Neon Effect in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Neon Effect in Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create a Neon Effect 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 creating a neon effect in illustrator, and along the way we're going to learn a little bit about creating reusable graphic styles and doing it in a smart way so that when you come to use the style, you have the minimum amount of things to change in it. We're also going to look at applying a neon effect to text, which is going to involve us breaking the text apart. 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 just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started creating neon effect in Illustrator. 2. Neon Effect - Part 1: Before we get started with this project, we're going to need a couple of things from the web. The first thing that we will need is a picture of a flamingo. If you're not confident drawing the shapes yourself, then find a photo of the object that you want to work with and then use it as a tracing object. That's exactly what we're going to do. Now, morgue file has changed recently, looks a little different to what it used to look like, but I'm going to give you the download link for this bird. You can always go to morgue file and just look up flamingo and find plenty of them there. The other thing you'll need is a neon font. Now, I've gone to the site 100001fonts.com, and I've found a neon font here now this is for personal use only. It's not for commercial use unless you contact the author and make a payment. But I think this is a really nice font to use and it's called Neon club music. I will also give you the download link for that. You want to download it and install it on your computer. Then we're ready to go to illustrate our open up our flamingo and get started. We're going to start in illustrated with a new document, I'll choose file and then new. I wanted a portrait orientation document. The settings here are good for me, 750 pixels wide or 1000 pixels tall. You'll want to create an image and about these proportions and about this image size, because that will make it a little easier when you come to create your Neon effects because you can use the same values as I'm going to use, we're using RGB color mode. Now the Rostra effects selection here is a little bit important because we're going to be using a raster effect. I've got mindset to a low value of 72 PPI. If you're working on a faster computer, then you could use 150 or 300. That will get you better effects on the screen. But for me, because I'm trying to video at the same time, I'm just going to settle for a smaller value. I'm going to click okay, to create my new document. You need to go and get our flamingo image, So I'll choose file and then place. We're going to locate my flamingo photo in my Downloads folder click place. I'm going to place it fairly high up in the document here, because I think this bird's legs because the way it's been shot or a little on the short side, I want to put a bit more action around the bottom of the flamingo, so I'm living myself plenty of room to do so. I'm going to the last pallet here and I'm going to open this up and locked down the flamingo It won't move even if I'm working above it. Now I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to put the flamingo itself on this new layer, the drawing that I'm going to make. Next up, we need to draw us stylized flamingo. For this you can use your choice of tools, if you really go with the pen tool, go ahead and use the pen tool. I'm going to assume that the Pen tool makes you a little bit scared. Let's use the pencil tool. I'm going to click on the pencil tool. So select that, I'm going to double-click on it to just say what its settings are. I want it to be operating up this [inaudible] I want any wobbles in the pencil tool to be smoothed out, that really good setting to use here. I'm just going to click okay. Now we need something to paint with. I'm going to flip it these two colors so that we're working with our stroke color. Let's go and get something that's going to show up against this bird here. I'm thinking this blue right now will be a good color to use. right now my stroke is one point, so I'm going to increase it to about three points. Now I'm going to draw the shapes for my bird. Now you want to remember as you're drawing this, that this would be glass, things need to be fairly curvy. I've gone ahead and drawn my flamingo using very, very simple lines. This is the stylistic interpretation that you'll want. Of course, I said earlier that I wanted mine to be a bit taller and I've gone and drawn it exactly the right size. what I'm going to do is go to the direct selection tool here. I'm going to select either the nodes at the bottom of this foot and just stretch them out. That will give it a longer leg, I can also do that here. I'm going to probably grabbed the last story tall here is going to be easier to grab. This portion of the flamingo. press V for the move tool and just move its leg down a little bit. I'm going to move this portion in line. Then this part of the leg can simply be stretched out. At this point, you'll probably want to turn off the visibility of the bottom most layer so that you're working with just the shapes that you've created. You can spend a little bit of time working on the shapes. One of the things you want to make sure is that you don't have any really type bins. This pace here is way too tight of a band. It's not something that would happen if you were working with neon glass. We're going to have to round that off, so it looks a little bit more like it could have been made from neon glass. To do this, I'm just grabbing the direct selection tool, selecting this point so I can get access to the handles and just move them. Anytime the angles form a straight line over the top of a point like this, you're going to get a very smooth curve. Control or Command zero to zoom back out. You can continue to work on your bird. Once you've got the stylized bird created comeback and we're going to add the neon effects to it. 3. Neon Effect - Part 2: Now I've gone ahead and made some minor alterations to my bird, what I did was I pulled these claws from its foot out a little bit so that they would be more separated from its foot. Now, up here in the jaw line I just want to show you what's happening here and how we will resolve it. I've ended up with two lines in this jaw line and I'd like them to be one line so I'm going to go and get the end point for this line, and I'm going to create it a lot more closely to the end point of this line. These two points of very close together, I'm going to select over them, I'm going to choose object path join and that will join these into a single path. Now they are going to behave like a single shape and if I need to alter the curve of the path, I can do so. Control or command zero to Zoom back out. Now, right now each of these lines has a flat end so I'm going to select either all of them with the selection tool, and I'm going to make the lines more curved at the end. To do this I'll go to the stroke panel and I'm going to make their caps round, that will give them a softer end. I'm also going to increase the width of the lines, I'm going to take it up to seven points. Click away and just check how everything looks, now as a result I'll probably want to start moving these pieces out a little bit so that they're a little more separated from the bird's body. Because typically neon won't overlap, you might have two pieces of [inaudible] if I've left, everything will be a little bit more separated. Now that we've done that, we're going to add a black background behind the bird so we can see the effects that we're creating a little bit more easily. I'm going to click on layer one in the last pallet and click new layer, that will add a new layer underneath a neon and above the image that we're no longer using. On this lap, I'm going to add my black filled rectangle, I'm going to the rectangle tool, I'm going to click once on my document and now I can type in the dimensions of my document which was 750 pixels wide by 1000 pixels tall. I want to fill this with black so I'm going to go and get black, and I'm just going to flip my stroke and fill colors. Now in the alignment panel, if I go to Window align, if I click here and click show options I can see what everything is currently aligning to. It's pretty important that you know how your alignment tools are working, I'm going to click this drop down here and everything is aligned to the art board. If I go to the selection tool, select on my shape, I can now click these two options here, horizontal align center and vertical align center and my rectangle is going to be aligned perfectly to my art board. Then click the last pallet and I'm going to lock down that as well because I don't want it start moving on me. To create a neon, we're going to create it using the appearance panels so I'm going to take the biggest bit of this bird that we can work with right now and that is its body. Right now it's blue, it probably should be pink, so I'm going to go and get a pink color. I'm going to the appearance panel here, if you can't see your appearance panel go to Window and then appearance, and we're going to work with the appearance panel to build up this neon effect. The first thing we want to do is to blow this line, the seven points is a pretty good width for this neon affect, what's not good it's right now we've got solid pink where we'd like it to be a little bit fuzzier if you like. In the appearance panel you'll say when the triangles face this way that all the settings are collapsed. If you open them up here, you'll say that there are things like another opacity setting for this individual strokes. You can do things with a stroke rather than with the entire shape, this is really important at this stage because you need to do whatever we're going to do next with this pink line, you don't want to do it with the whole shape or it's not going to work properly. So we're going to click on this pink line here, and then we're going to effect, blur, gaussian blur and we're going to blur this line. I'm going to turn preview on so I can see what's happening and you can just choose a blur that you like, I'm think that around 3.5 is a pretty good blur for this line, you want the impression of a sort of neon glow I'll click "Okay". Next up we're going to add another line to this shape so we're going to click here on this stroke and we're going to click here on add new stroke, which is going to add a second stroke on top of the first one. Now this stroke we want to be gray, I'm going to go in here, open up the panel and we're going to use a gray that is 204, 204, 204, this is roughly a a light neutral gray. Then we're going to decrease its line weight to about three points, and we're going to set its blend mode to screen, and then we're going to have a talk about why we just did what we did. Now, what's going to happen in a few minutes is we're going to take this neon look and we're going to save it as a graphic star, so we want to be able to apply it to anything in future. If we added a lot of pink strokes to this shape, anytime that we wanted to make red neon or yellow neon, will have to come into the appearance panel and start changing a whole lot of things. It's a whole lot more simpler if we only have to change one thing and this is the thing we're going to have to change, if we want to make red neon, we're going to have to make this right if we want to make, blue neon we're going to make this blue, but everything else that we're building up in this appearance panel is neutral, it's a neutral gray. It's going to have the exact same effect on blue as it is on yellows, as it is on orange, so being smart about how we're building things up. So until this end what we've done, is we've added a light gray three-point line, thinner than the pink line so we can still say the pink line but this is a light gray line. Setting it to Screen blend mode just makes it lighter, a Screen blend mode always lighten things up so if I turn this off, you can say no lightning, here we've got a narrow lightening in the middle of the line and we're going to do that again. So I'm going to click on this top-most line, click on add new stroke. This time I'm going to make it white so I am going for a very bright, almost white color here. I'm going to bring down the line white to one and I'm going to sit the blend mode to screen so it will lighten everything up. There's my neon pink look, now if I'm not happy with the pink, this is what's controlling it, so I can come in here and choose a much hotter pink color. That's all I need to do to change the color of my neon, so we're designing the neon effect in a smart way. Now that we've done that and designed it in a smart way, let's go and save it so that we can reuse it, I'm going to select the shape that has the neon applied to it, I'm going to the graphic styles which are here. If you don't say the graphic styles there, go to Window and choose graphic styles. What we're going to do is we're going to drag and drop the bird's body into this so pick it up with the selection tool, drop it into here and let go. We don't see a bird's body, what we see is the style, this is the pink neon style that we just created and it's a permanent staff of this particular document. Now I'm going to click away from the body of the bird and select its head. I'm going to click here once on the graphic style and the neon color effect is applied to that shape. I wanted to do the same here, so I'm going to select both pieces here and I'm going to make them pink for now. But you know what, they look a whole lot better if they were actually read, so with them still selected I'm going into the appearance panel for the shapes, I'm going to click on this pink here and I'm going to turn it into a bright red. I'll click away. You can say that the neon style has now been applied to that shape and we were easily able to recolor by just selecting one particular color option which is in this bottom most stroke and we can do the same for the legs. Make them pink, change our mind on the color to anything we like, I'm actually going to make those red as well. Now the bird could use an eye and a little bit of greenery and perhaps some blue water along the bottom here. So I'm going to finish off the bird by just doing those extra little piece, I'm not going to talk as I do this but we're going to come back in the next video and go and create some neon text and one of the things that we're going to confront is the fact that we need to pull out, takes the pot before we can actually make it neon. 4. Neon Effect - Part 3: Now that we've created a Flamingo in Neon, let's go, and have a look at the issues surrounding creating type with this Neon effect. I'm going to click the "Text" tool here, I'm going to type the word Flamingo. Now, it's in black right now, so I'm going to make it white so we can see it. I'm going to increase the font size here, and I'm going to go, and get a Neon font. I'm clicking the "Text" tool, selecting over the text, and I'm going to go, and get the Neon font that we downloaded, and that I've installed. Now, it's obviously a bit big for this project right now, I'm just going to decrease the size a little bit. Now, before we can apply our Neon effect to this text, we're going to need to turn the text from text into outlines. I'm going to choose Type, and then Create Outlines. I'm then going to ungroup these objects with Object, Ungroup. Now let's go in, and have a look and see what we get when we get text outlines. What we get is a dimensional shape. We've got outlines around a filled shape. What we learned about the Flamingo was that our graphic style is got to be applied to a single line. We've got too many lines here. What we're going to need to do is to get rid of them. Going to start with an easy shape, first of all, this L. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to keep the outside line, but get rid of the inside line. With the Lasso tool, I'm just going to drag through the middle of this letter, making sure that I trap all of the nodes that are on the inside of this shape, and I'll just press "Delete" and what I'm left with is this line. All I need to do now is with it selected is flip the stroke and the fill. Now, I have a stroke line. I'm going to go through these other shapes, the easy shapes, the N, the G, and the O, and just get rid of the inner shapes. On the I, I'm going to get rid of the shape on the right, and keep the one on the left, and we'll come back in a minute and grab these other shapes. With the F over here, I'm going to take the outside line, and the top line here. The other bits, I'm going to get rid of. With the A, I'm going to take the outside line, and then I'm probably going to take this top line. With the M, I'm going to take the outside line, and this left line here, getting rid of the rest. The thing I'm making sure I'm not going to delete is anything that is an anchor point for any of the lines that I actually want to keep. Now that I've got the actual letters of the text, I'm ready to go ahead, and to apply my Neon effect to them. I can take individual letters by selecting over them with the Selection tool, going to the appearance panel for them. Seem to have lost my appearance panel, so I'm going to choose Window, Appearance, and then just change the color of the text. There's an easy way of creating a Neon effect in Illustrator, and you've also learned how you can curve up a font to create a single line that you could then apply a Neon effect to. Your project for this class is going to be to create a Neon effect, something like this. You can go, and use the Flamingo I used, or you can use any image of your choice, or you can just draw it freehand if you prefer. Add some text to it too, so that you get some practice with working with graphic styles, and applying them to those text elements once you've extracted them from the actual font. When you've finished with your project, post it in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course, and that you've learned a lot about working with graphic styles, and with fonts, and shapes in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and 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.