Transcripts
1. Introduction: Getting back from the road. Already on my Skillshare, huh? Frying panda, hotplate. Hello everybody, we're back from tour, we're tired, early here in Portland. The who lives like this, and we're doing our fourth Skillshare today with you guys. Call this one Situation Iteration because the idea is that when you sit down you start a logo, and what sort of quick changes can you make to the simplest of shapes to have lots of new aspects quickly. I've trained myself to flip things so many different ways. By the time I get from end to end, that thing is taking on a whole new life for itself, but the simplest of changes. That's the lesson here. You're building an arsenal for yourself. [inaudible] I could pull another arrow out of my back that may be a little bit different than the last one, and that's what we're trying to get at here. So, we're going try to do this, and start here with some ode to your hometown or your favorite town. When you think about that place that you're from and you boil it down, what something, what's a thing from your town? What's a vista or a place from your town? Then, what's one you hear also there? As you go from the thing all the way to the place, and up to that person, it gets a little more complex with each step. We're going to make each of those, and you can take those things and really watch it come to light because you put those things together into one little cluster, create a T-shirt or a postcard or a poster. That's the perfect ode to your hometown. The main thing of this whole exercise here is when you break things down in little simple shades, is you'll get [inaudible] some really complex process. It's not, you have to build each shape, you have to own this shape and knowing that, that should license you to say, "Wow, I can really build anything." All right. So, I hope it all makes sense, from a dig into some of this new merchandise. All right. From one stupid hat to another stupid hat. All right you guys. Let's go make some stuff.
2. Creating Your Base Form: Iterations, okay. I've been making low in a lot of years I have been making things in Illustrator a lot of years. Stuff starts here in my feel note as a sketch, and then by the time I hit some little something here and then take it into Illustrator, it's just a shape right? It's just sort of like form that I kind of call architecture. Where, when you take it from the sketch to this, you're just drawn lines and pieces and little bits and pieces of type and and things to assemble that first sketch. What's interesting about that to me is Illustrator is this sort of infinite space for me right? Where, if you know how to move quick you can take something and build that first time and an option drag and dup that thing and then start really cooking and you change it, you tweak it a little bit and then you keep going, and you keep going, and keep going and basically it's sort of like a tree branches it's sort of like build out. You'll see the sort of linear quality of how far these things go, you can't really just stay here in you're eight and a half by 11 art boar, right? You have to learn to take that thing far out and see where it will take you. So, what I'm going to do right now, is I'm good try to take something really simple, and I guess you call it Illustrator or just draw it, or designer, or build whatever you want to call it. Because that's want to walk you through this sort of like these are micro tweaks that you can do on your own to give things life. The idea is they might be more my style or something whatever you want to call it. But, just to show you sort of iteration versatility, right? That you have this power within this machine and within this program to make quick changes that can take your first idea and make. Well I may I've got a list here of things to try, up to 12, 13, 14 things we'll check it out. So, we're going to start there. Now, something that comes to mind at all times here in my little drawer of drawers I always have my little mustard on hand. Because I don't screw around with this honey mustard shit I, don't like stuff with bark in it, I don't like shit with pebbles, I like my shit French's, I like my shit with my good strong Pantone 122, I want to say. When you look at this little shape, there's really three pieces, one, two, three, right? This shape is sophisticated, it's got this little debit here because it makes for good ergonomic grabbing when you're taking a little squeeze. But, when you reduce it down, let's just take the opportunity to let it be really simplified. So, I'm going to start by drawing that, I'm looking at this thing here I'm going to go draw this thing. Here is that cap and remember I'm just grabbing really simple pieces right now, to sort of handle this. All this stuff is editable later on but we're just going to try to quickly draw with this actual shape looks like on this mustard, on this mustard bottle, right. So, right here we go now, if you're grabbing shapes and I grab a little tombstone shape here out of my cymbals palette, expand that thing out. I'm going to go try to subtract some of these pieces here, because you see this little hand debit for that extra grip. Well, let's go grab some circles and lay those things over that, right? So, we're just trying to like by grabbing a white circle, and gently putting that over that to get that some of that form there. Well, later on we can clean that thing up a little bit better. But, for now we want to make sure that all these things are centered and align the right way. If you grab those two, and group those two white boxes, and then grab this red one here and center them. Now, as soon as you see that form come out of there. Now, to get a line to come off this stuff, there's something I want to talk about, is there is a group out of the UK and they're called Astute Graphics. If I can do any sort of endorsement, let me do it now. There's a couple of pieces from this Astute Graphics that have really changed the way I work, right. This is a plug and you have to pay for it and stuff, but it has change the way I work. If I can just sort of fumble through this real quick here's the deal, I don't work for these guys. I met them all, they are super nice guys they gave me the stuff to use, but how many thing can you say in your normal day to day workflow have changed the way that you work? Well, Astute is one of those things. I'm so thankful, I met them over dinner, when I went to the UK last year. Because, if i'm trying to hit this line. For me to get this line to connect down here and to go up to this point. This is a tricky spot right here, like the way, here's the deal, if I try to do it with my regular line segment tool. I come up here and I look at where that thing sort of connects there, and I kind of come off of this thing and I start my lines and that's I try to meet it on that little path with there. Well, where is that perfect point to hit on right? Now, if I try to eyeball it and I say, "Well it's probably right about there." Now, here's the thing is, wherever that little line is connecting, if we go and we look at that point. Command Y, it's not quite hitting, it's hitting too late after the fact or it's not quite hitting on the spot. It could be before the spot, it could be out here where there's this extra space in here or whatever you want to call it. The thing is that, is just math and that's a tricky thing. But, if you go over here and you pick one of there, let's see here, a line tangent of our path this would be a line tangent two a path. So, I'm going to start line up here, and I bring this thing down, this, see that? It connects to the perfect sort of rounded apex of that zone and then you let go, now that line is perfect. So, once again if we do that, and we come over here, and we grab a line, and bring that thing, it's going to pick that spot over there. So, what that did right there was you can see here now, if we go to try, we going to grab, we make that a little shape. Just for the sake of speed, we just go and grab this thing here and color that thing in. Then you start to see that shape come to life, right? Because right now if we're going to take this piece and say, "Well it's a little bit too tall up here." Let's just pull this thing down. You can't quite just, I'll show you, you can't just grab those pieces and move them down and want that to be the same nice bit of math, where we let that line connect over here. Because here's why, when you drag that thing down, if you see when go to your command Y, you see where that, there's a extra little space in there. So, you have to kind of do it again, right? If we like were that just, sort of that from this edge to this edge, let's go do it again. So, let's grab the line tangent to path will come in here a little bit. We're going to see where that kind of hits, there hits right there, and let that thing go, right? Instead of trying to redraw up, because we don't know what that distance is from there to their, so I've tried to redraw that, let's just be smart about this thing, instead let's just flip this whole piece, right? We're just going to take this whole piece and reflect it. So, when we do that, then that means that line is perfectly on the other side. So, there that thing goes, right? I'll get rid of the extra shape in there. Now, let's make this its own little piece here. So, now we're getting kind of close, right? All we want for right now are three shapes, right? So, if I grab this piece right here, I'll bring this thing over and I get rid of these two little guys, now maybe that's enough. Now, I go in and I just sort of round all these corners kind of like what's going on in this piece here. I grab this four and I around those things off to get that ergonomic feel. It might be just a little too much if I look at it, it just a little bit too much. So, we can kind of scrap this thing and try it again, right? So, here's how you do that. I'll bring this little piece over we're going to bring this one out here just a little bit less, a little bit bigger. We'll do that again over here, we'll center all this stuff. Group those two pieces and I'll center these pieces. Now, that feels just a little bit better, right? Now, when we take these things and minus them off their, the minus front. Then you go round those edges a little bit. All we're trying to do is get that form down of whatever object you picked, right? So, here is my little mustard bottle. It's got the form the extra piece, don't connect those just yet and I'll show you why.
3. Iterating with Lines and Shapes: Because here's the deal, just by getting those little guys down, let's just take it over here and let's just let it go. Number one, I've got these things listed here. We're going to call it an outline thin. Get rid of the color of the thing and let's just go black one point. Because right there, there's your first version. Let's put a big old number on here, and just get some really simple Helvetica. Don't worry about it being a cool piece of type because later on if you don't have that type face loaded, you just want to be able to use something that's very default that you know is readable. That's just a good rule of thumb anyway when you're working with these machines because someone else has to open the document. That's one less thing you have to sort of worry about. Everyone's got a Helvetica Bold in some respect on the machine. If you take this thing, you just kind of go over here to option number two. I'm going to call that outlined thick. Just simply by taking this first thing here and just taking this guy and now ramping it up, and stopping, there's something happening right there where it's just this sort of thick outline. Now, what if these lines were to come up a little bit short? You grab all these pieces yet again, and how that might work is just to, instead of trying to go sheer these things off, you could just lay a little white box, and then let that little white box be the thing that becomes the divider. Let's get these on the same layer. Now, that little division there between that little spout and where the thing meets, that's come up a little bit short and it's kind of interesting. If you do it again down here, you could just take that same white box and let that separate a little bit, and that's just coming up a little bit short. If you take this thing off, and we'll call that the Coming Up Short number three, and we're just doing sort of a 3.1 down below here, now just check it out. Instead of it going the entire distance, went for only one half. You can see here now, just those little line breaks. Those are the sort of interesting little decisions that you made where it could be asymmetrical. We'll call this one three point, I don't know, two or something. If we were to go and take this thing and say let's just go a little bit long, maybe it's something where, instead of having these white lines, these nice clean shapes, we're just doing. Remember, I mean, I guess we're calling this kind of illustration, but now these are just the options that you have. If you want it just a little bit long, and then took this guy and did something like this, and you see in here, that's yet another way to kind of tell this story by going a little bit weird and let this thing hang over. In the end, it's still a mustard bottle. It's just this idea that maybe right here along this line, this one could come up a little bit short. How you would do that is just grab this line right here, C command F, make it white, the line white, put it behind it, make it a little bit bigger. We're on to eight point, let's go to 12 points. Put this line behind that, and you see that's making making that little connector right there? We're going on to 4.1 and we did something like this where we went a little bit long and we sort of broke this line right here. Instead of having the line behind it, get rid of the white line, let's take a section out of this line right here and let's just go a little bit long with it. Now, I don't know if I necessarily like that, but the idea is if we're illustrating something and it's just this simple, simple shape, this is all about options. This is all about quick little moves. This is all about like you think of like a little quiver with lots of arrows, there's another arrow in your quiver. Right now, if you were to go grab this one because it was kind of feeling kind of good, we're going to go do number five now, which should be a rounded edge thick line. Check this thing out because all I want is I want this sort of global rounded edge on this whole item here. Let's grab that command C, let's go jump into your Photoshop here. Bring that little piece that you copied over or start a new window here. Don't worry about the CMYK or any of that sort of stuff for now, but this is remedial. If you saw my third Skillshare, you saw me do this here. But just to be quick, I'll show you what I'm doing. Now, check yourself. First things first, we want to make sure that thing is going to be a grayscale. Don't flatten and don't rasterize it. Now go option command which is your canvas size, and give the little extra canvas size 2.5 by 5. That gives us some breathing room as this thing is floating there. Now, check your option command I which is your image size, and go give that some high resolution. Okay, as you can see now, that thing is super crisp in there, but it's still just a little vector in there. It's still editable. What we want to do is we're going to round all these stuff off, all these little pieces, and here's how you do it. You grab the two layers, command J, command E, flatten it. Do it again. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to just take this thing and we're going to blur the hell out of it. Gaussian blur that thing a bunch. Now, if you take it out here too far, that's too far, but you'll see we're starting to get uncomfortable. But if you notice there, what it's doing is it's sort of rounding all those corners, because now if we go, we blur that thing out a little bit, you hit your command L for your levels. You bring your black point in, and you bring your white point in. See what it's doing to those little shapes? It's making this form a nice rounded form. See it there, if you zoom in here and you want to get that line a little bit crisper, there it is. Now, when you go select this thing, you grab your magic wand tool, you grab that dark shape, you come into your paths, hit the Make Work Path from Selection tool, and that makes a little path of points there. Command C, come back into Illustrator here, command V, expand it, color it black, and now you've got this rounded edge version of whatever you were making back here at number two. You've just got this rounded edge version. It just sort of took the edge off, if you can just see the difference there. It just softened all the stuff at my grid. When you look at this stuff, it's a little junky because you're taking that off at pixels, but this, instead of having to go around these corners and take the time to do that in Illustrator, you can go do this globally and really quick. Because if we are to take that thing off here and say, all right, cool, let's just take this thing, and let's go and make these all just shapes, and we're going to go, these ones go dark yellow. We go put a little something in there that's just. I hit a red for the label. Now, you've got this, like, little icon thing here which is a little bit different, a little bit different edge on those lines. That's why you would mess with that. That would be five and I would call that some sort of outline rounded edge. Now here's another one. This one we're going to call it inner thin line, outer thick line. You keep these lines. Let's give it like a one or two point, okay, cool. Because what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that all these stuff is colored something. This color, what color does that mustard yellow for now. What we want is we want an outer thick line, and the inner thin lines. When you take this guy out here like this, and you make a version of all those other guys and you, put those all together. Now, send this to the back by going shift command, left bracket, because that's behind that now. Now, you can cover this thing all black or you're going to group all these pieces over here, command G. Take this little guy right here and give it up to six points or something. Now, center these two. Now, when you touch the first one, lock it, command two. Now go to that back one and bring that line up nice and thick. Now you'll see what you're getting here is you're getting like this inner thin line and this outer thick line. Think of a set of icons with this or something. Something squirrelly is going on over here, let me go investigate. There must be an extra point or something. There it goes. These are just simple, simple design cues of how you can affect this.
4. Iterating with Color and Style: Okay, let's get into a little bit of a different realm now. Let's go all the way back here to these originals. Let's come out here and we'll start this one is number seven. We're just going to call it flat shapes. What is that mustard bottle? It's a yellow piece of plastic. So, let's let it be that, but watch what it does when you do that. If you just tell it to be this one mustard yellow with no outline. If you look at this thing, it's just this yellow shape. The problem here is, if you really look at this thing, you'll see the way the light hits this right now, this makes this a little bit darker because that thing folds back a bit, this is a little bit lighter, and so on. Just by giving it just a tiny bit of color change, that's going to be your first trick because there is enough right there and there's enough right there to say, all right. This is enough to tell the story of this bottle. You see that this thing is connected to this larger body, and there is this little spout, this little spigot. If you take this thing and you said, let's add a little bit of volume to it, number eight, and you grab these pieces over here, what would the volume look like? If you look at that thing, I see a highlight come in there, I see a highlight coming in here, I see a highlight going across this thing. So, let's just take this thing really quick, and just mask in some shapes. So, I just draw a box over this thing, and I'm going to give it this dark mustard color. I grab that thing and I put it behind this thing. Now watch. Let's grab this thing, send it to the back. Grab both, Command+7 that masks inside there, get that lighter mustard shade. Now, you can grab this thing and push this thing around a little bit. So, this thing goes to here and now that I just gave that thing just a little bit of volume. If we go open this and we say, we wanted to show a little bit of highlight, look, watch this. Command+C, Command+F. Let's hit like a bright piece and let's just put a little bit of volume on that spigot. We'll do it again up here in this piece, Command+C, Command+F. We'll put just a larger one a little off-center over here and it will just go in and bring that. So, you can see what we're doing here, it's just this idea of just by taking just some really simple shapes and adding just a little bit of extra volume to this thing. Let's take a look at maybe there's another little piece off of here somewhere, where we just don't want to lay, this is just for quickness sake. Grab this piece and do something like this and let this thing just be a lighter value, like this, and send it all back behind that cap. See, you can do this again where if you want to just touch a little bit of this part up here. Let's take a circle and let's say that we want that little piece just accentuating the top piece there. We just want this little piece right here. Well, what you do is you would just grab another square here, subtract this piece off of it, go and give it a weird color for now. Cut this thing, Command+X. Grab the outer edge here, Command+F and it pasted inside there because you already had another item pasted in there. Now, see this little guy right here? Maybe that's that third color right there. Would just be that muster bottle at 50 percent or something. Then you start to see here with having good math and things making sense, if you are to take this line now and do something where it connects all of this one little point right here and let this guy come on in, don't worry about it being weird like this because it's out in the ether. You're just seeing what you're seeing here. Okay. Now, this one gets a little bit weird. We're now color the outline with some skewed colors behind it. So, let's go grab this cool outline right here with the rounded one. This is going to be our number nine. Because if we're going to take this thing and we're going to do some cool little mustard splotches and stuff behind it. So, let's just go quickly make us a little mustard splotches. A little raindrop, a little mustard drop. Let's just take this thing now and just allow this thing to rest behind this thing. Now, that still tells a story of mustard bottle. See it? Now, that's just the skewed shape. We see there's a bit of a red label here. So, check it out, we'll bring this one up here, we'll just go grab a red dot and we'll just let that dot just rest in there a little bit, a little off-center. There is that navy blue in there. Let's just go grab a navy blue bar and let that thing touch over all these pieces, we'll make a quick navy here. Put that one behind there. Then there's one little white dot in there somewhere too. But just go grab a little white dot and let that thing just rest over that thing and we can go try it a couple other ways. This idea of telling the story of what these skewed shapes behind it, well, that might be too much of a leap to have that little drop. So instead, we take this thing out of here and we just go grab one of these shapes, let's just go grab this shape inside here. Cover that thing yellow. Put that back here and just let it become a little bit bigger. See this? Put that back behind there and now same with these guys up here. Grab this piece and grab this piece. Now, just make them a little bit big and a little bit wonky, and just let that just stay sloppy, just rest behind there. It's still telling the story of what this thing is. This is just another opportunity, another way of telling this whole story of what illustrating this thing will say. Because now if we took this guy and we just let it just have a little bit of white in this little zone here, took this guy real quick and put it up above. There's a little mustard splotch. It's not necessarily the same story as if we were to play by the rules, when you play by the rules and go along this line and just let it be, this is really simple geometric. Well, this is where you're breaking the rules a bit, so we'll let that be number nine as just another way to mess with this a little bit. Number 10, you don't have to let this thing be a blackout line. Let's bring this guy over here. Let's call it number 10 and let's just rely on the white outline on this thing. Because it's one thing to see it in black and white, it's another thing to say outright mustard bottle. Just check this out. Watch how fun this is. Now, there's this little icon right there, that's just allowing it to be white. There's a different feel when you don't have that heavy color affecting it. You take this guy over here and you get rid of that black outline, who's to say that doesn't tell the story enough right there. Well, it's a little odd, but it's just the idea that when you're cooking through these things, you're flipping, you're flapping, you're doing things, you're going a little bigger, you're going a little bit long, you come up a little bit short. You're just finding more and more ways to iterate. More and more iterations. If you take that a little bit farther, if we take this guy back here, where we like this one right here. We took that into Photoshop and spruced it out a little bit. So, let's go into Photoshop here, but we've already got that one, so just working with this one again. Let's just go Command+J off of this one. Unclick your path. Command+J, let's add a little bit of noise. `Let's get it pretty weird so you're starting to lose that edge. Now, blur this thing just a little bit. That's not really a clean line anymore, you can see a little divits and davits and spruces and screezes and shit inside there because now, why bring that thing in? Look what that does, that just messed that line up really good. That might be enough. Right there. It took it from a clean line to this screwsy line. Now, hit that with this, the only thing I use in filter gallery which is this nice little Stamp Tool. You can smooth things out. That might just be enough, right there. Say, we just want a little bit of white scress because now, we'll grab that thing out of there, select it or Color Range. Select this piece. You grab this piece, right here. Make it a path. Cut it. Now, take a look at that. It's just got this little bit of tooth to it. Let's grab these pieces and just quickly plop them behind there. You'll see yet another version that could come out of that thing. If we zoom in on that. Now, you've got this flat and screezed, what if it's all screeze? Well, it's up to you to go do that. I showed you how to take the shape and bring in the Photoshop. But, don't be locked in by these things. This is an alphabet. If I just tried to show you, here's yet another one. If I just try to show you 11 options here that's meant to just challenge you to look at this stuff in new ways. If we go back out here and we're still going to lay, I called them AT&T lines, and I do this stuff on a lot of the junk that I make. Whatever. Yeah, I'm giving out the secrets. But there's all kinds of ways to do this. If we want to add just a little bit more value and tone to this thing, here's a quick way to do it. If we grabbed a little white line that just came out to here and then, took this piece and did something like this. See what that just did to that top part. Let's do it again. Just grab say four or five of them, four of them and bring it down to this little piece here. This is yet again going to change the whole feel of this piece because now if we go into here and we do something cool where we only do it maybe on the inside of this thing, but what we want is we want that line to be Command+D, Command+D, Command+D, Command+D. We take all of these pieces now and make sure they're all equal distance by Vertical Distribute Center. There it goes. Group it. Now, you've got this a texture to work with because of we took this guy here and said, Shift+Option+Command+O, Offset negative 1.25, that's that inner shape now. Give it a weird color for a second. Then, go put these little lines inside that thing, Command+7, masking it. See what that just it? That just added yet another little twist. Okay, when I zoom out here and I just take a look at this thing. From where we started with the most elemental shapes of just how do we make this little thing here. Well, that's up to you now to look around you and say, "All right. Here is this cool gold marker. I'm going to go redraw this thing," in your style. But, the idea is walk it through this a couple of times. Walk that shape as simple as that thing is, walk it through this a couple times because you're just going to see the versatility upfront. You're going to see that you have options. You have options, not the program, not the bullshit that I'm trying to pound down your throat. These are things that you can go make twists and turns on. A lot of the things that you're seeing here, well, this is how I walk a logo through myself. Sometimes it's really flat, sometimes there's an outline, sometimes there's a thicker outline and a thinner inline and all those things. You'll see this stuff done a million ways out there digging around the web or just looking through your latest design annuals or books on your shelf, you're going to see that done, lots of ways. We just forget that we have always options that are fingertips. Whoever's watching right now, your favorite might be number eight. Well, then go and make a cool twist on that. You already might have learned that. I'm hoping that you didn't really think about the versatility of 1 through 7 and 9 through 12, whatever. I'm excited to see you guys make up number 13, 14, and 15, if that makes sense. So, I hope you enjoyed this. Now, we're going to move into some stuff. It's going to get a little weird. People, places, things. We're going to flip it around a little bit to things, places, people. Here we go.
5. Illustrating Objects: All right. In my hand here, I am holding a spark plug. This would have been hanging in some auto shop or something years ago, and I procured this from some junk store somewhere in my travels and it is one of my favorite, favorite items. Today, what I would do is we just went through some iterations, and now I want to jump into something where I do a little tribute, a little Ode to Detroit. There's just a metaphor here of Detroit, and muscle cars, and engines, and mobility, and industry, and making things happen. Ingenuity. Yet you combine that with the salacious side of Detroit which has been wrought with protests and riots and an upheaval. I think about the bands and I think about the contemporary things, what bands come from there. Now, what's crusty stuff that I love, and then of course you've got your Jack White's, and then I getting to my Dirtbombs or His Name Is Alive or all the way back somewhere you pass up a Bob Seger and you pass up an Iggy Pop all the way back to the MC5, and I think of Rob Tyner and that big hair and just how cool those guys were and how ahead of their time they were and how for their time they were. Today, I'm going to try to tackle Detroit and spark plugs and some Rob Tyner, and somehow mash them all up into some little graphic somehow. So, in that previous chunk here, we did what? 11, 12, 13-ish, 12-ish little iterations, that's just to show you guys versatility. Digging into this next section here, you're going to see versions of those show up in all three little chunks. You're going to see how I tweak those things and apply them quickly to just keep myself moving. Remember, there's all sorts of different ways to do these iterations. You can follow by the book, kind of how I did it in that first section, or you can mix and match and see what happens so. All right, here we go. When back up and we take a look at this whole piece here, it's like what we did that quick. Just for starter, with these simple shapes that very first version, it's just this outline shape. By going to the second one, I'm just going to a thicker line. Well, remember, it doesn't have to go to be some always a thick line thing that's going to take finessing later on. To the third version of where you take that thick line, just go a little bit short as a way to kind of- that's another little quick style change there. If we go to four, we start to color this thing and you're playing it a little bit of loose, you're going a little bit long, and you're allowing these things to just have these sort of just gestures of color behind it fine. If we're going number 5, we're playing it real safe and just colored pieces. Jumping out to six and taking the line away and letting it this thing just be this flat shape. If we did this real quick again here, and just to make sure that I'm not getting too ahead of myself in this thing and we call this one number 6 v2, like just so you can see the differentiation here just from a quick granular level. These things have to jump off each other. So, now, by letting this thing be really dark, now we're giving just a little bit more depth just within these really, really flat shapes because that part is larger and this part is smaller and et cetera. But what we just did right there with this first little thing is we made about eight or nine different little versions. Those are tiny little moves. Depending on what's right for your client. If it is about thick lines, well, then maybe that's right. But the idea is you were versatile, you are exploring new styles, you are exploring new fields, you're trying different little color combinations, you're trying a little line combinations, and you're feeling around what feels right. Because now if I was to take one of these things and say that it's a spark plug and what's my favorite one, well, I don't remember, l'm just playing it straight back here, where it's a shapes, but I'm going to bring it over here and here's what I would do. I'm going to go put a little star next to it because this is my tuned up version for later on. Just give it to a wild color, and now I'm going to go and say, "Well, let's just take a look at what a spark plug even looks like." It seems a little bit longer, a little bit squaddie or whatever it's going to be. Well, let's just go. You can just go on fudged things. So, I'm just going to go and just do a quick little tune up of this guy. That's looking pretty good, these little pieces. Remember, these are just shapes, these are just lines, you can tune all these things super quick. So, I lay it out on here. This is my little spark plug. Later on, we can color that thing, we can make it thick, thin. Remember, in Illustrator, command Y, do you see all this stuff is? They`re just shapes. Let that demystify this, you guys. They're just simple shapes and there they are. That final version, that's just a series of boxes. Remember, at the end, as if I try to combine all these things or something and I have a thick line piece and I'm not feeling the thick line piece, well, I'm going to show you how to make it to simple shapes. Maybe add a little bit of texture or add some half tone or a little bit grit. All right, moving on to places.
6. Illustrating Places: All right, so that was great. Let's take a little break and have a message from, not one of our sponsors, my girlfriend, Lee Mikola. Take it away. Now, we're back. See, that was some pretty cool stuff, right? Right. Okay. I was born in Detroit and I think of that, my experience as a kid going to downtown Detroit was a couple of times in summer. I'll go to a Tiger game or I'd go with my dad and we'd go downtown. When I think of Detroit, I think of the Renaissance Center. I think of downtown now in 2017, it's coming back. It might even be back, whatever you want to call it, Detroit. The last couple times I've been there to speak or hang out, it was awesome. There was food, and things, and stuff, and fashion, and just. Ten years ago, you'd go in just, be like, one coffee place, a couple of crusty record companies or whatever, but now, there's all kinds of stuff. It's so awesome to see that stuff happening in this place that's always gets pushed around. Now, stuff can happen there, it can happen even in Cleveland, it can even happen. For me as a kid, thinking of going downtown, seeing these big buildings and that incredible Detroit skyline, I'm going to go do a research where I'm going to go jump online, just take a look here and see what is that Detroit skyline look like. From the water, it's one thing, but there it is, right there looking great. I have tons of photos of this stuff too, but now there's that Renaissance Center. Here is a good straight version. Now, remember, someone took this photo so you have to be respectful of that. Just for the sake of saying, doing a quick little screen grab here. You go grab this thing and just to get this sort of cluster going here. Just for the reference here, we'll bring this thing. All I need to see is, wow, a couple of buildings here, a couple of things here, and we can quickly build out what this coming from, what we're down and start ways to get closer to the city there, you start to see that city explode. I'm going to draw an idealized version of just that. Okay. I'm just going to go straight. Remember, all this stuff later on is going to be massageable. If something doesn't quite feel right, we can go and adjust these things. Now, for the sake of speed, instead of having to draw these other four pillars, just grab that first tall one and let a couple of those things sort of suggest the sort of height or whatever you want to call it, and just let those things quickly sort of design themselves. In my brain, Detroit's always been this magical place. People shitting now over the years that I've heard. I get it, have your laughs, but maybe some day, I'll go back and die there or something, which would be kind of fun. Now, we've got this little bit of Detroit. Let's just back off for a second. Let's pull this off to the side here, and let's grab this little piece now and let's just go sort of massage it. If we bring this thing in here now, here's the first little trick. Just grab all the bottom ends. See all these little bottom edges? Grab all those and align them like that. We have a couple, there's a couple more to do. Because now, this one sort of general horizon line worth, because we can go grab a couple little lines and just make them sort of almost like cool apartments and stuff downtown there. There's sort of a Detroit now. This might be a little weird because this is looking from Windsor over so let's just go and let's just flip this thing. Let's grab a version out here and let's flip this thing. Like anything, you're just looking for like-minded spaces and pauses, and this little space right here, try to make that the same space in between all the rest of the building so it's just a certain consistency. What we're trying to do now is just we're going to sort of fudge this thing a little bit, take a little bit of liberties to try to condense this thing. It's one thing to get that architecture, because we look at that person's beautiful photo of downtown glimmering Detroit there. This is where we get to go and be a little impressionistic and still tell the story of this peak, and that peak, in this building in this angle, and these building names. I know as a little kid, my mom used to take me to Hudson's downtown and we would go and have a little ice cream treats and shit. I was a cute little kid. I was 33 years old that summer. Now that we've got this little piece and it's starting to happen, you can do another version yet again where you just take this little guy and we just take it over here and we do something like this. There's going to be no gaps. I'm not going to allow any gaps. I'm just going to fudge all these pieces and just get them just to where it feels city and condensed. Remember, these are all just chunks. They're all just little pieces and bits and we're just trying to get that just as compacted and as Detroit-ish as possible. Here's where it starts to get fun, it's because now, once you've got this piece, now just real quickly go do something where you remember from your symbols palette. I drew this little guy. Here, we have this thing right here, and we say, we go grab this thing and put a little Detroit on his shirt. Then we're going to go give it some cool color. We're going to let the city do this, then we're going to go back here and just real quickly give it a piece to type, and get some Detroit muscle going here. All we're doing is we're just testing our little place. We're just testing our little shape. Here's this cool little Detroit. Put that in the back there and let that thing hang over that thing. Now, we're making a little Detroit shirt, but you've got your Detroit piece, you've got your Detroit skyline. Let's go ahead a fun little enhancement right here that just says, "Fuck Kid Rock" real quick in there. Let's get that and this is just signs at this point. We're doing our part to save Michigan from it's very worst citizen right there. That's kind of fun. We'll give it a little hint of color, some Tigers, some Go Tigers colors. Let's see if we'll give it a navy blue going here. I'm riffing. I'm getting out on the ether. It's getting weird. You lost, Verlander. Still pissed, but he can go. My dad used to get all pissed off, this guy named Al Albuquerque, would come out and my dad will go, "Ah, Albuquerque." They were sending them in the pitch. Anyway, just to go see how that thing feels on there, now we can step back and say stuff like maybe all it needs to do is just something like this. If we're going to go and apply some of what we were messing with right here, we built those shapes now. Let's go do a little bit of this, but instead, let's just make another version. Let's slam it into one shape. Let's get rid of that whole bottom piece right here. Now, let's just let this be this one line. Now, you've got another version of this thing and let's just give this a little bit of air here to breathe between the buildings. It's still Detroit. You're still coming from Woodward down. What's cool now is now, we can take this thing and start to play with this thing because now, you could do something where you grab, and you combine like one big box like this. After a couple of quick decisions, you've got something to work when you're downtown. You see all these T-shirt shops and shit down there celebrating Detroit. Well, same kind of thing. We're making these little pieces quick, but that's just an outline version of that thing or just allowed to be something cool like this, where you just take and let that be the haze of the city or something and go behind it and just extend this a little bit longer. Put that back there. Put that behind there. What we're doing now is we're trying to show you a couple of ways to suggest windows or something, or maybe this is a quick little bit of haze, but we make another one down here. Now remember, if you go look at what those windows look like in there in that photo, we go find that image and we zoom in on that. There's X amount of floors. There's X amount of windows. There's X amount. There's some math there that we can get perfect. But over here, the gesture, the sort of like they were straight as it is just one line. Let's just go over, these little salt shakers right here. You don't need to show everyone. Check out what we're going to do here. I'm just going to do a real quick one. Put a line in there, color that white. Now I'm going to do something like this. Do this, command D, command D, command D, command D, command D, command D. Then I'm going to grab those pieces again, I'm going to go bring them over here. Put them in there. Now, what we do is just keeping with this suggestion of the city. Let's get rid of a couple of these things, and then allow that to just be this little suggestion. Now, for these guys, if we wanted the little office windows, well let's just do something real quick. Get those things so they're equidistant. Close enough, group them all, and now bring these things down. Now remember, you jump back in there, you can globally change these things real quick by grouping them all. Now, you just don't want to have every floor represented. What you do is just something a little more like this, bring these all in here, and then go have fun with it. Now, we can go through, do something where you get rid of a couple of these things or do something cool broken up little piece. You just put some tiny little lines in here. Go grab one of those and just do something and then just lay a black line over it. You start to see these things come to life. Now, I'm just trying to make a quick, quick, quick, recognizable thing from the Motor City and I just built this little skyline. There's my place.
7. Illustrating Places: Adding Color: Now, we have all this stuff kind of organized here. One thing we sort of forgot to do was just give them one of this, just a little smidge of color, and allow it to just have yet another new attribute, which is just maybe a little bit of depth or something because you can tell a story by which one's going to be the lightest, which ones can be the darkest as it fades away from you. We can go reference our little guide here. There's one more sort of a blue. I want to flip it around so we're looking at it from Woodward on the way down. Here's the deal, like we're just going to quickly grab this stuff and we'll just take some colors from that thing real quick. Then, that might just be enough right there to say you know this is enough to tell this little story to give these things just something that- now all you need is about two or three colors, if you grab this guy and give it a sort of nice orange-ish hue. Now, there might just be enough right there, and that's enough now to let some things pop up and some things go a little bit farther out. Check it out what I'm doing here, I'm going to go real quick for a second, and just kind of try to knock this thing out. Yet again, these are just shapes, these are simple, simple pieces. All right. So if I notice some stuff here that I want to send all the way to the back, shift command left bracket goes all the way to the back, shift command right bracket goes all the way to the front. Learn those two because a lot of the stuff you're just sort of tricking the layer order, but we just gave this thing like a little bit of life because now if we take this guy over here, and we take a look at this thing and say, all right. So if we put a box behind all this now and we grab all this stuff and say we just want like a little bit of a haze coming up over the river in a really early morning, what would that look like? I will try to mess with that now. This is the cool part of Illustrator that's sort of always surprising to me is that all these gradients and stuff, you can't really do that on paper. But here with these weird mesh gradients and then of course sort of like measuring out the kind of feel of them, you can get some pretty lifelike properties going pretty quick. So back to this photo here, we just want to grab these little colors and what we'll do is we'll just kind of take some little boxes out here, and we're just going to go and grab what this looks like down. This part of the fade, I'm going to grab it at the very best part of that blue with the fade. Now, we can take these little pieces and drop those in a gradient, and drop this on here and go and sort of activate it to where it's got this sort of like weird hazy quality to the day. So check it out. I can go here and just sort of lightness this up a little bit. There's just like kind of early morning- the darker that- as the light is coming into the landscape, it's adding light. So if you want to go down here and just add a little bit the darker, it hasn't quite hit the city yet. There's a odd little pink hue, that looks like early in the morning to me, right? Here's a deal, this now, this feels about right as the light starting to hit the stuff. But to get this thing to feel like we're on the other side of the river, now check it out. I'll just grab it all, check it out to get the other side of the river. Let's put this thing over here like this, and let's just give this all like a nice deep dark brown, and this would be sort of like as it's silhouetted as the sun's going down behind it, because now you've got, that's from here, that's looking west, and here we are as that sun comes up and you're looking east. You know, this is the power of Illustrator. We forget this stuff, but that's- in a glance, if we were to take this thing and say, ''Well that's easy with a skyscape, because we have these with this sort of skyline, we have this stuff to work with.'' But let's just for one little second here, just really quickly go and say, all right, we were just in beautiful Iowa and we were out there driving through, and we came around this little corner and it was kind of doing something like this, way out in the- way out there somewhere. All I'm doing is I'm just looking for that little, that little bit of landscape there as natural as we can make it. You know, you can sort of stretch things because now, if we take one of these guys and put this up back behind here, and just go put it into something real quick. Let's just go give it a shape to give it a home. Because now you've got like that looks real almost to me, it's like freaky. But here is the green of this sort of like the edge of this sky. This looks like some Idaho or something early in the morning, and I'll just kind of zoom in here as you see where I'm messing with these colors just to give them a little more kick so there's enough contrast, and then, of course, here's that early morning sort of that purple morning sky. I'm going to let this thing- and then, of course, you could take this little guy that's just like some big pasture or something. Then, it would give us a little bit more of a green so it jumps out above that. Here's the deal, because if you're looking at a skyline, you're looking out the back at the, I don't know, the family, 500 acres or whatever you guys have. Well that's just as valid, and just as beautiful because now it's going to take on some sort of like it's an ocean you're looking out over or something because here I'll just make the ocean real quick. Watch this, to do this, I'll just give this some- there's an ocean day right there, right? I can't mess around with the ocean, there's just shit that can bite you, things just step on, I'll stick to bathtubs and- yes. So here is- these are just some simple shapes to make this thing because it's fun now is if we just take this thing and we say, ''Idaho,'' and I grab a little bit of piece of type and I give it that great you know cable black and I give it a little bit of kerning and give it just a smidge of love, you know, and bring this thing in here, because check it out. It's cool. Now, if you're just to go over here and say, ''You're down on Hawaii,'' or something, but I'll show you what's kind of cool. There's now, we start to believe that that's some little Hawaiian Vista, and we need to go back and kind of tropical it up a little bit. Let's go and put some incredible sunset over the sea and then these things darken up a little bit. You've got this like a lush green. That could be Hawaii all of a sudden. Let's give this thing just a little kick of- and then Idaho, let it be this sort of- Don't be afraid to allow these things to be moments of nature, to be moments of the real color from around you. It's hard just to pick from a limited palette within illustrator. You might have to go grab a photo for reference to see how those fades work and how the light works early in the morning, how it'll work- light work as it's setting over the West or something. So, learn how to sample that from real life, from real photos, stuff you take with your iPhone, stuff that you're sort of using from the web. Remember, you have to be very respectful of someone's image. You just can't sort of blast that thing out and just go grab it and post it as your own. You have to make your own image, you have to make your own stuff, and kind of own it, right?
8. Illustrating People: Facial Features: So, you can see a theme coming together here. If Detroit is home of the automobile, and the Motor City, and this incredible Detroit skyline, who are your heroes from Detroit? Things that come to mind. I don't know, Mel Farr Superstar, or Billy Sims, or John Brannon from the Laughing Hyenas and Negative Approach. Who else would you have? Well, Jack Kevorkian and Bob Seger, Bob Seger. No one is going to tell me that Ram, Gab, and Man, or whatever you call is one of the greatest songs of all time. Right? These are my heroes in Detroit. Who are the people that you look to there, and one that comes, all the dudes from the MC5. Because what they represent to me is, they represent challenging authority, creating freedom, odd transcendental quality of getting outside of your own brain and it's the 60s and Age of Aquarius and shit, and yet these guys were fighting the good fight in and around Ann Arbor in Detroit for equality for all, or for peace, or to end that fucking war. So, when you think of someone like Rob Tyner, what comes to mind is this odd hero to me. So, if we go take a look at Rob Tyner real quick, and I just go and do a search for this guy, I know what he looks like. I know he looks like-. Let me see what we've got here. There is the MC5. That's the picture. That's the class. That's from his Wikipedia. So, if we go take a look at that shot, and the thing is, I'm going to grab the shot. I'm going to bring this thing in here. Here is sort of the exercise. It's like, what will illustrators do? Well, it's like determining the attributes. So, if I was to take a look at Rob Tyner and go, "Okay, what are the things that come to mind right away?" Number 1, it's that killer afro. Number 2, it's those incredible glasses and the weird geometry. When he smiles, he had a pretty big gap in his teeth so there's something there. Then, this tiny little unassuming nose, a big collar, these are things that he was sort of consistently known for when I think of these old images. Like anything, like a logo. If you're going to make a couple of moves on a logo, you're going to say, "Well, here is a chance to amplify this element of the piece. Let's do that, and let's tone these parts down." So, if I was to boil him down say, "Well, yeah it's the 'fro, the glasses, that cool sort of smile, and chin, and the gnarly ass gap in his teeth." Well, that might just be enough. So, I mean, I can take a look at this stuff and start sketching and just quickly make my own little Rob Tyner. So, here, we are I'm going to try to get him that big smile of his. I'm looking at this one right here where he's got this big gap in there and stuff and his stone-looking eyes. We're just looking for opportunities to let this thing become Rob Tyner. I don't know. He's got this big afro that becomes this shape around him. It's not quite perfectly uniform. We'll have to figure out a way to illustrate that. But, if I'm just to try to sketch this thing and say, "Well, that's my version of Rob Tyner," well, now, it's a chance now to, once with that quick sketch done. Is that good or bad? Well, here's the deal. It's like if it's off, we can push that stuff around. The moment I have a little scroll that says the MC5, Rob Tyner's MC5, that's enough to connect that. He could look totally off or he can look totally spot on. It's still my representation of it. But what's important here is just to get you to not be afraid of making the shapes, and letting that start to guide it. I guess, what I'm trying to show you with this whole class is when you aren't afraid of the forms, you're not afraid of all the options you have in your quiver, suddenly, it's just not as freaky to sit down on a big thing away and start to try to attack what Rob Tyner might have looked like. So, let's just see what can happen here and now, I'm just going to quit talking for a little bit and start trying to build this guy. Okay. So, if you look at his glasses, he has got these, let's just get the shape down on those things. Now you're using very simple shapes to make this stuff but he's got these, I don't like to use the F word all that much, funky. Got to be careful with that one. He's got these odd little bits of geometry there. I'm just trying to be respectful of the shape. So, if I'm making these pieces here, once we knock those pieces out, those become these little parts of him. We allow those to start to guide it. Now, let's just work in just outlines for now. Because later on, all these stuff is sort of massageable. We can edit these things and tweak them all, sort of tweakable to where we can adjust all this stuff to feel the right little sprinkle of Rob Tyner that we need. So, I'm going to quickly draw a little, funny, little nose for this guy here. So, I think, all I'm going to try to do this is something like this. All these parts and pieces that you're working with, remember you get to keep all this stuff live for later on because you just want all these pieces. If you'd have to go back and use something out of this stuff, you want to have it around. So, can we try and make his nose now? Now, what I'm doing here is, I'm just trying to get the good geometry of these little bottom points here. All the stuff can be adjusted later. Now, when you look at what his nose looks like and what I did, it had this odd little bit of symmetry if you look at when he is just at rest. There is this kind of punchy little squatty quality to it. Well-. I just want to like kind of accentuate that. But before I jump into like a pen tool, or to use some freehand tool, I'm just trying to reduce it down just using basic simple geometry of pieces. I mean, it's not necessarily easy but you'll see what I'm doing here is by just flipping that piece and putting that one over, we've got this weird little nose now, right now. But that may or may not be right, but I'm just trying to isolate this thing, so later on, I can post a bag in here and then connect these two. How we're going to go do that? It's a little sloppy right now, but now when we have that little shape, this weird little shape here, it is pretty much symmetrical. Later on, if you need to go that much tighter, I will show you what I'm doing here is, I started by just grabbing off these bottom pieces, I connected one line, I flipped it right here to make these two pieces connected to down here. Now, I'm going to get rid of shear off some of these little pieces, because check it out, now if we take his nose up there and we put this little Rob tied nose on this thing and get it down to that right little scale, small inside those big glasses. Maybe there's something there. Now, let's keep track of our stuff. Remember, kind of housekeeping here of our shapes and our pieces. These things don't have to be these giant things, just get them off, hold them, and put them off the side here, because now we look at this guy and say, "Well, maybe it doesn't quite come to a point like that. It might be enough to let's just keep our shape pristine." Let's just go and sheared off right where those glasses meet, and let's just come down here and do something kind of like this. Let's put a big box over it, shear it, get rid of that little nose part. Now, we've got that little nose in between the glasses there and we can see if that should this thing be tighter? Let's bring in a little bit tighter, let's bring this line and a little bit better. Then, we certainly get this geometry where now there is this like fluid a little bit of Rob tied her nose going on there, right. Now, let's go get those eyeballs nailed. So, in essence, what does an eye shape do? Well, an eye shape, I will show you in a second here, if I'm just drawn to eye which is kind of a CBS eye. Well, that's an eye. If we were to go to try to quickly do that, you're going to see where it just becomes a little too sterile or something. So, if we grab a shape and then put it in such a shape here like this, I'm just looking at what his eyes were doing over there. We keep these pieces. I use the intersect here to get that little eyeball, and I will bring this thing in. There kind of small inside there. Now, go grab a nice dark eyeball for him. Remember, these are all just pieces we're working with here. So, if we're going to get these eyeballs going, and here's this little picture of him now, it looks like he's got a pretty thick taking off this line, a pretty thick set of eyebrows. Right. They weren't tiny little ones, they were pretty bushy and remember it's the 60s, free love and not washing and I don't know whatever the hell else. Now, just as a study, real quick here, these three different lines, let's keep these things right now one point, we're just trying to draw in a just that one point. He had these dark eyes, so I think it's not too much of a stretch to take them and just let them be these sort of dark dots. But if we're going to go grab this, all you got to do is just draw one. So, we're going to start up here, or take it out to here, and let it be this little bushy little eyebrow. Because now, if I just take this guy, and flip it around here, and pull this thing out here and you're seeing like, okay now, it's something. Let's go try to do is his lips now. Now, instead of trying to just draw his lips, what we're going to do is, we're just going to draw the simplest of shapes, we're going to keep it all live too. He's got these little high peaks. Now that's enough right there, because now, if we take this guy and say and bring this thing over, and let that thing design itself. All we want right there is, we just want from about right here to where this thing connects, we will get to that in a second and then down here. So now, we're going to try to draw this line that does this, add a little dip thing. But here's the deal, you just going to have to jump in there sometimes and just wing it. Now, I'm just going to go to this point right here. If that's feeling like it's good, here's why, because this one line feels pretty good, drooping down there. Now, when we go in and we take this piece and remember, this is just architecture. Copy this one over here, shear it, flip it back over, we touch it to this guy, we connect those two, Command J, and now we take your little Anchor Point tool. Now, you can even adjust that thing symmetrically by clicking on that little point with your Anchor Point tool and now you can adjust this thing. If we wanted a little more power to it, well we have that at our discretion now. So now, when we take this and we group these two, we take that one nice bottom line and we let those things center up, pull these off to the side. Because all we really want is we just want this inner line right here, and here's how you do this, you just would connect these guys. You've got those things duped over there, connect those guys, connect these little bottom parts, and now just quickly shear these all off using your divide tool. Get rid of the stuff you don't need. Keep the stuff you want. Now, we've got this little shape. If we're going to take and look at the reference of how his lip curled when he smiled, I've got them right there. It's pretty close. So, we can take this line now and just connect something like this already here real quick, and let that thing touch up underneath there, and then do one more, and watch. Just take this piece Command C, Command F, and bring it in here like this. We see that might be enough. That scene, now that was a little bit of an accident, that might be enough to get that add a little pop, but he had this pretty big gap there. So, let's just go put a piece of dark there, a black square. Consistently, he had this little cute, little chin thing that lived just in touch the bottom of his lip. So, just grab one of these singes real quick, because all you want is, you want that little that little curved line, go make it the rest of these guys right here, because he's got that little piece that's something that you see in all the photos. That was kind of small. So, now you see when this thing started to become him.
9. Illustrating People: Head and Hair: Okay, so now we've got these pieces, we've got the part of the lip, we've got that weird little nose, got those big awesome glasses. So, let's just, so we can just do a little audit here. All right, let's pull it out here, because now we're going to go after that little face shape and his face shape is pretty round. I'm just going to draw a piece over here for now, and just try to go a little past it to get that roundness of the face a little bit, and then we'll grab another one over here. Here's why this thing is tricky. I don't know the right way or the wrong way to do this, but if I just want these pieces right here, and I want this to be a shape, this little inner upside down triangle thing to be a shape, if I just go in path find this thing it needs endpoints. Here's just something I've just learned. I just kind of come out here and go onto the either mates and my little weird shape, and now you've got- watch when I try to divide this up. It's got divideable shapes at least now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do something like this, because now if we're starting to get into this sort of zone we're getting his face shape and that little chin and where his hair kind of comes down. Now check it out, if we pull this little guy down here, and now we're going to go sturdy that fro a little bit. Now, it's not a perfect just kind of circle. It's got this yes, it's got this circular quality, but there's some frizz and some frazz there, right? If we do this, that's a little too a little too much, right? If we can put that back behind there, that's just not what he was about. If you look at the mouth here, check this out. If the mouth here the froze is extending there. If we take a look at this with, what this shape means right here. In essence there's kind of like two pieces there. We just need to remember this sort of ratio for later on, because we're just trying to get the feel of what that thing feels like. So if I bring this guy down here now and put it in there sort of close, it's going to give us a bit of a guide of what to work with, right? So, now when we take a look at that and we say, "Okay, let's put all this stuff back behind everything" and let's just let that be our little template and you start to say like, whoa, that's kind of him, and then of course the way that thing fades in, we'll just quickly go and grab like he's got some little stuff here. Now remember, you don't have to do every little nick and tick, you don't have to do whatever but you can just sort of come up here and let it go to a point. So, you're kind of going a little longer and we're just going to quickly give it a little bit of while. Now, we've got that one little piece drawn here. Take a look at what our reference material looked like, and we're just, we're not allowing ourselves to really trace that thing, we're allowing just to kind of riff on the ratio of hair to roundness of the face. How thing worked. The way the hair laid on top of his head and this is like the hardest part, it's just making this initial line. Well, remember, you grab everything and bring it over here like this and now when we take this little guy and we flip it around, and bring it over into here and let that thing connect and get rid of this little line, we start seeing a little bit of Rob Tyner coming out there. Now, if that's not enough, well, okay I'll show you can do in a second. So, let's just go connect these things and let's get to that initial shape there, which is just sort of here and then get rid of that little top little dodad there. Okay, so now we've got this one shaped back here but I want to add a couple more little spindles and riffs of hair, little wafts of hair here. So, I'm going to grab this little piece. Now see what I did there?I just went and grabbed one that was feeling kind of good. I need to draw it again. Just grab one it's feeling kind of good and bring it up here and let that thing guide the rest of this thing. That's enough rate there. If we wanted one more little one right here, just go and just kind of pound it in there because you're using them like minded pieces from this thing, right? Now, this is, the faces are tougher because there's symmetry, there's things need to add up, and line up, and work well. So, before I go do anything, what I'm just going do really quick here as I'm going to make sure that all this stuff is symmetrical, because this would just sort of be just general good housekeeping. So the idea of what you're going to do here is you don't want the stuff group just yet, you want the things like the glasses need to be grouped into one piece, right? There's the glasses, right? How you could kind of do this just to trick yourself is like now let that be red and we know that one's been handled. Let's go grab these two, color them red, because if it's a complex, complex it can get away from you really quick, right? So, let's go through and let these little eyeballs be their own little guys, group, ungrouped, and then put them into one and then just quickly caught them red. Now, when I take this thing, these back pieces are separate pieces. Grab all this stuff right here. Now watch this. We grab all this stuff, Command G, that goes to red. Grab these little guys, back goes to red, Command G. Now, when we grab all these pieces, and we do a little bit of this, that just lined everything up because you're using the centered little pieces. The mouth is good now. Now, if we go back and we start to say, when we look at building the architecture of this little spark plug, well there is that. If we go back to what we were saying, we just want outlines. Okay, let's go quickly and let's start doing that to Rob's face where we say, okay this is just one shape back here and that is just a black outline with a white inside, right? Okay, cool. Now, let's put this little guy back here. Let's use your little eyedropper tool, look for consistency. Now, there's that first bit of face and now we're going to go through and we're just going to go through and make sure that all the lines are all the same widths. What is this one? This one is at 1.326, so just check it out. All we want to do is we just want to make sure that these are just 1.326 for now, and because it's all red, you'll know, you'll see the ones we miss. I intentionally miss one here. Well, let this thing go to that 1.326, cool. Get rid of that Phil because he's just laying up over these pieces and now it's go grab those glasses. See it is off in his nose. Now these guys don't need an outline. This just needs to be a shape. In fact, just for the sake of what we're doing here, we'll let this go to an outline. Then, this guy needs to be filled white in his face, please. Let's check it out. You're starting to see him kind of come to life, right? So, if that's just this little black piece. Now, whether or not that's Rob Tyner spot on, well, it's my little version of Rob Tyner, right? Because now we've got this thing to start working with. If this thing is, let's just say, we want all these lines to be two point. Here's a little trick. What you do is you go Command All, that grabs everything on the document, see that grabs everything. We just want to isolate this stuff. Command All, then you hit shift, and unselect that one little piece that we want to play with. Now, Command Two and lock all that shit. Now, jump in here, when you grab this line and you say, "All right that one is at 1.3. Right now we want them all to be two, because what you have now, when you select all now, you're only grabbing that one little face. All this other stuff is locked, right?" So now, when you grab this little piece and say, "Okay, let's go just grab all the black lines." So you come in here and you go Select, Same Stroke Color, there they are. Now, I just grabbed all the black lines. Now, if you go over here and tell it to be two point, that's how you quickly equalize all this stuff, right? Because now having this, you can pull this off to the side here. Remember, all the rest of these is locked. If you do, Option Command Two, that unlocks all the other stuff. But see now, if we go to go apply, what we were doing up here, and some of this, well, there's a thin line here is a thick line. We've got our little Rob Tyner here, and now it's just kind of go and let's just gently bring up the width of some of this stuff. Let's go to about six, and then let's just start grabbing this stuff and allowing it all to be that six. You're going to see where it gets away from you real quick. This is why it's like, you can't just like, listen I love thick line stuff, but you're going to have to learn where to fudge that stuff. Some go thicker, some go thinner. They all just can't be the same. Because if you go into my Barny poster, or my Jerry Garcia's, or some of this other things, certain things go up certain things go down because you're fudging tighter spaces. To go back out and say, "All right, I'm going to slowly work my way up." What are the things that really punch you in the face? Well, definitely, the glasses, right? Well, let that go to that six down. These things can just go to a dark shape, his eyebrows. Now will slowly bring these guys up. We got a four, maybe that's not a droopy enough of an eyelid, so let's go and let's just tune one of these eyes real quick. Bring up that little one, two, three, four, okay? Now, bring that piece over here. You see he feels different now, right? So, maybe pull back. This is where I guess you have to go and like be really patient to finesse it. Because if you go too far, and it takes it away from what it's like, that's too tight on that lip. You've got to let that lip breathe a little bit of above. Otherwise, if you're just going on the pure math of it, that's going to take away from the feel of that poutiness of what he had, or the smile, or whatever. Let's do it again here, where we taking these guys. I'm going to take his eyes back to where it was. All right, let this thing come down a little bit. We'll bring his eye over now. It's still kind of him because the first things first like, one of the things that we talked about in my, I guess would have been the last Skillshare, was how you could take everything and globally round it. Let's go do that real quick with this guy, right? Because now that we've got just a little bit of the stuff happening, we might have gone far enough now. We might have gone far enough to say, "All right, let's go and take this thing." Let me go look at that real quick. There was something about his face; it was actually a little bit tighter in there. So, if we go and take this guy and just bring it in a little bit more, and let it push just a little bit harder to get his glasses, and maybe his Afro comes down just a little bit. All the stuff is adjustable, right? Now, this is our little crusty little version of Rob Tyner. Because now if you take this guy, and was this going to be is real fast. Command C, we're going to go over here into Photoshop. We jumped into Photoshop here, and we go Command New and just paste that thing in, a smart object, right? Now, when you go check it, we're going to go through here. We did this in my third one, right? So, all of them are reason to go watch the third one or the third Skillshare. It's just a quick little rounded edge treatment. When I go in here and when I make this thing gray scale, don't flatten, don't rasterize, that thing is just lifted above that. Now, going here and give it a little bit of extra room, right? So you do Option Command C, and that's your canvas size. Let's go to seven, let's go to six. That just gives it a little bit of space around that object because you can see here, that's what the object is, it's just floating there. We don't want to affect pieces around. Now, go here, Option Command I, and you want to come up and bring this thing up really, really high, let's go 999. Now, that means this thing is super high resolution. If you go take a look at super high resolution, and we've got this piece now flattening above. If we grab these two, and go Command J, Command E, that just flattened up above. Now do Command J again, and now watch this. Take this thing, and blur the hell out of this thing, a bunch. Now look what certainly to do. We get to a point where it's uncomfortable, because now when you go into your levels and we bring that black point in, and we bring that white point in, you're fudging all those nice little edges and lines and it's making it a completely new kind of thing. Like you see how I did, his eyes you just catch that little tiny bit of the bag of the eye. If we check it, and that's where we started, and that's where it's at, you can see where this thing is taking it one step even further to give it this little bit more of soft edge kind of feel. Because now, if we go grab this thing and we say Select, Color Range, and we grab all that Black value, you jump into your Paths here, you're making a path. Just on a one point path Command C, now. Jump back into here, and bring this illustration in Command V. The color black and expand it. Now that's got even a little bit different feel than where we were over here. We didn't have to go and massage them here, we could do it with Photoshop. Because now that that's there, we can get rid of the shape right here. Let it be black and there's some Rob. But then there's just ways to start coloring this thing, to start building this thing out. But, the idea that I built just from starting out here, working our way down to this, and we're just trying to isolate these pieces. I don't even know if it even looks like Rob Tyner, but just for the sake of argument, well, that's my Rob Tyner for today, right? Because now those pieces are built, because check it out. If I take this thing now, and I go grab a little red arrow, and the same thing we were doing right here, I just want to add a little bit of color to this thing.
10. Illustrating People: Adding Color: Because now if you go in there and you go okay, he had that big dark afro, there's no line to that anymore. Now, when we grab some skin tone, cool, and if we go in there and say okay, let's these lips now be a little bit of a lip color. Right? We're going to trust that we don't need that line anymore. But how we're going to do that is we're going to go grab this line, and grab one behind it command C, command F. We're going to grab this piece right here, where I divided out. I just keep the top part, right? Because now, traditionally, I'd be a little bit darker. The way the lip and the shadow on that thing is just a little bit darker, and now we want that little insight piece here. So, we'll just kind of quickly grab this little guy, just going to bring it up. We'll grab all three of these pieces, command C, command F, and grab this piece and divide those into pieces, and let's just give it something that's sort of a tooth color. We just want that one middle piece there. We want to reduce this down to where we don't need any of these lines, right? We don't need any of these lines. Instead of this, we're going to think this through them and we're going to say, well, what would this actually be? If this is the bright spot on this face and this recedes back, we just want that shape back there, we're going to let it connect. Great to hear. So check this out. I'm going to bring this line right here to there, and then we're just going to bring them both up, see what we're doing here. I just want that shape in the background. There's that shape and we're going to let that be a little bit darker skin tone, right? So, I just want to shape behind here and you see where I'm going to push him back a little bit, because I want that nose to be another color now too. So, let's grab this guy and let him be up above that, because now, we're working with him, just working with these. Let's go grab this and let's let this go a little bit darker, right? Remember, we're just trying to do, we're just trying to adjust the shapes, right? We're not allowing these things to be, and it's yes, it's a little, what we call it? South Park-ish. Yes. But all we're doing here is we're just trying to let these things be. I don't want that to be a shape like that. I want that to be a shape underneath this piece. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this, connected to like sort of right here like that, and I'll go do the same over here. I know where I'm on but you see where it connects. Let's just quickly do that and now let that be a color, and put it behind the lip, and that's like his little lip piece or something, right? We're just trying to make really, really simple shapes. Now, if we want to see those eyes, because he's wearing some sunglasses, well, we could go grab some dark stuff. Now, this is just a version. Let's just take this version. Let's just put it off the side for now. Let's go back to his glasses, because you know what? In the end, we're not going to get away from that. So, let's just be from up a little bit, and then let's go in there and let's color these eyes. Now, remember all I do is one eye. So, if this eye right here and we want that little shape to be subtracted from that piece, we're going to do this thing as an eyeball color, and then we're just going to go and we're going to subtract that piece away from that. So, we'll do something like we're going to grab this command C, command F. We just extend this little line just a little bit because then that allows that thing to make. We're going to intersect these little pieces using your little divide. Now, we've got this piece, we can go and we can globally grab one of these colors here. Grab the eyeball, and now we want this piece right here, this line to be something. So, let's just go and connect it right to there. Now, that's a little shape, and give it a color, and now give this little piece down here a little bit darker color. They're starting to see where we're building his eye just using these really simple shapes, right? Because all we want is this one piece. So now we can group all of this into one piece, bring it up a little bit bigger and mess with it later on. Now, copy this thing over and you've got this like nice geometry, and these glasses that lift up above, and you're starting to see where it's getting a little spooky down there. Maybe there is something that's just we just grab something like we just want this little chin just be a different color. So, let's just grab this piece right here, this little guitar pick looking piece. Bring it like this. Touch the bottom of that lip and now take this thing called command C, command F. Grab that piece. Take the inside piece and let that thing be a little chin and we got this little chin now on him. If you see here like this would actually be all dark back there, that would all be pretty dark. So, let's grab this little piece, command C, command F, throw it in the back there with a little bit of a dark kind of quality, but the thing is just with that rate there. You've taken it away from being obviously this outline version. You're having to own it. What else could you do? Well, if you wanted a little more tone with afro hangs, you could take this piece right here and just do something like this, command C command F. All we want is that back little piece right there, lay it over that thing and now tell this thing to be one of these colors, and now you can see the afro hangs over his face a little bit better. If we want a little more of this. Let's do but just take this out here and say, we'll, let's just go experiment. Remember, these are just shapes and take this little piece out of here and say, all right, you could do and he just seems a little too upbeat, right? Making him a little bit more of stone. There, look at that. He's looking stonier now. Let's just for shits and giggles real quick, get that thing in there, let that those be the eyes, flip that one around, see how he looks stonier now, right? Lift this piece up above. Now you've got these little shapes, you've got the eyes. I don't know if it's right, I don't know if it's wrong. I'm not really concerned about that. It's more that it was just sort of fun to surprise myself. I'm not an illustrator, but by deducting these pieces and letting these pieces start to design themselves, I mean we did this in three minutes, and I'm a little gone. So, I'm trying to entertain you guys, but man what if you did it over the course of an hour? Well, that's what it starts to look something like this. When you grab something like this, now this is John Hodgman's new book called Vacationland. John's a buddy of mine, and I got to work on the cover, and work on the back cover, of course. That would be some Maine, a painful beach at Maine. Here would be some sort of Vista and Massachusetts of course where he's from and stuff, but I'm not an illustrator. But I did that little picture of John right there, and it's kind of the same deal. What's fun was every time I would send an iteration, he would say make the eyes sadder and shit like this, right? So, there's some Hodgman but I'm not an illustrator but somehow, I got there that little John thing and he's using it all over on his tour now. So, now, I'm going to go over here, I'm going to go grab my little star tool. If I take this thing and I make a star, well, there's a star but check it out. You're making that star right now. If you just hit the up arrow key, you add a point to it. See that? 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,13,14, 15, 16, 17, whatever you're going to go do, but check it out. By holding your option down, that takes the point longer or takes the point and it holds it, and for getting it to about right there, we have a little afro, but if that's not enough point, you can just click like this now and say, hey, we want 45 of those. Now, you've got this little thing here where you can now when you go make that little star, you can tell it. I want a couple less, a couple more. We can go hold that shift and mess with those points, make them longer or make them a little bit mellower. Because if that's about right there, now we've got this little blast. He starts to like, when we get it to the right little ratio of the MC5 kind of hair, that's starting to happen. All I'm trying to show you guys is that you can go and push this stuff pretty far and own it. What's cool about this now is like if that's too much. That's bugging me, his lips are just a little too much. I'll just take that piece and scoot it in a little bit. Now, it feels a little bit less. It's just a little more understated, right? Because if that's Rob Tyner, because the thing is there's even a bit of a feminine quality to this thing or something. Well, let's just take this whole thing right here. Watch what I'm going to do here, I'm going to grab this, and grab these little guys and just chill out that little afro just a little bit. So it's just like weird little round shape, and allow that thing to nicely connect because what I'm trying to look is I'm trying to let it connect. So, I don't want these little pieces to go down here. So I'm going to take this piece right here. I'm going to command C, command F. I'm going to give it a weird color. I'm going to take this piece right here and I'm just going to let this thing extend out. I'm going to let this one extend out. I'm also going to shear it off the back little cookie shape or whatever, right? See. Now, when that goes back behind there, it's got this nice rhythm now. Here's some Rob Tyner or something. I mean, I don't know. Because now, I'm going to take this little guy and it's like if you were to say well, he just sort of the fringe of his hair as it goes out would be sort of darker. You could let that thing like now you can see with a little bit of tone right there just made that another interesting version of just telling that story of that big fro coming from this sort of dark brown, and you get a little Rob Tyner going on there. Now, when we cluster all this stuff up together, we've got a nice little thing up here. We've got some Detroit happening right here all the way down to some of these little vistas. Then of course our little thing, places and people, we get a nice little cluster there. You can just bring this thing down. So, it's not getting too out of hand. The idea is now when I step back and I look at this thing, like this is big honky document. That's like what? Like 20 feet by 20 feet or something, right? If that's 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper, what we're just allowing? We're just allowing this stuff to breathe a little bit. We can go back to it. We have it saved and everything is safe. But you just got some good management of the things that we're happening and the decisions that were made, because now when we go back, as we wrap these all three into one big cluster of something, that's where it gets really fun, really fast.
11. Clustering it All Together: Now, that I have all my things, and places, and people done, all right? I've got my sparkplug, I've got my Detroit silhouette, skyline done, and I've got my little Rob Tiner going. Now, let's take these things and let's combine them into something. If you take, I went digging in some of my stuff and I just, when you see people putting a little bit of type in this old license plate and there's this little illustration here, this little minor or something. Well, the type is sort of overpowering, right? But, still there's just this sort of combination of shape and things holding things. If you go a little bit farther in some of these cool little NASA specialist payload, little mission stickers and stuff, and you see how they're putting a lot of their, obviously, circles, and type and things. But these are just elements drawn, some have outlines, some don't, some have shading, some don't. They need to do something like this where it's just these really flat shapes. What's interesting to me, is just how there's a lot of stuff happening in these things, and we have those now at our fingertips to work with. So, I'm going to grab some of my favorites from these guys and see what we can build into maybe one of these we'll call it, like a little cluster, a little combination of the three. So, all right here we go. Something that comes to mind is some sort of, like triangle ending with him, right? Where he is at the top of this thing. Let's just mess with that. If we take a triangle, take your hexagon piece here and go down arrow one, two, three, there's your triangle. At all times keep your shift buttoned so that thing is this nice rounded piece. But maybe we try something a little bit different. If that's this shape that we're kind of going after, maybe we try something that's a little bit more like we take circles to make that piece. So, watch this. Let's take a circle here. Because I want to be a rounded triangle. I don't know if that's even. Let's just see what happens. Because the idea is we're going to use math to build this thing. So, watch how I do this now. If this little piece where you at all times try to keep things centered. But, when we do this, we want this line to kind of connect out here. So, how you do that, is you just have to find the sweet spot of where to go and take these things and now do something on the lines of this. 120 and rotate it and copy it and do it again, and somewhere in there, if you see what we have here, this piece get rid of that piece, get rid of this piece, get rid of this piece. That's the little piece we want on the inside of there, right? That little rounded edge cool little. Well, those are equidistant now. Those all sides of those, grab that piece and lift it off and let's reduce this thing down to that little center piece. Now, that's like that's the shape I wanted, right? So, you see, I did it with math. Now, just to review, let's just go do it one more time. Let's take this guy and let's just give it a thicker line, and then let's do another one here, where we just kind of, give it like, the line that we're going to get rid of. Let's give that an orange line. I'll take both of those and just rotate them 120, 120. You see it in there? You get rid of the orange lines now. What's left, is that little guy right there. Now, that becomes this sort of proprietary little shape, right? That's not something we got from. You have to kind of go make that. Now, that I think feels a little too squaddie, then maybe you start over and you bring this line a little bit less. Color that thing some weird color like orange and do it again. Now, that line's, it's a little bit gentler because it's got more arc in this first one. There's less arc here. So, now let's get rid of those oranges. Let's just keep track of this thing and go flip it back around, use your divide, touch that one to get rid of the rest of them, and you've got this cool little proprietary shape that's all yours, right? So, let's start with that and let that be that sort of your base. We're going to let this thing go in here. So, if I just go quick and I take this thing and all times I'm always duping. Because, if I want that color again, maybe I go back to that. But, maybe it's not about them. Maybe it's just about this really nice silhouette of the city and let that just be a shape now. Just let that be a shape. The way that that nestles at the bottom there is kind of interesting. So, let that be a shape that works in there. Give this thing maybe some cool little gradient or something and how you do that is just, here's your little gradient, little readout or window. But, let's just go through a yellow in there. I want to throw a nice big orange sunset and get rid of that little black piece in the end there. Now, take your little gradient tool and tell it to go from orange down to yellow and you'll know that sun is coming up over the city, or setting on that city. Now, we're going to throw another black box in there and then just mask it all in there, right? Now here's a little pro tip, If you want to try this a little bit different. The masking gets a little bit tricky. Now, watch what I'm going to do here. I'm going to go. I'm going to put a little white box around this whole thing, right? See that? White box. Now, I'm going to take this shape right here and I'm going to just subtract it minus from it. Now, what you've got is, you got to put your little gradient back and put a box behind there with that gradient. Now, you're working within that square and you're not having to be too confined to it, right? Right. You're just using this outline to see the outline. We'll go and put a little gray line on it just for so we can see it. So, we see it there. You pull it away. You're just left those pieces. So, now the idea is you can then massage this stuff and get that city just right inside there without having it to be masked just yet. Not yet, right? So, okay, now if we step back from this thing and now we know that's there. You see that outline. Now, we go grab Rob and we grab that spark plug. What could that thing be? If we take this shape right here and we lay it right over that piece, and just squish it a little bit. You see the shape that's coming out of here? Maybe there's something with that. I don't know. So, the way to trick that now is to say, "Okay, this piece is the gradient." This piece is the gradient. That goes behind the city. Then this piece becomes just this little bit darker piece that goes behind all of it, right? So, in effect you see where that thing's. It's kind of like this little snow globe or something and this little piece. I'm just looking for opportunities later on to put him somehow in there in a cooler way. If this thing is all clustered and you can all time center all these things, and maybe there's something with that. Because remember, if you get rid of this little outline, you're just working with those really simple shapes command Y. See that outline preview? Let's work with those really simple shapes. So, now if we go plop Rob in there, and we're not going to use any big thick. We're always going to use some simple, simple out, like the shapes now. Or plop in here is the Patron Saint of Detroit. You start to see right now, there's an accident right there. You see this right here? This line looks really nice with his hair. Maybe that line subtracts from his hair and we just allow him to stir. So, let's go center him up there. Let's jump into this. Now, let's take him and let's make him a little bit bigger, bring this guy down a little bit, and let's go mess with that hair. So, let's grab this guy, command C, command F, color it something weird, grab his hair, and just get that top shape of the hair. So, by dividing it, and then that line follows that hair really nice, right? Now, remember we can change all these colors to do whatever we need. We could also go lay something behind him that kind of, this sort of like cool circle kind of feel or something. Because these are just shapes. So, if they're off of his big afro there's just like really simple piece coming off of it. Because now, where did the spark plug go? Well, I don't know. There's a lot of little things you could do. You can do something cool where you're kind of like bring in another little shape here and let it nestle. It doesn't have to be too prominent. We're just looking for ways to make this thing all integrate quick. So, let's do something cool like this. I mean, there's just something really simple about this thing where this thing comes up a little bit higher. There's your Detroit, and this little line comes up here and now what we're going to do is, remember, we're just feeling around. Now, if we just stop ourselves and say, "Wow." Maybe there's something starting to happen here. I don't know. You've got these little elements, this little flat shape thing. We can reduce that even further. Let's go and let's do that a little bit.
12. Clustering: Adding Color: Let's take this top piece here. Now, if you hit shift option command 8, that releases all the shapes. Now, mask all of that stuff into this one piece here. So, make sure it's above everything. Command 7, and now it's all inside there. You're going to bring this little guy up to the front. Now, let's just go and let's pick a color palette. See, one of the things that's really cool about when I'm digging through all my junk here and all my drawers stuff, I don't know if I would put blue, orange, and yellow together. The blue is just a little too kind of clashes with the orange, but there's something about taking a look at that and just coming off here to the side and grabbing some little boxes and saying, okay, let's go and let's just try to remember why that thing felt good in my hand. The blue, the orange, and the yellow, and then we allow that thing. Now, this is just one little thing I saw. If you were to think of the MC5 in Detroit and spark plug box, we're pretending we're junking right now, we're out in some antique mall, and I say vintage spark plug and I say, okay, vintage spark plug box. I don't know. I go, "Man, I touch one of these things and it is just infinite. All this cool stuff." Now, I'm just taking a look at something here that just feels like something that maybe I haven't done, wouldn't do, haven't yet come across yet. So, maybe it's just even this little guy right here. So just check this out. This comes with some weird little colorways. So, now, when we pull up this little piece in here and you take a look at this guy and let's go grab any little squares, and line them up underneath there, and now what we're going to do is we're going to take you a little eyedropper tool. Here are samples of these colors. There's that sort of brown. Here is that nice copper. Here is that mint. Here is that darker mint, and here is that orange. Now, there might even be one more, would be this sort of blue. But what we did right here is we just sampled these guys and we made a color off of something that I might have found in my junk or whatever you want to call it. Meet this little color palette that I'm just not used to. I didn't really see it coming and it feels new to me, it feels fresh to me. Now, take it up here and let's just whatever that read out was there, let's make it more minty. Let's make this one a little more minty right here, because all we're doing is we're just being reminded that things can have this weird punch and that things are getting way too close to purple. So let's get it out of there. Then for that, all you do is just being reminded that wow, these things can have this kind of exciting hue this way and we just made this whole different color palette. So, now, if we take this guy and we simply do something along the lines of this, make a new folder here and we'll call this the Bosch color palette. Now, I think you just drag these guys. That just took all those palettes, see that? By selecting those and making your color palette, now you've got something to work with now because now if we go back into here and we say, okay, let's take our darkest value. If you double click these things you can make them global. So the idea is now if we say, when we make sure those are on that, when we double click it again, we can go and adjust this thing to give it a little more of a copper punch. It affect both colors, so you see that? Now, if we go back in here and we said okay we want that, we're going to adhere to these colors here. I want him to look a little stonier, let's just say. So, let's go in there now and I'm going to bring this eye up a little bit and let's do it again. All I'm doing here is just grab back behind there, command C, command F. There's no little eye shade right there and then let's just take this piece and just sheer a little bit off of it. Now, it's a little bit stonier. Now he's getting that kind of '60s counterculture haze thing going. But we are within our palette. Now, it could use a little punch, that orange. Let's get this thing a little punch and then let's allow this little piece to be this turquoise and make sure that this is global. So what this does is when you make a global, this allows you now to tweak it on the fly and it all changes all those pieces. So by saying this piece now versus just being a one off swatch, you've got this global quality where you can work these. So let's do this to all of these things to make sure this navy blue is global. You see a little white triangle in the corner, make that brown global because watch now, if we take a look at this and say well we like this brown a little better up here, but this is the brown we're working with, we'll watch when we go and we tell it, the darkest value is the eyes and his eyebrows and his hair. We make it all that brown and then you go and you say, maybe, all these little parts were here, these are all brown too because that's the darkest value of that palette. Now, just check this out. We make this right here a value of that brown. Now watch, if we say we want it all to be a little bit darker, you double click this thing and add a little bit of black to it and watch the preview. You're affecting all those things that you globally color. So now we can go back and say cool. Let's let this city be the dark and then maybe this city just nestles just enough for something kind of like this, comes down a little bit, and then we put another little black bar in there to let it go and cut this little guy in half. It makes us nice little space right there, but what's cool now is if we were to say, all right, here is that one orange, we don't even need this copper anymore right. The orange is working enough for us. This right here is a little problematic because we want to be part of this hue so maybe this stuff all goes to brown and then we just bring in little tones of it. Because now, if you step back from the scene you say, "All right, here's my color palette, here's what I'm working with, let's go color his face." Now, he's got a bunch of different skin tone colors and things in there. We're just going to make him a version of this all of this orange. So that's the loudest version of it. Here is the half version of it, 50 percent, and the inside of the glasses that will be the 50 percent. His nose, we can just eye drop tool to get that presence back there. His lips, maybe his lips, they go to this blue. Now, grab these pieces and let's flip his as eye roll. Select it, and now let's make these things all make sense because here is the darkest, let that be the orange. There's your brown, that's that white. Now, as you pull back here, now check it out. When we go in there and we say something like, "You know what? Maybe we want that to be yellow." That's what's cool about when your colors are global because you've got that tweak that way. So what's cool about this is once you build these three things, you own those pieces. You own those pieces and you can go build it into a T-shirt graphic, or a little postcard, or some this little, and this might just be just a one day graphic because I'm flying back to Detroit, for the afternoon. I'm going to go back there and see my family and stuff. You own all these pieces at this point. They're yours to play with, and depending on how you push that stuff around, you can go pretty far. It's versatile. Here's your postcard and here is a couple of stickers of this thing and the idea is you just made a way to promote a rock show or something. You got a poster, the postcard, and some fun little stickers to make, simply by taking these little elements to palm them around. This stuff is infinite because you have to have a quiver. You have to have an arsenal. Whatever I landed on here with these little thick line forms, I've been making these things for years and I challenge you to go try these things, but don't let this be your only arrow in your quiver. This is one of 12 or 10 or 9 or in my case, I don't know, I hope it's seven or eight. If you do thick lines or you do little icon design or I don't know these really simple geometric things like to do, that's in my little quiver. I'm trying to cord those things off. I saw a hole somewhere and tried to make something not necessarily mine, just another version of it. Because remember, I saw this stuff happened when I was a little boy with Peter Max or something in one of my uncles record covers. When it was my turn to do it, well, that's where the thing just keeps plodding on. I really implore you guys to push this stuff. I showed you how to make it, round it, I showed you how to make it. If you look back in the third when we can go make it even dirty and stuff, see where it takes you. All this stuff, they're just shapes, and when you boil down a face or a place or well a thing, that's all it is. Me and you are shapes. When you get down to some quantum level, it's just a little cell or a piece of energy that says plus or negative and yet we're all stardust. Well, here I go again. Now I'm rambling, I'll stop.
13. Bonus: Thick Lines Cluster Timelapse: This weird footage of Rob Tyner floating around, where he, just a couple of years before his death, he was playing some sort of harpsichord or something, and he was singing about the Grande Ballroom, which is where my mom used to go. It's just this kind of odd grainy kind of public television footage and he's probably about my age,40-44 years old at the time. There he is, and it's just jarring to me. I'm going to go now, and I'm going to do a little riff on that and try to do like that. If that thing could have been a record, that one song, just we record the song right off YouTube, make a little record of that little Grande Day song. What will that little record cover look like? I was kind of go fast now and take some of these elements and go blast down. Certainly, taking those guys and just really working with a simple uniform outline. We're taking Rob's face and maybe a nice cluster or a nice circle, and just see what happens. Maybe, it isn't about the spark plug, maybe it's just about Rob and say something about Detroit, Rob and the skyliner, Rob just over the city, or something. So, that's what's I'm going to do now and just see where it goes.
14. Looking for More Draplin?:
Aaron Draplin, Designer and Founder, Draplin Design Company
