Make Art with Stock Images in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make Art with Stock Images in Adobe Illustrator Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design class make art with stock images 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 making art with other people's vector art. We'll start by downloading free vector art from an online site. Then we're going to open it and have a look around those vector objects to see what's going on inside them. We'll get rid of the bits that we don't want, and we're going to rework the pieces that we do want. We're going to put them together into a final image of our own making. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people, people just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment as well, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. If you're ready, let's get started now on making art with other people's art in Illustrator. 2. Make Art Using Other People's Art - Part 1: For us to be able to make art with other people's art, we're first of all going to need some other people's art to work with. I've gone to a site called Vecteezy and I'm going to give you the links to these if you want to download these images. I found this image which I really liked, and I also found this tie-dye image. I decided that I would work with both in Illustrator and create an original piece of art using pieces out of each of these images. At Vecteezy, you'll just go and click the "Free Download". When you download these files, they're going to appear in your downloads folder. You'll double-click on the zip file that you've downloaded. On the Mac, they should automatically be extracted into a folder for you. On the PC, you'll see a link to extract all files, so you go ahead and extract the files. Then I open up the folder of extracted files, and in each case you'll find that in the zip archive, there are a number of files and the one that you want is the AI file. You want the Illustrator file. Now, I've gone ahead and downloaded and extracted these files. I'm going to bring them into Illustrator. The first one is the tie-dye image, and then the second one will be the car image. Now I've got them open inside Illustrator, we can start having a look at these images. This particular class is not only going to be valuable to you in terms of putting together original art from other people's art, but it will also help you learn to explore the layers palette so you can make sense of what's going on inside other people's images, because you're effectively going to be reverse engineering their thought process. I'm going to make sure that we have some fairly large panel options here so we can see what's going on. I'm thinking 30 is probably a pretty good size. Now, in this particular Volkswagen image, we've got three layers and two of them are locked down. My suspicion is that these involve some of this information here. I'm just going to turn off the layers to see what disappears. Well, the background disappeared there, and since I don't need the background, I'm going to unlock it, I'm just going to drag it onto the trash can because there's nothing there that I want. Let's go and see what's on this one. Well, that's this piece of text down here. Again, I can unlock it and drag that onto the trash can, which leaves just this layer here. Now, inside this layer are a number of subgroups of objects. I'm just going to close those up for a minute so we can see what we've got. Anything that's locked I'm learning from this particular image is likely to be something that relates to copyright, so let's just turn this off. With this turned off, the freevector.com type that appeared in the wheel of this car, and I don't want that, so I can just go and drag that onto the trash can. Likewise, this one is this piece of text here. Again, I'm just going to get rid of it. Now we're down to the car and the text. I don't want the text, so let's go and see if we can find it. Now there's a very good chance that the text is in here, so I'm just going to click its eyeball on an off. Nothing changed in the car, everything changed in this text area. So it's safe to say that this is the text and as I don't want it, I'm just going to drag it onto the trash can. Now let's look inside what we've got left and just see what we've got. I'm going to look at these larger groups of objects here. I'm going to click here to see what this is. Well, this particular layer is this shadow here. This is the car, and this is the windows. Now I have a fair idea of what's happening here with my car illustration. It's time for me to think about what I want to do with it. Well, what I want to do with it is I actually want to cut these white pieces out of the pink vehicle because I want to be able to see through them. If I put another layer into this illustration, I'm just going to add a new layer here at the top and I'm going to move the vector graphics layer above it so that my new layer here is at the very bottom. I'm going to add a rectangle and fill it with some color. It's gone into the wrong layer, so I'm just going to drag it onto the layer that I made for it. This allows me to see what my illustration actually looks like against a background. What I want is this car here, but I don't want the white pieces in it. I want the white pieces to see through so that they're actually yellow, so I want to cut them out. Let's see how we would do that. The white pieces are all on here. If I click here, there's one window, here's another one. Here's the wheel surround, and here's the other wheel surround. In this group here, I've got a compound path, which is the white surround, and I've got the car itself. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to get rid of this compound path because at the moment it only surrounds the car and later I want it to be in the areas I'm going to cut out, so it's probably not going to be of any value to me at all anyway, because it doesn't have the little bits on the inside of the window. I'm going to get rid of it by just isolating it here, making sure that is the layer that I want and just getting rid of it. Now this path, I want to cut these white shapes out of it, so I'm going to move the path up into the same group as the white shapes. So four white shapes and the car itself. I'm going to click, Shift, click on every one of these so I have all five shapes selected, the four pieces of white and the pink car underneath. Now I'm going to the Pathfinder palette and I'm going to select "Minus Front" because all these white objects are in front of the pink object. It's just going to cut holes in my pink object, and that's exactly what it's done. It's cut out these white pieces out of the pink, so I have the car that I wanted. But remember the original car had a white border around it. Well, we can add that back in with a stroke. I'm going back to my compound path here and I'm going to select it. With it selected, I can add a stroke. I'm going to click here on the "Stroke", I'm going to select white as my stroke color, and then I'm just going to increase the stroke width until it's as wide as I want it to be. I've just added a three-point stroke, actually I think two is probably better. Now I have the objects that I want from the car layer. I've got the shading for the car. I've got the car and it's white edge and I've got a background color here that I don't need any longer. It was only there to help me identify what was going on, so I'm just going to drag it to the trash can. I've now isolated the pieces that I want of this Volkswagen image. It's time in the next video to go and do something about these tie-dye colors. 3. Make Art Using Other People's Art - Part 2: For the tie dye image, I want to get rid of the text at the top here, and I want to brighten up the colors. I'm going to start in the last panel, but my last panel seems to have disappeared. So I'm going to choose window and layers to bring it back. Everything in this particular illustration is on one layer and there are a lot of them. Being able to find the places that I want to find to delete them is going to be a little bit difficult. Instead of poking around the last panel here, I'm going to the selection tool and I'm going to select over this area at the very top of the image that I want to remove. I'm being careful to select over all of the text and also to capture this black box here. But I'm being careful too not to get into any of the tie dye image because I don't want to remove it. With what I think I need to remove, select it or press delete. Now if you do that and you make a mistake and wipe out your tie dye image or something like that, just do undo, press Control or Command Z to undo and start over again. But in actual fact, everything's worked pretty well for me. So I'm just going to put my last pallet aside for now. I'm going to size down my art board. So I'm going to my artboard tool, just going to drag down so that my artboard is now butted up against the top of the tie dye illustration. I'll click the Select tool again to get out of artboard mode. Now a couple of things I need to be aware of here. One, is that this is a CMYK image and my Volkswagen images are RGB and I prefer to work in RGB, so I'm going to change the color mode of this image. To do that, I'll choose file and then document color mode, and I'll select RGB color. Now that shouldn't change the image at all, it's just that we're now working with RGB. Now I'm also rather disappointed in this image in terms of its color. I would like it to be a lot brighter and more saturated, because that's what I think of when I think of tie dye. I'm going to select either all of the image. These little handles are around every single one of the shapes in this image. Now, if I'm going to check the saturation of this image, it's going to be a bit hard to do with seeing all those little handles here. So I'm going to hide them for now. I'll choose View and I'm going to hide edges. Now the edges are still selected, it's just that they are hidden so I can see the image itself. Now I'm going to increase the saturation. I'll choose Edit and then edit colors. I'm going down here to saturate. I'm going to go back to the zero mark so we can just see the original image and I'm going to turn preview on. Now I'm going to work this intensity up. As I do so, you will see that the colors in the image become more saturated. That's what I came here looking for. So when I'm happy with the saturation, I'm going to take this all the way up. I'm just going to click Okay. But remember that all of these objects are still selected, it's just that we can't see the selection handles. We need to put the selection handles back. I'll choose View and then go back to showing edges, and then just click out of the way. Now I have a better tie dye image and I have my car that's ready to go on top of my tie dye image. So I'm going to select my car. I'll choose Edit Copy. I'll go to my tie dye image and I'm going to choose Edit Paste. It appears that the car is quite a bit bigger than the tie-dye image. So I'm going to the last pallet, first of all. I've got a group here that is my car and I've got this group here that is the whole of the rest of the image. So if I fold that collection of objects up and turn it off, you can see that this is the whole of the rest of the image. Well, if I'm going to be moving my car around, it will be really good if I lock my tie dye down, because they're just way too many objects here that's going to be too easy to select something by mistake. So I've locked it down and now I can make my car visible again. Now, the only thing I can select is the car because everything else is locked. It's going to make life a little bit easier. I'm going to make sure that I have my car group selected here. I'm going to the Select tool, go to find one of the corner handles, hold shift as I drag it in proportion to size the car to better fit over the tie dye. That's a better result. Now what I want to do, is to add sunburst behind this. In the next video, we're going to add a sunburst behind the car and finish off this illustration. 4. Make Art with Other Peoples Art Part 3: To add a sunburst effect to my image, I need to make sure it's going to appear underneath the car and on top of the tie dye. I'm going to the last pallet. Down here is my tie dye and up here is my car. I'm going to need to split these two pieces of the illustration into separate layers. I'm going to click here on the "Create New Layer" button, and I'm going to move the car onto its own layer. I'm just going to drag and drop it up onto that layer. Which means now that the car is on its own layer and so too is the tie-dye background. I'm going to lock both of those down, I'm going to add another layer and it's going in the middle of these two layers, and that's where my sunburst is going. Locking down these two layers means that I can work on the sunburst and not affect anything that's on either of these two layers. I'm going to select the polygon tool, make sure my new empty unlocked layer is selected and I'm going to click once on the image. I want to create a triangle. I'm going to make sure I have a three-sided figure selected and it doesn't really matter what the radius is, I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to turn off the calf and out because it really is in the way and make sure that I have the layer that I'm working on selected. I'm going to the selection tool. I'm going to drag out a long thin triangle. This is going to become one of my sunrise. I'm going to position it approximately, so that the tip of the triangle is in the middle of the image. I'm going to color it too. I'm going to select it and I'm going to sample a color from the underlying image. I want it to be orange color for now. To make my sunburst, I need to rotate this shape around. I'm going to select Effect, Distort, and Transform, Transform. I'm going to turn preview on. I want it to rotate around this point, which of these nine little boxes is represented by the middle one on the top row. I'm making sure I've selected that one. I want 12 of the sunburst. I'm going to type 11 in here. In other words, I need one original and 11 copies. To calculate the angle, well, I'm going to have Illustrator do the work for me. I'm going to type 360 divided by 12 and hit the Tab key. Illustrator will make sure that there's enough of a rotation angle to evenly rotate this shape around and to create 12 of them in total, 11 copies, one original. I'll click "Okay". I'll also press "Control" or "Command 0" so that I can see the middle of my image. Right now, everything to do with this sunburst is associated with this one triangle. I want to expand it. I'm going to select the triangle and choose Object Expand Appearance and then I'll choose Object Ungroup. I'll continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. I'll go back to my last palette and what I should have is a layer with 12 objects on it, which is exactly what I do have. I'm going to go ahead and group those. I'll choose object group. Sometimes you might find that you have to ungroup things multiple times to get them so that they're just single objects and then group them together. If you don't do that, you can end up with the last pallet here that has a big mass, making it very difficult for you or anybody else to work out exactly what's going on. I want to crop this sunburst to the size of my art board. I'm just going to close the last palette down for a minute. I'm going to create a rectangular size of the artboard. I'm going to the Rectangle Tool, and I'm just going to click in the corner here and drag it out so it's the size of my artboard. Now I don't want it to have a fill, but I can give it an orange stroke for now. Let's go back to the last pallet. Here is my rectangle and here's my group of objects. I'm going to click and shift click so I have the rectangle and the sunburst selected. Coming in here into the document, I'm going to right-click and choose make clipping mask and that clips the sunburst to the shape of the rectangle. It's now sitting inside the illustration. Let's go and get our car back. If we're not happy with the color of the car, we can recolor it. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to open up the last pallet here and locate the compound path, that is the car, and that's it here. I'm going to select on it and here is the color that is the fill color for the car. We can sample any color from the illustration. We could, for example, make it blue. But I'm looking for more like a orange-pink. I think that's a pretty good color here. Now, I've lost my stroke, but that's very easily go back. I'm going to click on the stroke. I'm going to select this color here, double-click and go and select white. Before I finish, I want to blend the sunburst a little bit into the layers underneath and I think I've got it not very well positioned, but since it's in a clipping group, that doesn't really matter. I'm going to open up its clipping group and I'm going to select just the sunburst and now I can move it within the clipping group. I can position it wherever I want it to be, just making sure that it doesn't fall inside the image at any point. To blend the sunburst in, I'm going to select the sunburst layer and I'm going to the Appearance panel. Here is the opacity settings as well as the blend modes for this particular object. At the moment, it's blended in with the normal blend mode, but we can use another blend mode. We're going to see a fair bit of action around the blend modes like lighten and screen. Screen will always lighten things up and Color Dodge. Now I'm liking the color dodge effect. It's pretty much in your face, but then so too is this illustration. I might just decrease the opacity of this layer a little bit. I'm getting a blended sunburst effect. Let's see what we've got. This is our final illustration. It's been made using two objects that we downloaded from the web, the Volkswagen vehicle and the tie dye. We managed to extract from both of those documents just the pieces that we wanted and then we put them together. Along the way, we increased the saturation of the tie dye image and we threw our own sunburst into the mix as well. Your project for this class is to do something like this. To go and get some vector images from online and to combine two or more images from somebody else into a final illustration and give it your own twist. Now you're perfectly free to go and get these images that I've used from vector AZ. I've given you the links to download them so they're very accessible to you. You can just follow along with this video tutorial and create your own image to look like this. Or you can go and find and use images of your own choice. When you finish your image, post it in the project section so we can all enjoy your artwork. I hope you've enjoyed this course and I hope that you've learned a lot about sourcing and using other people's art in your own designs. If you did enjoy this course and if you say, "I prompt to recommend it to others, " please give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people. People just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name is 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.