I just wanted to be cohesive in a very familiar way. I'm trying to make these pretty symmetrical. So, we're going to have to shrink this down a little bit. Holding Shift, and I'm just going to track these out a little bit so they fill the bucket. So, to me that's feeling pretty good. I think these banners maybe need to be a color though, because they seem won't be in the next to the other illustrations. So, maybe they go red. Maybe we change this a little bit. So it's a little bit darker value of red. Because you're in shadow. Maybe this go to white. Think that's starting to feel pretty good. 10. Adding Texture & Finishing Touches: So, now we're going to make our placemat on the Illustration and add a little bit of texture to it. I like texture a lot. I use it in a lot of my work. If you watch my other video, there's a completely different method in that video than this one. This one's maybe a little bit more straightforward and easy to do, but it's also really fun too because you get to get your hands dirty a little bit. There's not too many things you need to get for this. These being the two main things or the three main things. Just Speedball blocking because it's just water soluble ink, and a brayer. You can usually buy a kit of this and they'll have a woodblock in there, too. You could experiment with that as well. Usually, you need something the brayer to ink out on. This is actually a ceramic watercolor thing I have. It's not ideal because there's like a big thing in the middle of the back here and you can't brayer the whole surface, but we're just going to use it today because I think it's fine. So, you're just going to take some of this ink and put a little bit on whatever surface that is, and you're going to take your brayer and mix this around a little bit. Then, you're just going to take the brayer and you're not going to make anything really necessarily creative on the page, you're just going to brayer out lines. Then, you don't even have to ink it up again. You can just do the next one and you're going to get some other different texture from that one, and then you can do it again, and each of those is going to have a different quality to it. If those are a little bit too textural, if they're a little bit too loose for you, you can sit and brayer away, too. So, that's starting to feel interesting. There's nothing to it. You can just sit and do a bunch of different pages, and they're all going to feel different from each other. It's better to make a lot of these than just one and then just scan them all at once because you've already got the ink out, it's already wet, everything's already in place, just as make as many as you can. I've done this in the past and made like 40, scanned them all in, and then you have a texture library. It's pretty great. So, we're going to take this, scan it into the computer, and then I'm going to show you how to add this to your illustration. I have a few scans here. Let's look at which ones I want to use. Not that one, not that one, let's go with this one. So, we're going to open this up, and we're in Photoshop, so no vector stuff here. I'm going to rotate this clockwise, I'm going to crop in on it a little bit, like so. You can see from just, we did that brayering, how much great texture you get out of such a simple thing. Now, I'm going to push the level up a little bit to make it add a little more contrast to the illustration. But before I do that, I'm going to resize the image a little bit because it scanned it a small size, so we'll make the resolution 300 and maybe we'll make it like 200 percent bigger. So it's pretty big because I think the size of the placemat is about tabloid, 11 by 17, so this will put it at about the size we need it to be. So, actually, it's way bigger than we need, it's 33 by 23. So, we'll be able to move it around a little bit in there. So, we're going to mess with the levels a little bit, which is image, adjustment, levels. I'm just going to bring up the contrast of this a little bit more, push it a little bit more so it's a little bit more black and white-rich. So, that's kind of what I was looking for. You want to save this as a grayscale TIFF. I scanned it in at grayscale, so it should be already grayscale. So, just make sure that's the mode it is in, and you're going to save it as texture_1. Now, we're going to go back to Illustrator. First, we have to draw the placemat, so let's do that real quick. Let's turn on our sketch. So we want to drew this scalloped edge. I'm going to show you a really easy way to do that in a minute. So, just pull out a box. We'll actually put this on a background layer. Let's align it to the art board, so it's centered. It looks pretty good. I want to make this scalloped edge that I had in my sketch. So how do we do that? Let's copy and paste the outer box in place and then we're going to go over to our stroke palette, and we're going to make this a lot more than it was. Now, you want to go click on the dashed line button and set the first value at zero in the dashed group. The next one, whatever your stroke is, like say this is a 40-point stroke, you're going to want to make this a little bit less than that. If we do 40, that's going to be a dotted line. That's how you make a dotted line here. These dots are a little bit far apart than I want, so I'm going to go on here and adjust this. Maybe I'll do somewhere in between. Let's do 45 and a value of 30, may be a 33. That feels pretty good. So, let's take this, expand the appearance, already in stroke, so then it makes the scalloped edge that we want. If you pathfind it, then you have what you're looking for. So, let's copy and paste this. Do the same thing we did when we made bread crust. There, we have our placemat. What color do you want this to be? Maybe let's make this not green, that feels pretty good. Let's make this actually green. Let's make this, how does it look blue? That looks pretty cool. So, this could be done. This could be our final illustration. It feels pretty good. It doesn't have the texture in there yet, but I want to try a version where we put the texture in there. So, what you're going to do, place that image that we made. By making this a grayscale TIFF, we can actually change the color of it, so the value we had in there or this color we had in there, we can keep the same color. Let's send this to the back and let's make a clipping mask, and you do that by pressing command + 7, that crazy about this texture. I think we could've done a little bit better, or maybe let's just move it around a little bit. That starts to feel pretty fun. That's cool. Actually, that one works pretty well. Maybe we can try to add a texture layer to the top of the art. Maybe we'll head over to Photoshop, open up the last texture file, invert it, so it's the black speckles, mess with the levels a little bit, and bring up some of those flecks of dirt. Let's save this as texture_2. Let's say, we wanted to copy these pieces right here. So we copy that, paste it in place, make these one shape, and that's very important because that's the area we're going to apply the texture_2. So, let's place, send to back, and now we can do a clipping mask of that. So now, that main illustration has just a little bit of texture to it, and you can move this around a little bit and make it feel a little bit more grittier or less grittier, whatever you want to do. So that's just about it. I think you could leave it flat, you could keep it simple, keep it nice and flat, or you could grit it up and make it a little bit more fun and add a little texture in there. Either way, I think it's going to be really fun and a good exercise to do. 11. Conclusion: That's it. We did it. Thank you all so much for taking this class. What a fun wild ride it's been. I encourage you that you share any part of the project, whether it just be your sketches to start out with to get some feedback from. If you just do a single burger and you're really excited about that burger, share that burger, I'm sure everybody love it. If you want to do the full placemat or your full meatball smackdown poster, no matter what you want to do, share it. Skillshare is a very loving community, and everybody wants to see what you're making. So, share it and we'll all give you feedback. I'm excited to see it. 12. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: