Guilloche Designs in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Create Guilloche Effects Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, Create Guilloche Effects in Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now today, we're looking at getting creative with Guilloche effects. Historically, this might have been etched in metal and they are also used in security documents and some banknotes. They look extraordinarily difficult to create, but a secret is that they're actually quite easy to create in Illustrator and they are just a heap of fun. Now in creating our Guilloche effects, we're going to experiment with a number of ways of creating them. Then they're going to be things like envelope distort. We're going to look at blends, we're going to look at rotations, we're going to look at pattern brushes. There's a whole heap of learning in here in terms of learning techniques and tools in Illustrator, as well as coming out at the end with some beautiful designs. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which will ask you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying and learning from the class, do two things for me. Firstly, say yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write in just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started getting creative with Guilloche effects in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Basic Guilloche Effect: To create our first Guilloche effect, we're going to create a new document. I'm just using a document that's 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. Because if you're using an earlier version of Illustrator, your dialogue is going to look a little bit more like this. I'm also working in RGB color mode, but it doesn't really matter too much what you're working in. Now we're going to start with a series of lines. I'm just going to click here to create a line that's 500 pixels wide and an angle of zero. That's virtually just a horizontal line. Now I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and Transform because I want a series of lines. I'm going to make this about 35 copies, and I'm going to start decreasing the vertical value, which is going to send a series of horizontal lines up the page. Now I think I've got two fuse, I'm just going to increase that to 45, and I'll click Okay. Everything is attached to this line so I need to expand it. I'll choose object, Expand Appearance, and then because these are all in groups, I'm going to choose object Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. That ensures that in my last pallet, all I have is a layer with individual paths on each. Path is one of these lines. The lines are still selected, now I'll group them. Now I've got a really neat little group of my lines. I'm just going to move this down the page. Now we'll create a shape to use. I'm going to start with a rectangle. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle which is going to be the base of my shape. Now I'm going to the pen tool, but you could also use the pencil tool, and this is going to add a shape above this. But I want to attach it, but right now I don't want to mess up my rectangles, so I'm just going to put my shape in up here. I'm going to come down and intersect with my rectangle. I can overlap it as well, that's fine. Basically what I want is some straight sides on my shape at this point. I'm going to select either both these objects and I'm going to group them. I'm going to the Pathfinder; if you don't see the Pathfinder choose window and then pathfinder, and I'm going to click Unite. I have a single shape here. I think my shape is a little on the tool side. I'm going to the direct selection tool, just select over this base here. I'm just going to wind it up so it's a little bit shorter. But these straight sides are going to work better with a pattern brush later on. You do want to try for straight sides of you can. We have a group of lines and we've got our shape. The shape is above the group of lines in the layers palette, which it needs to be if you're going to use an envelope distort. I'm just going to select over both objects, they don't have to be aligned or placed anywhere specific, except that this shape has to be on top in the layers palette, I'll choose object Envelope distort and make with top object. What that does is it distorts the lines to match the look of the top object. There is a little bit of leeway in getting these lines to look a bit better, perhaps in your version of Illustrator. You want to choose object and then Envelope distort and then Envelope options, and there is a fidelity slider here. If your fidelity slider is not wound up to 100, you can wind it up and you might find that that will give you a more even set of lines within your shape. But mine is already at 100, so that's as good as I'm going to get here. I'll click Okay. Now we're going to make a pattern brush out of this. I'm going to select over it, I'm going to brushes palette. Again, if you don't see it, choose window and then brushes, click the flyout, choose New brush, Pattern brush and Okay. This is my pattern brush. In most recent versions of Illustrator, you can create outer and inner corner tiles. In earlier versions of Illustrator, you can't do that. But because we are going to be working with circles today, that's just fine. The complexity of creating inner and outer corner tiles for these sorts of designs is beyond the scope of this particular class. Just go with whatever you've got if you're working with an earlier version of Illustrator. If you want to be able to color this, select tints as your colorization method and we're choosing stretch to fit. I'll click Okay. I've got my brush and let's see what it looks like applied to a shape. I'm going to select the ellipse tool, hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle. Now my circle has got a fill; at the moment, I don't want it to have a fill, I do want it to have a stroke and so I could select the color if I wish to color my brush as it's applied to the line. I've selected a sort of blue color. With my ellipse selected, let's go to the brushes palette and let's click on a Guilloche brush. This is what we get. Not totally inspiring right now but there is an easy way of getting something just a little bit better. Let's go back to the brushes pellet and let's choose options of selected object. Now what we're going to do is turn preview on and let's reduce the size or the scale on this brush. The smaller you get the brush to be, the more interesting the effect is because you are getting this sort of repetitive effect around your shape. It's got all these lovely little lines in it. You can make this as big or as small as you like. I'm going to select that and just click Okay. There's a very simple start to making Guilloche effects. In the next video, we're going to make something that's going to be really quite exquisite using the same process but being a little bit more careful in drawing the shape that we are going to use for the envelope distort. 3. Pt 2 - Guilloche with a regular shape: For our second Galatia effect, I've already gone ahead and created the lines and they're just in a group exactly same as we did in the previous one. What I'm going to focus on this time is actually drawing the shape that we're going to put these lines into. Now I am going to start with the Pencil Tool just because it's an easy tool to use, you can double-click on the Pencil Tool and set it up. I like to make my fidelity fairly close towards the smooth end, so illustrators going to smooth out my lines as I work. I've got that setup in earlier versions of illustrator, you might have a different set of sliders here, but you want to go fairly close towards the smooth end. Now, what I'm going to do with this line is I'm going to draw a sort of wave shape. What I want to make sure is that I move away from my starting point as I draw my wave shapes. It's not going to look like this, because you'll see that the starting point is here, but the wave extends out here. We want to bring the wave in from the starting point so that everything's going to line up neatly later on when we go to make this a brush. Back to the Pencil Tool, I'm going to move away from my starting point and into a half a loop here. If you don't get it right the first time, just delete it and start again. I've got a pretty good starting shape here. Now, I'm going to select over the shape with the selection tool. I'm going to choose object transform and then reflect, I'm going to reflect this over the vertical. I'll click "Copy." Now I've got two of the shapes. I'm going to move the second one so that it's actually going to intersect with the first one. Now when I've got them intersecting, I can join them with object path and then join, and so this is the shape I'm going to be working with, but I need to build up the bottom of it. I'm going to do that with the Pen Tool. I'll click here to click on this anchor point. Will hold the Shift key so that I go in a perfectly vertical direction. Let's go across here and pick up this point. Click once, and then click back here. It's important to create these sides as straight and not angled if you want them to line up side-by-side in the pattern brush in a minute. This shape is on top in the Layers palette, I'm going to select everything and I'll choose Object, Envelope Distort, make with top object. You can see we've got something really interesting happening here in terms of the shape that we're using. I'll select over my new shape. I open up the Brushes palette and go and create again a new Pattern Brush. If you're working with earlier versions of Illustrator that don't have these corner tiles. That's just fine you don't need to create them because we're going to be using circles. If you're working with a later version of Illustrator, then you can create corner tiles should you wish to do so. I'm setting this up as tints and I have stretched to fit selected. I'll click "Okay." Now I'm going to create an ellipse. It's going to be a circle, so I'll hold the Shift key down as I draw out my circle. Now I don't want it to have a fill, I don't want it to have a stroke at this time. I'm just going to use a blue color for my stroke and I'm going to apply my brush. Now we've already got something really interesting here. It's just that I think that we can do even better by, again, reducing the size of our brush stroke here. I'll click options of selected object. I'm going to click Preview on so I can see what's happening here. I'm just going to move this down, and what I want is about six of these elements because it's going to help with the mathematics. I'm just going to increase this until I get my six. I now have six elements around my circle here. I'll click OK. Now the reason why I chose six was because it's easy to do the mathematics for six. Because if there are six of these each one of them is that a 60 degree angle because there are 360 degrees in a circle. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a duplicate of this shapes. I'm going to choose edit, copy, edit paste in place. I'm going to make this one a red color. Let's go and get a pink-y red color. I'm going to rotate this top one by 30 degrees, which is going to place it just offset from the original so I choose objects, transform, rotate. I'll just type 30 degrees in and click "Okay," and now we have this overlapping Galatia effect. Let's just zoom into it and see how attractive it is. You can see up close the Galatia effect here we've got heaps and heaps of lines, but they're in this beautiful repeating pattern around the circle. In this video and the previous video, we've looked at one method for creating this Galatia effect and that is to create a series of straight horizontal lines and to put them into a shape using the Envelope, Distort Tool. In the next video, we're going to look at a different method for creating a similar sort of effect. 4. Pt 3 - Guilloche with Distort and Transform: For this next Galatia effect, we're going to be using the distort and transform tool, but to start off with, we need an ellipse. I'm just going to drag out and ellipse here. It has no fill, it has a stroke. Now, ellipses on the half for anchor points that might be a little bit easier for me to manipulate this if I have more than four anchor points. With it's selected, I'm going to choose object path, add anchor points, and that just adds more anchor points to this shape. Now I have anchor points at the top here where I didn't have them previously. All I'm going to do is just manipulate this shape into something a little more interesting than it was a minute ago. Can squash it up a little bit if I wish. Now I'm going to make a duplicate of this. I'm going to hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate away. I don't want it to be too far past this one. I want them to be fairly close together, but definitely to separate shapes. When I've got my two shapes, I'll select over them. I'm going to group them because I want them to behave as a single object. Now with my group selected, I'll choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll turn preview on and I want to rotate them around this point here, which in this set of nine boxes is this point here, the middle box in the bottom row, and that sets, this is the rotation point. Now I'm going to test and say how far I want to rotate this. I'm looking for a rotation that is a number of degrees, that when I divide those number of degrees into 360, I don't have any remainders. Four into 360 is 90, five will go into 360, six will go into 360, but seven will not, seven will leave a remainder. I wouldn't want to use seven, but I could use five, I could use four, I could use six. Now, if I'm going to use five degrees then I can't do the math really quickly. What I'm going to do is I'm going to type 360 divided by 5 to get the number of shapes I need. But that would be 72, but I've already got one which is the original, so I'm going to take this down one, so 71 will give me the total number of copies I need, and when I add my original, I haven't got any duplication, there is no two shapes are layered on top of each other. If you do go too far, you might find that you're going to get some darkening, and it's just not going to be as attractive as if you get the numbers right in the first place, so I can just click Okay. Here is a Galatia type Effect created using a shape that's been duplicated and group, the grouping is really important. That's going to break if you don't do that, and then rotate it using the transform effect. Now if you don't like the black center here, you can do something about it. Firstly, I'm going to expand their shape, so I'll choose object, expand appearance. Let's just say what we've got in the last pallet and say what we need to clean up here. Well, we've got groups and groups and groups, so let's do an ungroup and then another ungroup until we have individual paths and that group them back together again. Now, because these are grouped, I'm going to be able to find the center of the shape really easily. Let's go and create a circle over the top. I'm just going to draw a circle that's going to go over the top of my Galatia shape here. Let's fill it with white. I'm going to select both the Galatia shape and the circle, and let's just center those. Now, to make the circle more interesting, we can apply a zigzag appearance to it. With the circle selected, I'm going to choose effect, distort and transform, and this time I'm going to choose zigzag. Now, choosing zigzag lets you not only create the sort of angular zigzag outside of this circle, but you can also create a smooth one. This is the more interesting of the two. Going to increase the ridges per segment to probably about six or seven. I'm just going to reduce the size a little bit, so I get a sort of smoother effect. Maybe even take the ridges up a little bit and I'll click Okay. That we can say this a little more clearly, let's just put a black edge on there, so black stroke on the outside. Here is still our Galatia effect, but in this case, we've got a shape over the top of it. Again, if you want something a little more interesting with this shape selected and go to the appearance panel. You can get to that by choosing window and then appearance. With the shape selected, let's go and add a second stroke, so I'm just going to click here on Add New Stroke. What I want to do is to offset this stroke, so with it selected, I'm going to choose effect, path, offset path, let's click "Preview". With the default setting of 10 pixels, there's a second sort of outline to the shape on the outside of the shape. If you want to bring it in, you just going to bring this down to a negative value, and click Okay. When I click away from it, this is the Galatia effect that we've created. We have here something that's looking a little bit like a bud. I'm just going to lock my Galatia shapes so that I can move over it. The Galatia element is around the edge and then the center is a circle with this sort of zigzag outside to cover up the middle of the Galatia shape, so you can see that these could be used as sort of awards or badges. There's a potential for using them for that purpose. 5. Pt 4 - Guilloche with Distort and Transform another variation: For this next Guilloche effect, let's have a look and see what we can do with just a simple oval. I've got an oval here that has a stroke but no fill. I'm going to rotate it using my Distort and Transform. I'll turn Preview on. I'm going to rotate it around its bottom middle here, and I'm going to rotate it two degrees because that divides evenly into 360. I'll need 179 copies to make my 180. I'll just click "OK". This is a Guilloche effect created with an oval. While it's attractive, it's probably not as visually interesting as it might be. Let's see what it would look like if instead of rotating a single ellipse evenly around this shape, we did it in two steps. I'm going to select over my ellipse, I'm going to the Appearance panel because that will allow me to adjust the current rotation. I'm just going to click here Transform. I'm going to turn Preview on. Instead of making a 179 copies, I'm going to make five. I'm going to close them up a little bit, probably about 1.5 degrees. I have a set of six loops here and I'll click okay. Now I want to rotate these five loops as a group, and that will allow me to put a space between them. I'll select this shape again, and choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. Now Illustrator is warning me that I'm about to apply a new effect, not edit the existing one. I want to apply a second effect, so I'll click here. I'm going to click Preview on and I want to rotate around this middle bottom point. Now, I'm not exactly sure how big an angle I want to use, so I'm just going to start moving this out. Let's do one copy. We can see initially, when we've got the second set of loops past the place where the first set of loops were. Well, here we've got it at 12 degrees, and 12 degrees is one of those magical numbers that would divide into 360, leaving no remainder. I want to rotate around using 12 degrees. I've got 360 degrees to go around. I'm going to divide by 12. That would give me 30, but I only need 29 copies because I came with a shape to start off, so I'm taking it down to 29, and I'll click "OK". This is a more interesting Guilloche effect. It has the look of some ovals being removed from the rotation. In fact, it was not created that way, instead, what we did was we created a set of six loops to rotate so that we could leave spaces in between them. But of course, your initial shape doesn't have to be an oval, it could be anything. I'm just going to select this oval and let's turn the transforms off. Let's go and select Object, Path, Add Anchor Points, and let's go and just adjust the anchor points on this shape to create something just a little bit more interesting. Here is a more interesting starter shape. I'm going to select over it and I'm going to turn my transforms back on. There is our spaced Guilloche effect created this time with something that's not an oval, it's a sort of wiggly oval. I didn't have to redo any of the computations. All I had to do was to isolate the initial shape, turn off my transforms, go and fix up my shape, and then reapply the transforms to it. Of course we could put something in the middle here. Let's just go and get our Layers palette, just going to lock this one down. I am going back to the shape we used in the last video. I'm just going to copy it and bring it across here and paste it in. Now I could be probably a little bit more careful about placing this shape in the center, but you get the general idea that you can create these Guilloche effects for the outside of an element and put something plainer or more simple in the middle if you prefer, rather than using the center of the Guilloche rotation. 6. Pt 5 - Guilloche Designs with Zig Zag Lines: For this next set of gloss effect, we're going to look at the possibilities of wavy lines. I'm going to select the ellipse tool. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a small circle. I want it to have a strike, but I don't want it to have a fill. Now I'm going to apply my zig-zag filter to this. So I'm going to select, choose effect, distort and transform, and then zig-zag. I'll turn preview on. I want these zig-zag lines to be smooth, so I want them to be curly and I'm going to bring down the size. We're going to set it to four. So they're just really small wiggly lines. But I might take the ridges per segment up to six, and I'll click okay. We're going to make a duplicate of this shape on top of it. So I'm going to choose edit copy and then edit paste in place. I'm going to hold the Shift and Alt key as I enlarge this. Now because of the settings that I've got setup in the Illustrator in the preferences list, let's just have a look here. See where it says scale, strokes and effect, I've got the check mark selected. Well, what's happened is that my stroke has got wider. What I want to do is to bring my strike back just to a one pixel stroke. Now, your settings might be different, so you might have it scaled up with the same stroke weight and that's fine, if it doesn't, you just need to adjust it. Now I'm going to select either both of these shapes and we're going to use the Blend tool. So I'm going to click on the Blend tool and then click on these two shapes. Now, you may or may not see just one shape in the middle. It doesn't matter at this point what you say, what you're going to do is double-click on the Blend tool tone preview on, set this to specified steps, and now start cranking up the steps until you get your zig-zag gloss shape. That's a gloss shape created very simply with a circle that's had this zig-zag effect applied to it. But we can do it also with lines. I'm going to go to the line segment tool and I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a decent length line, I'll choose effect, distort and transform zig-zag, and we're going to zig-zag this line. So I'm just going to find some nice settings here in terms of my wiggly line. But there is one thing I want to make sure off before I leave this dialogue, and that is the start of the line and the end of the line are identical. So these are going to join up perfectly in a minute. If they looked like this, it wouldn't be any good because you can say that if we take this point and try and join it up with this point, it's not going to join. So you will want to make sure that you have these two either above the line or below it so that they will join up really nicely. So I'll click okay. I'm going to make a duplicate of this line. I'm going to hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate away, I'll add the Shift key so that it's constrained to a vertical directions moving perfectly aligned. Select either both of these. Let's go to Blend tool. I'm going to click on the top most line, click on the bottom most line, double-click on the Blend tool, and then we can adjust our line. I'll choose specified steps and just create a few more of these lines, and click okay. Now there are a couple of things that we can do with these lines. So what I'm going to do is make a duplicate of the set so I can go two different directions just to show you some of the possibilities. Now with one of these sets of lines, I'm going to make a shape that I can use as an envelope distort. So I'm going to drag out a circle and I'm just going to remove this bottom point here. So click on it with the direct selection tool and press delete and then I'm going to re-select the whole line and choose object, path, join. So I have a solid path here. Now let's select the blend of lines and my path and choose object on envelope distort make with top object. We get this loop effect, and that can be a pattern brush. So I'm going to select it, opened the brushes panel, will choose new brush, pattern brush, okay. Again, because we're going to put this on a circle, it doesn't matter if you have these corner tiles or not, and so that's going to work just fine in earlier versions of Illustrator. I'll click okay. Let's have a look and see how that pattern brushes going to look. Got a circle here. Let's just remove the fill from it. Let's add a stroke. Now let's add a color for our stroke, let's go for a dark green this time. Now let's go and pick up our new brush. We've got this three-point brush. Well, we can just click on the options of selected object and start reducing this value. You want to make sure that preview is turned on until you get a look that you like. So you can do more or less of these shapes, just depending on what you like to see. You could of course just rotate a copy of this. So we could choose object transform, rotate, and in this case I'm going to rotate it around 30 degrees, but I'm going to make a copy so that I fill in the gaps. If I choose a different color for this second copy, I'm going to get something more interesting in the overlaps. Well, let's choose a blue. Let's just zoom in to say just making those wavy lines and then overlapping the brush effect with two shapes that are slightly rotated has given us a really interesting effect. They are really sophisticated, really intense lines, but made extremely simply. Now, this set of shapes can also be a pattern brush. So let's go and select them, and let's go and make a pattern brush from them. Now, this looks like a pretty boring brush, but it actually comes out quite nicely. Just click okay, remove this set of objects just up out of the ways. So I can go and create a circle about which we're going to place this brush. Then of course we're going to size it down so that we get something interesting out of it. We have this really interesting [inaudible] effect here. Now, if we went and took this blend and colored it, then we would have a colored brush, I'm just going to tack this out of the way. Let's go and get this set of lines back again for a minute. Now, I'm going to break into the blend. If I open up the last pallet, I've got a blend in here, which is here. Now the blend has these two lines, so we can go and select just one of these lines. With it selected, I'm going to apply a color to it. I'm going to apply a dark red color. Then with the second line, I'm going to select it and let's go and apply a dark blue color. So we have a blend from red to blue and I try thinking, I could probably use a richer red. So now that we've got that, let's go and make a brush out of that. Truly, let's make sure that we've got our entire blend selected. I don't want to make it out of just one line, so I have my blend selected. Now let's go and make this a pattern brush. We've got a very subtle transition here from red to blue across the brush that as being applied to this line. There's lots of things that you can do creating these gloss Effects. You can do them using blends, you can do them using transform tool. You can use the envelope distort. You can use pattern brushes to create them. Then you can just layer them on top of each too. There's nothing to say that you can't place one element on top of another to get some really nice stacked effects. 7. Pt 6 Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of these guilloche effects yourself. You can stack them on top of each other, you can recolor them, you can create them using any one of the features that we've had a look in this class. Post an image of your guilloche design as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Illustrator that you didn't know before. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a 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, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.