Transcripts
1. Make Steampunk Gears - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class. Let's go steampunk drawing gears 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. For this project, we're going to create a series of gears, a sort of steampunk gear set. Now, when you're starting out with a project like this, if you're not sure exactly what you're going to be drawing, I suggest you go and look for some reference material. I've gone to Google here and I've just searched for steampunk gears, and I've asked to see images. Here are a lot of gear shapes that we could use as inspiration. Now, one of the challenges that I like about making gears is that it's really a problem-solving sort because when you see a gear shape that is inspiring to you, the next thing you've got to ask is, how am I actually going to make this in Illustrator? This is really a problem-solving exercise. I've already selected a number of gears and I've created them and what we're going to do is re-create them ourselves using Illustrator. I'm going to go through some of the problem-solving techniques that you would use and explain which Illustrator tools are going to work for what.
2. Steampunk gear 1: Here's the very first gear shape that we're going to create. Now I'm going to start with something that's not in the final gear. I'm going to the Ellipse Tool here and I'm going to drag out a very small circle because I'm going to use this as the point around which everything is to be rotated. Later on, I'm just going to remove it when we no longer need it. The next shape we're going to create are these edges to the gear. You can see that they're rectangles but the bottom of them is a little bit narrower than the top. We're going to start out with a rectangle, so I'm just going to draw out a rectangle here that is going to be the starting shape. Now to bring the bottom of the rectangle in, I'm first going to select those anchor points. I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool. I could be pressing the letter A, and I'm dragging over just the bottom two anchor points. Then I'm going to the Scale Tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Shear and the Reshape tools. With the Scale Tool selected, I can just drag on these anchor points so you can see that they're both going to travel together so I can make the shape wider or as I want, a little bit narrower. There's the shape that I want. I think it needs to be just a little bit less tall, so I'm also going to shorten it just a little bit. Next, I want to align it, so I'm going to just move it roughly into position, the distance away from the center of this shape that I want to use. Then I'm going to make sure these are perfectly aligned by selecting over them. I'll click here on the "Horizontal Align Center" option just to make sure that they're perfectly aligned. To rotate this around the center, I need to make some decisions about the tool I'm going to use. Though you may be tempted to use this one here, Object, Transform, Rotate. Unfortunately, that tool will not rotate around a point that is outside of the shape itself, so you're going to need to use the Rotate Tool here in the toolbar. I'm going to select on my shape and I'm going to click the "Rotate Tool". Having done that, I now need to tell Illustrator that the center of this circle is the point around which I want to rotate this shape. I'm going to hover my mouse over the very center of the circle looking for the word Centered to appear because I have Smart Guides turned on. I'm going to hold Alt or Option and click once. That sets the center of the circle as the rotation point and it opens up the Rotate dialogue. That's exactly what you're looking for. If this doesn't happen, just go back and do it again. It might take a little bit of practice to get a feel for exactly what you're doing. Now we need to decide how many shapes we want around the circle. I want 12. There are 360 degrees in a circle so if I divide 360 by 12, I'm going to get the rotation I need, which is 30 degrees. But you know what, if you're not really very good at math, it doesn't really matter because what you can do is you can get Illustrator to do the math for you. You'll type in 360 and then the forward-slash for divide by and then type the number 12, and Illustrator will do the math for you. When I press the Tab key, it calculated that that was 30 degrees. We want a copy of our original shapes and we want the original and this one so we're going to click "Copy". Now everything is set up, all we need to do is to press a keyboard shortcut; it's Control or Command D. Every time you press the D key while you're holding down the Control or Command key, you'll get one of these shapes created. You'll just do it 10 times until you get all your shapes created for you. We have the edges now created, now we need to do the circle and the hole in the middle, because this is sort a doughnut shape, you can see through the gear. That's going to be important later on. We wouldn't want it to be white-filled because if we put it on a background, we won't be able to see through it as you would be able to see through a regular gear. Let's go to the Circle Tool or the Ellipse Tool, and we're going to drag out a circle. I find it easier than getting mixed up in here. It's actually drag it off to one side, holding down the Shift key, and then just move it into position. Press the letter V, or go and select the Selection Tool, and then just move it into position. You're looking for it to be lined up over the center of the circle with something like this. It's pretty easy to eyeball it, but you don't want to get this one in the way because that's not an intersection that I want to make. I want to line it up over the center of the circle. You can see now that the center indicator here has appeared. This is in a really good place. I'm just checking the sizing and I actually think I've drawn a pretty good size circle here. If my circle were not the right size, if I click on the circle and hold Shift and Alt, I can size it without losing my center point. That's still centered because I added the Alt key to keep it centered, the Shift key makes sure I drag out a perfect circle. We need a second circle. I'm going to make this one a different color. So with the Fill Color selected, I'm just going to go and select something like an orange. It'll make it a little bit easier to see. I'm going for the Ellipse Tool and I'm going to drag out a circle. I'm going to move it into the middle here, attempting to line it up. But you know what, if it's a little bit difficult to line up, we can solve that problem. I'm going to click on the larger of the circles, the black one, and then Shift-click on the orange one. I'm going to let go of all the keys on the keyboard, so all I have is my left mouse button. I'm going to click back on the black circle and it gets this deeper blue surround. That tells me that when I go to use these tools up here to align everything, they're going to be aligned relative to the black circle. It won't move, the orange circle will. I'm going to click "Horizontal Align Center", and then "Vertical Align Center", and then click away. I just want to test to make sure by hovering over these shapes here, that my circle is well away from the edge of these shapes. If it were over the edge of those shapes around the edge here, we would need to make the circle a little bit smaller because we're just going to cut out of the black circle, we don't want to have bits of these edge shapes coming into the hole in the middle of the gear. So just watch out for that. I'm going to click again on the black circle, Shift-click on the orange. Now I'm going to the Pathfinder because I want to punch the orange circle out of the black one. The orange circle's on top, so I'm just going to click here on "Minus Front", and that's going to make a hole in my shape. I don't need my center point here anymore. It was only there to help me create this gear, so I'm actually going to just click on it and delete it. Now this is multiple shapes. We want to make it all one shape, so I'm going to select over it, and in the Pathfinder, I'm going to click "Unite". That's going to make it just a single shape. So it will scale if I click over it and hold the Shift key. As I resize it, it's going to resize in proportion. There's the first of our steampunk gears that we've created for this steampunk project. I'm just going to delete the one I brought with me, and this is the one that we've made.
3. Steampunk gear 2: Here's the next gear shape that we're going to create and you probably can already work out exactly how we're going to create it because it's really not that much different to the one we've already done. We're going to start with our center point, that little circle that we're going to use to rotate everything around because it's just going to make life easier for us. Now, let's look at these bars here. We can create them the same way as we created the edges around here. We're just going to go and get the Rectangle tool. We're going to drag out one of the bars about the way that we want to use and about the length. There is a little bit of overlap that we can use if we don't get it perfectly right. I'm just going to move it roughly into position. We're going to align the two shapes by selecting over them both and just make sure that their horizontal centers are aligned. When we rotate it, it's all going to work perfectly. Again, select this shape and again go to the Rotate tool. Again, we're going to Alt click in the very center of the circle. Again, for this one we want 12 of the shapes around the circle. To get Illustrator to do the math, 360 divided by 12, make sure Preview's turned on so we can have a quick look. Click "Copy," and then we're going to do Control or Command D until we rotate it all the way around. Then we need to create this inner circle exactly the same way as we created it earlier. We're going to get the Ellipse Tool. It's going to drag out a circle and position it in place. Move this one out of the way so it doesn't get involved in my alignment here. There we are. The centers are now aligned. I want the middle shape as well. I'm going to draw out another circle. I'm just going to change color again, just making it a little bit easier to see what we're doing. It's not going to be quite such a big circle and it's going to be positioned in here and I'm looking for the center. Of course, if I'm finding that difficult, we know how to deal with that. With the Selection tool. I'm going to click on the pink one, Shift click on the black one, make sure I click again on the black one so it has this circle around it. Then I'm just going to align everything up to it with Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center. Select these two shapes. Back to the Pathfinder and the pink shape's on top of the black, so Minus Front. Now, we're going to need another circle around the very edge up here. Now, we could do it the same way as we've just done that, circle that we've just made, but we could also do it a little bit differently. Let's select a stroke this time, and let's go again and get the Ellipse Tool and let's drag out a circle. Now, to move the circle as I'm drawing it, I'm holding down the space bar because that allows me to move the circle at the same time as I draw it. Let go the space bar, and then let go the mouse button and the Shift key, which is constraining it to a perfect circle. Now, with this shape selected, I can increase my stroke until I get the width line that I want. If I want to, I can bring the stroke into the middle of the shapes so we can align the stroke to the inside of the shape, we can align it to the outside or the middle. This allows me to make it just a little bit smaller, although I am going to need to just expand it a little bit to make sure I can't see any of those bars around it. Now, this is a stroke line, so in a few minutes when we come to put this all together as a single shape, we're going to run into problems because it is a stroked hollow shape. To solve that, we need to expand and so I'm selecting the circle and choosing Object, and then Expand Appearance. That transforms this into the exact same circle as we've been creating previously. But this time we've done it just with a stroke circle and then expanded it. Just a different way of drawing these and another thing to have in your armor if you like. Now, we need the little bits on the very edge. I'm going back to the Rectangle tool, I'm just going to drag out a very small little shape that we're going to use. I'm just going to move it into position. I want it to line up with the center of that circle. This is the perfect alignment here for me. This might nudge it up a little bit, just pressing the up arrow key a couple of times and just check that it's looking okay. I'm thinking that this is looking really good. Our only option for rotating, this is back to this Rotation tool. Click on the "Rotation" tool, find the center of our circle here, Alt or Option click on it. This time we want a whole lot more of these little things around the circle than we've had before. I'm not sure what degrees I'm going to use, but let's just say we want, for argument's sake, we want 24 of these. We're going to type 360 divided by 24 and let Illustrator do the math. I'll click "Copy." Now, Control or Command D until I go all the way around the edge of the circle. Now, I'm ready to finish off. I'm going to take out the middle piece, the little circle that we've used for reference because we no longer need that. I'm going to select over all of this shapes and just click "Unite" to make it a single gear shape. There we are. There's the second of our gear shapes. I'm going to delete my reference one, and we've now created two shapes for our steampunk project.
4. Steampunk gear 3: Now we're ready to up the ante a little bit. Here's another gear shape that we're going to create, like a sawtooth almost. Well, we're obviously going to start with some circles. Again go to the ellipse tool. I'm going to make the very small circle for the middle of the shape here then I'm going to make the larger circle. I'm going to actually color the small circle just a different color so that we'll be able to see it as we work. Let's just make that red. I'm going to target the Selection tool and then deselect the red shapes. Now I can go back and pick up my black. I'm going to again, go to the ellipse tool, and again, I'm going to drag out a circle. I'm holding the space bar so I can move it into position pretty much on top of the middle circle there, so I can see just how big the outer circle of my gear is going to be. I'm going to select over this shape, I'm just going to send it to the back right now. I'll click ''Object'', ''Arrange'', ''Send to Back''. That lets me see my red circle over the top of my black one. I'm going to select both shapes and let's just make sure that they are aligned to each other. Now let's look at these teeth. One of the ways that we can draw the teeth is to borrow a shape from the Illustrators shape collections. We're going here to start off with the polygon tool. I'm just going to click once on the artboard because I want to be able to set the polygon dimensions up myself. I want a three-sided figure, so I want a triangle effectively. I'm just going to click "Okay" because it doesn't really matter how big the triangle is, but I've got a starting point for my shape. I'm going to the direct selection tool because I want to start working on the corners of the shape. I'm going to click on this top corner here. When I click, you'll see that these options become available up here. I want to convert this selected anchor point to a smooth one so I'm just going to click on that, and that gives me my handles. Now I'm going to drag this a little bit off-center, so I'm going to move it horizontally a little bit. Then I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key as I drag around on this handle. Now I'm looking for the White Arrow key to have a little plus sign beside it. If it shows two arrows, just let go of everything and start again because two arrows means you're about to make a duplicate of this point. One arrow and a plus sign means you're about to free up this handle, which is exactly what you want to do. We're going to create this tooth edge here. I'm going back to this point, again with the direct selection tool, I'm just going to move it a little bit more still, and perhaps reshape it just a little bit to get this tooth edge that I'm looking for. Down here, I can come to this point and just drag it in a little bit. You can just manipulate this until you get a nice-looking tooth. Don't worry that this tooth is way too big for the shape because it's really easy to scale it down once you've actually got the shape that you want to work with. I'm holding the Shift key as I scale it because I don't want to lose the proportions that I've achieved. Now I'm going to just move it into position and audition it over this shape and just see if it's looking like I want it to look. Well, I think I could rotate it a little bit even. I'm going to just rotate it, and I think that's pretty good there. I'm going to line it up over the circle so I'm going to select both shapes. Click again on the circle so that it's my reference point and let's just horizontally align the centers. Now let's go and do our rotation. Again, we're stuck with this rotation tool, it's the only tool that is going to rotate the way we want the shape to rotate. Click the rotation tool, find the center of your shape here, Alt or Option, click on it. Now we need to decide just how many rotations we want. Last time it appears we used 15 degrees, that was 360 divided by 24. I think that might be pretty good, well, we can test it and see. Let's just click ''Copy'' and see what we get. Well, that's pretty nice. But if you didn't like it, if it wasn't quite far enough or it was too far, just press "Control" or "Command Z", and go and do it over again. But I'm pretty happy with this so I'm going to Control or Command D because I want to rotate this around my circle. Now we're ready to put the pieces together. First of all, we need to select the red circle and we need to select the black circle. Because we need to knock the hole in this black circle. We're going to the Pathfinder, and we're going to click minus front because the reds are on top of the black and that makes the hole in the center. Now we'll select over all of the shape and we're just going to go to Unite, and there's our gear shape. Let's get rid of our reference copy. Here's, the gear shape that we've just created, the third in our series.
5. Steampunk gear 4: This next gear looks a lot more confusing than it really is. Again, this is a problem-solving exercise. We've got three large cutouts in this gear and they're all centered around the center point. Well, all we're going to do is to create these as circles so they're centered around a center point. Let's go and get the Ellipse Tool and let's start with our center point, then let's create one of these circles. Again, holding the Shift K with the Ellipse Tool selected, we're just going to drag out our circle. I'm going to select the Selection Tool and now just drag this into position roughly where I want it to be. I'm looking here. The distance between this circle and this one which is this distance in here. I'm going to align the two circles up with the Horizontal Align Center, and then we're going back to the same rotation feature that we've been using all along. Select the circle, click the Rotate tool, Alt or option-click on the very center of this circle. This time we want three shapes around the 360 degrees so we want to rotate around 120 degrees. I can just type in 120 and click "Copy" and then Control or Command D to make the third of my circles. So far so good. Next, we need the big circle. I'm going to select the selection tool here to deselect everything. Because it's really important if I'm changing colors, I don't want to change these colors right now. But let's just go and get a red color for this larger circle that we're going to create. Click on the Ellipse Tool, hold down the Shift K, eyeball the circle that we're going to use, move it into position by holding the space bar as you're drawing the circle. We're looking for the centers to line up. It's going to be a little bit easier in a minute to line them up using the alignment tools, but I'm just looking for something that looks like it's going to be pretty much the shape I want. Now I'm going to move this to the back with Object, Arrange, Send to Back. That allows me to see my black circles and my red. Now looking at the shapes that we've got so far, the black circles are all in the position we want to leave them in. So if we're going to align things, we do not want to be changing the black circles. I want to make sure that the red circle is perfectly aligned. I'm going to click on the red circle, Shift-click on the center circle here and then I'm going to click again on the center circle because it's the one I want to stay in place. Now I'm just going to click here on Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center just to make sure that the red circle is exactly where it should be. Now I want to knock the black circles out of the red circle, but right now, I'm really afraid that I'm going to lose that center marker if I do, and I don't want to lose it. So I'm just going to click on it to select it and in the last palette, I've identified where it is and I'm just going to turn it off. So I can't see it, can't select it, so anything that I do right now is not going to affect it. Now I'm going to select over all of the shapes, that's the three black shapes and the red one. They're all selected. I'm going to the Pathfinder and I'm going to click Minus Front. The three black shapes are in front of the red ones, so they're going to poke holes in the red one. Now I'm going back to the last palette and I'm going to re-select the eyeball here for the black shape, but we can't see the black shape even though it's there, we can see it in the palette here. The reason we can't see it is because the red shape has jumped above it in the last palette, so I'm just going to move this down. It's the same as sending the red shape behind the black shape using Send to Back for example, but because we can see this very clearly in the last pallet, we can just move the paths around here to change how they related to each other in terms of stacking. Now we need to do the little teeth on the edge of this so we're going to go and get the rectangle tool and we're going to drag a very small rectangle into position so that needs to be really, really tiny. I'm going to select the rectangle shape, I'm going to select the center circle. I'm going to click again on the center circle so that the alignment is going to be relative to the circle and I'm going to click "Horizontal Align Center." Now I've got my tooth in position, I think it's a little bit too tall, a bit too high up, so I'm just going to move it down, just nudge it down one or two pixels. Now I'm going to select it and we're going to do our rotation thing again. Select the Rotate tool, alt, or option-click on the center of the shape. Now we need lots and lots of little teeth. Let's say, for example, that we want to have 40 teeth, we're going to do 360 divided by 40, click "Copy." It doesn't even look to me like that's enough, so I'm going to press Control or Command Z and let's try that again. Again, I'm going to select the shape, select the Rotate tool, Alt, or Option-click in the center here and let's go for 60, 360 divided by 60, click "Copy." Much better. Now I'm just going to press Control or Command D to get all the way around the circle with my little shapes. When I'm done, I'm going to the Selection Tool and we're going to select everything except this middle circle. Again to protect it, it's probably going to be easier just to turn it off for now. I'm going to select over all of these shapes and I'm going to the Pathfinder and I'm going to unite them. I have a single shape, I just don't have the hole in the center yet. Well, we can get the hole in the center back by just clicking the eyeball for the circle, and let's just move it so that we can see it. We're going to take these two shapes the red and the black. Because the black's on top of the red, we can just use Minus Front again and there's the hole in our circle. Now, of course, it's the wrong color, but that's an easy solution. We're just going to make it black, exactly the same way as the other gears have been colored. I'm going to delete my reference gear and here is the fourth of our gears that we've created for our Steampunk Project.
6. Steampunk gear 5: Here's our next gear. This is the one that I drew earlier. I'm not really happy with the edges to it, so I'm actually going to change those as we design our own. But what I'm interested in is these curves here, because this is really a little bit more complex a gear than the ones that we've been creating so far. Let's see how are we going to put it together. Well, we're going to start with our center point, because the center point is really the point at which everything is rotated around. It's a focal point for our design. The next thing we're going to do is these bars. I'm just going to concentrate on the bars and ignore the curvy bits because they look to me like a circle, and I think I might be able to solve the problem of those with circles later on. But let's go and get our rectangle too. We're just going to draw out the bars that we're going to use. Again, I'm going to select all the bars shapes and just make sure that they're horizontal align center. Now, I need five of these, so I'm going to do my regular rotation this time creating five. I'm going to click here, I'm going to click on the rotation tool Alt or option, click on the center of the circle here. I'm going to type 360 divided by 5 and click "Copy". Now control or command D until I get my five shapes. So far so good. Next we're going to draw a circle. So it's going to be this circle before the little bits got cut out of it. So let's go to the Ellipse Tool. Think it might be helpful if we start changing the color here. So I'm going to make it a red circle, just going to drag it out and move it into position. I think something like that is going to work. Now I'm going to the last palette because I want to bring my little black circle, this one here, above everything else. It's just going to help me line everything up if I can actually see it. Again, I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to select the red and the black circles. Make sure I target the black one as don't move this one. Let's just line up the red one with horizontal and vertical align. So far everything is in position. Now, I can get these curvy bits because they're like circles themselves. Let's just go and get a different color. I'm going to do green this time, and the Ellipse tool. Let's drag out a circle again holding the space bar just to move it into position. So what I wanted to do is to just butt up against the very edges of those bars. It's going to give me the curvy bit that I'm going to cut out of here. I'm just going to let go there and I'm just going to move this manually into position. I can nudge it a little bit using the keyboard. Then thinking that that's going to be a nice little cut-out here that's going to give me this shape. With this shape now selected, I'm going to rotate it. If I'm going back to my rotate tool, I'm going to "Alt" or "Option" click in the center of this black circle, and now I'm going to do the same rotation as I did last time. I'm going to click "Copy" and then "Control" or "Command D" until I create the circles all the way around the shape. Now we need to do a little bit of subtraction. I'm going to select my green shapes, and I'm going to select the red shape. Because the green shapes are on top of the red shape, I want to subtract them. So I'm going to select Minus Front. I'm going to go here and click "Minus Front." That cuts the green shapes out of the red shape, and I've got a pretty good approximation of what I had in the center of this gear. Let's go and get our black shape and just put it up the top there so that we can adjust everything relative to it, because it's going to be the center point around which will be rotating this little edge bases. For the rest of this shape, you should be pretty familiar with exactly what we're going to be doing here. I'm going to draw the outer circle using a stroke on a circle here. I'm just going to position my circle here and I'm going to increase the stroke. I'm going to make sure that this circle and this inner circle are lined up perfectly to each other. Then I'm going to expand this outer circle because I used a stroke to create it. I'm going to choose object, expand, and just click "Okay." Now we want the little teeth and as I said earlier, I'm really not happy with those little teeth. I think I'm just going to do regular literal sharp teeth like this. So let's go and get the rectangle tool. Let's drag out a rectangle. We might angle it slightly this time. So let's go and get the direct selection tool, grab the bottom two anchor points, and let's just move them, so it's got a slight interesting shape on it. Let's just make it a little bit smaller. That's going to be my tooth. I'm going to move it into position here. I'm going to line it up again with the center selecting the tooth, shift clicking on the center, clicking again on the center, making sure that everything is going to be adjusted relative to the center, so the center won't move. Align that, now I'm going to rotate it, click on it. Click the rotation tool. "Alt" click on the center. Determine exactly how many of these I want around my shapes. So 360 divided by, well, let's, for argument sake, say 40 this time, and click "Copy." I'm continuing to press Control or Command D to add the shapes all the way around the edge of my circle. Now we just have to do the finishing touches. We're going to click on the center and we're going to click on the red shapes. So these are both selected. The black is in front of the red. Again, we're going to use Minus Front here to poke a hole in the shape. Now we can just grab everything and unite them. Just clicking on "Unite." Then we'll just fix the color problem. There is our black gear. I'm going to delete my reference one and now you have the fifth key in our series. This one was a little bit more complex to design, but looking at the curve shapes that you were trying to create, they really psi circles to you. So it's just a case of working out how you can draw the circles and subtract or add them to make the curves that you're looking for.
7. Steampunk gear 6: This gear shape looks a little bit challenging, but really it's just a component of most of the stuff that we've already done before. We're going to start with an oval because I'm going to create this shape here. I'm going to create a fat oval shape. I'm going to warp it using effect and then warp. I know that I need the Squeeze Warp. But if you didn't know which one you needed, you can just come in here and select any of the Warp Options. Then you can really look again at what they might do to your shape. But I want to use squeeze and I'm going to squeeze it up really quite high. You can say that this is giving me that bended middle shape. Then that's a horizontal bend. I'll just click, okay, I'm going to size it down a little bit. I'm going to try and make it a little bit more this shape here. I'm going to select over the shape and I'm going to choose Object Expand Appearance because that makes it the actual shape now. I need to subtract a couple of circles from this shape. I'm going to go into the ellipse tool. I'm going to choose a different color so we can see what we're working with him. I'm just going to use a pink and I'm going to hold the Shift key down as I draw out a circle. I'm going to select the circle and hold the Alt or Option key as I drag a duplicate away because I won't want it in the end. Select over the whole thing, and let's just line up the centers. The two pink shapes are on top of the black shapes. We'll select everything and just do a minus front to poke holes in this shape. Now we've got this shape here. Select it, just re-size it a little bit perhaps. We're ready to do our rotation for that, we're going to need a center point to rotate around. Again, just a circle. Select either both of these, make sure that they're aligned horizontal centers. We're looking at this distance here. I think this is too far away, so I'm just going to close it up a little bit and just recheck it. Now we need to rotate five shapes around this center point. Again, selecting the shape back to the rotation tool, Alt or Option click on the center point. We want to do 360 degrees by by 5 and click Copy and then Control or Command D. Let's just click away from here. The next thing we need to do is this circle here. You can see that the circle runs between these shapes, but it's actually cut out here. We're going to need to do something here to cut the shapes out of the circle. But we're going to start with the circle part of it. I'm going to do this with a stroked circle. I'm just going to hold down the Shift K, create my circle, move it into position, test it because it's named to go over the holes in these little bars. Now it's not perfectly centered right now perhaps, but it's going over these circles over these halls. That's exactly what I wanted to do. I'm going to select it and let's just widen the stroke. It has no fill, which is exactly as it should be. I'm going to need to expand this. I'll choose Object Expand. That's just a filled shape now it's not a stroke shape. We're ready to do the subtraction, we're going to do a couple of things here. One of them is I'm going to hide that in a circle away because I'm going to need it later on. But I don't want to lose it in what I'm about to do. The other thing is that if I use, minus back, to subtract all of the shapes from the circle, I'm going to get what I want, except I'm going to lose all these shapes in the process because they're just going to be removed. Well, the best thing to do is to take a copy of them and tuck those away as well. I'm going to click Shift, click on all of these bars. Then I'm going to choose Edit Copy, Edit paste in place. That creates a set of those bars line on top of the existing ones. Here they are in the last palette. I'm just going to turn them off. I can't select them and they're going to be hidden away so I can use them again in a minute. I've tucked away the bits that I want to save. Now I'm going to select over those paces, that's five bars and the inner circle. Because the bars are behind a circle this time instead of minus front, I'm going to choose Minus Back. In other words, subtract everything from the front most object, There's a shape. Now I've got the little bits in the middle so I need to deal with those. I'm going to zoom in here. I've got to be really careful that I do not move this shape because I've got everything nicely aligned. It would be a pity if I moved it at this point. I'm going to click here and I'm going to choose Object Expand. Then I'm going to click to isolate these individual shapes. Just clicking until you get the little handles and anchors around one of these shapes and press Delete and then go and get the next one. Want to leave these bars in place, you just want to get rid of the middle bits. Let's click to get out of isolation mode. Let's press Control or Command 0 to get back to full-size view of the document. Now we're going back to the last pallet and let's bring back the things that we hid, the center of the circle and the second set of bars that we stored away because we were going to need them. Now we've got this inner part of the shape created. We just need to concentrate on the outer part. Well, this is just a circle. Again, let's go back to a stroke circle and let's drag it out here. Shift, drag it, use the space bar to move it while you're still drawing it. This time the bar is not going through the holes, so we don't want it to go through the holes in those bars, but we want it to go fairly close to the holes just not over the top of them. I'm just auditioning this. I think that's pretty good and I let go of that. Now, I want the circle here and this inner circle to be lined up. I don't want to move the inner circle, I want to move the outer ones. Let's click the outer circle. Let's shift click the inner one. Let's click again on the inner one so it's not going to move. Let's just line this circle up with the shape that we've created. We'll go back to the circle now we can work on the stroke. It's going to increase the stroke on it. Think three points for the size document I'm working on is looking just fine. Everything is looking good here. I'm just going to click on this. I'm going to expand its appearance to turn it into a filled shape rather than a stroke shape. Now let's go and create these little bumps here. These are going to be oval, so I'm just going to drag out an oval. But I only want the top part of the oval. I'm going to take a rectangle and draw a rectangle over the bottom part of the oval. I'm looking right now at the bit sticking out the top. I just want to make sure that it's going to be what I want. When I'm right with that, I'm going to select both shapes. The rectangle is in front of the oval, so I'm just going to click Minus Front. That's giving me my little shape that I want here. I'm going to start with this shape right over the top of the existing bar. Let's just color it a different color for now so that we can save. We're going to click on this to select it. We're going to shift click on the center. We're going to click again on the center to make sure it's the reference point. We're just going to make sure that the horizontal alignment is correct here, which it is. Now we're going to click on this shape and do our rotation. Click here, Alt or Option, click on the center point. We need to work out how many we need to rotate it. Well, we need 20 of these around here, so we're going to do 360 divided by 20. Make sure we click Copy and then continue to do our Control or Command D. Now, you'll notice that we've got some of these pink shapes where we don't want them. But to do the rotation, we really need to create some shapes that we actually didn't want. Because once we've created them, we can just go back and delete the ones that we don't want. I'm just deleting the ones that are over the top of these bars. Now we're ready to finish up so we don't need the center circle anymore, so I'm just going to remove it. I'm going to select over all of the other shapes and we're ready to do our Unite. Then from the Pathfinder, we're just going to click Unite. Now it's become pink, but that's an easy solution to make it black. There's that gear. Again, it was just a process of looking at the paces and looking at how we could do it with the tools on the features that we already knew about in Illustrator.
8. Steampunk gear 7: To finish up our steampunk gear project, let's create a final image incorporating all the gears that we've created so far. Now, I'm going to give you the download link for this particular monochrome grunge texture. It's just a really nice little texture file to use to finish off our project. You'll want to download the file, unzip it, and then open up the APS file that's in the zip file in Illustrator, and it will be converted to an AI file. We're going to start in our gear image, I'm going to click the selection tool and select the first of my gears. I'm going to choose Window and then Transparency because I want to have this transparency dialogue open on the screen so I can make sure that everything is working perfectly. I'm going to go and get the texture to use. I'm going to click on the texture image. I'm going to use the lasso tool to drag over a selection of the texture that I want to use, and I'll choose Edit and then Copy. I'm going back to my gear image. I have my gear selected here. I'm going to click Make Mask, and I'm going to deselect Clip. I'm going to make sure that the mask here is selected. Then I'll choose Edit and then Paste. That pastes the texture in. You should be able to see the texture in this mask area here now. If you don't see that, you'll want to undo everything and start over again. Now, this texture is going to be a little bit difficult to move around because it's lots of little pieces, so I'm going to group it. Choose Object, and then Group. That'll group it together, so it's going to move as a single object so it's going to be a little bit easier to deal with. I've got it selected here and now I'm just going to move it into position over my gear. You can see here you've got the gear and then the texture that's exactly the way it should look. When you finish, just click back on the gear, that'll stop you editing the opacity mask and you should see your gear with the texture over the top of it. This first gear is now complete. Let's go to the next one. We're going to select the gear, and then we're going back to our grunge texture. You can choose the exact same piece of texture that you used previously, or you can go ahead and select something a little bit different. Copy it with Edit, Copy. Go back to your gear image. You're seeing your gear here in the transparency panel. You want to click, Make Mask, deselect Clip. Click on the mask so that you're editing the mask. Choose Edit, and then Paste. Group this element together by choosing Object and then Group. Now you can go ahead with the selection tool and move it and size it into position. You just want to make sure that you see your gear and your you here. If you don't, you'll want to undo everything and go back and start again. When you are happy with the way that texture looks on top of the gear, go back into the transparency panel and click on the gear itself. That stops you editing the transparency mask and let's you go ahead with the next gear. Again, select your gear. Go back into your grunge texture. I'm going to take the same texture this time, so I'm just going to choose Edit and then Copy. I'm going back to my gears, I'm going to make my mask. Turn off the Clip option. Make sure that I select the mask itself so I'm editing the mask. Then choose Edit, Paste. Go back to the group, Object, Group. Now I can size my object. Checking in the transparency panel that I've got my gear and my texture. If they're not there, it's not working and you want to go back and start again. Move the texture over the gear. In this case, I think I'm going to rotate my texture, so I'm just going to rotate it around a little bit, so it's going in a slightly different direction, it doesn't look so much like the same texture as I applied over here. When I'm done, I'm going back to the transparency panel, I need to click on the gear to go back to editing the image and not the texture. Now I'm going to finish up the next three shapes. I'm just going to speed up the video because it's the same process for every single one of them. I'll come back once the textures have all been applied. Now that all the shapes have been textured, it's time to apply some color to them. I'm going to select each of these in turn and I'm just going to color them a gray color and neutral gray. But one of them, I'm going to color red. You could even select a brown color if you wanted to. But you want neutral tones for most of the gears, and then one red one. Now let's go and create a background for our illustration. We'll use the rectangle tool to do that. I'm just going to select a rectangle, then drag it out the size of the art board. Now, it's going to be filled with the last used color, but I want it to be filled with black, so I'm just going to click on the black here. Now I'm going to the last palette because the black rectangle has appeared at the top of everything. I want it at the bottom, so I'm just going to drag it all the way down. Now we can see our shapes on top of it. I'm going to duplicate this rectangle, so I'm going to drag it onto the new icon here, and that will create a duplicate of it. In the version behind, I'm just going to turn this one off so that we can see the one we're actually working on, I'm going to apply a slightly lighter color, so I'm probably going to choose something like this brown. I've got a black filled rectangle and a brown filled rectangle underneath it. Let's go to the black filled rectangle. I'm going to select it and then I'm going to the Transparency tab here. We're going to do exactly the same thing with this rectangle. I'm going to my grunge texture and I'm going to select pretty much everything here except this outer edge. I'm going to the lasso tool here and I'm just going to lasso most of this texture, just avoiding the darker edges as I don't want those. I'll choose Edit, Copy. We'll go back to our gear image. With this rectangle selected, we're going to click Make Mask, deselect Clip. I'm going to click on the mask and I'm going to paste the texture in with Edit, Paste. I'm going to group it with Object, Group. I'm going to look for the corners of this shape because I seem to have lost them a little bit here. I'm just going to size it down. There's one of the corners up here, I'm just going to size it so it's going to appear pretty much over the top of this rectangle. When I'm happy with the positioning, I'm going to click back here on the black rectangle because that's going to deselect the mask. You'll see that the result is that the black background has been lightly textured, so you can see a little bit of the brown through it. To finish off, I suggest that you go back to your shapes and you size them and move them into an attractive position. You may also want to hold the Alt or Option key as you drag a duplicate away because you can reuse these textured shapes, just resize them and recolor them so they look a little bit different elsewhere in the illustration. I'm going to continue to work on my project and you can look out for my finished result in the project details for this Skillshare video course. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
