I'm Seeing Stars - Shapes in Shapes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. I'm Seeing Stars - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class: I'm Seeing Stars, creating shapes in shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at stars. Now we're not looking at stars per se as much as something that we can do with stars. We're going to create a star pattern and we're going to do it using a technique that perhaps you haven't used before. Then we're going to take our star pattern and we're going to apply it to different shapes. We're going to apply it as a surface to a sphere. We're going to apply it to a shape using a clipping mask and then overcome some of the issues that surround trying to apply a drop shadow to a clipping mask shape. We're going to warp our pattern and then crop it. We're going to create some brushes as well. Although we're using stars today, this Illustrator class is really about a whole grab bag of handy Illustrator techniques. I hope you enjoy it. Let's get started. 2. Before we begin: Before we begin this class, I just want to address some changes that have happened in Adobe Illustrator since this class was produced. In April 2022, Adobe added some new 3D tools to Adobe Illustrator. And these work very differently to the old tools. And the two can fit side-by-side because they are so different in terms of their effect. For this class, you're going to need to use what are now called the classic 3D tools. You can't use the new ones because they just don't work in the same way. And they're also really, really slow in terms of requiring a lot of machine overhead. So you really want to be making sure that you're using the correct 3D tools. I'm just going to select this shape and show you what's different. If you go to Window and 3D, which is what I would have told you in the rest of this class. You're going to get the new tools and these are not what you want. So don't do that when you see me do that in the class, just know that the position of the 3D tools that you need have moved. Instead you're going to select your object and you go to Effect and then 3D and materials. Because here are your 3D classic tools. And depending on whether in the class we use Extrude and Bevel, revolve or rotate. You're just going to select one of these three options. The options are exactly the same as they used to be, and they work exactly the same as they used to work. So it's important that you understand that there are some new tools. They're not the ones you want. You want the old tools which are now called classic. From there, you should be able to just continue on with the class exactly as I have taught it. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the question area and I'll help you as soon as I'm able to. 3. I'm Seeing Stars Part 1: Let's start by creating the sphere that's covered in a star pattern. I'll choose "File" and then "New". I'm going to use a document size that's 1000 pixels wide by 600 pixels high, RGB Color Mode. I'll just click, "Okay". I'm going to start by selecting the "Star" option here, which shares a toolbar position with the Rectangle Tool. I'm going to click on the "Star Tool". I'm going to click in the middle of my document here. You can see that the default star size that I have right now is a 50-pixel radius star. Radius 1 is 50 and Radius 2 is 25. Radius 1 is the outside area of the star and Radius 2 is the inside. This is quite a nicely balanced star and I have five points selected. I'm just going to click "Okay". Here you can see this is the star that I've created. I want it to be filled and I don't want it to have a stroke so I'm going to turn the stroke off. I think I'll choose a different color for the fill right now. Let's load a blue color. We're going to turn this one star into a whole pattern of stars but I think it's too big. I'm going to drag on the corner and just hold the "Shift" key as I make it much smaller. I'm just going to position it down here to start my pattern. For this pattern, we're going to use Distort and Transform. It's a really handy tool and one that you might want to practice a little bit with. We're going to use it here. I'm going to choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". I'll turn Preview on so I can see what I'm doing. I want 22 copies of this star so I'll type "22". I want them to appear up here. I'm going to start by pulling back in a negative direction. You can see the stars are lined up here. But I also want to move some of them in a horizontal direction so I'm going to start moving them horizontally, say around 20 pixels. But I don't want to move them all like this. I just want to move every second one. I'll click "Reflect X" and you can see here now that I have these stars, the 22 stars, but they're starting to form a pattern. I think I don't have my value set quite high enough here. I'm going to use 26 and minus 26 and perhaps a few less stars. That's looking pretty good to me so I'll click "Okay". I've got two rows of stars but I want a whole lot more. So I'm going to apply another Distort and Transform to the star. "Effect", "Distort and Transform", "Transform". I'm being warned by Illustrator that I'm about to apply a new effect, not edit the old one. It's what I want to do, anyway so I'll click this button. I want, probably, another six versions of this particular star pattern so I'll type "6". I'm going to click "Preview" and I want to move this in a horizontal direction. I want to use a value that's pretty much double the value that I used previously. I'm just not quite sure that I remember it but let's assume that it was 26. I'm using 52 here. You can see I now have my pattern but I don't think I have enough of them. Let's just increase this value here. That's looking pretty good as a pattern for wrapping around my sphere. I'll click, "Okay". The star right now is blue, but I want white stars on my sphere. I'm going to need to change the color. With this star selected, because that is the only object I have, these are all transformations of the star, I'm just going to click on "White". It's now colored white. But let's expand it so we can see it. "Object", "Expand Appearance". You can see that it's a whole lot of white stars here. For us to be able to wrap this around the sphere, we need to add it as a symbol. I'm going to my Symbols Panel and I'm just going to click and drag with the Selection Tool in the middle of one of these stars and just drag it all up into the symbols. You can see it looks pretty funny as it's traveling along but don't worry, this is exactly what it's supposed to look like. I'll just drop it into the Symbols Panel. I can make an Export Type as Movie Clip or Graphic. It doesn't matter. Either of them are going to be the same for our purposes. I'll just click, "Okay". Although you can't see it here very clearly right now, we do have those stars saved as a symbol. We can now wrap them around the sphere. We just have to go ahead and create our sphere. I don't want these stars any longer. I don't need them any longer so I can just press "Delete" to delete that entire object. Let's create our sphere. To do that, let's go and get a color. I'm going to choose a navy blue color. I'm going to choose "Ellipse". I'll hold "Shift" as I drag out a circle. I need to break the circle in half and one of the ways that I can do it is just to delete this node here. I'm just going to click on that node and press the "Delete" key. That just breaks the circle in two. I'm going to select my circle and let's create a sphere from it. To do this, we'll choose "Effect", "3D", "Revolve", and click "Preview". This is revolving the wrong way. Instead of from left edge, we're going to select "From right Edge" and now we have a sphere. But we have a set of stars that we want to map onto the sphere. I'm going to click "Map Art". From the symbol dialogue here, I'm going to drop down this list and choose "New Symbol" because my symbol's going to be at the very bottom of this collection. You can see that we're already mapping the stars onto our sphere. It's just we don't have quite enough of them right now. We just need to move this pattern into position. I'm just going to place it about here, and then hold the "Shift" key as I just stretch it to fit in this dialogue. You might find that it moves a bit strangely for you but that's fine. You just might need to adjust that manually to sizing it to fit. In here, the stars applied to our sphere so I'll click, "Okay". Right now I'm looking pretty much front onto my sphere. I can rotate it if I wish by just pulling here. I'm going to pull it so that I get a nice pattern at the top of my sphere. Once I have something I'm happy with, I can just click, "Okay". We have a 3D sphere created in Illustrator with a star pattern mapped onto it, the first of our Mini Star Projects. 4. I'm Seeing Stars Part 2: For the second of our stars projects, we're going to create a star that's going to be filled with little stars. We're going to start out by clicking on the "Star Tool". This time, I'm just going to drag out a really small star. I'm holding down the "Shift" key as I draw it. At the moment, it's filled with white, but let's go and fill it with a dark red. I'm going to use the same transform process to create a entire pattern of stars here. I'll choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". Again, I'm going to turn preview on. Again, I'm going to choose "Reflect X". I'm going to make about 22 copies here. I'm going to wind back on the vertical so they go in an upwards direction and then wind forward on the horizontal. I want to do this to about the same amount. I'm choosing 18 and minus 18 and I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to do my horizontal pattern using the same technique, "Effect", "Distort and Transform", "Apply New Effect", "Preview". I want about 10 of these. This time, I want to move the horizontal double, the horizontal I used last time, which was 18. We're going to make this 36. It's a nice pattern of stars, perhaps not quite enough, so make 11 and click "Okay". I've got a pattern of stars now and I want to cut a star shape out of them. First of all, let's expand this. With this star selected object, expand appearance. Now I'm going to draw my large star over the top. Again, I'm going to "Star Tool". Again I'm going to hold "Shift" as I drag it out. Now, I haven't put it in a very good position, but I haven't finished drawing it either. I'm going to hold the "Spacebar" as I move it into position. Holding the "Spacebar" lets me move the shape until I get it exactly where I want it, and then I'll let go the left mouse button and let go the "Shift" key. Now, I want to clip this group of stars behind this front star so that I just have a star filled with little stars. I'm going to select the "Selection Tool" and drag over everything here, so I've got it all selected. I'm going to right-click and choose "Make Clipping Mask". I could also use "Object", "Clipping Mask", "Make", it's exactly the same. Now I have a star that's filled with little stars. Let's go to the Appearance panel and the Layers panel. First of all, I just want to grab this group of stars here, just this one here. You'll see that I'm able to then move the stars around. I can position the stars within the big star exactly how I want them to look. I can also size them. I'm holding the "Shift" key as I size them, just so that they're sized in proportion. Now what would look really good to me, I think, is to be able to put a drop shadow around this shape. Now it's not as easy as it looks by just selecting the shape and choosing "Effect", "Stylize", "Drop Shadow", this is the result. We end up with a drop shadow that is a drop shadow behind each of the individual stars and not a drop shadow that is behind the clipping group that we've created, so I'm just going to click "Cancel". Now, the step-by-step for creating the drop shadow for this star is a little bit complex. You'll need to do it one step at a time. First of all, select this entire group, the clipping mask, as well as the pattern so you have it selected here in the last panel and then choose "Object", "Group". This just creates a group of the clipping mask object. Then go back to the group itself. we're going to add the drop shadow to the group, "Effect", "Stylize", "Drop Shadow". Click on "Preview". We're getting the same effect, but this time it's going to work perfectly. I'm just going to click "Okay" for now. Now to make sure that the drop shadow appears outside the star and not behind the individual stars, we're going to this path here. I'm just going to click on this star here. In the Appearance panel, I'm going to open that up and I'm going to fill it. I'm just going to click on the "Fill" option here and I'm going to fill it with white. This fills the front style with white and you can see that the drop shadow has now been applied. It's just a very simple process of going from no fill to fill and the drop shadow behaves totally differently. At this point, I can go back to the last palette, I can reselect the group, I can reselect the Appearance panel, and here is the drop shadow. If I click on it, I reopen the Drop Shadow panel because I might want to make adjustments to it. But really until we see the drop shadow in position so we see exactly how it's going to behave, it's a little bit difficult to make choices as to what it's going to look like because when the object in the front was not filled, we actually didn't see the drop shadow the way that it really should look on this object. That is a little bit of a confusing set of steps, but it is the way to apply a drop shadow to a clipping mask. Of course, the way that you're going to do this, to add the drop shadow to the clipping mask, is to put it all inside a group, apply the drop shadow to the group, and then fill the actual clipping object. Fill this object here that is the clipping object and that just blocks the shadow so it's no longer inside the shape, but it appears outside of it. 5. I'm Seeing Stars Part 4: We'll finish off our stars project with a star pattern brush. I'm going to click on the "Star Tool" and drag out a star. I'm going to fill it with a color. Now, we can make this star into a brush that we construct lines with. To do this, we're going to select over the star and we're going to open up the brushes panel here. I'm going to drag the star and drop it in the brushes panel. I'm going to create a pattern brush and click "Okay". This is what the pattern brush is going to look like. We're going to set the colorization method to tints and shades so we can color the brush as we paint. Now, we're a little bit short on stars to use in the corners but we can fix that right now. I'm going to click "Okay". Now I'm going to re-select my star and I'm going to Alt drag it into position here and I'm going to drop it in the first of these boxes because this means that my star can now be a corner star here if we were to create a rectangle and stroke it with a brush. So I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to do the same thing. Again, I'm going to Alt drag, and drop it and this time into the 4th panel in the pattern brush. That creates it as the pattern piece that's going to be used on the inside corner of a bend. Again, I'll click "Okay". Now, I don't need the star any longer so I can just delete it, and let's see how our star will look when we use it as a brush. I'm going to click on the "Paintbrush Tool". I'll click on my star and now I'm just going to draw a line. You can see that the line is now stroked with the brush. If I select the line, I can change the size of the brush. I can make it very small stars by using 0.25 of a point, or it could make it a lot bigger. I can also use a brush profile, so I can make it thinner at either end and thicker in the middle. I'm just going back to the regular uniform profile here. You can see that the stars that we've used for our brush all touch each other. Now, if you don't want that to be the case, you can make a slightly different brush. Let's go back and get our star tool. Again, I'm going to draw out a very small star. Let's recolor this one a different color. Now, I'm going to add over the top of it a rectangle. I'm just going to draw out a rectangle that is going to be as high as the star, but it's going to have a little bit of extra space on either side. Let's just zoom into this. I'm going to, with the rectangle selected, give it no stroke and no fill, and I just want to line it up a little bit better relative to my star. I have a star and I have a rectangle that's just a little bit larger than it on top, I'm going to select both of those objects, the star and the rectangle, and now I'm going to drag the whole lot into the brushes palette. I'm going to create a pattern brush from this and click "Okay". Again, I'm going to use tints and shades. This time you can see that the brush is spaced out a little bit more. I'll click "Okay" for now. Now, I'm going to go and get just my star. I'm going to Alt drag it into the first position here so it becomes the corner element for my brush and then Alt drag it into the 4th position, and it's going to be the inside corner and click "Okay". Now, I can delete everything. "Control 0" to get back to my document. Select my brush here in the brushes palette, select the "Brush Tool" and let's just paint it out. You can see this time we get a different-looking brush. Now, it's colored a bit deeper because I have the red color selected. If I want to color it the original brush color, I'm going to select it. Click down here on the options for selected brush and instead of tints and shades I'll just select None and it'll be colored the same way as the original brush was. 6. I'm Seeing Stars Part 5: The final project for this class is just to put this altogether. I'm just going to quickly explain to you what I did. But really, you can do whatever you like. I first created a rectangle that is the size of the art board. I just dragged it out and filled it with a blue color. Because it appeared in front of everything else, I selected it and choose Object, Arrange, Send to Back, and that just send it behind everything. I moved each of this shapes into position. If you want to, you can apply a drop shadow to this particular shape, by choosing Effect, Stylize, Drop Shadow. Click on Preview, and you can see that the drop shadow actually gets applied to this object a whole lot easier than we were able to apply the drop shadow to the other objects here. Then I created these loops and I did it using the Ellipse Tool. Just drag out an ellipse. I went to the Direct Selection Tool and clicked on the topmost anchor point here, and then press delete, and that gave me these loops. I then applied the brush to it. Now the brush came recolored because of the color that I had selected. I just went here to the options of selected object and reset the brush to none and click "OK". Then I duplicated this a few times to create these loops. Finally, I just created a few lines. I just use the Line Tool and applied the blue brush to each of these. Now you can do whatever you like for your final project. I encourage you to have a shot at creating these stars because there's a lot of techniques in here that you've learned along the way. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.