Illustration for Designers: Create Your Own Geometric Animal

1. Introduction: Hello. I'm Dan Kuhlken. I'm Nathan Goldman and we are DKNG. We're design and illustration studio based in L.A. We've been working together for about ten years on a whole range of projects. We primarily work with the entertainment industry. We focus a lot on poster design and more specifically the art of screen printed posters. This class is illustration for designers, create your own geometric animal, and in this class we're going to be covering a range of techniques that we use when creating an illustration in Illustrator. Specifically, the rules that we apply to ourselves, so that when we reach our finished product, we have a cohesive elegant look to the illustration. This class is for students that are interested in both fields, illustration and design, and doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be either one. What we want to do in this class is teach students that something as complex as an animal can be distilled down to basic shapes just as much as geometric shapes like a building or a car, but it poses a new challenge for people to push themselves and take something that normally wouldn't be considered geometric and minimalize it down to its basic shapes. Our goal with this class is to bridge the gap between design and illustration. We are basically going to show you both worlds simultaneously and how they can work together with love. 2. Your Assignment: The project for this class is to create your own geometric animal. We'll be covering our process from doing research and discovery of what animal you'll be choosing, the process of sketching out your initial ideas on paper, and then bringing that into Illustrator, and eventually creating a vector illustration using a set of rules, and we'll be using the basic tools in Illustrator to create these animals. So, basic shapes, the pathfinder tool, guidelines, the pen tool, occasionally. But In a simplified version, a lot of this is going to be made with circles and straight lines, and you're going to choose specific angles that you would like to use and try to repeat it as much as possible so you can have a consistency with your design. While an animal is the subject of this specific project, it's going to be a way to learn some of these skills and some of these tools that you can then apply to all types of vector illustration projects. For the student project gallery, we suggest basically a three-step process. You can first upload your pencil sketch of your animal to basically get ideas at the early phase of things you might want to change or manipulate before you go to your final illustration in the computer. You can then choose to post your process along the way and share as much as you'd like of how your project is progressing. Then, when you're all done, post your final artwork to the student gallery. So, hopefully, at the end of this class, we'll have a great collection of finished geometric animals. Thanks for taking the class, we're excited to see what you post, and most of all have fun. 3. Research: So, we want to do an animal that has a lot of interesting features. So, one thing that came to mind is first looking up what a deer looks like. We'd like the antlers, we'd like the frontal view. We can search for things like deer head to get a better indication of what it looks like from the front, but you know we've drawn a deer before, and it would be nice to do something different. So, we're just going to play around with other options here. So, what's up all the horned animals will become look for. So when I search for that we can see like there's gazelles, there's rams, there's buffalo and they all have different types of horns, and we really want to determine what this is going to look like on paper and in an 18 by 24 format for example. So we don't want something too tall, we don't want something to wide, it's got to be a little bit more boxy. So, maybe a gazelle is not a good choice because the horns are really, really tall, and maybe a ram isn't the right choice because it's a little bit to boxy like wide in terms of where the horns go. So, let's see what it looks like if we choose a bison for example. What we think is interesting about the bison is that at first glance it doesn't seem like it has a lot of features, but I think it'll give us an interesting challenge to try to basically take out those features and emphasize them. So, it does have that very 18 by 24 slightly taller than it is wide formatting, and it has horns, it's kind of hitting all the parameters that we want to give ourselves. So what we want to do is once we choose an animal, really start researching as much as possible. Do we want to do a side profile of this animal? Is there different variations what a bison is. We've learned that bison is also called a an American buffalo, and there's different types of buffalo. There's like a water buffalo which is completely different than a bison. So if I were to look at buffalo, it's actually going in the opposite direction, we're getting a little bit too many different variations, so specify what you're looking for and try to make it as narrowed down as possible so you can actually have as much focus as possible. So, I think what we're going to do instead of a water buffalo we want to do something more like an American Buffalo. So let's check our bison again, they have an interesting side profile, something we see a lot in terms of illustration. I don't see too many things that have been done with just their face which I think we want to pursue for our drawing. So, let's see what happens when I type like bison head. So we got side profiles, we've got frontal. We can get more specific with that, what happens when I type in bison head front, were more specific, we're starting to see other illustrations that had been created so we get an idea of what's out there in the world. What's also important is basically to know what has been done, and how you can make your own unique twist on it without replicating it too directly. So, I really like something like this I can imagine us doing that in a geometric form. So, what you should be doing at this point is grabbing as much references as possible of your animal. So, what I'm going to do is have a folder, ready to go. So, I'm going to create a reference imagery folder, and I'm going to call this folder 'folder reference', and you can see I already started putting in some stuff, got a couple of bison images. I like what I've found online here, what I'm going to do is add a little bit more, and the more options you have to work with, it'll be easier for you to basically get yourself out of ruts. So, if your bison is not looking right, look at different photos of bison and see all the different characteristics because they all have different facial features, they all have different facial structures, and you can customize from just looking at all your options here. So, another thing you want to do is once you've chosen an animal, start researching style. Obviously, with the geometric style you're putting yourself in a position where you're limited, but we like to research things on dribble, let's see what happens when I look up bison. So you can see what's been made, a lot of side profiles. This one's actually interesting. That's just line work, very symmetrical, you can make something like that look beautiful in simple forms, some more bison heads, pretty unique style. So, I've already started to fall for that as well and you can see that there's a lot of different ways to draw this, and you can start to see all the basic shapes that are integrated into a bison head. So we know where the horns are usually placed, we know that it has ears in specific locations, where it's snout is, where it's eyes are, and those things can be altered and changed around without losing it's likeness. It definitely has a lot more structure than you had originally assumed. I think beyond any reference that you find online, also feel free to head out and explore, take pictures of your own paths if you want to illustrate them, you can go to the zoo and take pictures, there are a lot of options out there to find inspiration for this project. So, another thing that I found in this process is actually bison skulls which I think are pretty beautiful alone, but we're not going to draw a skull for the purpose of this class, we're actually going to try to challenge ourselves, and find what's going on with all that fur. But remember that all these animals that we're researching have anatomy underneath the skin, and they have bone muscle, and go as far as kind of researching what's going on underneath all that, and that might help you find those shapes that you're looking for. So, I think when we approach this sketch we want to imagine what's going on underneath, and I can kind of see like the skull and maybe I can use some of those lines inside the drawing without deliberately showing a bison skull for example. So this is good start, just to see what you're working with. The next big step would be to take this off screen, and start experimenting with pencil and paper and just seeing what basic shapes we can find inside this animals anatomy. One little trick that we use before we go to sketch is to actually figure out what your dimensions that your papers are going to be, and we have this little quick file that we created in Illustrator that is an 18 by 24 piece of paper, reduce down so that you can print it onto an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, and we've created some grid lines inside it to give you some guidelines to work with, so we have midpoints and a little bit of a border. This will help us keep things symmetrical and centered in our composition. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and just print this piece of paper out and we'll start drawing. 4. Starting Your Sketch: Right now I have full screen all the reference images that we found that we like. All frontal compositions for, in terms of their face. They're all very different in subtle ways. We'll be able to get like a large variety to work with here. I also include a skull, too, in case there's some extra structure that I want to find within the animal. I'm going to start looking at one, and kind of like get an idea of what we're working with here. You can kind of see that, it's got kind of this oval looking head, it's got short horns, it's got like a pill shaped kind of right here, holding its eyes, and nose goes straight down, which is interesting, and actually lead up to the nose right here. That's something we can work with in terms of how it lines up. The overall shape, is this a huge circle right here? Is this considered maybe like a triangle? Start to think about, when you squint your eyes, what you're seeing here. I'm just going to go ahead and start playing around with some options. I draw pretty lightly in terms of, how you start, and then you can darken it up once you're pretty happy with where it's going. I know that basically what I'm looking for is a shape that's probably going to fit like that. It's nice and central. We want to make sure there's room for the horns. Let's say the widest it will ever go is probably right there. Maybe that might be a little bit too wide. Give yourself some leeway, and play around with, let's say something like that. Does that mean the shape of the head needs to be a little slimmer maybe? There's no wrong way to go. A lot of these animals have pretty long heads. There's additional fur on some of them that makes them look pretty huge, like this one for example. Is that interesting? Do we want to include that? Looks like horns could be more internal anyways, maybe there's a circle that's going on behind everything. Something like that. Kind of framing it. Where are the eyes going to be placed? We want to kind of get an idea like, "How wide?. How big?" That seems pretty good. Want to go back to the other one. What I like about this one is that we kind of getting this shape where we can kind of find out where the snout is. What's kind of interesting is as I'm doing this, I'm realizing that those holes kind of lines up with how the horns are. Think about how continuous your lines can get. This is kind of interesting just to play with at this point. It should be kind of fun. Push the limit in terms of how creative it can get. Don't think that the photographs are the end all in terms of what you can do. Let's try get the nose in here. Noses seem to be, kind of a circle as well. What if I just draw a circle? Does that seem weird or not? They have a little bit more structure than just a circle, though. Let's see if we can break it up a little bit. What if this continues down, and has like a soft break right here? What happens below that? What's part of the bottom jaws? That's like other shape. Maybe that's like a half circle. What's going on with the nostrils? What shape did they make? Probably a circle with an additional element. Let's start off with circles again. Looks like they kind of taper out a little bit. Add those little shapes. Don't feel like you have to draw everything perfectly straight, like you're drawing triangles, and circles, and squares only. Kind of treat it like a little more organically at first, and then you'll find the base of shapes within that. Looks like they kind of go up a little bit. I'm seeing a shape right here, looks like a circle. If that was drawn. What's going on below the mouth? You kind of see like, gizzard or hangy skin. Is that something you want to show, and see it continue down? Now look what's happened here when I'm drawing that, I'm finding another continuous line. The more interaction everything has with each other, the more it's going to look like a final piece in the end. This guy's got a big goatee, so does this guy. Do want to have that with ours? Let's see what it looks like. What if I were to draw something like that below him? We're getting a little too long maybe. But we can add more to the top. We have our big circle here going around there, if we want to add something a little extra something, we can do, that, looks like this guy's got a little portion of his back that's showing. Where does it connect? Do I have nothing to connect to? Does it make sense for me to find another continuous line? Probably. Look at that, it just goes right on the top of his nose. What about the sight of his face? Do we want to just make it simple like this, or do we want to try to find more going on? What I'm seeing here is almost like a cheek. It kind of tapers off from his face a little bit, which I think is kind of cool. Let's try to do that shape a little bit. Maybe he connects like that. It's starting to look like a buffalo. Let's go back to his eyes, and see if we can finish a little bit more about, how they're made. He's kind of got this outer area around his socket. Or I guess this is considered as the muscles in his socket. And that's a shape. That looks like, something like that maybe. Basically another ellipse. Do we want to make sure that his eyes are kind of a little bit more outward looking? We don't want it to look directly at us. We kind of want it to have more of a eyes going outwards look. Maybe not perfect circles for the eyes merits to like a pie shape. What's going on in their little sockets? Let's see. We've got, kind of a line that continues from the eyes, that goes down like that. Look, we're finding continuous lines again. Look how this comes together. Let's try to do that with this one. Another interaction. All right. So then, doing it like mimic this again, doesn't make sense? Eyes are the most important part really, you want to draw people into the center of the face, something like that. What's going on right on the sides here? You've got this mean shape that we have kind of started. Maybe we can continue that. Maybe it makes sense to have this almost transparent. Kind of do this. This guy, with this huge Afro, maybe we can start working on that. It's not a perfect circle, it's like another ellipse. I'm going to start refining it. I think what I'm seeing is, it's kind of attaching right in this little tangent here, which is kind of nice. Where does it continue? It actually continues perfectly at this little tangents. Maybe we want to emphasize that. We'll just continue refining it. 5. Adding Details: Again, we can refine this a lot more on the computer, but this is just to give us a really good game plan. I have a hard time being motivated by something when I don't know how to visualize it, so we're going to visualize this as far as we can on paper before we get into the computer. It's really hard and really intimidating to jump on a computer and have a blank art board. But if you have a blank art board that also has a sketch behind it, then you have something to work with, you can start drawing over and you can change things as we go. So, that's definitely having a cool look to it. We got the hair. What are we going to do about this bulb, maybe it's not a perfect circle and not as tall, maybe it's more like this. Again, I'm finding a continuous line here. Let's erase it, refine it. I'm going to give it that hair look again. So, we've got something cool here, we got a three-stage, almost three-dimensional feel, it's like a diorama almost like, here's a layer, that's a layer, that's a layer, that's a layer. We could even get creative in the computer and start giving things some dimension. What if this had a little bit of a drop shadow, I'll add a little bit of a drop shadow. That'd be cool to make it look like we're looking at layers of paper. It's not just about making basic shapes, it's giving yourself a game plan in terms of how it's going to be rendered. Start drawing in darker shapes, pretty sure its eyes are going to be pretty dark, so let's go ahead and get those in. I like the blackness of it, makes it a little bit more mysterious. All right, I want to make sure that his mouth and his goatee look like they're in front, are closest too, so let's give this a little bit of a drop shadow. I want to make sure these continuous lines make the most sense where they are. I like to draw over my drawing over and over again to really emphasize my favorite parts. Does this need to be darker? Probably. This will give you a good idea of how we're going to colorize this thing too. You don't want to find ink colors or colors in your illustrator that represents something dark, something that represents something light, unnatural. I would say stick to the basics. All right, that's looking pretty good. Do we want to play around with anything else? In our research, we always try to go beyond what's surface level and we know that American buffaloes have a huge history with Native Americans and they were hunted and used. What if we gave this a little bit of a Native American look? It seems appropriate. We already have this going on, Native American styles are very geometric. That's a good example. So I'm thinking, we can add some flavor to this. What if we try some of these triangles or something. That's cool. What if we start filling in these gaps with other shapes? What do we want to do with the horns? Do we want to keep them simple or do we want to give them some darkness? I think it'd be cool to give them some structure like skin these lines to make it look like they're different material than the fur. That's neat. Most of these horns are pretty dark, so let's darken it up. We can give it some structure too maybe darker from the bottom so that they look round. What's happening right here now is I'm discovering a light source too. If I do it like this, that's implying that light's coming from the top here, so let's think about how that affects other areas of this drawing and if this was, in fact, a three-dimensional thing, the tops of everything would be lighter than the bottoms of everything. So, I would say, the darkest parts would be down here and we got his goatee and is probably not to straight down, it's probably going away from you as you look at it. So, let's darken at the bottom. We want to probably play around with more shapes. Can we add some more pattern? I like to draw little circles, almost like little stitching. That's neat. What's happening here with all these three little connections, do we want to make sure that they differentiate from each other? So, let's say these are considered the dark ones and we leave these little triangles as something else, and we can put another triangle inside it, not a triangle, a diamond. We're dealing with all the basic shapes here. What else we got? We got pizza shapes, we got diamond shapes, we got circles, we got ellipses. What's interesting about these circles I drew up here is that they are half-circles but as they're coming down, they just stop at a certain point. What if they continued? Now, we're on to something. Almost has a feathered look to it. Yes, it's representing fur but doesn't have to literally be fur, it could just be the shape of the fur area. Do we want to repeat that in the back? That might be cool. Where are all these things going? They'll go into this midpoint. Maybe we want to emphasize that a little bit in our final so that people aren't staring into the eyes, they're drawn to the center. One thing I'm noticing here if that's the center and this is a little arc that we've created, look at that, it's a perfect circle right here. That could just be a hidden guideline that we use, it doesn't have to be drawn. What happens if this circle radiates? Another hidden guideline. So, I have a lot to work with here. I think it's safe to say we can probably go to the computer, but try to take this as far as you can because the more you do now, the less you have to worry about on the computer. You're just basically tracing over your original drawing rather than trying to make things from scratch. So, I think we're at a great point to move on. I can refine more things like its mouth later on. Let's just make one more last stab at that. Keep in mind the eyes and the mouth are going to dictate an expression. I don't think with this style, I want this animal to be smiling, but I also don't want it to look like it's super sad. So, this line I think should just be not straight but just slightly curved. However, that one's down. That one is straight. That one's slightly down. That one is straight. We can consider maybe just a straight line for this. Play around with this shadow a little bit. Make sure those nostrils are nice and dark. Give this some darkness. Voila, I think we're good to go, so let's bring this into the computer. 6. Basic Shapes 1: So, we're about to scan our drawing. I got it ready to go. Make sure it's got enough DPI so you can get all that detail. I'm going to go 300, black and white. There is no need for top color unless your sketch does have color. So, let's go for it. So, once it's scanned, one thing you want to do is bring it into Photoshop. What happens with pencil pretty easily is that you get a lot of unnecessary on beyond slick, the graphite spreads. We don't need all that. So, let's go ahead and play around with the levels here. Take this bar over, and I'll take care of that whiteness. Now, we're bringing it down. Is it too dark? Let's see. If we go that way, we're losing detail. If I go this way, actually gaining a little bit of detail. We're seeing more of those mid tones. Then, when you put this bar, probably not. Want to lighten it a little bit. The point of all this is just so that you can see as much as you drew as possible without any distractions. So, that is a lot better than that. Boom. We'll go ahead and save it. All right. So, now that we have our files scanned, what we want to do is create a new art board. We're going to go 18 by 24 on this. We got our file started. Let's go ahead and save it as something. Forget too far. So now, we want to place our sketch. With the guidelines that we created previously, we know that this is going to line up perfectly or close to perfectly with an 18 by 24. So,let's size it for that. This is the sketch layer and in your layers area which you want to make sure is visible right here, we're going to call this sketch. That will be on its own. So, let's go ahead and lock it and start a new layer on top of it called Art. So now, we can start drawing over this thing pretty easily, but what's going to happen is we're not going to be able to see what's going on behind it. A quick thing you can do is basically push this button right here, click to target. Then, go to your transparencies and go multiply. So,now you're dealing with an entire layer that's dedicated to being on multiply no matter what you do, no matter what color, but they don't act as multiply on top of each other which is nice. So, we're going to always be able to see what's going on. So, now that we're in our art layer, let's go ahead and start making these shapes. I'm pretty excited about this little circle here. So, let's go ahead and start. There's one. So, we created an outline here that basically is knowing that this circle is the center. If it were to radiate out, it would all line up. So, what I'm going to do is click on this shape and I'm going to do a command C for copy and then command F for placing the exact same shape duplicating it on top. Then, I'm going to hold down Option and Shift and do this. Basically, I can make it bigger that shape and it's going to stay in place. So, as I'm doing it, we realize that our geometry in our drawing wasn't exactly as perfect as we would have plan, which is great now that we can really get things narrowed down. So, I'm going to stop right there. So, you'll probably want to designate this as a different color. Let's move it back one and we got a red and a green shape. So now, we're dealing with what kind of colors are we going to work with. Right now, I don't think we need to worry about that too much in terms of what they're going to end up being, but you want to try to figure out how many colors you're dealing with. I'm going to say that this drawing is a three color. One of those colors is represented by being the paper color. So technically, I guess if I were to commit to that, it would be only two ink colors. But I do want three ink colors, so let's do three ink colors and the last swatches representing paper. So, let's say our dark color is going to be a brown. Let's say our light color is going to be an off light. Then, what would look good with that? Maybe an orange. What represents buffalo, I mean bison, same thing? Well, if I stick with this green, is that an interesting or unusual interaction with orange? What if we made this tonal? What if I did a red and if we just have this nice little gradient? You don't have to be too committal about this stuff, but what you should be doing is finding a dark color, a light color, and then two midpoints that basically create a gradient. That way, we have a nice options to choose from. We can get like shadow and definition and highlights with all these stuffs. So, I'm going to say this shape is now going to be orange. Let's say this shape is the brown. So, what I'm going to do is start designating these things as swatches. In the past, I think I've just started drawing. Let's say, I'm getting tired of this orange and I have a million shapes that are all going to be orange, the best way to change those colors in the past has been basically to Select, Same, Fill Color, and then you can change it, but there's actually a better way to do this. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to keep those there, I'm going to take this swatch right here and I'm going to create a swatch by dragging it into our area. Then, I'm going to double-click it and I'm going to turn it into a global color. So,what this means is once it's global, I can change it from here and well, hold on. Let's make sure it does right. Turn into a global color and then make sure that all these shapes that you just created are that global color. So now, they're all that global color. So,without me having to go to Select All, I can double-click this shape, this swatch, and I can change colors this way. It's a nice quick and easy way to play with colors without having to do too many clicks. So, if I got tired of this orange and I want to make it a pink, I could. So for now, let's get it to where I was and press OK. Make sure preview is on by the way, so you can see it all happening at once. This is really helpful in terms of separating your ink colors if you're going to screen print this. So, let's do the same with all these other colors. So, this white color we're going to drag it and drop it, double-click it, turn into a global color. This red color we're going to do the same. Double-click it, global. Last but not the least, the brown, global. So, we got our swatches ready. Let's start drawing. 7. Basic Shapes 2: I like to start from the center out. Everyone has their own style, but what's going to be helpful is to start creating your guidelines. There's a lot of prep in terms of making this as easy as possible for you, and we know this is 18 by 24 and so that means that the center line is going to be nine inches. So, right there. I'm going to create an 18 by 24 paper color in the back. Make sure that that is aligned to your art board, which an easy way to do it would be to click it. Let's say if I move it over on accident, you can go to align, just to artboard rather than line the selection, and then centerize. Boom. Let's go ahead and make this the paper color. Boom. I'm going to put this in the back by going Command+Shift. Was that bracket? Left bracket. So, that's considered a paper and we want to make sure that, now an interesting thing about making that paper layer is that we know that this little dot is representing the very center of everything and the center line that I made is not really aligned to it. So, in order to make sure that your guidelines are aligned so you want, go to view and snap to point. This is a really easy thing to do that will make sure that all your guides do in fact snap together and all your shapes snap together. So, I'm going to unlock my guide for a second and I'm going to move this and see what's happening that anchors to the center, that's nice. Guide, lock guide. All right. Let's also get a center point for the horizontal lines. So, we now know that that is the center point of the entire thing. Boom. Now, we got a guideline here, we can cut this up into quarters if we wanted to. The first thing that I drew is not centerized to the actual art board. So, what we're going to do is, center to artboard. So, make sure you're aligned to artboard and I'm just going to the center align. So, now everything's in place. You might need to move around your sketch behind everything over time realizing that it's not exactly in the right place but I think we're in a decent area. Another interesting thing about making these guidelines is that we're also starting to see how that interacts with your sketch, like the eyes are lining up with that, doesn't make sense for them to be lower so that the very center of everything is these eyes. Maybe but we'll decide later. All right. So, what I'm going to do, is just start making these shapes. We got a couple circles made. Here's another shape we can make, I'm going to copy and place in front, do this. Boom. We will designate that as the red color, send it back. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming when you're drawing filled shapes, so I like to make them with outlines so they are there but they're not in your way. So, we see them. I'm going to go ahead and make the opacity of my sketch a little bit darker, so I don't need to see all of it. That way we can have much more visualization of what we're doing. So, we got our main shapes being drawn out. Let's continue. Okay. So, we realized after drawing the circle that the nose has an interesting interaction with it. So, what I'm going to do is copy and paste the shape and bring it down and it's completely with the tangent here and I'm going to turn into an ellipse. Boom. I'm going to make a settings so that every time I change a scale ofsomething, my strokes don't scale with it. So, let's go ahead and transform object, scale and I'm going to turn off strokes and effects. Boom. So now, if I want to make this like super huge, stars the same stroke weight which is nice. I'm going to go ahead and lock my paper color. I'm actually going to put my paper color on a different layer so that we don't need to touch it and it can just be on its own. I'm going to call this paper. We're also going to make sure that this is on multiply so we can see through everything and lock that. Now, at least we're going. Okay. Other shapes. We've got this big shape right here which is basically another circle. More specifically an ellipse. So, I'm going to take this shape again and I'm going to copy and paste it in place and I'm going to stretch it by doing that. Now, so we got this outer shape which looks like as it's coming down, it also hits the bottom here, so I'm going to keep working with the shape, copy paste and I'm going to bring it up and try to keep it a perfect circle and see if it lines up. Well, that's interesting. Now, we can see that we made this a little bit lower than the back so, I'm going to stretch it down, then we have a little guideline. What else we got? We got the eyes. I'm going to try to see if I can get these eyes to start centrally right where this line is starting. So, I'm going to actually move my cursor right to the edge and hold down Shift and option and create a circle right from their. Boom. I want to do the same thing on the other side so an easy way to do that would be to copy and paste it and go to your rotation tool, go to reflect, click the guide which is the center and do that and it will go to the other side. It keeps everything really aligned. 8. Basic Shapes 3: This little circle thing that we're creating here is probably a little bit more complex, so we'll see what we can do with it. I'm going to start with the center of this eye, move it up, and make an oblong shape, that's starting to work, but it does come down like that. So, let's rotate it. It looks like the way it was drawn, the eye is not the center of it, gets lower at the bottom so I'm going to keep it up that rotation and stretch it like that. Look at what happens, basically its center point is a nice little alignment to the circle. So there's a lot of math going on here, but that's the perfect little tangent. I'll make it a little wider. Same thing, copy-paste. Move to the other side. Bam. All right. So now I'm noticing a little bit of a misalignment with the drawing, and what we can do is play around with the actual sketch and try to align things a little bit better for our purposes. So, I'm going to actually stretch the sketch a little bit and shift it a little bit down a little bit maybe. Okay, will be easier. Alright. So, we don't have to draw all the basic shapes but, what I'm doing is basically creating a system of guides to help us throughout this entire process and I'm going to keep all these shapes here. They might not end up being used, but it's just a good point for us to, you want to keep these things around just in case you need to reuse them. Okay. So, I'm going to create the mouth and it looks like if I were to move this shape down and duplicate it, and the way I did that by the way is click it and hold down Option and shift and you can duplicate it in place and the shift keeps it aligned with this shape. So, it just moves down. Everything is on track with each other. It seems like that's a good place for that I'm going to move it down a little bit more. Looks like the chin is like a circle, I'm going to start with center point and make it from here. Kind of dealing with just a bunch of circles of at this point. Eventually we'll start working with some straight lines, but let's make the second portion of this chin as double chin. I'm going to copy and paste the circle, stretch it out, stretch it out. Alright. So, let's see if we can get it to align in a interesting way. I'm going to try to see what happens when I bring it up that much and it can basically be centered with this, and when I'm going to align it, I'm going to align it to selection, center it. Let's make it wide enough so that it hits the edges. We're starting to get some structure here. Does that mean that this will do the same? Will it become nice? I'm getting a 3-dimensional pill shape, I want to keep it aligned with everything, so, let's move it down like that. Here we go. Some of these shapes you can keep here, some of them you don't have to keep. One thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take away a couple so they're not as distracting. Let's say, this circle right here for example, we don't need right now. What we can do is either make it invisible by doing command three, or we can turn it into a guideline by doing command five, which is kind of cool. I'm going to do both. I'm going to basically, well, I'm going to make it so it's invisible, but I'm also a guideline. So, I'm going to copy and paste it, take it away. I'm also going to turn into a guideline. So, it's there but it's not there, and if I want that shape back all I have to do is hold Option Command and three and it will be back for you but for the time being it's not there. Okay. So, we have this connection line here that we want to make. How do we do that? So, we're running along this circle and it connects to his mouth, and is his mouth wide enough? Probably it can get a little wider. So, all those shapes, let's do that. One thing we are probably going to figure out here is that this is a straight line, and what's happening is that far to create a tangent here and make a box, how far down does it go and where does it line up? It looks like it doesn't line up perfectly with what we've drawn, so we can adjust things. So, what I'm going to do, is take what we've drawn and shipped it to that box, and we've got another shape on its way. All right. So let's box I'm going to move up so it hits this, and we have that connection. You don't have to commit too much but at least we know that where these two lines connect because of this tangent. So, we can adjust it as much as we want but basically, it's right there. 9. Basic Shapes 3b: All right. So you want to start flashing things out like, let's make this color an orange color. Is that too much orange? Maybe, we could make it to brown color. That brown gets lost. Let's make sure we can pop that back out. What color do we want to make these? Say orange for now. All right. So, we just want shapes to hold shapes. So, let's see, I want to make his entire snout essentially. Looks like we have another line that needs to be made here. That might be as simple as dragging the shape down, which has another interesting little interaction here. Does that makes sense? How do we create this line? I'm going to take this circle and drag it. So, it's like lining up on these little tangents, which is nice. Okay, so what's happening here is, farther doesn't make this as a color, and this is going to be like the knockout. Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to copy and paste it. I'm going to align to the center. When I take two shapes to knock out one, they got to be treated a little bit differently. You want to bring them to the front, and you want to Command-Eight to turn them into one shape essentially. Then, take this shape, I'm going to copy and paste them, just in case I need them later. Then, knock them out. Starting now to put together something here. All right. So, it comes down like that. Do we want to straight line it? Might look cool just to take up those little elements. So, let's take this box, drag it over here, line up with that tangent, copy and paste it. The same thing, just bring them a little front, Command-Eight, take the shape with it, and knock that out. Cool. We've got the beginnings of a head here. So with the eyes, let's make them black for now or the dark brown that we've chosen. I'm going to make these a different opacity so that I can see a little easier to sketch. Looks like I made a basically straight line to cut them off. Let's see what that does. So, I'm going to start right at the edge of the circle and draw a straight line, by holding down Shift. Does that make sense? Kind of. Do the eyes need to be perfect circles? Maybe not. Okay, so we want to get these circles up and running. So, you can see already started something like that right here. The way I created that, was finding the top portion right here, centerizing with that node and getting your circle shape ready, and hold down Shift and Option, and you can make a circle like that. So then, what you want to do is, find the midpoint that we're going to be wrapping around. Let's say, it's going to be constantly going along this edge. We're going to just repeat this. This, you can do it in a number of ways. There's ways of doing this with the stroke and there's ways of doing with the shape. I'm going to show you with the shape first. So basically, I'm going to show my guidelines here. I'm going to create another guide that lines up with this new midpoint. Copy and paste that circle, go to your rotation tool and anchor where it's going to be rotated from at that new point. You can see, as I change it, it's only going along that axis. So, you can choose how close you want these things to go. I'm going to try to get them pretty much butting up against each other, for example. Then, you can continue doing this, just as it is. So basically, all you have to do is take that same circle and do copy, paste again and I'll still be on that axis. This is kind of a dirty way of doing it because you're not 100 percent sure that it's lining up, but least visually, you can get it pretty close, and there's some math to it. You can see that it doesn't match up perfectly. The way to go about that is starting over a little bit. You got to make the circle a little bit bigger and just try again. Trial and error, playing around with the settings. I may have made it just slightly too big. So, you can see how close we were in the beginning. So, what I'm going to do is literally make it only just a very small mouth bigger. Hopefully, third time is the charm. We're off. So, things aren't lining up perfectly and you can adjust things accordingly. I'm going to take this circle and get it more to the edge. Then, I'm going to just like even things out. So, you can see I have a little bit of a gap in between all of them. One easy fix would just be to bring the nodes closer. 10. Basic Shapes 4: So, let's talk about making some stuff that might not seem basic at first, like these horns. Your instinct probably would be to take up the pen tool, but you can make these with simple shapes as well. So, I'm actually going to make them with circles. I'm kind of see how I can lining up with it and how it takes on that curve, and go ahead and line with your illustrations, so you're nice and center. And then, copy and paste the same circle and play around with that shape a little bit so it matches the sketch. One thing I like to do is to line up with another tangent which looks like it's about there. All right. So, what we want to do now is basically knock out these circles to create a new shape, and what I'm going to do is make sure this bigger circle is on top and it knocks it out by going through path finder. So, basically, by cutting it, we get the shape what we want and we have these nice little horns now. As you can see, it's a lot more pointier of a horn than we drew in the sketch, and what's nice about Illustrator CC is that you can actually use live corners to round it out; and I can make them really nubby, I can make them as rounded as I want. So, I'm going to just kind of do something like that. And you always can come back to that if you wanted to and adjust it. An easy way to give something like this, a shadow, would be to take the same shape and multiply it. So, basically, duplicate it on top of the other. I'm going to make it red so you can see the difference, and create a new shape from that. So, I'm going to copy and paste the one behind it and knock it out. So, now, we have a little bit of a shadow going on. Throw this to the back. So, it's a nice, quick and easy way to make horns for example. So, then, moving on to other things that are pretty basic, like this ear shape, it's basically, again, circles but knocking each other out. So, make that shape that is following the line of the shape that was drawn, but you can duplicate the same circle and move it down, and you kind of see what happens. It kind of makes that Venn diagram, and then you can squeeze them if you want to get that shape. What I'm going to do is probably somewhere in between, maybe expand it out. I'll make a nice even shape. So, if we go to path finder again, and go to intersect, you can get that shape that way. And repeat the process. Now, for something like this hair up top, it's going to be a little bit more custom work, but what you could do is start from scratch and just kind of get your pen tool and start drawing it out if you would like. It's probably not the most efficient way to do it, but what we can do is come back to it and play with geometry to make it a little bit more smooth, kind of rough it in essentially. And try to keep your process pretty streamlined in terms of how it's made so you can alter it easier in repetition. So, for example, we got this weird looking hair. And it's not the cleanest looking thing but I'm going to start hiding some shapes. Let's consider this shape around it a guideline at this point. So, again, how do you do that is command five. And now, we can work with that line. So, the consistency of this is all way off, but what I'm going to do to make it more consistent is kind of actually play with circles as added guidelines. So, you can make a nice clean look by kind of creating a system of rules. So, let's say I want it to kind of follow these guides, make circles in front of it and alter your drawing based off that. Might need to add some extra points here and there, and then go on that and maybe use the same sized circles as you go down to make a nice consistent pattern, and just repeat the process. Take away those circles and you have something a little more cleaner that way. 11. Creating Rules: So, we're at a point now where we basically have all the shapes in place and we just want to revisit some of the rules that we've been using and how we got to this point. We still have a ways to go as far as finalizing things but it's far enough along that we can address most of the points for the class. I guess, one rule that we try to adhere to is using particular angles, do you want to point out some of the angles going on here? Yes, we've determined that we're using a lot of 45 degree angles. So, this fan shaped for example is a 45 degree angle. It's really easy to use 45 degree angle because all if you do is hold shift and you'll create a line that's either going to be 90 degrees or it's going to be 45. One thing that's nice about using similar angles is that you can start to basically turn your project into like a more streamlined look. If we want to add more of these 45 degree angles in other areas we can. We can start breaking this up, his head because it's like right now seeming like one huge piece and chopping it up using those 45 degree angle rules. Moving on from there, we always try to work with either minimum shapes sizes or minimum stroke widths throughout a piece. So, we have more details to add here, but for the most part you can identify that a lot of the smallest shapes like the triangles on the nose or some of the smaller circles being used in the feather like patterns, they're not getting below a certain size. That also helps a lot with keeping a consistent look throughout a piece. We don't typically end up using a lot of strokes in our work just because it's a stylistic choice, but if you're planning on using a lot of strokes what we recommend is using the same stroke for everything. You can then maybe have a couple of versions like a thick one and a thin one, but let's say we add strokes to our design. This one's a 10 point. It's going to look unusual if you start adding strokes to other elements where it's a different weight. Let's put this out like a three, for example. It can see it doesn't feel like the same family, however, if we were to make it 10 point maybe probably outside it, starts to look a little bit more like it's part of the same design. Yes, it gives you some consistency. That's not to say you can't use multiple stroke weights throughout a design, but as long as you have a little family that you're establishing as far as like strokes, it'll give you a more consistent look. One thing I didn't touch upon yet is the use of gradients and basically using any feature that isn't a solid fill. One thing I'd like to do is layer a lot of shapes on top of each other. This is a screen printing technique that makes it easy for us to do separations, but let's say we want to have some shadowing going on on top of a shape. I always copy and paste it and I'll create a gradient on top of it. The way to do that is to just go into your gradient tool and make something custom like that. So, this is technically two different things going on, two different shapes but I'm using the brown colour that we've chosen and make sure you use your swatch to create this and drag it into the nodes that are inside the gradient tool and this is a really cool thing. When you click on this swatch and you want to change your brown to a different color, it also changes the color of the gradient. It's not like you have to go select all the same fill and then find all those gradients and change each little node, it's going to change every single thing that's ever used that swatch which is kind of nice. Yes, on that note it's a good rule of thumb. In this case, we've just been dealing with four colors throughout and our paper color. So, you always want to be consistent and make sure that you're using the same colors. Then lastly, as far as rules are concerned, using hidden guidelines we've showed those a bit throughout this project and implied lines versus what's actually in your piece. You can see all the guidelines here and how not every single one equates to a literal shape that will be in your illustration, but knowing that you have those guides there to kind of give a flow and a consistent shape to your work can be very helpful. You can create new guidelines pretty easy by just making a shape or a line of some sort. Let's say, I'm going to go from that center point and use the line tool and make a 45 degree angle. Again, it's just command five and I have it. This is a good way for you to approach what your next step is in the design. Like if you don't know where to go start looking your guidelines again, saying like well, could I create something that's following these hidden guidelines that I haven't touched upon yet or is there new guidelines I can create that haven't been created. Yes. So, just to summarize the rules think about angles, minimum and maximum stroke with and shape size. One thing we didn't touch on yet, was your working zoom size. I think we said we only going to zoom into like 1200%. If you started zooming in too much it's easy to start making shapes that are too tiny and that are going to get lost when you eventually zoom out to your final size. Along with keeping stroke weight consistent, not zooming in too much will also keep a consistent look to your work. Keep in mind the size of things too. Like I'm at 600% to 800% right now and this looks pretty huge to me. I spent a lot of time staring at it because it's the only thing I see but this shape right here is only an inch and a half long. If you're screen printing this and you're going to be doing it with an actual screen that has a mesh count that can only do so much, you want to make sure that it's not retaining so much detail that it's not even possible. So, try to think big and zoom out a lot like whenever you do something, I always do command zero just to see the full art board to get a sense of where I'm at because it's really easy to dive into a project and only work on a square inch for a whole hour and realize that you've got a whole poster to make around that. Lastly, we talked about color. Keeping a limited color palette in this case for colors and also using your hidden guidelines and we'll get a little bit more into color in the next video. 12. Adding Color: When it comes to color, we arbitrarily picked out our four colors that we were going to work with at the beginning of this project. Now that we're pretty far along, it probably makes sense to revisit that, and one thing that we're noticing having this kind of red horned animal is that it has kind of a devilish look to it at the moment. So, we recommend that you start exploring different color schemes, switching things up a little bit and see what might work for your animal. You can also work with lighter and darker colors to get a sense of if less contrast or more contrast might make sense as far as getting your animal a bit more recognition. So, since we created these swatches, these global colors, it's going to be really easy for us to play around with our color schemes. So all we have to do for this red, for example, is double-click at swatch, turn on preview, and start playing around with it and we can change it drastically based off of the CMYK nodes. So, basically, we can go completely out of this red zone and it's already starting to look a lot less devilish just by playing around. So we turn off that. This is also a good indication of how much more you have to do because it does look completed many times when you have the sketch turned off, but once you take it out, how much open spaces around this and what areas feel unfinished? I can already tell there is on the top of his head and his ears kind of need more extra detail and we want to make sure that there's consistency throughout. We put more focus on the center of this face than the outside, so now it's time to start working in those details. So, again, as you're playing with color, one thing that we have in here now is also the use of gradients. So you can start thinking about your light source and how are you gonna use gradients to convey that light direction. This is, again, kind of a stylistic choice. You could stick to just flat colors and not get gradients involved but it is an option to explore. So here's an example of what Nathan's talking about. I'm going to go into his forehead here and make a light source essentially, and I have all these shapes that can essentially be copied and pasted, and you can create a gradient on top of it and let's make it a highlight. So we're going to use our paper color for example and change its angle so that light's coming from the top or something like that maybe. All of a sudden, we're kind of now dealing with what looks like a highlight on top of his head. Lastly one note on color, if you are planning to screen-print this artwork at some point, you can also think about how overprinting might be used to think about printing two colors on top of each other to create a third color. That's not necessarily something that you have to do but when we're creating an illustration like this, oftentimes, we look for opportunities where overlapping colors can create some interesting mid tones. So, for example, if we're gonna deal with their swatches here, start to experiment and see what they would look like using different filters. So one quick and easy way to do this would be to use multiply, and you want to be careful with how that interaction creates a new color because multiply is transparency that is under the assumption that the color has only pigment in it and no white or black mixed in because it's completely transparent. But if you've ever mixed ink or done any sort of color mixing, you know that in order to get certain colors, you can't just use only pigments. So for something like this orange, it probably has a little bit of white in it and we're not going to get this exact color but you can use this as an indication of where to start. If you were to put this color on top of the orange, you might get a completely different color and you think about your layers. This probably has a lot of white in it. For anything that has a lot of white in it, one technique that we use that is helpful is to create this kind of three-part series. So in the beginning, we had orange on top of our our gray here or tan on multiply but it's going to be different when we have that gray on top of orange, especially since that's so much white. What I'm doing is I'm taking a full opacity tan color and putting the very back on having orange right in the center of this little sandwich on multiply, and then I'm adding in the tan color at 50 percent opacity on top of everything. That is probably a more accurate representation of what it would look like for this particular colors since it is using so much white. But going back to the basics, if we were to use CMYK, which is full pigments, multiply works great, and that's probably a very accurate representation of what would happen. So one thing that we've decided throughout this process is that we're going to be using a light-colored paper and remember that there's so many colors of paper out there that you can use. You don't have to do a white. You don't have to do an off-white. You can use the orange as a swatch for example. I'm going to start taking these things off of multiply. So our original instinct on our poster was that we're going to use a light-colored paper like this off-white but what's kind of fun near the end of your process is that you can play around with more options in terms of what color paper you're going to use. Let's say, we want to use our orange color as a paper color, or let's say, we want to use this purple. You can see when you change colors how it interacts with the colors that you've chosen and you can change your artwork based off that accordingly. Another thing I'm noticing is how much white is actually in fact used in the design. So changing colors like this is now giving me an indication that maybe we should add more white in the actual design itself or consider taking it out altogether if it's not going to be used that much and this could easily turn into a two-color poster versus a three. So that's a little background on what we think about when it comes to color and next we'll wrap up the project with adding a little bit of texture. 13. Texture 1: So, now that we've done some experimentation with color, one of the last steps we like to take with a lot of our artwork that's drawn in the computer is to add some photographic texture to it, and it helps take it out of that really super clean vector look and gives it some texture, gives it a a handmade feel. So, we're going to show you a couple of ways of doing that. One good option if you're looking for textures, is you can go out in the world and photograph them yourself. You can also purchase stock images like the one that we're going to use here, which is probably like carpeting or something but, it's some type of fabric that is a pretty close approximation to what Verona Bison might look like. So, now we have our image in Photoshop. What we're going to want to do is basically create a pattern of it because the sample that we have is just not enough fur to really cover the space of this buffalo at the scale that we're looking for. Right now, this is an unusual shape. It's 72 DPI and it's 72 inches by 48 inches. What we're more looking for is a size that's more like our poster. So, make sure that your last layer, this layer of the image is unlocked and you want to go to canvas size. I'm going to go ahead and make an 18 by 24, and it's going to clip it. Then, I'm also going to change the size of this and bring it back in. Actually, before I do that, let's make sure that our DPI is also 300 because right now we're dealing with print and 72 DPI is more designated for online resolution. Luckily with texture, you can play around with resolution and not really worry about rasterization that much because what we're doing is just basically trying to get an ambience. So, I'm bringing down this whole thing and transforming it. We probably want to make it fairly small. Let's go even smaller, say, maybe around that size. An easy way to start tiling this would be to copy and paste it, and then that second thing that you just made, go ahead and flip it horizontally. You can move it along until it hits the edge of the next one. You can see it creates a seam that's almost invisible. Then what you can do again, is take both those images and copy them, and flip them vertically and pull those down. So, we see we're creating a pattern already just by doing that. By making the same image into a quadrant of four, we can then take all of that and just copy and paste it again. We're basically creating a whole new texture in this case. But what you want to watch out for is these weird little shapes that are happening. We're getting like this iris look, and everything's very centralized. I try to keep things a little bit off kilter, you could even angle it if you wanted to, and resize it. Then you want to flatten everything. So, now this is all one image and there is literally no seams to the whole thing. So, to push it even further, let's go ahead and grab the clone stamp tool, and play around with customizing it a little bit and make sure brush is large enough that it's going to grab a good portion of the pattern. Make sure your hardness on this is not 100 percent, it's all the way down to zero so basically, it doesn't create a hard line. So, the way this works is essentially, hold down Option in an area that you want to duplicate, let's say this area, and then move it over to an area that you want it to look a little more consistent. So, this whole dark area, I want to patch up a little bit. You can see what just happened there. Then grab from another area, maybe down here and patch it up right there. If you do this enough, you can basically get away with making this a very consistent fur look without a pattern in sight. You're going to get a little bit of fogginess in certain areas. So, be careful to be a little bit more conservative with the pen tool, but sometimes a little fogginess is good so it doesn't seem too crisp. So, now I just get a nice consistent look here. Now, in order to use this in your design, what you want to do is grayscale it out so it has no color, and start playing with the levels. Right now it's very midtoney. So, you can see that with this arc here. If you want to bring it to a lighter situation, pull in this node and if you want to have high-contrast, pull in this node. High contrast is pretty good for what we're about to show you. It really helps make the texture look alive and more in depth. You want to have a good amount of white in there too because the more white you have in there, the less texture that's going to be printed. But this is something you can experiment often on and I'll show you how to drop it into the file. So, basically, save this as a new JPEG, for example. Let's call this Fur2 and that'll be one option. Another thing you might want to do, is save that grayscale version as a different option so, that you can always go back and make different revisions based off that native file. It's always good to have a backup. So, what you want to do is go back into your Illustrator file and let's say we want texture on this main shape, basically his head. Go ahead and copy and paste this entire shape and turn into one shape. So, go to your shaped mode and unite it, and also Command A. Then drop in this texture to be around the size of what you're looking for. Send it all the way to the back and you're basically creating a clipping mask of it. So, take that shape that you created of his head, and put it inside that clipping mask. So, make clipping mask. So, you can see that we basically are throwing in the texture within that shape. Right now, it's basically going to have a white background and black imagery. Now, you can change the color of this texture by clicking on it with the white arrow tool inside the clipping mask. Right now it's black, but if we want to change it to orange for example, we could. If we want to change it to the dark brown, we could. In order to get rid of that white, all you have to do is make sure that clipping mask is on multiply. All of a sudden we have a texture. So, that would indicate black ink textured on top of a fully filled shape of teal. You can use this technique throughout and have multiple clipping masks. One thing you want to keep in mind is that whenever you have rastered imagery inside a Illustrator file, it makes the file much larger and the more you have, the slower your computer is gonna run. So, try to be a little bit more conservative with it and you only use it where you need to, and try to use as little imagery as possible. So, that's how you get a darker texture on top of a lighter background. That's pretty simple and we got a pretty high resolution on it. 14. Texture 2: If you want to do a lighter texture on top of a dark background, it's a little bit of a different of a process. So, let's say, we want to get the same texture on this main shape here, what we're going to do is go back to Photoshop and we're going to open up. Actually, let's keep with this gray scale, because this will be easier to work with. What we want to do is have the same filling of the texture that we're using, but we're going to invert it. The reason we're inverting it is so that we're getting the highlights emphasized in this next one. So, go back to your levels and play with the whole contrast over there again. It's going to look crazy now because it's completely inverted, but what this is basically going to do on the poster is that anything is black is going to be light, anything that's light is going to be transparent. So, go ahead and save this as a different type of file, and we're going bitmap it first. Try to stay at 300 DPI, the same DPI that your file, your poster is going to be at, and use diffusion dither. It's probably the smoothest looking bit mapping that you can use. I wouldn't go to half toning just quite yet because that requires angles and specific dot sizes, and that's something that you want to determine at the very end when you're ready to get this printing. But diffusion dither is a nice clean simple way to get things started. So, let's go ahead in diffusion dither it. What that just did was, if I zoom in, turn this into a one color design. So, we're just dealing with black and the background is going to be basically transparent. Save this as a TIFF. You can't save it as a jpeg, you have to save it as a TIFF because it's now bitmapped. We're going to call this fur four. All right. So, this shape that we have here, again, we're going to copy and paste it to make the shape that's going to turn into a clipping mask. Make sure it's all one piece. So, go ahead and unite it, and do command eight. Then we're going to place the texture that we just created, fur four. You can keep playing with angles and stuff like that to make sure that it looks a little bit different from the last one. What we want to do is turn it white. So, you can see what it's doing. It's taking on the paper color and it has a transparent background. This is a great way to add an overall texture to your entire design. I'm going to throw this to the back, grab that shape, and create a clipping mask. So, you can see right now that the texture that I added is pretty intense and it's almost taking away a lot of the darkness that we like to in the original design. One easy fix would be just to change the opacity of it if you wanted to. Another fix would be to go back to a Photoshop, and go back to your levels basically, and try to lighten up a little bit like play with the levels so that it's not as intense. This output level is a great way to get all those blacks to more of a neutral color to. So, let's see what that looks like. Again, bitmap diffusion dither and save. What's great about having linked images to now that I've saved this, I can go back to my Illustrator file and it's going ask me would you like to update, and if you say yes, it automatically will update what you put in there. You don't have to redo that part. You can see with just a little amount of texture that we've added into this, it's dramatically changing the design. It's taking it out of the vector digital illustration realm, and turning it into something that looks more like it was screened printed and handmade. 15. Final Tips: So, here's some physical examples of screen printed work that are using the style that is taught in this class. For this particular poster, there was a couple of things going on that demonstrates the set of rules that we talk about. So, for example, consistency in line angles. So, if you notice a 45 degree angle actually runs all the way through to the other end, so feather-to-feather. All these diamond shapes are made with 45 degree angles and you can see how they all line up and interact with stuff going on behind it. There's a lot of perfect circles being used, and there's a central point if you expand it out makes another circle. Then other circles are based off of the tangents of those. So, everything has a relationship with the next shape next to it. Another thing that's interesting about this poster is the color choices and how they interact. Yeah, this is only a three color design. Three ink colors were used, yet we were able to get a whole variety of colors using over printing, which is something that you can consider doing with your project as well. So, for a good example of how certain colors interact, this red color was in fact mixed to look like a magenta and it's laying over yellow, which warms it up and makes it a little more rich. But let's say the same color goes over blue, it actually will make it look more like a purple. Moving over to this print, one big difference between these two is that this print uses no texture at all while this is using a tiff file laid over the top to create this fur texture. Another more challenging approach with this poster is printing it on black paper till we get a little bit different look and a more unique color palette comes out of that. Since it is on black paper, the color choices that we had to adhere to are mixed with a lot of white. It's not like we can use this yellow on a black piece of paper because it would basically, like a multiply filter, just disappear into it and become super dark. So, a lot of these have to be muted colors for it to pop on black paper. So, keep that in mind when you're making your design. If you're going to be dealing with actual dark paper, you're going to be dealing with a lot of almost in the pastel realm of color swatches. If you do something on a light piece of paper, you have a lot more freedom in terms of color options. Thanks for taking the class. We're excited to see what you've created and most of all just remember to have fun. Good luck with your projects, we're looking forward to them. 16. 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