Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Cacti Single Appearance Graphic Style Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. Create complex art in the appearance panel. 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. Now today's class is just a little bit difficult to explain, but I'm going to try. What we're going to do is we're going to create these cacti images inside the appearance panel. You're going to end up with everything attached to a single text character. The entire piece of art is created in the appearance panel. It's really an exercise in saying just what you could do in the appearance panel in terms of creating art there. We're going to create it then as a graphic style that we could use over and over again. If you're looking to really get a handle on the appearance panel in Illustrator and the power of it, this class is definitely for you. Now as you're watching those videos, as you're going to see a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying and learning from the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating complex art in the appearance panel, in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Create the Number and One leaf: We'll start here in Illustrator, so I'm going to click here on Create new. I'm creating a document the size of my screen, 1920 by 1080. I'm working in RGB color mode, and I'll click Create. The first thing I need is a number or a character to work with. I'm going to the Type tool. I'm going to click once in the document and just type the number 2. Now this is perilously small here. With the Type tool, I'm just going to select over that number, and I'm going to increase the point size. Now I'm working with a character that's about a 160 points. I'm not happy with this font, so I'm going to select an alternate font. I've already made a choice here, I'm going to use this one here, Big Book Heavy. But you can use any sort of heavy font, it's probably going to look better with a heavy font. The reason why I've chosen the number 2 and not the number 1, is that the number 2 is probably a little bit more indicative of what a regular character looks like in a font, because sometimes the number 1 can be really skinny. I want a good indicator as to what this font's going to look like, although we can change the font later on. Now that we've got our character, we're going to open up the Appearance panel and we're just going to be living in the Appearance panel in this class, everything is going to be done in here pretty much. Now with this character selected, we're going to click here on Characters, and what we want to do is turn off this fill. We're going to this black fill and we're going to turn it off, and so our characters right now has no fill at all. We're going back to Type and we're going to add our fill here because we need to add multiple fills to this shape, to create our characters. When we're in the Type area, we're going to click here on Add New Fill. Now that does two things, it actually adds a new fill and new stroke, but since we need both, we're just going to go with that. Now we have a fill on our types, we can see our number. The next thing we want to do is to create the first circle for our cactus, so it's actually going to be an ellipse. For that, we need another fill. I'm going to click here on New Fill. They're identical at the moment, but I'd rather be working on the one at the back, since the cactus has to be behind the number. I'm going to choose a color for this and I'm going to work with individual colors of green, so every leaf of this cactus is going to be a different green. The reason for this is that, it's going to be very easy for me later on to make all the green same green if I want to. But it's really hard to make all the greens different if we start with just one color and work with one color all the way through. What I did in developing this class was I made the cactus using the Appearance panel, and then I looked at the project at the end and said, "Well what could I have done differently, that would have made this a whole lot more flexible," and this was one of the things that really sprung to mind. Now we have a green fill, we can't see it right now, because it's behind the black fill, but it's there. Now with this fill, we don't want it to be the shape of the number two, we want it to be an ellipse. Well there's a feature that you can use in the appearance panel, so you going to target this fill, and go to Effect, Convert to Shape, Ellipse. What that does is it creates a elliptical shape or circular shape, if it's got the same values for width and height, behind in this case, the Number 2. If the fill here was above the black fill, then it would be in front of the Number 2. We don't want this to be relative because that actually relative to the size of this fonts, so we're actually going to make this absolute. I've got a fixed size that we're working with. That makes the circle really small. What we're going to do is start increasing it. I'm just pressing Shift up arrow here to get quite a bit of movement in the width and height as I go. Pressing Shift Up arrow also lets me eyeball things, I'm not just typing numbers in there, hoping that somehow I'll get to something that will be worthwhile. But this Shift Up arrow can be a little bit more considered about, how I'm sizing this. I'm thinking that that's probably going to be a pretty good shape for my first cactus leaves, so I'll click Okay. Now we have our cactus leaf. We need next the spines that go around the cactus. They're going to be made using a brush, so let's go now and make the brush. I'm just going to move in here so I can get idea as to the scale I'm working at by looking at the number 2 here, but I'm going to create my brush out here. With my brush, I'm going to drag out a horizontal line. I'm holding the Shift key as I do that so that my line is perfectly horizontal. I need it to have some white, so I'm going to increase its stroke white to about three for now. What we want to be working with when we're working with a brush, is we want to be working with black, black and not almost but not quite black. This is what I call almost but not quite black. Even though we've got six zeros here and the RGB values are all zero, and the CMY and K values are not all 100 percent. If we make them all a 100 percent, then we have blacker black. That means that when we recolor the brush, if we were to recolor the brush, then the colors would be true. They're not going to be a little bit grayer than they would otherwise be. It's really important when you're working in RGB color mode, that you make sure that you're blacks are really, really black when you're making brushes. Now I'm going to align segmental, I'm going to drag out another segment. This is going to be part of the x for the cactus spine. I need to rotate this 60 degrees, Object Transform, Rotate, rotate it 60 degrees, click on Okay. Now I need to rotate it another 60 degrees, but this time copy it. Object, Transform, Rotate 60 degrees. This time I'll click Copy, so I end up with the original and a copy. Let's take both of these together, and let's attach them, or place them over the very end of our line. I think my line is not long enough. I'm just going to Shift, drag on this to stretch it out a little bit. This will be the spines around my cactus. Now to make this into a brush, we're going to have to create a no fill, no stroke rectangle, that's going to go through the end of the brush here. Because what we want to happen when we create our pattern brush, is we want this end, to tuck all the way in here. If we don't make a no fill no stroke rectangle to mark out the end of this brush, this place is going to be attached somewhere here and there's going to be a gap. Let's go to the Rectangle tool. Let's drag out a rectangle and I'm going to try and get the rectangle to be the same either side of this brush, so that the brush is going to paint along the edge of our shape. Let me just put that down and let's go and align it to the top of the shape a little bit better. I think that's probably going to be better. We're going to select over this and make it a no fill, no stroke rectangle. Now apply this at the very back of everything. Choose Object, Arrange, Send to Back for this no fill, no stroke rectangle to control our brush, it has to be behind the brush shapes. Let's select over everything, and let's make a brush out of this. We'll go to the Brushes panel, click New, it's going to be a Pattern Brush and we'll click Okay. All these shapes are butted up against each other. You don't need the auto-generated corner tiles, so you can just select none. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, you possibly won't have this auto-generated corner tile, so don't worry because you don't need it anyway. From the colorization method, we're going to choose Tints, and that will allow us to recolor this brush should we wish to do so, I'll click Okay. Now press Control or Command zero so I can go back out so I can see what's going on here. Let's select back over our Number 2. Here in the Stroke panel, we're going to apply this brush as a stroke. Let's just go and make the stroke color black. We can't see the stroke right now because the stroke is actually around the Number 2, can you see it there? It hasn't been transformed into this elliptical shape. What we have to do next is to transform the stroke into the same ellipse as we used for the fill. We can borrow this elliptical transformation to do that. We're going to grab this ellipse here and we're going to drag it onto the new icon. That gives us two ellipses on top of each other, so we're going to take one of these and move it up and drop it on top of the stroke. That adds this transformation to the stroke, so we now have a stroke line around the outside of our shape. We're halfway to getting our spikes around our cactus. To get the spikes around the cactus, we need to select this stroke and we need to apply our new brush to it. Here are the spikes on our cactus. The spikes are a little bit on the big side, but we can solve that by clicking here on the options of selected object that's in the bottom of the Brushes panel. All we need to do is to turn Preview on and just reduce the size of the brush. You can adjust that to whatever size you like and then click, Okay. We now have spikes all the way around our cactus. It would behoove us at this stage to take this stroke and to put it underneath the fill that controls the number, and over the top of the fill that controls the green shape. We're going to start to keep some order in this Appearance panel because by the time we get all the cactus leaves and the flowers on it and the flowerpot, then we're going to have a mess of an Appearance panel. It's going to help you if you organize things very neatly.
3. Pt 2 Create the second cactus leaf: The next thing we're going to do with our cactus plant, is we're actually going to create another set of spines that are going to be inside the existing ones. For this, we're going to borrow this stroke, because we already have a stroke that's working, so let's just drag and drop it onto the new icon so that we've got two copies of it. Here's one and here's the other. Let's just focus on this one. What I'm doing is I'm actually turning the visibility of one of them off, so that when I start moving this other one around whose visibility icon is showing, I can actually see that it's moving and what I'm doing is working. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the strike panel here and I'm going to the ellipse, so I'm going to target this ellipse and click on it. Now this ellipse shape that we've created here is controlling where the spines of the cactus go. If we decrease the width but leave the height intact, look what happens. We're getting spines inside our cactus leaf. Now remember we've got the ones around the outside, we just turn them off for now, but this is a way of getting spines around the inside. You're just going to choose some value here that looks good to you and click "Okay." Then let's go back and turn on this stroke, and so we've got two sets of spines around our cactus. Now it's time to have a look at the next cactus leaf. The next cactus leaf is going to be a green filled shape that's going to be positioned up here. Let's go and get the first cactus leaf, and let's drag and drop it onto the new icon, because that gives us a spare cactus leaf here. We're going to turn on the one we're going to be working on and turn off the one that we're not, just so we can't see it. This fill we're going to change the color of, so let's choose a different grain. We need to do a few things to this particular fill. We need to shrink its size because it's going to be smaller. The higher up the cactus these leaves go, the ellipses are going to be smaller, and then we need to move it. Let's go and make it smaller to start off with, we're going to click on the "Ellipse Entry" here, and we're going to shrink its size. Having shrunk its size, we're now going to move it. With this fill selected, we're going to choose Effect, Distort, and Transform, and then Transform. We need to turn Preview on. We need to rotate this leaf because it needs to be sticking out of the top of the cactus. Let's go and rotate it. Then we need to move it, and so we're going to start adjusting its horizontal value by increasing that, and its vertical value by decreasing that. We're going to have a look and imagine that this is filled in, which it will be in just a second when we turn its visibility back on, and carefully, highlighting the amount of the cactus leaf that's sticking out there. Now I think that's looking reasonably good, but let's just go and set the fill on before we actually commit to it. You can see, we'll also need to move this fill underneath this one because at the moment we're seeing it over the top. What we want is for the layers to be positioned behind the main leaf. Let's go and get this fill. I'm just going to close up, let's disclose a triangle here, and drag it underneath the other one. We're asking ourselves at this point, is this what we want to see in terms of this leaf for our cactus? We may want to make changes to this leaf, we're going to target it here in the appearance panel, and we can make changes to it by changing the shape of the ellipse. I'm going to make mine just a little bit wider and perhaps moving it a little bit. We'll go to the Transform panel, make sure you turn Preview on, and then just adjust this transformation. This is the next leaf of our cactus and it needs the exact same spine treatment as the original leaf. Again, we'll select over the number 2 because everything is hanging off that. We're going to need another copy of this patent brush. We've got a couple of them here, one of them is controlling the inside of the shape and the other one is controlling the outside of this shape. Let's go and get this one. I'm going to drag it onto the new icon and that'll give us a spare. If we just turn those off, you'll see that they're both identical. I'm going to take this one, the one at the very bottom, and I'm going to adjust it. Now, let's have a think about what we need to do to it. This stroke and this fill might have the exact same transformations applied to them. Let's turn off the ellipse transformation on this stroke here, and let's go and get this one. I'm going to drag it onto the new icon, that gives me two copies. I'm going to take one copy and put it back up under this stroke. You can see here that now this stroke is pretty much the same size as this leaf here, it just hasn't been transformed. Well, here's the transformation that we need to apply to it. We're going to grab this and add it to the new icon. That affected this shape because we've now got two transformations on the one fill. Well, we actually want this transformation up here on this stroke. What that's done is apply the stroke around the edge of our second cactus leaf. Now you'll see that the strokes are in front of this fill shapes, so what we want to do is go and grab this one here, and we want to move it underneath the top fill, which is the fill that controls this leaf here. At this point, we can turn this other stroke back on. Now if you want, you may want to add a few more spines to this back leaf. This is the back leaf here, this is the brush that's controlling it. Let's go to the options of selected object here, turn Preview on, and we can actually reduce the brush here on just this particular leaf, so that's what I'm going to do, click "Okay." Now we need another set of spines for the middle of this leaf here. Well, we've got a set of spines that's pretty much where we want it to be; it's just not quite the right shape. Let's go and grab this stroke and let's drag it onto the new icon, so we've now got two strokes. This one we're just going to change the shape of the ellipse on. I didn't get rid of these ellipses earlier, the ones that we're not using. I'm just going to do that, because that's going to help neaten this up a little bit. This is the one we want to change, the shape of the ellipse on. Let's go to the ellipse and let's reduce the width. Here we can see the second set of lines on our cactus leaf. I'll click "Okay."
4. Pt 3 Add the remaining leaves: Now we're ready to create our cactus leaf that goes up here. So it's going to come off this leaf that we've been working on. Let's just close down all these stroke and fill so we can be clear about what we've got. This fill is at the top, so it controls this cactus leaf here. This one is at the bottom, it controls this leaf here. If we want to put another leaf up here, then we're going to need one underneath this one. Let's go and borrow this one first of all. We'll drag it onto the new icon, which gives us two identical ones on top of each other. This is going to be the one at the very back, so I want to change its color. Now I want to change its shape and its position. It will help me to turn this leaf off first of all. I'm just going to turn its visibility off. This is the one we're going to be working on. Let's go to the ellipse and let's shrink this one. That's its new size now we need its new position. I'll go to transform, turn preview on. Now I need to rotate this in the opposite direction. Let's move it. It's going to go in a positive horizontal direction. If we get to the end of 100 and can't take it any further, all we do is click in this box here and press "Shift +Up arrow" and we can take it wherever we want it to be. With vertical we want to go up. Now I think the leaf is possibly just a little bit large, but that's fine. If it's in position, I can come back and adjust the ellipse shape. I'm going to make it a bit narrower and perhaps just a little bit less in size. You can finesse it at this point. I'm going to turn the missing fill back on so we can see how this leaf is going to be positioned here. We've got the leaf in position all we need now is the spines around it. Now these are the spines here that belong to the leaf up here. We're going to borrow the spines for the outside. Let's just go and grab that, drag it onto the new icon. We've now got two sets. Make sure that these are the two sets. By turning them off, we know exactly what we're working with then. We're going to grab this one and we're going to adjust its shape to this shape up here. The way we're going to do it is use the ellipse from this fill down here. Let's actually pull this stroke just above the fill because that's going to make it a little bit easier to see where everything is. The ellipse on this fill here, on this green one, we need to apply to the set of lines that we just borrowed. Let's drag this ellipse onto the new icon, turn this ellipse off and then drag this ellipse up here, because that's the one we're going to be using. Then we need the same transformation. I'm going to turn the transformation off on this one. I'm going to go to this transformation, I'm going to make a duplicate of it and I'm going to take it and put it on this stroke. Now we've got the stroke in the exact right place and we've got an ellipse and a transform that we don't need, they're turned off. Before we leave here, let's just delete them because they're just going to get in the way. Now we've got this set of lines and we know that if we've got this set of lines, they're going to make this inside set really easily. We're going to grab these set of lines, which is this thing here and we're going to make a duplicate of it. One of the set, it doesn't matter which one and we're going to change the shape of our ellipse by just narrowing it. That's all we need to do. There's a second set of lines around this shade. I'll click "OK." Again, we may want to size down the brush lines here. We're going to select this pattern brush here and go to options of selected object and we'll just decrease that maybe a little bit. Let's take it down to about 27. If we did that to this one, we're going to do exactly the same thing to this one. I'm just going to type 27 percent here then click "OK." The spines on this leaf are all identical. We've got one set of spines missing here and that's because we turned them off, so we wouldn't be confused by them, so we'll turn them back on. The next thing we need to do is to go and put one leaf over here. The process for doing that is really similar. We've been doing it all along. What I'm going to do is borrow this one because it's probably closer in size to what I want. I'm just going to go ahead and do that through to the end this part of the class and then in the next video we're going to put some flowers on our cactus. This is the one I want to make a duplicate of, drag it onto the new icon, and I'm going to change its color so I could see see it really clearly. I'm a bit short on green colors right now so let's go and get something for it. If I want to I can change its size a little bit. Let's just get rid of this brush because that's a bit embarrassing having it sitting there. I'm just going to delete it because I don't need it any longer. This is the stroke I need. Now, it actually belongs with this fill so I'm just going to reverse this fill so it's a little bit easier to see what's going on. I'm going to bring this stroke, and make a duplicate of it and I'm going to bring it down here. This stroke here is going to be moved over to here. I need to open up both the stroke and the fill because I need to replace the current ellipse and the transformation. This is the ellipse shape that I want to use. I'll turn the current one off and I'm going to drag this one up here. This is the transform I want to use, so I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I don't want to use this transform anymore, so I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to drag one of these transforms up onto this stroke. The transform needs to be underneath the ellipse. You're transforming to make the ellipse first and then transform, the movement of the ellipse needs to be underneath it. You'll see that if you get these in the wrong order, they don't look very good at all. Just be aware of that. Now I've got an ellipse and a transformation that I don't need. They've been turned off, they're not needed, so we're just going to get rid of them. Now this stroke I need to copy off, so it's up here. I need a duplicate of that. I'm going to drag it onto the new icon. These are the two copies, this one and this one. One of these I need to shrink. I'm going to turn this on and all I need to do is to make the ellipse narrower. Adjust its width and that brings in this line here. Click "OK" and turn this strike back on. This is all the leaves that we need for our cactus.
5. Pt 4 Add the flowers: At this point, if you haven't already done so, I really strongly suggest that you save your project because you don't want to lose it with all the work that you've put into it. The next thing we're going to do is add the flower to our cactus. Let me actually go up the top here, and I'm going to add another field. I'm just going to click on this field in. This is field that controls the number because it's at the very top. I'm going to drag it onto the new icon. We now have two numbers. This one's going to be red because it's going to be a cactus flower. I'm just going to add a red color to it. Again, if you're, ultimately want the flexibility to make your cactus flowers different colors, then you're going to want one of these to be a slightly different red just so that you can separate them out later on. It's also very easy to make them all the identical color, but it's easy to create them as separate colors first. At the moment is fill is the shape and the number two, we want a flower shape. While we only get three shapes that we can use, we can use a circle or an ellipse around a rectangle or a rectangle. Let's go to the ellipse. We want it to be an absolute size. I want this to be about 70 pixels by 70 pixels. About this amount of roundness will be good. I'll click, "Okay". Now I want this to look a little bit more like a flower. There's a tall in Illustrator that's going to allow us to make a flower shape out of this circle with this field selected. I'm going to choose effect, distort and transform, and then zig-zag. I'll turn preview on. I want it to have smooth corners, so I'm going to select smooth. Now, I can just adjust the size because the top part of this is going to be my cactus flower. I just need to work out what sort of about half of this shape, It's going to look like. It's, I want the number of bumps and the amount of size and dancing here that I want before I leave this dialogue. I'm pretty happy with that. I'll click, "Okay". For our cactus flower, we now have to move it. Let's go again to this field. We're going to choose, "Effect, distort and transform" and transform. Now, we're going to move it. I'll click Preview. We're going to just adjust the vertical. Let's run it back up there. That's about where I want my cactus flower to be and I might move it over a few pixels maybe, and maybe down a little bit. Click, "Okay." Now, the only thing that's wrong with this cactus flower potentially is that might look better if it was behind the cactus leaf. Well, this is the cactus leaf that it belongs to. We're just going to grab this fill here and drag it underneath the cactus leaf. There is our cactus flower in position. Now, that we've created one cactus flower, it's really easy to create the rest. The first thing we're going do is drag and drop this onto the new icon. Then, we're going to place that just underneath the cactus leaf that it's actually going to belong to, which is this one here. Let's go and get its transformation. Turn preview on, and let's just start moving. It doesn't really matter where we put it. We just need to be able to say it well, there it is over there. Let's go and start taking. We're going to apply it to this flower here. Again, we can go smaller by just clicking in here and shift up or shift down arrow to make the number bigger than 100. This one needs to be pulled across. Then, we need to just finesse it. Now, for this one, I think it's probably a little bit big. I can reduce its size here by making it 90 percent of its original size. That just shrink that down a little bit, and having shrunken down a little bit, I might want to just adjusts its positioning and little bit. I can also rotate it by increasing the angle. That might allow me to get the flowers lined up really nicely here. I think that's a better option here. I'll click, "Okay." Now we'll just go ahead and make the other flower. I'm just going to grab one here, make a duplicate of it, move it behind their life. It's going to be ultimately attached to it. Go to its transformation, turn preview on, start moving it so I can actually say where it is and then move it into position. Then, we'll do the final one. For that one, I might borrow this one since it's closer. Drag it behind the leaf that it's going to belong terms is going to close up that disclosure triangle. Let's move it behind that life. Let's go and get its transformation. Turn preview on, stop moving it so we can see it. Click, "Okay." Now we've got flowers on all our cacti. As I suggested earlier, it's going to work better for us if every one of these flowers is a different color. I'm just going to do that right now, and just change the colors. Because we can make them the same color later on, but it's going to be easy if they start off being different colors. It also gets us a bit of a chance that looking at the colors that might work for the flowers. In the next video, we're going to finish off with the cactus spots.
6. Pt 5 Add the pot and recolor the artwork: Now we're ready to add the cactus pots in. We're going to go back up to the top here. We're going to focus on the fill here that belongs to the number 2. Here it is, we're going to make a duplicate of it. We've got two copies of the number 2 here, and we're going to make one of them a brown color. I'm a bit short on brown's here. Let's just make it an orange for now. This number 2 is going to become the pot for our cactus. With it selected here, we're going to choose Effect, Convert to Shape, and we're going to choose a rounded rectangle. We're going to make it an absolute size, and so we're going to start increasing the width so it can be the top of the pot and decrease the height. We can also adjust the corner radius so I don't want it to be nearly quite as heavy as that. About three pixels will be fine. I think I've just may add an extra pixel or two to the height and click "Okay". Now, this needs to be moved down as well. We're going to select it and choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform, turn preview on, and move it down to where it can actually be a pot that's going to hold the cactus. I think that here is pretty good. I'll click "Okay". Now we need the rest of the pot. I'm going to grab this fill. I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'm going to select a different color for it. We want it to be at a slightly larger shapes. Let go to the rounded rectangle we've turned preview on and we're going to increase its height. We're going to decrease its width a little bit. Click ''Okay'', and then we're going to move it. We're going to adjust its transformation, turn preview on, and we just need to move it down a little bit. Now, this tied, if you think it's too big, you can go back to the rounded rectangle. You might want to increase the corner radius, and I certainly do want to decrease the height. I think it's too big. Which means I'm going to have to adjust its placement a little bit as well. Now the base of the pot is on top of the rim of the pot. We're just going to reverse that by putting the base behind the rim so that the rim sits over the top of the pot. We're just going to leave these two shapes where they are because they have to be in front of all the cactus pieces. What we're going to do before we finish up is we're going to add a drop shadow to this entire shape. I'm going to click on Type up here and we're going to choose Effect, Stylize, and then Drop Shadow. We'll turn preview on. This is adding a slight drop shadow around the shape. Now you can adjust the drop shadow to whatever suits you. I'm going to decrease the opacity a little bit and just increase the blur and click ''Okay''. Now you can also lift the number off the cactus a little bit by locating the fill that belongs to the number which is this one here. We're going to apply a drop shadow to it. With just this fill selected, last time we selected type here, and that affected the whole shape. So the drop shadow is around the entire shape. What we're going to do here is select just the number 2. We're going to apply a drop shadow to it, Effect, Stylize, and then Drop Shadow. Turn preview on. You can see that that's starting to lift that number above everything else and you can just adjust that to whatever you like. You're going to need a dark color and you're going to need multiply to be the blend mode. So click ''Okay''. At this point we have our cactus and we'll want to go ahead and save this document. But we'll also probably want to do some color work on there. What I'm going to do first of all is I'm going to save this as a graphic style so I could use it later on. I'm going to the Graphic Styles panel. I'm just going to click here on New Graphic Style. That saves this look, this multicolored appearance for our cactus as a graphic style. Now I'm going to start working on this and adjusting the colors to suit me. What I want is some differentiation between the cactus leaves, but I'm pretty much going to use the same color flower for all of them. Let's go and change the colors. With our shapes selected, I'm going to come up here to re-color artwork. This is where we can start working on recoloring the artwork. We can identify leaves of the cactus and change the leaf color. Now we can do it in this dialogue here, or we can go into the edit area. Now the other thing that we can do in here right now is that we could make each of these flowers the same color. The way we're going to do is we're going to grab this pink color. I actually want all my flowers to be sort color. I'm going to grab this pink color and drag it onto the red. I'm going to drag this red color and drag it over here. I'm going to drag this color and over here. What we're ending up with right now is tints of this red. I'm going to click here and I'm going to select ''Exact''. That's going to recolor all of these to this exact color here. You can say that all the flowers are now the exact same color. If we wanted all the cactus leaves to be the same color, we could do the same thing. We could drag them up onto the color that we do want to use or near enough to it. Then we could set this to exact, or we could set it to scale tints, and then we would get varying colors of that original color. You can see that we're getting tints of that color. But I don't want that. I would like to individually color my leaves. What I'm going to do is just grab those colors and put them back where they came from. Now let's go to edit, which is where I can adjust the colors of these leaves. I'm just going to grab a leaf color, work out which leaf is which, and start re-coloring them. I'm literary pretty happy with that. I just think this one could use a bit of brightening perhaps. At any point you can go back to the assign area and just adjust them here so I can grab this one here. I can just go and get a color for it from the color picker. I'm going to set my flowers to all the exact color. I'm going to do a little bit of work here on the cactus pot. I want this to be a brown color. I think this red is not quite red enough. Click ''Okay''. Now I've entirely recolored my cactus and what I want to do is select over this and make it a different graphic style. There's my new graphic style. The beauty of graphic styles is with this shape selected, I can just go and reapply the original one if I want, or I can apply the new one that's got my new colors in it. Now let's have a look and say how we would use this graphic style. I'm going to click away from this shape and I'm going to go to the Type tool. I'm going to click and I'm going to type the number 4. With the number 4 selected, I'm going to click here on my graphic style and the entire cactus image has now been applied to this number 4 as an appearance. This is all going to appear in the Appearance panel for this shape. Here is the entire graphic style that we created is now been applied to this particular shape. Now the only thing that's not being applied in that appearance is the actual font. If I go over here and I change the font that I'm using. Instead of Big Book Heavy, I'm going to choose a different font. Let's just choose this one I'll hit ''Display''. What I can do is if I want to update this number with this font, is I'm going to select over this number here. What I'll use is the Eyedropper tool, and I'm just going to click on this shape here. That samples the entire look and feel plus the font. The font-style is actually applied when we use the eyedropper. It's not saved in a graphic style. Now, these graphic styles can be saved as individual files on disk. You could make a graphic style like this and you can give it away to your blog readers or you could even sell it. If you make complex graphic styles like this, this is really impressive stuff to be able to give to your blog readers as a gift. I know that this has been a fairly specialists class and you may not want to create numbers that have a cactus on them. But I hope that this has really helped you get an idea as to what things you can do in the Appearance panel. It's just a case of thinking about what you're doing and the potential for actually achieving some really interesting effects using that Appearance panel. I hope that you've enjoyed this class. I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Your project of course, is going to be to create your own cactus graphic style using the Appearance panel and just build up all of the shapes and all of these elements in the Appearance panel and really get a feel for how you're going to use it. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others, please. If you did enjoy the class, if you did learn things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class to others. Secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. 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™
