How To Design Sports Logos: Create Your Own Team Mascot

1. How to Design Sports Logos: My name is Fraser Davidson. I'm the owner of sports branding company Field Theory. I've created marks for brands, teams, and sports from all across the world, and my course is entitled; How to Design Sports Logos. I'll be taking you through the design process step-by-step, as well as explaining some of the theory behind logo creation. On my course, I'll be showing you how to design logos like these. Sign up today, and don't worry this stupid music is only for the promo. 2. Introduction: Hi there, welcome to my Skillshare class. My name is Fraser Davidson, I run sports branding site Field Theory. This class is titled, How To Design Sports Logos. In this first class, I'll be taking you through the processes and heuristics needed to create logos similar to these lion logos. I'll be breaking the tutorial into two main sections, the theory, in which we will discuss the techniques and heuristics that we should keep in mind throughout the process of creating a logo, and the process itself, a step-by-step guide through the creation of the logos. Let's begin. 3. Theory: This is the theory part of the tutorial. Before we start, I'm going to offer a little disclaimer. These are purely my thoughts on how to create this type of logo. These are not definitive or all inclusive. This is an art, not a science. So these rules are not hard and fast. But with that in mind, here are a few tips and guides to keep in mind while you're creating logos. We're going to refer back to them in the process, but I'm going to go through them now on and explain them briefly individually. When we create our curves, we're going to be using just two points, and use three types of curve. We're going to be using parabolic curves, which have two points and a single tangent or we're going to be using circle curves, which use two points and two tangents, I want you to make stronger, smoother, rounder curves, and finally, we're going to use two points with tangents going in the same direction to create smooth waves. We're going to be paying close attention to line consistency, meaning that when we create thickest strokes over our guide layers, we're going to be doing that using the same curves either side of the line and making sure that our lines stay consistent throughout the piece so that no one section of any line is smaller than around three times the size of the thickest line. We're going to apply the same concept to our negative space so that the areas between our strokes have the same consistency as the strokes themselves. We'll be looking at geometry and containing shapes, meaning that we'll be looking out and considering the overall shape of the logo whilst we're designing it, as well as perfect geometry that we can work into the design of the piece. Finally, we're going to pay attention to refinement, reduction, and simplicity. We do want to make sure that we're not using anymore vertices or lines than we need to in the piece so that we have simple smooth curves with minimal amount of geometry. We're going to refer back to these as we go through our process. 4. Introducing the Process: In the process section, we're going to go through a number of steps. I'll be breaking these down into a video for each step. First we are going to look at reference material and images. Then we're going to look at sketching with simple strokes. From the strokes will be creating bold lines and looking at negative space. We'll look at refining those lines, we'll look at shading and coloration and finally, presentation. 5. Reference Images: Okay so in the first part of the process, we're going to look at our reference images. I've chosen to create line logo for this course. Lions, tigers, and bears are the staple of any supposed logo designer's portfolio. I'd say around 30 to 40 percent of all teams fall into one of those three categories. So with regards to the pictures that I've taken, I've used images of statues for two reasons. One, it allows you to get around the front sides and have a constant pose, so you have a little bit more reference of these pictures. The other reason being, using sort of internet images has race issues for a course like this, so I've got a couple of different lines here, shows the statues around Trafalgar Square in Buckingham Palace that will work just as well as the images of real animals. You might want to start off following along with the images that I've used. Feel free to use the ones that I don't in this course. Obviously, when it comes to presenting your stuff on Scotia, it would be great to see lots of different logos from lots of different source material. But for this first logo, I'll be using this guy here front online. 6. Sketching with Simple Strokes: The first thing we're going to do is open a new Illustrator file. I've opened this one, saved it as a line drawing 1. I'm going to import our line image. It is probably going to be quite big. I want to scale him down. I want to keep him off to the side here. I'm going to crop him a little bit, and drawing a box around the part of the line that I want to draw, and then I just select both. Apple or Command, 7, Control, 7; and you'll be able to crop him down to a more manageable size. I'm going to call this layer Reference. I create a layer above it that we're going to draw on, which I will call Lion. Here we go. Now, the first thing we're going to do is create a simple illustration of the lion just using the lines of the face. We're going to pick out the lines in the face that aren't necessarily the areas with the most contrast. We're not going to try to draw these shapes at the moment, but we're trying to pick out lines like this line from his eyes all the way down to his muzzle, and the sort inside his mouth, the curve of these lips, and the shapes within the nose. They're going to be our important key lines that are going to make up the heavy stroke work of the rest of the logo. We're going to use just simple black lines here. Black lines, here we go. Now, you can choose to draw over the top of the line. I don't recommend that you do. We're just tracing this, but in order to get the proportions right of the face, you might find that easier than drawing to the side. I'm going to start off, I'm going to just get this muzzle shape in place, and then I'm going to take this illustration off to the side. I'm going to get this long curve down here and I'm going to create that shape there. I'm going to make these a little bit more curved, I'm going to make his eyes a little wider there. I'm going to thicken these lines. We're going to start by drawing only half the face and then flipping it over to the other side so that where it's going to be a mirror image because this guy's symmetrical. Obviously, that's not the case if you're drawing something asymmetrical or one of the reference images that uses a three-quarter face. But otherwise, it's the same principle what we're using in a moment. Again, we're using these very basic lines. This first one is the wave, two opposite tangents. We want both tangents extended and creating a broad curve here. I don't want little knobby knee, these nasty little twists at the end of lines, you want really broad curves. The same with this big one here, another wave stroke. So two opposite tangents. The next thing I'm going to do is try and get this line here from the edge of the nose down into the mouth. Again, another one of these wave curves from here and it might be we factor in this little curve here and bring that all the way down to the corner of the mouth. I'm going to try to simplify this mark here as much as possible when it comes to the lips because there's obviously extremely fiddly in here, but we just want to get this long arching shape. Where the lip comes back around, we're going to create another wave stroke. There we go. It's just tucking in around there. Under the muzzle, you may need to put third tendon in this one. I'm not sure if it's going to quite work with two. We want this kind of a shape where the lip curls around. Yeah, I think what we're going to need to do here is curve a little bit more like that. We just have to double back on ourselves. We've got that kind of a shape. We're going to get this chin shape in flat across the bottom. I'm using our strokes here, again, with our long tangents, but I don't want it to be a total curve like that. I'm going to start off heading down and in, and kick out. We've got another wave stroke there, getting his teeth in here. For this, I'm just going to use a single tangent parabola lines. If you look, we want the tangent really to be extending to somewhere around the center of the line, so we get a really nice curve here rather than pulling it like this and we get a slightly tweaked curve at the end. We want this thing going on. On the outside, on the other side of the tooth here, we want to use the same type of curve. What I'm saying is, when we have a curve that uses a tangent like this, the curve that's creating the point or spike, or tooth, or whatever it's going to be, piece of main or rough, we want that to be the same shape, we want it to be the same single tangent line. Conversely, if we're using a line that needs to be a little bit more curved around and you have to use two tangents, we don't want the other side to use a single tangent because you get these slightly awkward shapes. You're going to want to use two tangents here. You get nice consistent shapes inside the curves. I want to put in this other tooth here and this hide behind the first teeth. Are meshed together very closely, so I'm going to use a little bit of artistic license here. I'm going to put them slightly over to this side, the outside teeth to the side of the smaller teeth, and it should probably be a little bit bigger really. There we go. Now, we want to get these interesting shapes inside the nose here, but we're going to do it with lines again with simplifying everything down to very very simple strokes. I'm going to use a circle curve here with two tangents and instead of rejoins this line here, I'm going to just have it and you just curve down like that for the moment. Now, they aren't necessarily, some Some these lines aren't going to be necessarily as I said earlier like the sections of the features that have most contrast but if you look carefully, you really see these strong cheekbones, you see the highlights in the cheekbones. You get a sense of line here coming down and I'm going to couple of these maybe. This line here comes and joins the muzzle, you get this nice triangle. The shapes in here that we want to feature and you can see this line is tighter up here. We've got a long line down here that's within shadow, but the up facing section of the cheek that creates this highlight is tighter. We're going to have that feature there and let's get some eyes in. Again, I'm going to use a little bit of creative license here. They're not especially fierce looking eyes, it looks dopey. I'm going to use a wave here. Rather than them being dopey, friendly eyes, I'm going to have them narrow down. You guys obviously can't smell this, but my dog who sat underneath me has just done the most revolting fart. Jesus Christ, molly. She's walked away in shame. There we go. We're using a lot of license with the psi here and we're keeping it extremely simple, to be a little bit bigger. I think actually, I'm going to have this line that we've created the eyebrows it will be a little bit more downturned, again, making him look a little bit grumpier. We've got these kind of interesting shapes and the foreheads creating here. I might just keep it like that and these help create this parsing, this beginning of the mane. I'm just going to follow them around here like that. There we go. I think in terms the features, we really just want to concentrate on the core features that's probably it. What we're going to do is make sure that all these points that are right at the end here are aligned, so we're going to use the Align tool. Let me just grab the points and not the whole line. I'm going to group these together, so Object Group. I'm going to copy and paste. Again, I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste in front, so this piece right over the top of our original. You can see there. Then I'm going to transform and I'm going to reflect him vertically. Now, we should have both sides of his head there, and it's going to look a little bit out at first. But if take him, he should have some semblance. You can see how we're starting to build up the key lines in there. You can see how the shadows here fit into between these two strokes, how the muscles and the nose incorporated in these shapes that we've got here. Eyes might be a little bit high. Let me bring them down less smudge. We simplified the mouth and you can see in here the lips and we've got the teeth in roughly in place. Now, in terms of the mane and we discussed in the theory part of the course, I'm going to use some geometric shapes to create elements of this logo. For the mane, I'm just going to use a giant, really big oval there. That's going to make up the majority of our logo, and there's not a lot going on inside at the moment really. It might be that we add some lines to that later using the shadowing or perhaps when we're drawing the main key strokes. But for the moment, I'm just going to leave it empty. Although I do want to get in these ears and they are semi buried. There are any very slight. I'm going to create these little nub in triangles. This is buried by the hair. I'm just going to keep them like this for the moment. Again, grouping that, copying and pasting it, flipping it, popping onto the side. You might find you add little bits like this across your logo and we want to keep them all aligned. We're going to group all the elements. We've got the head, the mane, and the ears or groups individually now. I'm just going to use the Align tool, and that's going to make sure that if they're off center like this, then this is perfectly symmetrical. There we go. 7. Bold Lines and Negative Space: Now we've gotten the main lines of our face and we've set up this big, attractively curved containing shape for our final logo. We're going to start making the major decisions of the piece and start creating our thick strokes. What we're going to do is we're going to take our reference drawing here, make sure everything's grouped. "Object" the whole thing is collected together. We're going to knock this back to about 20 percent, so it's just faint in the background there. What you're going to want to do is lock that, so you're not interfering with your illustration over the top. "Objects" if you want to lock it, that just means that when you "Object", "Lock" I've changed it. Apple+2, use shortcuts. That just means when you're drawing over the top of the line, you're not going to interfere with it or get your strokes mixed up. Referring back to the reference again, we're going to start creating some really thick lines here. We're going to do that by drawing around what we've already got. We're using the same principles as before in terms of the type of lines we're using. As we went through in the theory, and then we went through, again, when we were drawing our background sketch. Really simple lines, two tangents. We wanted two tangents. This time the inside and outside, we want to use the same types of lines, so we get nice consistency inside them. There we go. You don't need to be too precious at this point, we're going to go through a number of phases and refinement. You'll see these very dark areas around the eyes, these dark circles in the areas where the [inaudible] fold over them. I'm going to draw some single parabolas there. I think this is also close, that it's all going to fall inside this big black stroke. We don't want it to be too fiddly, if you're finding the lines are close to each other, create [inaudible] eyebrow there. you're finding that lines are close to each other, just fold the shapes in together like I've done here. These number are very close lined now, become this one big shape. It's a little bit fiddly up here, I might come back to that later. But for now, I'm just going to move on. Don't need to be too precious initially. These two lines here, now you can see this big black swathe of shadow underneath the cheekbone. We're going to copy that and use these two lines as the outlined for unused stroke. There we go. Now, let's have a look at our nose. We've got this line that we've created earlier, but we want to work in the very, very dark shadow inside the nostril. You can see towards the top of the nose here, we lose any sense of separating line, so we're going to leave that white and just create stroke inside the nose here. That maybe, that's going to be our big underlined bit, and I've simplified it a bit here, you've got a little bit of slightly more intricate lines. But I've, again, simplified everything down to a very, very smooth curve. Inside the nose, we want to draw these nostrils. Going to use two tangents here because we are creating a very extreme rounded curve, and then those curves back together and other circles. What I'm going to do here, I'm going to add a nice little curve that finishes flat, so that when we join this and the other side together, we've got a nice flat tangent. You'll see how that will meet another flat tangent, creating a perfect curve inside there. There we go. Now I think that the mouth is going to be best just to draw the whole thing in. Let's create this really big upper lip, have that match the lower lip here. Again, I want to use my flat. If you hold Shift, then you'll create tangents of 45 degrees, 90 degrees, or zero degrees there. Again, hold Shift and you'll get straight lines. We're going to come straight up here. I'm just going to move these bits back in here. We want all these lines to align, so we're going to use the align tool. Select all our points with the direct selection tool, put them together. Might be a little bit far to the right now, so I'm just going to select them all again and use the direction pad to tap them back. What we're going to want to do here is emphasize this curve of the lip. I'm going to redraw this line like that. Then over the top of it, I'm going to draw another thick curve like we've done and everything else there. So we just get a sense that these lip's folding over. I think it's best that we now do this other side of the lip. Again, because it's such a big curve that doubles back on itself, we might need to use an extra point in here to create these two lines. A bit ugly at the moment, so we're going to need to make our tangents longer, make our line a bit thicker. Again, we're using the same one, two, three points. One, two, three points on the inside and outside. We want this to progressively get thicker. We want this part of the line here to gradually widen. At the moment, it's a little bit awkward, so it might need to get wider. These tangents might need to get thicker towards the back of the line, give us a nice pleasing shape. We don't want to get too close. Again, for the first time, instead of referring to the negative space, we want to consider this line inside the lip, as well as the one outside it. I'm going to make sure that's nice and thick there, and get these curves looking a little bit nicer. You might need to play around with them for a while to get them looking exactly how you want. There we go, starting to work into it. It feels now like it's joining up with this line here. We might want to emphasize that a little bit by tucking these tangents into match the curve of this bottom lip. Now, I haven't drawn the line of the chin, especially. So what I'm going to do is try and get some of this sense of rough, shaggy fur in here by just creating a couple of spikes of hair. Again, I'm going to use the Shift button to make sure this line is flat, and we'll realign it with everything in a second. I'm going to need to see the inside of this curve, I'm just using single tangent parabolas. There we go. I want to get a sense of this, slight under the lip here, so I'm going to create tiny little [inaudible] like so. Again, we want all these lines to align with each other. I'm just going to use the horizontal [inaudible]. There we go. Now, this hairline here, it's a bit of a strange. [inaudible] looking he's got here. We're going to interpret this a little bit and I'm going to give him a center parsing that's not going to go all the way around the face. Now, this tape is a bit too much. We don't want any lines that really feel very fine at the end. We want them to have a chunkiness to them and a consistency that makes them feel all part of the same, as if we've drawn with the same width pen in a way. I don't want it too skinny at the end, so that should work. As we did with the shaggy hair on his chin, I'm going to do the same but using the nice shape that we created earlier, I'm going to use that as a guide to draw some rough little spikes of hair. Again, using simple parabolas with tangents right in the middle. I'm going to follow our lines around here using the oval as a guide. Let me get to the bottom. I'm going to leave that spikely pointed. So we've got a crest shape at the bottom. Again, we want to do exactly the same on the inside using the same types of curves, so we get a nice consistency of line. Single tangents. Could we ignore the ear for the moment? It's going to come up like this and then just work in this little tuft. There we go. A little bit awkward here you can see this line attenuating in a way that looks a bit nasty. We want to poke this up, and you can see the problem is, my tangents aren't quite central. One's a little bit low, one's a little bit high. There we go, we're starting to get a more even line there. I want to just have this line thick and a bit at the bottom. Put tangents nice and equal, nice and centered. There we go, it's a bit better. Now, we're going to need to work in this ear. It's work out and we're going to do that. It's going to consider point here, is going to pop out. Getting some nasty little areas in here, they're all a bit close, and so we might need to come back and sort them later, but for the moment we're not going to be too critical. I'm going to try and just for the inside of the ear here. I need to extend this line. So very simple lines and what we want to do, I'm going to draw a little white square in here for the moment, a white triangle to create this shape of the top of the ear, you can see, so you get this little bit of highlight here. That's going to make up for the upper shape of our ear. I'm going to grab my black line and I'm going to go Apple X and then F, and that's just going to bring it to the front, pop it in front of our white line. That's obscuring our main edge. I'm going to play about with this until these lines start to feel like they're part of the whole of what we've got already. You can see this tangent is a bit sloppy. It's not in the middle. You want to bring that in there. This one's too long, too near the end, so I'm just going to bring that back. There we guess, some hinting at an ear there. I think we're going to come back to that, but for the moment I'm going to leave it. The very last thing we're going to do here is we're going to get our teeth in. I'm going to use the white that we've used here to create these blocking shapes. Because this is all so close, I'm not sure if I'm going to try and create these on the inside of the mouth. Have them come from the negative space into the mouth. I think maybe I l like him like this. It feels like these are almost touching the bottom of the lip here. So it makes sense to have them just come straight in from the lip. Now, it's not going to be the case for this tooth at the top because it's obscured by this shadow. I'm going to do that is have this again. Tooth area, I'm going to have him. Now here, I'm going to use parabola on the inside, but I'm going to use a really wide two-tangent curve on the top to create this shape here. Going against all the advice I've given so far. Well, rules are made to be broken. There we go. We've got very simple teeth that work with the rest of what we've got going on in the line so far, and just have this nice width between them that looks like consistent with the widths that we've got everywhere else. We've got nice negative space going on. There we go, that's one side of our lion. What we're going to do, I'm going to group all of this, I'm going to make sure all these points down the center are aligned. You're going to need to use this tool for that, the direct select tool. This just selects points rather than lines, and we're going to make sure we have aligned all of those. We going to Control, Apple C and then Control, Apple F. Paste another second version in front of the first. I'm going to transform and reflect that. There we go. Now, we're going actually align these properly. What we're going to do is we're going to open up our line console here. You might need to double tap that a few times, and we're going to go to our distribute spacing and we're going to go align to Key object, and that's just going to give us an alignment that allows you to align the shapes relative to each other rather than anything else. Then we're just going to go horizontal distribution space. This should be zero, so we want no space between them. There we go. Now, we've aligned them. I'm just going to group these, so Apple, Control-G. There we go, we're starting to get aligned. I've left off this little awkward knob here because it feels a little bit out of place with the rest of the line for the moment, but everything else you can see we've outlined all of our strokes. They're all playing a part in these shapes that we've created so far. This is our rough logo in place. 8. Refining: Now, that we've got our rough, what we're going to do is start refining this and really working into it to get a final finished, polished logo that has consistency throughout it. At this point, we can get rid of original line drawing. I'm going to "Unlock All" and that should free that up and we can either move that or delete it. You might want to keep that for the end so that you can see your process. But I'm going to move this down and also screen it. We're not going to be using it. Now, you can just tweak each line, but I prefer to redraw everything from scratch each time we do an iteration. It means that you get to refine things down, remove superfluous points, all this stuff over and over again. I'm going to make this 20 again. Let me go 20 percent opacity. We get toward the top of it, and I'm going to again object "Lock" a "Selection" or Apple Control 2. I guess we can draw back over the top of it. We've got a few areas of the logo at the moment that aren't quite feeling right. I think the nose feels a little bit too strong. We've got these tight, bunched, [inaudible] sprigs of hair at the top here. The ears aren't specially recognizable at present and they feel they're clipping in here with this stuff with a second element of them making this outline looks shaggy. We've got some big areas inside the cheeks that could probably do the filling out a bit with some other elements that hint at hair. We're going to start from what we did before at the beginning. I'm going to start working with the eyes, and we're going to try and they feel a little bit delicate in here at the moment relative to the rest of the piece. You've got these really thick chunky lines here. What we're going to do is start off by just making these feel even thicker. Again, we're in refinement mode now, so we're really looking to use minimal points, very simple tangents and vertices. I'm going to make this inner line here a little bit thicker, and this feels a little bit complex here at the moment as well. I think what we want is to have this muzzle really protrude so that it feels our cheekbones are crossing it. I'm going to have that stick right out. Here we go, I think these are the eyes a little bit thicker. Eyebrows are little bit more curve now. Now, this line here, we mentioned earlier, it feels like it flows together, but it's a little bit awkward at the top here. It doesn't quite feel it's flowing into this line here. The way we're going to adjust that is by actually joining the two lines together with a couple of curves, and I don't know if that's going to quite work, but let's see, we could probably do that. We can make that all hang together. Again, we're going to use the same kind of curves on the outside, this in the inside. Exactly the same points. Little bit awkward at the moment. We'll get this feeling nice and smooth, and this one could bring this a little bit tighter here in the middle so that we get there. We really feel these muscle bulging out in front of it. Then finally, I'm going to keep this a little bit neater and thinner so that it feels part of the same extended line down to these lips. That's just a serendipitous thing. I don't think there's necessarily any physical structure that means that the cheeks are tied to the lips like this. But it just gives us a nice interesting little piece of geometry that makes the logo feel flowing and cohesive and smooth. I'm going to fiddle around with this for a little bit and get these curves nice and equally the side and flowing. This is probably a little bit long at the moment. There we go, and we can reverse this out. Now, this leaves a little less room inside here in the mouth, so we might shrink the mouth just a tiny amount and start down here. I think what we're going to do, this point here feels a little bit like we're missing a trick here. This feels like it should integrate as part of its own curve. what I'm going to do is, I'm going to change the way we've drawn this and I'm going to put this second two tangent a second point here. What we can do is have another curve that works its way up to our nose, like that. Again, we're just using these little elements of serendipity to create a more cohesive logo. I'm going to have this stuck in here. Now, the nostrils feel a little bit too dominant. I'm going to try hole out just this little edge here that comes around from the side. I'm going to have them come down here, uses single tangent here. No, actually I'm going to need to use a double tangent. You can see with a single tangent, you get a slightly awkward curve between these when we're using a double tangent at the other end. We've got a point there, we've got a tangent here and a tangent here creating this curve, and this single tangent feels a little bit awkward. The stroke isn't quite expanding. The space between isn't quite expanding smoothly. I'm going to use the same two strokes, and I'm going to hole out this little flare of the nostril, and this background. Rather than have a curve that we've got at the moment, use this point here. You have this sharper point come down into the nose. I'm going to have that, and that makes it feel now this curve has a natural ending where it meets the base of the nose. I'm going to come down here. Again, what I'm going to do, I'm going to connect this together, and I'm going to draw the lips separately. It might just be a little bit close here at the moment. Negative space isn't quite extensive enough. It feels a little bit too tight. What I'm going to do is just give ourselves a little bit more room at the beginning of the mouth, and then make sure that this line here is exactly the same either way. It just means that there's space in here where between the lip fold and the muzzle has a little bit more room to breathe. Make sure all these dots fit together, are aligned properly, and I'm going to flip that out. We're going to put the teeth back in. I mean now, it's quite happy with what they were, to be honest. I think I'm going to use them as a reference here. Here we go. Breaking the rules using two tangents on the outside, one on the inside, but it gives us an interesting shape here. it's just two lines to create the teeth. We don't want any more points than that, two lines, two points. This bottom tooth might be that we can make it flow into the jaw line, but perhaps not. I'm sure the tangents are in the middle again, got a nice space between them. It might be that we want this line here and this line here to feel a bit more parallel. Let's reverse these out and then make these two guys white. Here we go, might bring down this forehead slightly. It feels a little bit too high at the moment. I'm going to give it a bit more of a wave to his hair. Same stroke on the outside as on the inside. I think that's nice and thick, and make sure it doesn't taper too sharply not to feel coherent. Again, we want all these lines to align down the center of the face. I'm going to redo this bottom lip; it's a little bit thin. We want it to feel exactly like the kind of strokes we're using everywhere else. Again, make sure it's aligned. That chin's fitting a little bit thin at the moment, and this stroke is curving out at the bottom and this one curving back in. What I might do is have them both curve in so it feels like the face is tapering nicely. Using shifts to make sure this line is perfectly due north of the last one. Again, single tangent curves, tangents in the middle. You might want to think about the area underneath, this later point is going to be very dark and shadowed. So where you've got a significant shadow you can make these lines really dense and thick, and that helps to bring out that idea that this is the end of the face. This is the bottom of the face, this is where the neck starts. As I said, these lines up here are a little bit bunched up and close together, so I'm going to spread this tuft, and after we weigh, give each of them a little bit more room to breathe. The other thing is here it's a little bit bunched up with this tuft here, so I'm going to do a couple of things. I might move the ears up slightly, but I'm also going to bring this curve and this zigzag back up and back out, slow it, down slightly, just so that we're not bunched up, we've got a nice consistency throughout. Everything's got room to breathe. I'm pretty happy with everything else there, so I'm going to just make that bottom line really dense and thick. It draws the eye up and it helps emphasize that this is an area of darker, something obscured and shadowed fur. Again, I'm going to draw this without the ear to begin with, but we're going to leave this slightly darker area in. Stick a stroke. I'm going to create the outline zigzag first and give all these tufts a little bit more room to breathe. Again, thinner at the top. Where we don't have shadow, we've got a lot more light, and I made a curve there where I want a flat line. So I'm just going to join these two points again. They're not going to be quite straight, so what I sometimes do is drag these to the side and then align these to the right, and it'll bring them back perfectly in line, and it should keep your curves nice and smooth. I'll do the same at the bottom. I'll drag it out the way, select these points so that when it comes back, when we align right, they're going to line up perfectly in the right place. There we go. Now I'm going to bring the ears up a little bit. I have to cross this line of fur, so I'm going to bring them down. I'm going to have the base of the ear match this shaggy zigzag here. For starters, let's just start off with the big black region for the ear. I'm then going to draw in a little bit of highlight. I'm going to reverse this out so we can see what we're doing when we draw the highlight, but I'm going to copy and paste the mane in place. You can see here I've pasted in front another version of the mane and I'm going to select the ear. I'm going to pathfinder and I'm going to divide them, have them all split up, and what that's going to allow me to do is if I select the parts I want now before hitting delete, it's going to mean that I get rid of all of those bits that are cropping, that are sticking outside the line. Now the ear fits perfectly inside the space that we've already created, and that's going to allow me now to draw in white. Again, a bit of negative space and we're going to draw in the highlight to the top of the ear. I might just have that fall down. We wait it so we see just a smidgen of the inside of the ear there. Again, same kind of tangents. Now we've got a nice geometric simple layer that fits a bit nicer with the fur around it now. Let's make sure one more time that all these points here are aligned. I'm going to group them together. I'm going to control C and control F. Just paste in front, so we've got two versions. I'm going to transform this top version, reflect it, and select them both now. I'm going to align to key objects and have our distribute spacing set to zero, and just make sure those are perfectly set together. Then I'm going to group that. As I said earlier, we've got this space in here that still a little bit unused and we're not getting a sense of shadowing around the side of the head where all the fur is, so I'm going to draw in a couple of stripes of shadow. I'm going to make them try and fit with this outline that we've got here. So I'm going to have one that looks like that. It's not quite working at the moment. We're going to pull that up so our lines are a little bit more aligned. That's starting to feel like this negative space is a bit more even. Pull this down a little way. This is tapering a bit much at the moment for my liking, so I'm going to just pull the tangent down so it's a little bit thicker at the bottom and thicken the line up. That helps fill in our space and hint at this fur. Again, I'm going to reflect this and drag it across. I'm going to select them both and group them together, so that when I select my two cheeks and the face and I distribute them in the middle, I align them centrally, and everything's going to be perfectly symmetrical. You can test this. We're going to transform and reflect, and if you see no noticeable difference in the reflection, then it's perfectly symmetrical. Now we've got a much more refined lion, with nice thick strokes, much more uniform than previously and we've filled in some of these problem areas and we've distributed the hair nicely. We've got the chin's feeling a bit stronger, but more regal. We're about ready to start thinking about our shadowing and highlighting. So once you've been through this process and you're happy with the look of your lion or logo, what you're going to want to do is get rid of our reference underneath. You'll notice that the logo is made up of white and black elements and they're all grouped, and there's lots of joins that are visible down the middle. You can see where the joints were. At present what we've got is a logo made up of lots of different black and white elements, and we want to get a single black element out of this. We're going to fuse all these individual objects into one final logo object. The way we're going to do that is we're going to use merge, selecting everything, and that's going to merge all our black bits together and it's going to leave us with white bits. Now unfortunately, what it also does is it creates shapes inside the ones that you've got. So it's important while you have everything selected to then color everything black. You'll see that we've got this shape the illustrator has handily created for us. The inside turned these two white shapes to black, and it's done the same with the elements inside our mouth, so we delete all of these things. What you should be left with is a single black outline. Now we have a black version of our logo, just with the lines. Everything else should be transparent so that we can see all the way through it, ready for coloring. Now, if you want to stop it from moving around, and individual elements like this slipping about if you accidentally touch them with the direct selection tool, what you can do, select your group and objects, create a compound path in mane to turn that black again. What that does is when you select any element of the object, everything is selected. So there is no one part of it that can be moved independent of the others. 9. Shading and Coloration: The fun stage of this, is we are going to create a layer for our color and shading. I'm going to call that color, and I'm going to lock both the lion and the reference layer, so we'll only be drawing on the one layer. I'm going to pick a nice red, and I'm just going to fill in the whole head with the pen tool. This is going to be a base layer. Now we've got our red line. I'm going to start adding a few details in. The first thing I'm going to do is add the teeth in white here. I'm just going to dip below the lip there a little bit, and I'm going to flip that. Have the same thing on the other side, and I'm going to group them so that when we align the piece at the end, that all stays in the middle. Now, what I might do, is add just a little highlight on the lips. As if it's shining. Wet lips, there we go. I might do the same on the nose. Again, when we align these, these will all become central. There we go. We've just got these major highlights on the lips, nose, and teeth. Now we're going to use some more subtle highlights to create the rest of the highlights of the lion, and also add in some elements of detail. We want to work in some sense that this is fur around him. We want to pick up the highlights on his chin to show that's jutting out. We want to pick up the highlights in the cheekbones, and we want to get in some of these details show this strange divot in his forehead, where the two sides of his brow meet. We can pick up some nice highlights around the nose here, and these whisker marks on the muzzle. We're using the same method as we did before. We're going to pick a slightly lighter color than the base layer. I'm going to start in the usual place, around the eyes. I'm going to pick up this big, broad highlight above the eyes here, and bring that down. I think make this line quite curved. We want to make sure we've got plenty of room either side in this negative space here, always mindful of that. Then we're going to have this big forehead divot in here. We're not going to have this underneath the hair here, I'm going to move this up, because just where this hair meets the brow, we have a little bit of a shadow, as if the light was coming from above. It's not going to go quite up that high. I'm going to move this up. Again, making sure that this line is equidistant between the two black lines here. This point I'm going to make the reference a little bit smaller, so we can see it the whole time. There we go. Lock that again. His nose is very dark, so we're going to have the highlight extend down to this very sharp bit of specular. But we're going to have it just come down inside the nostrils, so we pick up this nice little highlight here. Then you're going to pick up this nice highlight here as well, and I think we're going to start working in some of these whisker lines on the muzzle. I'm going to just hint at them here. These fine little strokes, and I'm going to have them curl around, making sure they curl around right to the edge. I think I might need this, a double tangent to the line here. Get that to come around. Now he's got a little bit of a dark line on the inside of the nose here, where the muzzle curves around, so we're just going to dip in here a bit, and then have this line curve up towards the brow, so that we catch this little low light in here, where our eyes meet the muzzle. There we go, using very simple shapes again. Bring this up to the top. Move this center line just across the smudge. There we go. Again, keeping our lines equidistant of the artwork that we already have, so that we've got instead of staying out the way, and maintaining nice negative space. We're just hinting the features of the face narrowly. We're not trying to capture everything. We're just trying to make sure that we hint highlights and low lights so where this highlight tapers off around the muzzle, it does exactly the same thing here. I want to capture some of these highlights on the lips here. I'm going to be picking up this highlight on the bottom lip, and then I'll have that join underneath our little bit of specular light there. We push them up to the front. Once it gets some of this chin highlights in, I'm not going to bring it all the way across. I'm going to use a little bit of artistic license here and just have it sit in the middle of the face. I think it's a little bit complex to go all the way to the side. So again, I'm just going to maintain nice space in the middle, give it our artwork lots of breathing room, have some nice negative space and just use a little bit of that. Next, I'm going to try and simplify all this right down to really just using triangle of highlights on his cheek bones here. Here we go. Above the fold of his hair, I'm going to have a bit of a pilot that's going to draw some of this artwork together here. So I'm going to work in some of these tufts. Here we go. Again. So make sure that it's able to reflect across the middle, and I'm going to bring in some highlight for his ear here. So the top half of the ear, the edge of the main get a little bit of highlight. Again, we want the line to bisect the space here so we're not too close to any one part of the existing artwork, and I'm going to give him a highlight around the edge of the mane. Again, making sure that we stay equidistant from some of these existing bits of artwork. Again, using some new angles to tie existing lines together slightly. So there we go. So nice. A long highlight there. I might have one fill in some of this space here, again, leaving room to breathe for the existing artwork. I think we're getting there really. What I might do is just we've got these nice little highlights on the inside of the nose here. While we're referring back to the original piece of reference material, we're at a point now where we're more creating a logo than something that's very representative of the original piece. We're just using it for reference so I'm just going to keep those nice little highlight there. I think we're about ready to flip these over. I'm just going to bring this one down so it's a little bit flatter across. So I'm going to make sure these two elements are aligned, and then I'm going to look them for a second. So Apple too, so that I can lock the background red, and then I can just select all these points on the artwork, on the highlights that we've just created, and use our aligned tool so now you're going to see them move there. I've got a bit of a problem with this one, I've got a bit of a rogue keyframes who I'm going to do is just use the Pathfinder to crop off that little edge there. Now, when we select everything except for the white, should all line up. So I'm going to group all of that stuff. So Apple G, and it might pop to the front in front of some of the other elements there, but we can select that in a second. I'm going To control C, Control F to paste in front, and I'm going to reflect, it's across the middle. Again, we want to use the align tool to align two objects, zero pixel spacing and the distribution, and then lock them together. If we unlock everything now, what we can do is select the red and the pink and we want to send these behind till the teeth and little highlights that we've created here. So I'm going go arrange and send all that to the back. That would just mean it'll send it back behind our white teeth. If I've done everything correctly, when I select everything now, I'm going to unlock my original black artwork, select everything, I should be able to align everything and have it all fit in place. My teeth have come undone so I have to reposition them, and then I'll group them together and do the same again, just align everything centrally. Then finally, because everything's on different layers, I'm going to select everything in group it, and that'll just bring everything onto the one layer there. Then we have a final piece of artwork that's shaded. Now, the only thing left to do is give the liner key line, so I'm going to drag them onto the gray so we can see what we're doing here, or you can place another color behind them. Now, what you can do is use the stroke tool, so I'm going to copy, and again, paste in front, Apple C, Apple F, Control C, Control F, and that just gives us new version of the line, and I'm going to use the Pathfinder tool, and I'm going to use this one. It's unite. If I select that, it's going to compress all the objects down to a single object with the outline, and I'm going to make this outline white. So let's make it a stroke. We want this to sit behind our artwork, so I'm going to again use the arrange function to send that line to the back, and I'm going to go into stroke and adjust our weight so that it's really nice and thick, and it has that traditional sports logo heavy white key line. Now, the problem with Illustrator key lines is that you get these nasty little ends to the corners. So unfortunately, the curve doesn't carry through at a certain point. The curve stops and these lines are straight at the end. So what we're going to do, we're going to unlock everything. I'm going to look at the stuff at our fronts. So all I'm selecting now is the key line behind it, and I'm going to knock that write back, and we're just going to use it as a guide for a proper hand-drawn key line so that we can avoid these nasty little scabby ends and corners. So again, starting from the center, I'm just going to use that line as a basis for my own hand-drawn key line, which is going to have proper curves in it. You might decide that you want the thickness to increase towards the bottom of the object just to give it a little bit more dynamism, or might want to add a little extra width on the edge of some of these, just re-emphasize these points. One last one. There we go. Again, I'm going to select these two points to make sure that absolutely vertically parallel using the Align Tool, and I'm going to paste in front, so we've got two versions of that line, and their transform reflect it. Select both. You're going to get extremely good at this thing because a lot of this relies heavily on transforming, reflecting, and then binding objects together. We're going to align to key objects. There we go. They're are aligned together, and then we're going to use the Pathfinder tool and select. That's not quite done it there. So what we'd do is select these key points again, use the align tool, align them, and then we should be able to unite the two. God damn it. It's a curve, that's why. So if I unite them now, there we go. We have a single object. Excuse, my mistake. It's just a slight curve in the geometry there, so I've got rid of that, and then get rid of my original line, at least my old line in front of them, and then we go one last time. I'm going to use the align tool, align center, and make sure our keystroke is definitely around our line. There we go. What I might do is one last finishing touch is just give them him hint of eyeballs because they're' really stuck down there in the shadows. Just having these tiny little dots hinted the reflections on his eyes. Just so we get a sense that, I'm going to bring them ever so slightly close together. Then I use the align function one last time. There we go. So we've got those two little tiny dots in there to hint into the eyes, and there we go. There's our finished lion. Oh, my God. 10. Process Recap: I'm conscious that in showing you the process of the first line, it's very easy to learn how to bake one logo. I wanted to go through the process of second logo and just talk a little bit about it as I've got the footage here sped up so that we can look in general the principles in action. This is the line from the side, and we're going to go through points 2-5. From the creating outlines of the main features through to the shading and the highlights at the end. Again, you can see in this sped up piece of footage here, I'm just tracing out the main parts of the face, the sections that really stick out although they may not be the most necessarily intricate sections like the mouth and the eye, we're getting the broad shapes of the muscle and the cheekbones and getting some semblance of the main in place. You can see that I'm using a little bit of artistic license with the main. Again, using the perfect geometry of the circle to create a crest logo here. Using those three circles, we're going to generate an outline containing shape for the Lion. Again, here we're using more circles to create the nape of the neck. Just to give those elements are real sense of visual purpose. They feel like they're supposed to be there, they're supposed to be in place. We're going to take the initial sketch now, knock it back to 20 percent and start growing over the top of it to create our bold lines. Again, this is all about using those strong tangents, few vertices, making really purposeful marks. I've broken this down into sections so you can see I'm creating each line at a time. The bridge of the nose is separate to the brow and the element leading on to the main. That means it's easier to fiddle around and tweak them if they're not all part of the same shape. Again, we've got the idea here that the next going to use this perfect circle geometry to take us into the bottom of the crest shape. You'll see how later in the video I tweak some of these earlier marks. These are really just a rough sketch in a way. We're just getting in the idea of how thick, how dense these lines are, where these shadows are, where these major landmarks on the logo, on the lines face are so that we can start to get a sense of place within the logo. We know that when we come back and start to tweak and perfect these things that are negative space. The areas between some of these shapes that we're making can be tweaked and perfected. You'll see that the I there at the moment is a little bit close to the brown the head, there's quite a narrow bottleneck where it passes were white line that passes between the two. At this section, I'm just very roughly creating my own circle shape in here, tracing over the shapes I have created in the line drawing. I'm going to come back to that when we come to refine the shapes so you can see how we do that. Again, these lines in the main, they're the less important lines in terms of facial structure, but they're really big, thick, and dense lines because we want to fill that space and really get a sense that there's some texture in there. Again, I'm fiddling around with the ear at this point, trying to get that right. They're often quite tricky elements of logos is, so you'll see at the moment is quite rough. But when we come to refine it, we start using some of these circle shapes again to create nicer, more appealing shapes. I'm just reiterating the crest shape here. Starting to use the stroke function to create the inside and outside of this line. There we go. You begin to get a sense here of which lines are working, which are too thin, which are too thick so that when we come into the refinements section, we really know what we're looking to do. Here, this line is quite inconsistent at the moment. I've decided this point of that bottleneck of there between the I and the brow is a bit thin, so we're going to fold the two shapes into each other. Again, lots of simple lines and it's a little bit fiddly between the nose and the bridge of the muzzle there. I've created a little bit more space between them, broaden those down slightly. This is all a bit of fiddling around here. I'm going to come back to that and just finish off creating this shape. Making some of these lines denser, making sure they fit together nicely and just refining and refining those edges. Here, we're starting to build using the geometric shapes and the pathfinder. I spoke a little bit about the Pathfinder and the divide function to be able to cut up these shapes to create sorted lines. What I'm trying to do is you create a nice curve into the very bottom of the logo there. I'm going to create a number of shapes that I can split up and delete using the divide function. Again, some quite fiddly bottlenecks inside that shape there around the lips. I'm just going to thicken those negative spaces up. It's a little bit more space between the bottom of the mouth there and that hanging lip. It felt at this point that this section felt slightly contrived. I'm simplifying those two lines there. It just bisecting a nice circle. You'll see the line that we've navigated the useful to the left of that strip of main. Now, that goes into the ear is going to become more important with regard to how that attaches to the ear. I'm just adding some very fine detail there in the eye. But again, trying to make sure that little shape fits with the rest of the look of the piece. It's very fine that it's not too fiddly. Very simple, just the beginning and back of the eye with bisected by the pupil. Here again, we're using the pathfinder shape to try and create some space here in the ear. Something that's a little less contrived really feels a bit more interesting geometrically in a bit softer in a sense. There I am dividing, and then splitting all the layers apart and deleting what we don't need. I'm just reiterating some of these strokes, I think at this point I decided that they were a little bit too thick right by the ears. They now they taper that the flow from the thinner geometry into the thicker geometry is a bit less jarring. There's a little bit of space there so I'm filling that. Again, coming back into do the teeth. This is done much the same way as the teeth in the main line that we've covered. Just trying to make sure that the space between them there is consistent with the line work in the rest of the piece. Again, I'm filling around with this space is and the curves of this crest shape. That's really again, to give us a little bit of breathing room between the nose of the lion and the edge of the crest. Again, using the divide function in the pathfinder to split up our shapes. Just give us a little bit more breathing room at the front, there we go. I'm making copies of the logo and I'm using the pathfinder again to make sure we've got a single compound shape that we can work with so that when we do the coloration behind it and the layer underneath that, it's some entirely transparent. There are none of those white squares I've used for blocking. Here, I'm using the same red again. I think I'm using a gray to show you how I've made the key line just because it's on the white in this one and I've made that white. I've created the key line in exactly the same way as I've created it in the other piece. Because it's a bit simpler, it wasn't really worth showing exact machinations of that. Again, just doing the white highlights the teeth in the eyes, and then working as if the light's coming from above. On the tops of those sections of main, creating the highlights, coming down into the brow and creating, again big strokes that sit nicely between existing artwork. We're not creating what could shapes in the negative space there. We are know cheekbone, and the bridge of the nose, and then some more of these on the main is a little bit tight perhaps the between those two sections of main. But I think it's going to work in this case. I've created a few little other details in here, and you'll see how we're going to work them into create the shapes of the muscle. If you look at the reference imagery, you'll see that there's quite a pronounced muscle, but it doesn't feel quite right how you creating that with the black strong geometry. We're going to hinted it using the highlights in here and again the same with the whiskers. These are just versions of the same thing, slightly different angles. I'm going to group them, and there we go. 11. Presentation: Okay. Welcome to the presentation section of my tutorial. In this section, we'll be presenting our work in Photoshop. Obviously, this is entirely optional section of the course, I'm just going to impact a little bit of wisdom to you, give you a technique that's going to help you in a couple of ways. The first is that, it offers an aesthetic option for presenting your work. The second I'm going to demonstrate now, is to protect your work from people stealing and easily modifying and copying your work online, I've problem with people taking my work and some of the unscrupulous doc libraries. Occasionally, you'll find the work turns up on them if you put enough stuff all that out on the Internet, that's often where these things end up. I'm going to show you if I take a screenshot of this, I've done this already, this is just a straight screenshot so it should look exactly the same, zoom in a bit and we go, Illustrator being extremely powerful is now able to take that image. Using the Image Trace function and six covers will give you immediately an almost perfect replica that once expanded, there we go, it's a vector version of the same logo with very, very little effort. Now, the second image that I've created using the filter technique I'm going to show you, just distorts the color, the actual edges of the image and some of the lighting aspects of it, enough so that when using the same Image Trace function, six colors again, it's going to give people a lot harder time to immediately steal your work. It's not full proof, people are still going to take what isn't theirs, but it's not full proof but it's going to make their lives harder. I'm going to select my logo, open it in Photoshop, I'm going to create a square file, doesn't really matter what size you want to make it, I'm going to make this 2,000 by 2000 but 500 by 500 will be fine. I'm going to paste as a smart object my line logo in, now you can scale this around the center by "Right" clicking and selecting scale and then just expanding him like that, there we go. The first thing I'm going to do is color our background, remember we've got our white key lines that will show up now, here we go. When I'm happy with the size and positioning of the line, I'm going to merge these layers, now I'm going to start by applying this blur filter, these are lens blur and for that we're going to need to create a gradient map for that blurred to act upon. When white and black and this way around with white as your primary color, I'm going to select our Gradient tool and we want to use this gradient here in the way this reflected gradient works is the primary color will be where you start your gradient and the secondary color will be where you finish pulling the line too. I'm going to start in the middle, I want white in the middle and I'm going to drag, I'm going to use a slight angle, my black will be here, there we go. We're not going to see this in the logo but we're going to use it, as I say for our filter, I'm going to copy this, I'm going to select my lion and when I'm in the red I'm going to get from the layers console into the channels console. Then here you can remove your red, green and blue channels and your RGB channel and we're going to create an alpha channel. What this will do is when we paste this in, we'll create a transparency where we have black and then the opaqueness where we have white. We're not going to use it for that function, we're going to use it for our blur function so I'm going to turn it off and it's important once you turn it off, that you select your RGB channel again because that's the channel that we want the effects to be applied to. But the alpha layer sits there in the background and now [inaudible] is there, we can delete it from our main layers and with the background layer selected now we can go into filter blur and lens blur. What you see now and you'll see it slightly initially is the elements in the middle where we had white, they are imperfect focus and the elements on the outside, they should be slightly blurry and we can increase that blur by increasing our radius and the iris of our camera. You may find that this is the wrong way round so you want to have invert checks, if it's blurry in the middle and crispy on the outside, just check inverts or vice versa and we go. Once you're happy with that and that will be applied to your image and again this is to stop the live Trace function finding crisp edges here and now we're going to add some layers to this to make it a little bit more visually interesting. I'm going to call this lion, save this now, make it a little bit more visually interesting and there is a confound people that are going to steal your work. The first thing we want to do is select our black and we're going to make a vignette, so create a new layer over here, select the Gradient tool again and this time we want to use this tool here, the Radial gradient and we want our gradient itself, the preset, we want to go from black to transparent, our primary colors it's transparent. Make sure this is black and make sure this goes from black to transparent, there are the squares there are no transparency in Photoshop and we're going to select, we're going to drag our gradient from the middle to the outside. If this is the correct way round we should have the black gradient on the outside and if not, it should look like that. We want to undo that and reverse our gradient there, now let me draw it again, we get the gradient, dark gradient on the outside and nothing on the inside. I'm going to knock that right back down to 40 percent, it's just helps draw the eye into the middle of the picture makes it a little bit brighter in the inside. We're going to add another layer that's going to do something similar here but it's going to feel a bit like it's lit from the top-down. Again, we want a Gradient tool, again, we want our Radial gradient and I think this time we want to not have it reversed out, because we want to do the opposite, we want to have a gradient growth from the inside out. Again, white to transparent and I'm going to drag this across the top and it should look something a little bit like that and we're going to use a different transparency mode. Now we're going to use overlay and it's just going to feel like it's a little bit brighter, If you turn this off and on, you'll see it alters the color slightly sometimes but that again is what we want because that's going to protect our work slightly. I'm going to bring this down so it's not quite so pink but you can now see without and with, it just draws the eye into the middle of the piece of it more. Finally, what we're going to do is we're going to drag this third layer down underneath both the vignette and the light source, we're going to create a color wash across the piece and this again it's going to make it a little bit more visually interesting. This time I'm going to use this preset, the orange to purple, you can use any colors ready bit and see if I can turn this around, I want the linear gradient so I want to draw from one color across to the other and I think one orange top rights so I'm going do it the other way round, there we go. Again, when we overlay this or soft light, you can play around with these. We overlay it, it's going to give us a wash where we have pinker colors, where the blue is affecting the red down here and where the orange is affecting the red up here, we're going to have more orangey, please again, it's a hugely over saturated so I'm going to knock this right back. It's not too obvious to us, it's going to be much more obvious to Illustrator, so there we go, without and then we have them with and that's our presented and protected logo. It would be great, if anybody taken the class could post your work, whether it's some logos that you've created from my reference images of lions or even better your own work that's taking the techniques you've learned here and use to create original artwork, that would be great if you can post them on Skillshare. I'd love to see them, I'll be very much appreciate it. Thank you.