Minimalist Landmarks in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Our landmarks are a really important part of our lives. They were here before us and they'll be here long after we had gone. They tell us about who we are through our history and our culture. They serve as meeting places and they help us find our way around when we are lost. Love them or hate them, they have become an unavoidable part of any place. In my design work, I like to work with landmarks, stripping them down to their iconic forms and that's what we'll be doing in this class. Let's get started. We'll take your favourite landmark or one that represents the place you live and strip it down so that you can apply it to anything you are designing. 2. Your Project: Your project is to illustrate a landmark of your choosing. This could be a big monument, it could be an old building that's falling apart or could even be your favourite pizza joint. What's important is that it's recognisable and it means something to you. We are going to scout our location, decide what story we want to tell, sketch out some concepts, refine them and finally create a finished piece. 3. Minimalism: A quick note on minimalism. This is a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In the context of the class, we're not talking about using Helvetica, only black and white or circles, squares, and triangles or any of that stuff. Simply, we're talking about focusing on what's essential, being critical in terms of what you leave in and what you leave out. Take the Eiffel Tower, for example, it's fundamentally a triangle with curved edges. Now, this is really a great foundation to start from. 4. Scouting Your Location: When scouting your location, ideally, you want to go there in person. But if that's not possible, you can definitely do online as well. Typically when scouting, I'm walking around, I'm looking for interesting angles, interesting details. I'm taking pictures, I'm taking notes. I'm sketching. Trying to come up with a bunch of ideas, some of which won't make it into the final piece. But that's the whole point. I don't work with all of this reference in front of me. I like to gather it, then, let it go. An impression of what I think a place is rather than the accurate to the specific detail. Currently, I live in Toronto. I really love living here, but I have to be honest, I don't think it's got the best landmarks. We've got the CN Tower, which everyone loves, but there's not much else. The Museum of Contemporary art where my studio is, is a really interesting building. One that maybe takes a little while to appreciate but nonetheless worthy of its own image. What I've decided to do for this class is; create a poster for the museum as if it were something being sold in the gift shop. Let's head downstairs. The Museum of Contemporary art used to be a sheet metal factory. The first five floors are now the museum. One thing when you're thinking about your landmarks is to think about the moment that really resonates with you, the vibe that really resonates with you. What mood you want to generate. So it's not just this building, it's this building at sunrise. When the sun comes up early in the morning, you get this golden brown, pink glow. You'll have trains passing through every five minutes. You also have people jogging and cycling. So I definitely want to find a way to incorporate that as a tiny feature. The real star of the show is going to be the building itself. The real star of the show is going to be the building itself. One of the things about doing a minimalist landmark illustration is having a clear focal point. Now, I'm struggling a little bit with some of the features in this building. Round here on the back, you've got this cool glass facade. On the front. It's more of a stone and brick. So I'm not quite sure what angle I want to cover just yet. There's also a smokestack or a chimney going right through the middle of the building that you can see from a certain angle. So I definitely want to make sure I capture that. Part of what I'm going to do now is walk around the building get feel for different angles. See if I want to do it head-on, do I want to do the front, the back, or do a corner of the building and get two facades. 5. Art Direction: At this stage, we're going to start making some decisions about our artwork. What do you imagine the use of this piece being, is it going to be printed as poster? As a billboard? Is it going to be animated? Is it going to exist on the web? Is it going into an app? Things like that. In my case, I'm working on this as if it's going to be poster sold in the museum gift shop. I'm thinking about visitors to the museum, who might want to pick something up on the way out. What size might be convenient? What colors match the overall aesthetic of the museum itself? Those things. Is there something that's technically going to be a nightmare to do? I think about brick buildings, for example, am I going to want to draw every brick by hand? Probably not. The other thing I think about is what aspect ratio lends itself to the image. For example, in this case, I'm drawing a very tall building, I might want to have a fairly tall poster and quite narrow. Otherwise, I may need to figure out what to do with all the empty space on the sides. Once you have some of these decisions down, you can start to explore them in your sketches. If you stuck between two things, try them both out. This first one with the five roses I really wanted to focus on the text itself. The sign is such an iconic neon sign as you drive or take the train or fly into the city, you're confronted with the sign. I really wanted the text of the sign to be the focal point. I've downplayed the building. I've put these really basic clouds in there, just to give a sense of background and bring this into the foreground. The name of the company was originally in French on top and then an English underneath and the English got taken out. Now you just have this empty scaffolding. I wanted to make sure that that was part of the story that I was telling in this print. Now with the Olympic stadium, that was more of a quirky angular Saul Bass kind of thing. I wanted to focus on imperfections. All of these lines don't really line up. They're all a bit “wrong” but the structure is so straight and so rigid, that creates this framework for it to play inside. 6. Sketching: I'm more of a paper and pen person myself or even pencil. But if you're into sketching on a tablet, then you should definitely do that, save paper, etc. Small notebooks for if you're out in the field, slightly larger notebook when I'm sat here in the studio. Loose paper as well is quite nice because you don't have to worry about grabbing everything. You can just take the one sketch that you need. If I need to go slightly bigger than that, over here I've got this drawing board thing that takes A2, which unfortunately it's quite hard to get in North America and so I use 11 by 17 paper. One size up from that is this 18 by 24 newsprint pad. Then one size up from that is this even larger pad. These two are really great for getting out of your head and into your body drawing with your whole arm rather than just your wrist. I'm going to speed up my sketching because I'm not actually that fast when it comes to drawing. Essentially, what you can see here is I'm making thumbnail sketches about the size of what I imagine the poster to be. Now, because I know that I like to have a little strip of information down at the bottom, it makes things look a bit more official. I'm just creating that little strip down at the bottom. What I'm doing now is blocking in the general shape of the angle of two sides of the building. The top floor has this really interesting detail. I'm trying to make sure I capture that. There's the chimney stack that I was talking about or the smokestack I was talking about when scouting, trying to make sure I get that in. Then just very quickly blocking in any windows. Now I don't want these to be too distracting, but I do want to get a sense of it not just being a plain wall with no windows because that would be weird and prison like. I'm just filling in the basics again, not really looking at my reference image now, so I'm not counting how many windows there actually would be. The other thing I remember from walking around is that the building gets shade on one side. Then I'm just roughing in where I think the moon might be. If this either really early in the morning or getting towards sunset, you might see both the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time. The sun would be facing the building, providing it with light and the moon would be in the background. Then I'm just going in with some of it with my markers, doing a bit of shading, trying to get that gradient in the sky look. Then here I'm defining the dark and light facades of the building, as well as the windows. Sometimes I do like to get really into the markers, you don't have to be this painterly with your sketches. They can just be rough and you will see my last one I just do in Sharpie and pay no attention to rendering. Again, we're setting up the poster. I'm trying different things with the layout. I know I want to have either some text that explains what the building is. A logo, maybe my logo. I have an embosser, so I usually just emboss the logo in. Then here what I'm doing slightly differently is first of all I'm tilting the sides of the building so that it looks like it's in perspective, you're looking up. Secondly, I've included there's a skylight right at the top of the building that I've included. Again, I'm going with the smokestack coming out of the building in the middle and I'm making sure that I map out the perspective. This is two-point perspective, so as each side of the building recedes, it gets smaller in the appropriate direction. This time I decided I didn't want to have the moon. I was just going to have a couple of light clouds in the background, so that's what you see me drawing in right now. Again, I come to the markers to try and add some definition to the shapes. I use shading just to help myself think about how the foreground and background are going to be separated or stand out or even blend into each other. Here you can see in both of these thumbnails I'm going for a darker look, something that may not be dark in terms of value but what that is telling me is that I want these posters to be really saturated with colour. Here I'm trying to do the ground floor of the building, the back entrance with those glass panels. What I'm focusing on now is trying to capture the museum sign itself on the back facade. You see with the text this time I've centred everything, the text and the logo—instead of putting them to the left and right. Just trying different layouts, now rendering the glass in and creating again, a sense of shading between the front of the building and the sides of the building. This time because the focus is the ground, I'm actually going to render the ground in really dark. I think that all of these are viable ideas. Then for one last one, I'm going to go really quick and dirty and just focus on the smokestacks. Have them be really the hero of the poster and almost remove the building altogether, and I think this is the most minimalist approach to all of them. As you can see, I have sketched that out completely in Sharpie (marker). The moon is still in the background. You've still got the information at the bottom. But now instead of having a building with a chimney sticking out, you just get the top edge of the building, and then the chimney becomes the main focus. 7. Getting Started in Illustrator: Here's a picture I took, just walking around the building of the front. It's pretty distorted but you can see those first two levels are a different facade to everything else and you'll see the top level right around here, is also a different facade and you see that smokestack right up top. I personally tend to take most of my [own] pictures as reference. I get a few off the internet, throw them in a folder called refs, put that folder in my project folder so I can always find it. Here's a picture I took from the rear of the museum. What I really like about this view are these glassy panels. Here's a picture I took from the MOCA Instagram account. It has a more straight-on view of the museum, and here's a picture I took out of the window at sunset one day, capturing that pink wash that I'm really interested in. This gradient where you've got blue sky up top, it goes almost white, comes into the pink tones and starts to blue out again just above the horizon. This is here is a colour reference as much as anything. Here's another picture I took of the pillars. I turned this into black and white. What I'm going to do really quickly is create a new layer and fill it with a pale sunsety colour and just use that as a colour layer. Maybe turn the opacity down to about 50%. This is kind of the feel that I want for the final image. If we have a foreground to transparent gradient on here, and I should do this on a new layer. I add in this pink and maybe we set that to overlay. This just gives me a feeling of the eeriness that I would like to have in my image. Moving on, this is something a friend of mine posted as an Instagram story. I think she got it off Reddit. Then finally, here's another picture with a very similar palette. These are here to guide, my thinking around colour. I've gone ahead and done a quick and dirty sketch on how I see this piece going. The very first thing I did was to drop in some margins, which I think will show up. Now, since I've done this, I've had a change of heart. In the sketches, you saw that it was bleeding off the top and both sides and only the bottom was cut off. What I've actually done here, and you'll see this when I put the background layer in, is create a margin around all sides, but a slightly thicker margin around the bottom. I am actually flip-flopping on this. I think I'll go back to having it just bleed off all the edges except this, which means I do need to include bleed settings in my document, which is something I don't currently have. The next thing I did was drop that text in. Museum of Contemporary Art. Again, I'm realizing that perhaps I want to have this to the left and then have the embossed logo to the right. More like in the sketch. I made a quick palette that just has the colours that I picked out from the building. One thing that I notice immediately when I look at this, I notice that the palette isn't very harmonious and I do want something that feels like it's colour cast, like it's all being affected by that orange or pink sunlight. That's something I'll look to keep working on as I go along. Then I dropped in some rough shapes. You have the building again at an angle. One side is in the sun it's a little bit lighter than this side that's in the shade and you see the moon behind it. All of this, now that I look at my sketches, is backwards. I did this without looking at the sketches. This side should be that side and vice versa. Essentially, if I look all of these layers, and I just grab everything on this layer and flip it, reflect vertical and then I reposition it so that this is where it needs to be. That's essentially what I'm going for. I'm not going to work directly on this. I'm going to start a whole new file. But this is what we're looking at. I'm creating a new file in Illustrator. One thing I like to do is, right off the bat, if I know I'm making a print file, I just hit print and hit one of the presets. That's just to make sure it clears all the different settings I may not think about. That said, I do not actually want a letter print. I'm going to put this in inches and I think I'm going to go for a 24 by 36. I'm going to start there, if it really isn't working, I can always change it. But for now, we're going to go 24 by 36. I tend to name things in a way that I could search for them later on. If I was trying to find this print and I forgot what the landmark was, but I knew it was a landmark and I knew I did it for Skillshare, then this would show up in search. All of these things are taken care of just by hitting Letter, so I know it's definitely going to be in CMYK, it's definitely going to be 300 pixels per inch. We can create that now. Call this background, create a new layer, lock this guy for now, and then immediately, I want to again to my shapes. We'll go for a rectangle and I want the rectangle, the first one, to fall around here. Something like that. I have this tendency to work with... I'll copy my palette as well actually from the old one, even though I did say I was going to change it. Grab you, copy that, come in here and create a new one above text, call it palette. You may be asking why I don't just stop from that document. I don't know, it's kind of nice to have clean docs sometimes. Okay, we have this and already I know that I want that to be more over here [in the reds]. Even though now it's not standing out enough from the background and I will not spend too much time on this. I'll come back and I'll do a whole colour palette thing a little bit later. I like round numbers, so probably make this 14 inches and 24 inches, and then I'll bottom-align. Now, this is going to align without the bleed. So I've always got to make sure I'm coming in and bleeding things off the edges that want to be off the edges, which will ruin some of the maths for sure but, I just don't really care about that. Very quickly, bring this down. I'm holding, even though you can't tell but I was holding shift and down. I don't know why that wasn't showing. But shift and down just nudges a point by 10 instead of by one. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take this shape copy and paste it in front. I'm just going to flip it very casually this way. I'm noticing that I'm going to have a little bit more room. This could be nine inches wide, it could be 10 inches wide or it could be down to eight. If I make it eight and then I make sure, first of all, we'll darken it and saturate it in a bit like that, we are going to make sure that it's stuck to this. What I was saying before is, I'm already noticing there's quite a bit of room on this side, which means one of two things. It means one, I can make this, oops got the height wrong. I was doing height instead of length. I can make this 16, which is why I wanted to keep this eight because now this is double that. That will give me completely filling up, because it's a 24-inch poster. I may not want to do this, I may want to have some space on the sides, but for now...I definitely don't want to bleed off both edges. That's crazy talk. Let's bring this back down to 15 inches. That gives me one inch to play with on this side and I'll bleed it off the right side. That makes sense. I'm want to takes these same ideas and transpose them into the smokestack, remembering that the top floor is a different material to everything below, which is also a different material to the chimney. I'm going to grossly simplify that. How we do that very quickly is again, copy paste in front and I'm just going to move this down to about here. I think that's where I want it. Grab the bottom edges of all this, shift that so that they also clip, and I'm going to group these shapes so I don't lose track of them. I'll grab these two, click in... this is darker. These are both darker. So for now what I'm going to do is make them both like a dark brownish-red colour and come out of the group and set the opacity of everything to 10 or 20 per cent. 20 per cent, maybe "overlay"—overlay won't work, maybe "multiply"? That actually feels too dark. So I'm going to leave this up for now. We'll come back to it. Right? Again, we have two things. We have a chimney that's going like that. Then we have a smaller one that's going in like this. So back to boxes. Actually going to just have this as "facade". Make an overlay below it. I'll call this the "Smoke Stack 1", and this will be the smaller of the two. We'll make a new box about that. Again, bring this to eight, bring this to six, just like the roundness of the numbers. Speaking around numbers, I might set the X and Y points to 14 inches and 12 inches. That looks about right. This will be more or less the same colour as that. Again, we're going to grab a point about here, and we're going to pull this out, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. That's what creates the angles here. If I zoom out, you have a smokestack. It should be lower. So we'll move this down. To like twelve, should be more like that. That's pretty good. Then we'll grab this shape, we'll grab this layer actually. And duplicate the whole thing, We'kk call it "Smoke Stack 2", and we'll bring that up. First of all, make it this colour so it's not confusing. Bring it up and bring it to the left. It sits, and again, I'm holding "Shift" and the left arrow when I do that. For some reason, that's not showing up here... it sits in this position, but it's not as wide. It's taller and thinner. Again, I should be following my own advice. Let's say we make this seven and we'll make it a lot taller 7 by 10, it sits in here like that. These [smokestacks] have dark sides in light sides the same way that these [building walls] do. So what I could do is use three shades. Which means that when I do this with a copy of this shape, paste it. We want everything from here and then we wanted to go straight down. How we do that is by deleting this point, grabbing this point and dragging it until it aligns. But for some reason, I do not have snapping. That's fine. I'll eyeball it for now. Then this shape you can see it's not perfectly straight. One thing I could do is bring in my rulers and then just drag a guide so it snaps to that. This guide should have snapped to that, but for some reason, it's not snapping, Did I turn off snapping?! Anyway, we've got it now. Then make that [back wall], that colour [shade colour]. So now this doesn't really have any definition, but we're going to do the exact same process on "Smoke Stack 2. " Get rid of this point, What did I just do? never mind. I forgot to duplicate. Duplicate, this point is going to disappear, and this point is going to try and line up. Again, if I want that perfectly straight, I need to snap this guide. Then I can snap this to the guide. We're going to create a third shade that is a little bit darker, and a tiny bit more saturated. That's how you get all of these things to be in the same family. If we turn off the guides... That looks decent, but I was wrong about how high this thing juts out. So we're going to grab this and bring it down to about there. I think that works, except it feels still like it's too high, but I'm going to leave that for now. We have the beginnings of this kind of sunrisey building. I'm going to add in the skylight over here. This is the one thing that is going to be a radically different color from everything else. Start again with a rectangle. This should be enough on its own layer, of course, or it could be on the facade layer. Let's leave it on here. So I'll start with a rectangle, and I like to come in and round my numbers out. So it could be three by two could be three by one and a half. Now let's try three by two and see if that's outrageous. I want it to sit in the middle of this thing more or less even though it's in perspective, Whoa—I aligned it to the wrong thing. That's what's happening. This is not one shape, it's all of this. So I'm going to eyeball it—because it isn't perspective. It's not going to be perfectly flush or perfectly centred because the centre is going to be over here rather than in the dead centre. Again, I'm going to shear this so that it follows more or less the line of this building. Then I'm going to bring this down so that we get a little bit of perspective going on. The skyline actually the way I sketched it, pops out a tiny bit. So it also goes like that. So now we're going to bring this down so that it's just sticking out. Zoom out again. That's more or less what I want. I like to lean into the imperfection when it comes to angles. I think that gives things a bit more personality. It looks like they're drawn rather than built mechanically. I'm going to finish the skylight with this piece. You don't need that [fourth point]. Because it's just a triangle. So we have this thing sticking out. This like I said, is going to follow more closely the blue end of the spectrum. Which means it's going to be a little bit closer to that and I think it should be darker and puh—plurlur...purpler, more purple. How about we try this colour for now? This palette, like I said, I'm not loving it. So I'm actually going to come in and try and find, I think it should be somewhere in that family. Lot more faded than that. I'm going to spend too much time on this if I focus on it now. So we'll commit to this for now. I think that that is. starting to say something? I just realized the skyline doesn't come out like this. It actually recedes behind the building and then the building throws shade onto the skyline. So what I'll do is I will still keep this, but I will make it this colour. Then I'll send it all the way to the back of the facade. Now it's part of the building. It's going in, and that means that this would be completely straight. So again, I have made some mistakes on this. I'm going to have to rectify, but for now, we have something that's. kind of following this line in perspective and then this would be following that line which means that this would then be here and I've made another mistake, which is that it should actually go more like this. So that is looking more like what I would expect. Then like I said, it's going to be inset. So we're actually going to see a little ledge a bit of a lip here from the building, and you will see some shading, show up over here. But for now, we have our basics. If I hop back into this, you'll see I also wanted to have a moon. Even though the sun won't be there I wanted to have it represented. Then, of course, there's this text that says “Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada” I'm going to copy the text. There's going to be one small change, which I will bring up in a second. This of course is now nowhere near the right place anymore. We'll bottom-align it, stretch it out so that it's the correct size and on here as well. So we've got that and we paste the text in here, and what we'll do is top-left it like this. Then I'll come in here and actually dial in. I think I want to be, not width and height, but X and Y. I think I want it to be at two inches, and let's say 34 inches. There's our text. This technically, the museum is the first five floors and this is now the top bit. I'm actually going to change this to say, Tower Automotive Building. Which is the name of the building the museum is in. Now we've got that. I am going to get rid of it again because we don't need it. It's just a reminder to do it. If the moon is going to be behind everything on this facade layer int the back and again I would dial this in. Let's make it 10 by 10, less round number and we'll send it to the back, make it this color. Should be a bit brighter than that and I think it should also be a tiny bit golden. Maybe that means taking it towards the reds, I don't know. A bit tiny bit and of course, it's going to be quite transparent, say 30%. And it's there, if we need it, it's here. I'm actually going to make its own layer so I can do stuff to it later on. “Moon”, paste it here and Control F to paste in place. I'm wondering if I want clouds at all. We'll make another layer called “clouds”. These do not definitely have to stay in. But here's how I make clouds quick and dirty. Bunch of rectangles like this, grab all of them, “A” for the direct selection arrow, and then you just drag your points to make them rounded rectangles, Let's group this, and there's your cloud. What I'm doing right now, to make these all a little bit bigger. Make sure that they stay rounded. Drop it down below the facade, the smokestacks rather, so all of this should be below the smokestacks right above the background. Again, I do not know for sure that I want clouds, but if I do want them, they're there. I'm going to turn this layer off, for now, turn the moon layer off for now, because both of them are a bit distracting. I think this would be a good time to block in the windows over here, the weird geometry over here, the shading, and maybe some of that detailing that you see across the tops. First I'm going to go with the windows. I'm just going to draw again, surprise, another rectangle. I'm going to say it wants to come hereish and one floor is going to be about this. We can extend that all the way to the end. I'm going to try and follow these lines, so it'd be like that. Again, I'm trying to make them converge a little bit, in perspective. I think this is still going down, it's just going down a little bit less. Maybe like that. That does not look even a little bit right, does it? I think it, we still have to be doing this, and then this has to be a little bit more. That's starting to look better and we're going to bring in this side, just like that. It's a whole balancing act, isn't it? Something like that. We starting to get something that looks a little bit more [inaudible]. I want them to be really glowy in the sun and so bearing in mind that this is going to be printed and CMYK doesn't give you super brights. I'm going to kind of stick to pastels. This is a problem though, because I think I do want the window's to reflect some blueness, so I'm just trying stuff. I don't know where I'll end up going. The windows are actually a pain and I may do a very minimalist treatment of the windows because they such a pain. But for now, that's done. That's something. This, I think what I would do now is try cut the window by drawing the line, grabbing this, and going to pathfinder and dividing so now we have two pieces. Then grabbing this piece, and just sort of nudging this away. As you can see, it doesn't do the best thing in lines so you've got to do it one by one. What you have is two windows instead of one. But yeah, I'm really not loving how much they stand out. I guess what I might do, a minimalist treatment which is just going to be basically taking this point, flipping it like this, so that now it just creates the shadow of a window. If the light's coming from here and it's recessed, you'd see it there. You'd see it because it's coming from above, but you wouldn't see it here. That's my thinking. I'm going to just using this color that we already have that already exists. This is one get out of jail that I can use to just make more minimal windows that aren't a pain. When we get to the refining stage, maybe I won't like this either. But for now there you go. There's a window. On this side, I want to just very quickly draw the shade. Again, it's another rectangle that comes from here. We will then zone it to make sure that aligns with that point and down here it comes all the way to the full bleed. Then it sort of goes like this and that I'm going to make this color and so we've got some shading on the building. It looks a little bit too prominent and a bit distracting right now. Again, this is all stuff that I'll come to in the refining step. What other details do I absolutely need? How about instead of windows, just delete the windows altogether for now. I make the stripes, the design feature? This building has got these really interesting strips of color. Not on the top floor, but in every other floor, and that could be a way for me to distinguish this floor from the rest. If I were to do this. Just again, I'm breaking my own rules, let's just double-check these dimensions. I'll start in inches, and it's in inches. It has been before. Whatever it takes to get to the bottom. What we do this time is draw a line that feels like it's in current perspectives. We will then just give this a really dark stroke so I could find it. Rather than me try to be too clever. If this is four, which is, what we do is shift it over by five. Copy it and copy it again. Now, I have three. We'll grab all three of these. And we'll just move them so that I want this one inch gap right here to be the same gap on the outside. Again, we'll make this a really dark color on the inside, on the fill, not the stroke. We'll put this here. Grab these three guys, group them. Now we have that uniform gaps. Then we'll just grab these points and align them to this.That way, you've got something that seems to be fairly decent. That has without doing that much work created, if I drag in, the reference picture, is just created that feeling of this vertical striped rhythm that makes this building so interesting. I like that. Then we want to do a similar thing here, but as you can see, instead of these flat stripes, this poles. This is like dimensions in them, they get thicker. When they go higher on the side for some reason. But again, I don't want to spend too much time looking the reference. I'd rather focus on the impressions I got when I was sketching. You see even here, I've articulated, that I wanted to have the windows in, but maybe I won't keep them in. I really like what this is doing, actually, right now. Just how simple it is. I'm going to come back here, instead of doing this, I'm going to start right now, I'm going to come back in and add these panels. Because this is eight inches and I want the gap to be, maybe half an inch. I'm going to have to leave, half, one, one and a half, two. It's like it gives me six inches to play with, divided by three is two. I'm going to draw it again, something that's about two inches wide. It's even got the right color for me. Seems right, two inches wide and whatever height ending needs to be that's fine. Then I'll do here is come to this and I'll draw a half inch. Keep doing it in stroke, 0.5 by 0.5. No. Align that there. Make sure that this has no stroke.Bring that over here. Then, we will shift it by minus 0.5 of an inch. And Copy. Oh no, I'm wrong. It's minus 2.5 inch. Copy, Copy again.This time. Thank you very much for your service.This time this line can go from here. Again, you want it a little bit steeper because this whole thing is a bit steeper. You know let's do that. Will be that dark stroke. Again, the same process actually, let's just find the top point of this should be say 15. Then select the point of all of these guys, we'll move, we'll just drag that up, make sure this one lines up. Do the same for these two. It's a little bit steep.You take this line and just try and adjust it so that it's correct. Still a tiny bit steep, that's too much.That should be good, I think that will look good. Again, these five other points need to fall in line. Sometimes If it doesn't snap, it's too close, so you have to move it further away and then try again. Alright.I think that's good. I like that if it needs fine tuning, we can always come back and fine tune it, but I like it as a stock. This gradient could be a little bit more powerful what I'm going to do is unlock the background layer. Duplicate this and just make it a solid shape for now. I have an idea of like, what universe I'm in. Do we want something like that where it's pink? Do we want something orange? Where it's almost like a blood orange. That is too close to what we already have. If I go more orange, does that help? No, it doesn't want to go more purply. That's obviously just red, but I like it. If we come in here.I think that is starting to capture it. That gives me an idea of what this needs to do. Just to the bottom. Mind you, it's still going to be blue itself. It just needs to be a little bit stronger in this space. We can get rid of that layer but I'm actually just going to leave it in the back as reference, in case I need it again, we'll lock this backup. I think that's good for starting out. 8. Refining Your Illustration: So I'm going to make some refinements. There's some things I definitely know I wouldn't do straight off the bat. I think that the skylight needs some inset from the rest of the building. That's the details to the smokestacks. I want to show the molding that happens here, same with the very top edge of this design of the building as well. I do want to add back that shade across the side here. Then for the moon, I want to add some detail to the moon so it looks textured or like a moon. In the background, I may go back to clouds. That still remains to be seen. Then finally, I'm going to do some all rounds of color improvement and add texture as well. So I'm going to go ahead and start making those changes. [inaudible] this is not working for me right now. I don't have to have [inaudible]. So for now I wont have it. I'll figure out a way to incorporate that text in a better way. I think what might work actually is making it bigger but not bigger that way too, which is really counter-intuitive. But if we get rid of the actual type in two seconds and look at that, I think that just works a tiny bit better, but like I said, [inaudible] to have it right now, so I won't. I sign this off. Yeah. We call it a day. 9. Prepping For Output: Now, that I have my artwork ready to go, all that's left is to save it for print and the web. Now, if you were saving for something like animation there will be a few different steps, but I'm just going to show you print and web today. The first thing I want to do is save as PDF and just make sure that your original Illustrator file is saved. Command S, Control S, before you do this because you may not be able to get it back. Now, I'm going to just do a File Save As. I've created in my working files, sorry, in my Landmarks folder, I've got a folder called Artwork. I'm going to save it into this folder as a PDF. Make sure that's PDF, hit Save. When the settings come up, I'm going to select high quality print but before hitting Save, I'm going to come down to first of all, Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, I'm going to disable that because I do have my original Illustrator file. This I think it helps with file size anyway, it might not do. I'm going to come down to Marks and Bleeds, and I'd like to keep Trim Marks. That usually is enough for me if I have to trim this myself is definitely enough for a printer, and use the document bleed settings which I set at the beginning as an eighth of an inch on each side, and I'll hit save PDF. It will warn you that saving without Illustrator Editing Capabilities may disable some features when the document is read back in but you have your original Save file, so that's all good. Excellent. Now, that I've saved it for print, I'm going to go ahead and save for the web, and the way you do that is file, I always forget where this is, Export, Save for Web Legacy, I still use the Legacy, it's the best. You can also hit Command Option, Shift and S, and that will bring you to the same place. What I like to do is save my files so that the long side is 2,000 pixels. In this case that means 1,333 width. Set as JPEG high, I think that's fine for something like this. Sometimes I use PNG if there's transparency, but this would be good and I will hit Save. We'll save it in the same folder called Artwork, just put it in here, and that's all good to go. 10. Conclusion: Congratulations, you made it. We started with nothing but landmark in an idea. Here we are staring at this beautiful piece of art. I hope you had as much fun working on your project design as I did working on mine. Don't forget to post your sketches, references and final pieces into the gallery, so you can get some feedback. Thank you.