Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Nighttime CityScape Image Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, Create a nighttime cityscape image. Today we're going to create a nighttime cityscape scene. Along the way we're going to look at a range of interesting and useful illustrated techniques for creating art like this. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class and learning things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others and secondly, write just a few words about 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. If you're ready now let's get started with the nighttime cityscape in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Create the Buildings: I've already gone ahead and created the document that I want to use for the nightscape, and the reason is I wanted to be able to put these colors in. Now, I'm having some difficulty using this color themes option in Illustrator. Theoretically, it should allow me to go to color.adobe.com, select some color themes, and save them automatically so they'll sync in with Illustrator. This has been broken for me for a long time, and just isn't reliable. To avoid frustration, this is what I do: I go direct to color.adobe.com and I'll look for colors schemes that I might want to use. I might type in here city lights, for example. Then I'll go through the resulting color themes and see if there's something that has the kind of colors I want to use in the project. This one has some cool colors. It's not city lights, but let's see how I would approach it. I'll go to the Snipping tool here, which comes with Windows, I've gotten installed. It automatically defaults to new. What I do is I just drag over an area of the screen that has the colors that I want to borrow. I'll click the "Copy" button, go back to Illustrator, and just paste it in with Control V. On a Mac, you can do the exact same thing. The keyboard shortcuts that you're going to use to capture a screenshot direct to the clipboard on a Mac, are Command, Control, Shift 4. That's Command, Control, Shift 4, you don't need any additional software on the Mac. Once inside Illustrator, once you've pasted your sample in, you can then go to the Eyedropper tool and select any of these colors. As soon as you click on a color, it becomes the foreground color, and you can then create a box and fill this box with that color. Essentially, that's what I did to get my colors over here. I'm just going to remove all of those because we don't need them right now. The document size I'm working on is 1920 by 1080. I just chose "File" and then "New". I created a document, 1920 by 1080 in size. This is the dialogue, and the new Illustrator already have that set up. In earlier versions of Illustrator, your dialogue's going to look a bit more like this one here. Again, I just typed in 1920 by 1080 and click to create my document. Now, I don't need to do that because I've already got my document. Now, over in the last palette, I've got things started to be neatened up. I've got my colors in a layer. They're inside a group, inside a layer. I've labeled the layer colors and I'm going to lock it down so it doesn't move. These colors are selectable, but these little boxes are not going anywhere. I'm going to need to create a brand new layer to start building my cityscape on. It's a really good idea with a project like this that could get a little bit complex, that you start off trying to be as neat as possible. The neater you are at the outset, the more control you're going to have of the entire process later on. One of the things I'm going to be focusing on in this video is trying to make things neat and tidy and trying to make what could be quite a complex document a little bit easier to manage and work with. To start with our buildings, I'm just going to start with a rectangle. I'm going to drag out a rectangle and I'm going to fill it with one of my colors. I'll click on the "Eyedropper" tool, and I'll click on the color I want to use. Now, at this point, I'm going to create buildings that are pretty much all the same color because the rearrangement and re-coloring is going to happen in the next step. Right now, we're going to look at some tools we have for creating our buildings. Turning a rectangle into a building that has angled top, I'm going to the "Add Anchor Point" tool, because I'm going to add in an anchor point where I want that anchor point to be. Now, I'll go to the "Delete Anchor Point" tool. You can see I could be pressing the Plus or Minus keys to get to these tools. I'm just going to remove this anchor point, and that gives me a building that has an angled top. Another type of building that potentially you can build is one that has stacked boxes on top of it. What I'm doing here is just drawing the kind of boxes that I want to use. Now, everything is out of alignment, but that's fine. Once I've created them, I'll select over all of them. I'm going to the "Alignment" panel, I'm going to choose "Show Options". I'm going to make sure I'm aligned to selection so that all of these objects are going to align to each other. I'll just click the "Horizontal Align Center," and that makes sure that all of the boxes are centered on this building. Now, at this point, I'm going to unite them. If everything looks the way I want it to look, I'm going to click here on the Pathfinder palette. Again, you can get to any of these palettes by choosing Window, and then selecting the palette by name. Over here in the Pathfinder, I'm going to choose "Unite", and that makes a single shape. That's another one of those neatening up things, is whenever you get a building shape and you know that's the building you want, just go and unite it so that you only have one object and not four to be working with. Another kind of building that you can create is one that is stepped. To get this looking absolutely perfect is a little bit of work. I'm going to start by drawing a rectangle. At this stage, I'm not worried about putting it against the bottom of the document because it's not going to end up that way anyway. With this shape selected, what I'm going to do is make another shape the same width. But this time, I want it to be taller. I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform", and then "Scale". I want to do a non-uniform scale because I don't want this to grow width-wise, I just want it to grow height-wise. I'm going to set my vertical to 110, and I want a duplicate of this. Now actually, I can check and see what the vertical's going to look like. You can see that this is going to be considerably bigger. I'm going to click "Copy". Then I'm going to take the original one and I'm going to make it 120 percent more. "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I'm going to knock this out to 120, and I'm going to click "Copy", and I'm going to make one more copy, which is going to be a 130. "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I'm going to set this to 130 and click "Copy". Now, I have four shapes that are all increasing in height in an even way. I'm going to select over all of them. I want to align them to their bottom edges. I'm just going to click here on "Vertical Align Bottom". We want to space them out so that they step really nicely. I'm going to select over all of them. I'm going to my Align panel. I'm going to make sure that the options are selected. I'm going to click here on "Align to Key Object". I want one object not to move. These are all selected. This one has a heavier border around it, but I don't want it to be the key object, so I'm just going to click on this one and make it the key object. Not holding any Shift, or Alt, or anything else, just clicking on it. Now, what I want to do is to space these out. I know that if I set this to zero, they're all going to be butted up against each other. That is going to be too far apart. If zero is too far apart, then they need to come further together. So that needs to be a negative value. I'm going to start with negative 50 and see what happens. I'll just click here on "Horizontal Distribute Space". That aligns them with negative 50 pixels. They're overlapping by 50 pixels. I think that's a bit too much. I'm going to try negative 35 and see how that looks. That looks better to me. Now, I've got my building shape, I'm just going to go ahead and unite that shape. Once it's united, I can move it down so it's aligned to the bottom of the artboard here. I can stretch it or shrink its width if I like, just to get a better looking building with this nice, even roof line. Now, let's have a look at a building that has a pointy top on it. I'm going to draw out the bases of my building. I need another anchor point, and I need it in the middle here. The quickest and easiest way of doing that is to choose "Object", "Path", and then "Add Anchor Points". What that does is it adds an anchor point in the middle of all of the sides that didn't previously have an anchor point. Illustrator has gone and done our work for us. Here is this anchor point. I'm clicking on it with the Direct Selection tool. Now, I can just drag upwards to create the point on top of my building. We can do something similar with a building that has a curved point on the top. Let's go and do that again. Again, "Object", "Path", Add Anchor Points", switch to the Direct Selection tool. It can help to remember the shortcut key I, which is the Direct Selection tool. If you hold the Shift key, the movement of this anchor point is going to be constrained to going in an upwards direction and it's going to be directly upward, you won't be able to skew it. Having got it to the point, I'm now going to click on it with the convert selected anchor points to smooth. Now, I have a building that has a round top to it. At this point, I can start adjusting these handles should I wish to. I might put a sort of triangle shape on top of the building. Here I'm going to the Polygon tool. I'll click once in the document. I'm going to make sure my sides are set to three because that's a triangle. Don't worry about the radius. It's a weird value anyway. At this point it's just easier to click "Okay" and just see what you get, and then just reshape it yourself. I'm going to do that with the Selection tool. I'm just going to reshape it into a point. Let's go and put it on top of this building. Once I'm happy with everything, I would select over it, and then click the "Unite" option. Now, I'll go and create a second row of buildings. Some of these might be bigger, some of these might be smaller, but I just wanted to fill in the gaps and get some potential buildings that I could use. At this point, the new buildings, I'm probably going to make a different color. I'm going to use a slightly lighter color just so it's going to be easier to see them. Draw your rectangle, click the "Eyedropper" tool, sample the color you want to use, and that's now going to be the color that we'll use for the remainder of the buildings. I'll come back in the next video once I've done this, and we'll get to work with creating the other elements for our nightscape.
3. Pt 2 Arrange the Buildings: I've now gone ahead and added some extra buildings. Let's just go and have a quick look at the last product, and let's see how we are going to work at arranging these buildings. Every one of these buildings is just a single path. So what I'm going to do is turn everything off, and I'm going to turn on my first building. Now this is the rectangular building and it's also going to be my go-to building, for filling in spaces, but I'm going to start with one over here. Then I'll turn on the next building, and I'm going to place it and size it and just arrange it where I want it to be. Let's start making some of these a little bit taller. As I start building up these buildings, I might end up having to move some of the ones that I've already created, but that's just fine. I'm just looking for a nice arrangement. Obviously this one's come in on top of another one. So let's just move it over to where it might sit. When I put a building in front of another building, at this point, I will probably change its color. I'll go and select the second most dark color, leaving the darkest at the very back. Part of this rearrangement process is not only bringing in some of the buildings that I created in the mean time, but also just arranging the colors to suit. I think I might have a couple of these, and I've saved some colors for the background so I'm going to just grab these two, and I've saved this really dark color for the back. These two need to go behind everything. I'm just going to grab them in the last pallet, just make sure that I have the layers highlighted. I don't actually have to have them selected. Let's just show you this. Just going to grab these two layers and just move them to the bottom of the stack. They don't have to be selected, they just have to be highlighted in the last pallet. That's giving me a bit of background buildup, and probably going to build the background up with just a few of these rectangles. This building, again, I think it will go to the back, so I'm going to make it really dark. I'm just going to drag it to the very bottom of the stack, so it's behind the other buildings. It'll be really useful to get to know the letter V to get to the selection tool and the letter A to get to the direct selection tools. It will just help you move things around a little bit more quickly. Liking the shape on this building, but again, I might send it a bit further towards the back. I'm going to make it a darker color, and then I'm going to put it in behind some of these other buildings. Now if you've got empty spaces at the back, you can just go and borrow some of these very rectangular boxes, and just also option drag duplicates away, and just size them to fit in the empty spots that you've got. Once you've got your basic layout, select over all of the buildings. I'm just dragging over the bottom of the buildings. I just want to align them to the bottom of the art board. Well, that didn't happen. Let's just go and make sure we're aligned to Art board, which I'm not. I'm just going to click to align them to the bottom of the art board. So they're nice and neat across the bottom. We've got our general layout of buildings, it's time now to get to work in decorating the buildings. But before we do so, it might behoove us to put each of these buildings on a separate layer so that we can have an entire building with all its elements altogether so that things will be easier to manage. To do that I'm just going to select layer 2 and this is going to be my buildings layer. I'm going to name it Buildings. With this layer selected, I can click here on this [inaudible] menu and choose Release to Layers Sequence. When I do that, what happens is that all of these buildings are jumped into layers. Now each one of these buildings is a layer of its own. It's like a group, but it doesn't have the limitations of working with a group where it's really difficult to select something in that group. In this case, it's really easy because these are just paths inside layers. The trick to using that Release to Layer Sequence option is that you can't actually have things selected. You don't do it with things selected. You just target the layer, which would be the buildings, and then just go and release to the sequence. Everything that is there, every single one of those paths then becomes a layer of its own. That just makes management a little bit easier.
4. Pt 3 Decorate the Buildings: Now we're ready to add Windows to our building. I'm going to choose a building to work with. I'll just choose a rectangular one. From this is going to borrow a copy of this. I'm going to actually create a duplicate of this layer. I want a second building, so I want to be very careful that I'm keeping up with the same sequence. I'm going to make it a smaller rectangular building. Let's just move it into position about over here and let's color it with the color we're working with. This'll need to be at the front because it's at the front of everything. Here's a building to work with and we're just going to do something very simple on a rectangular building. I'm going to start with a little set of lights. I'm going to draw out a really small square here. I'm holding the Shift key so that I'm constraining this to a square. I could also just read off roughly how big this is and then delete that and then just click again and create my own square. I'm actually going to make this 20 by 20 because it's going to allow me to make the math a little bit easier. I've got a square 20 by 20, and let's just color it in with a color. I'm going to use a light color here for the lights on the building. With this light selected, I'm going to choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform, because this is going to be your next best friend in terms of a tool in Illustrator to do the work for you. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to move this vertically, so I'm just going to start pushing it out vertically and just say where I want it to be. Well, I think about 30. That would allow ten pixels of space between the original and the next copy. I'm just going to start bumping up my copies because I wanted to go all the way down the building. I'll click Okay. Then I'm going to do the same thing again, Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. I am going to apply a new effect because this time I want to go horizontally, turn preview on. I'm going to start my horizontal movement. I what this probably to be a little bit closer. Let's try increasing the copies, and we can determine exactly what we want of this arrangement so everything is neatly spaced apart. I just might bump it up a little bit and click Okay. Now if we don't like the color of the light that we've created, we can change that so we can come in and double-click on the color and we could make it a little bit darker, a little bit lighter, whatever we wanted. Now at this point if we want to center this over the building, we're going to have to expand this shapes. With objects selected, I'm going to choose Object, Expand Appearance. That has broken this out to a group of objects. Let's see what we've got here. I've got a group here, another group and another group. I'm going to actually break all of those out of their group. Let's just go in here and choose Object, Ungroup. Then Object, Ungroup and Object, Ungroup again. I'm making what looks to be a really big mess here. What I've done is I've broken every one of these windows out to a separate path. But I've done that for a good reason because they were buried inside multiple groups. It's much easier to work with if they just inside one group. I've broken them out into separate paths and now with them all still selected, I'm just going to group them once. Because that allows me to do things like go to the group selection tool, and click on one or more of these lines and change the color of them. Ultimately we can create a building that has multicolored lights. Some lights might be on, some lights might not be on. We can do that very easily using the group tool because everything's just in one packet. The other thing it allows us to do is to take the group and the building itself, so the windows and the building and just work with them so far as centering things. In the align panel, make sure we're on a line to selection, and then center everything. Now the windows are centered inside the building. We can just close that all up, and we've got a building that has its windows created, but it's also everything to do with that building is just here. We can work with it independently of the other buildings. Just make things so much needed because you are going to have a windows and lights and all things all over the place here. You really want to be in control of how you work with them. Now let's have a look at another building. It's this one here, and let's have a look at another possibility for decorating the building. In this case, I'm going to use some really long narrow rectangles. I'm drawing out a long narrow rectangle and I want to sample the color I've got on the building here. I'm going to go a little bit darker. Let's do Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. Turn preview on. I want to move this horizontally. I'm going to move it over horizontally a bit. Then I'm going to start increasing my copies. We're creating this grated element on the front of this building. Once I'm happy with it, I'll click Okay. Now for some of these, I want them to come up into these star area. But right now I just have a single shape that has this transformation applied to it. I'll need to choose Object and then Expand appearance. That's going to give me the same issues I had last time. A rectangle in here, that has groups and groups, and groups and groups. We're going to do Object, Ungroup, and keep doing it until all of those lines in separate parts. Once they're in separate parts, right now we can group them back together and we should group them back together just so that we can go ahead and center them on the building. With this group and this building selected, we're going to the alignment tool, and we're just going to center everything. The windows are now centered inside the building. At this point if I wanted to, I could go and ungroup these just temporarily. Let's zoom in. Let's have a look at the shapes that I want to change. I'm going to click on one. I'm going to Shift click on the others as I go across. I want to select all of these and I'm going to start moving these up. I'm just making sure that they going upwards and I'm just looking to eyeball a position for them, and then I'll let go. Now I'm going to take just a few of the shapes, just this. Again clicking on the first one, Shift click on all the subsequent ones and just sizing them up to come up the center of the building. Let's zoom back out again. Now I want to select all of these paths and group them. I'm just going to run down the last pallet here, clicking and Shift clicking to select all of these. I'm going to group them. It's a little bit of work, but it's certainly going to pay off in the long run. This is all of the decorations on the building, and this is the building itself. We have gone ahead and created the decorative elements for a second building.
5. Pt 4 More Building Window Techniques: Ultimately I'm going to lead you to do most of the decoration on these buildings yourself. I'm just going to show you some options and some better ways perhaps of doing things just to save you some work. Now work on this building, so I'm going to actually bring it to the very front to start off with, just so it's easier to say. I'm going to create some alternating windows across the whole of this building. So I need to choose the best place to start and the best place to start is here because it's easier to remove windows than it is to add them in. So I'm going to create my first window up here. It's going to be 15 pixels wide by 10 pixels tall. So I'm just going to click o-k. It's really hard to say. So let's for now make it a really light color. So this is our starting shapes. I'm going to put it roughly into position selected and then choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to wind up the amount of copies quite a bit. Let's start moving them in a vertical direction and just see what we get. I'm going to take them down 17 pixels and then I'm just going to increase my number of copies. That looks pretty good. Let's just zoom in here because I need to put a shape between the ones that I've got here already. So let's just click here and I'm going to make my shape 15 pixels wide again, but this time it's only going to be 6 pixels tall. Let's make it another color. Unchoose this very dark color. I'm going to place it into position, and so I've got my second window here. Let's select the first window however that we made because the other here in the appearance panel it's got the transformation that we need for this other window. So it would be really handy if we could borrow the transformation. So what I'm going to do is grab this little icon here, and I'm going to drag and drop it onto the second window. It's a bit hard to say but I'm dropping it on to the second window and you'll see that it's worked. Because what's happened is the second window has inherited all the effects from the first, which includes the fill as well as the transformation. So of course the fill is wrong, but everything else is just fine. So let's go and select the second window, just the one that's got the transformation attached to it and let's go and re-color it. So very easily we have just the right number of windows transformed down this building. So let's go and select the first 2 shapes. So it's probably going to be easier to select them over here in the last pallet. Just the two windows because they've all got transformations applied to them. So that's why we're saying all these extra windows, but the only thing that's actually select able or that you can do anything with is the top two because all the others directory exists, they just transformation. So with our selected, let's choose effect, distort and transform and transform again. This time we're going in a negative horizontal direction. So let's bump up our copies a bit and let's hit off in a negative direction. If we've got enough movement, but not enough windows then we're just going to increase the number of copies and that looks pretty good. So I'll click Okay. So now I'm going to the yellow window, its the window that is the wrong color right now. So let's just go and settle on a color for it. So I'm pretty happy with that. So I've got two windows and a building and I've got a lot more windows than I actually need. So I'm going to select my two windows and I'm going to expand these windows. So I'm going to choose object, expand appearance. Then I'm going to run object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. Okay, and so now every single window is unlocked, so every window is selectable. So I'm going to zoom into the top of the building and work out which of these windows I don't need, and will start deleting them. Now this might take a little bit of time, but we can speed it up by locking the buildings behind. So I'm going to select this building and lock it down. So now I can't select it in this building and lock it down, and this building, and lock it down and the building we're working on and I'll lock it down. So with those lock-down, I should now be able to select either just the windows that I don't want. Sometimes locking things down will help speed up a process because it will allow you to select other things. So now we have the windows on this building and of course, every single window is a path. So I'm going to again go and select either these windows, but as I select, I'm going to run into this building here and I'm going to select it as well as I go along. So let's just go and locate it in the last pallet and let's lock it down. So I'm going to lock down the building and all of its windows. You can see how much more control you've got over this document. When you start to put things in last as it's a little bit of extra time, but it's going to save you heaps of time in the long run. So now I'm able to make a selection of just the windows on this building because everything around it is locked down. It can't be selected. Now I can put those in a group. Now they're going to behave just like everything else. They go into base selectable, lockable, all sorts of things. So at this point I can go ahead and unlock any of those buildings that I had locked, if I don't need them to be locked any longer. We're of course going to leave our colors locked now because I've grouped those windows, let's go back to the building where we're working on. We've got the windows here and the building here. I can now send to them. So I'm going to select all windows and the building itself going through alignment panel and I'm just going to click to center it. So that makes sure that the windows are nicely scented on that building. So that's another way of adding elements to a building. But again, being smart about your management of layers and shapes just to make things a whole lot easier to work with. Now that we've finished with this, we can talk it back where it was, it was behind this other building in the front.
6. Pt 5 Still More Building Decorations: Let's have a look at another building. I'm going to work on this one with the angled front. I've already removed it to the front of the layers palette. Let's zoom in a little bit. I want to create a shape to work with. I'm going start with a long, shallow rectangle. I want to rotate this or skew it. I'm actually going to select over this end with the direct selection tool. It's going to move these points down to a long line of the building. I'm going to do the same with this end. I want to make sure that it's pretty well lined up with the top of the building so that when I move it down the building, it's going to look in the correct sort of rotation, correct angle. It's looking pretty good at this point. Now that I've got my shape about right, I'm just going to move it out of the way a little bit. I'm going to zoom in because I want to do some highlighting in it. I'm going to add a rectangle shape here. I'm going to select over both the rectangle and this angled line. Going to the Pathfinder and I'm going to click here on divide. What it does is I'm using this rectangle to break up this line. I choose object ungroup, then I've got this line here, this line here and I've got a little shape in here that's the perfect angle. What I can do is change its color. I'm going to make it very dark. I'm going to make these two pieces a lighter color, but still a bit darker. Actually, let's go a bit lighter than that. I've got this now, little vertical line in my angled line. With all of these shapes, I'm going to group them back together again because I want them to travel as a group and I'm going to pull them into position down here. This is going to be the decoration on my building. I'm going to select it and I'm going to do a transform on it. Effect, distort and transform and then transform. Turn preview on. I'm going to adjust just the vertical direction obviously. Let's just move it down a bit. Let's make some copies and see how they're looking. I'm going over the end of the building here because I want to cut it off in a minute. If I'm happy with that, I'm just going to click okay. I'm going to expand the object, Expand Appearance. I'm going to keep a check on the last pallet here because I would like this group to stay intact, the group of those multi-colors. But I do want to break it out of everything else. Let's just see what's in this group. Well, it's my little path, my bigger one and my bigger one. These groups are actually going to work for me right now. That's looking good. Let's come down to the bottom here and let's get rid of the ones that we know we don't want. We can do that by choosing the group selection tool, that will allow us to select objects within groups. I'm just grabbing the ones that I know I don't want and deleting them. I want some of these and I don't want others, but the building behind is going to make it difficult for me to select things. I'm just going to lock it down. Now, I can go on with my group selection tool and just make sure that I get rid of the bits that I don't want. Well, another building's causing me some grief here. Let's lock it. I want to cut this off. To cut them off, I'm going to use a rectangular shape. I'm just going to draw it about where I want everything cut off. I'm going to select everything in here that's impacted by this rectangle and these shapes behind. Pretty much I've got what I want here, I'm going back to the Pathfinder tool and this time, I'm going to click trim. What trim's going to do is trim off the ends of any of those shapes where they were behind this rectangle. I don't want the rectangle any longer, so I can just select it and delete it. We can say that trim has curved those off so everything now, is looking really neat across the bottom of that shape. In some cases you might find divide and trim are handy to understand and be able to use. Now that we've got this looking the way it is, we've got groups inside a group, I'm happy with that in this situation just because of the complexity of this object. But I just want to see what I've got here. Well, these are the bottom bits. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this group and just put it inside the window groups. The windows are all isolated in one place and the building itself, is isolated in a second place. They're all within a layer. I'm just going to put the layer back approximately where it came from. There's obviously a lot of work to be done on the buildings, but let's take a step forward in the next video and let's go and have a look at the sky and some finishing touches for our illustration.
7. Pt 6 Sky and Clouds: You don't have to do any of this in order. If you're ready for a bit of a break from making windows for buildings, you may want to go ahead and make your background. Let's go to the last palette. I've got a buildings layer, I'm going to lock that because I don't want to be able to touch it right now. We can always unlock it and continue to work on it later on. I'm going to need a layer for the background, so I'm just going to click on new layer and it's jumped to the very top. I'm just going to drag it down so it's underneath the buildings because the background needs to be behind the buildings. For clarity, I'm going to double-click on it and just call it background. I know I label a lot of my layers, but sometimes it's just really useful to have a reference point. We're going to add a rectangle the size of the background, 1920 by 1080, in my situation. Yours will be the size of your artboard. It's already filled with the gradient. If it was filled with a solid color, you're just going to click here on gradient, and we're actually going to fill it with a gradient. But let's go first and just align it to the artboard. I'm going to set the options to align to artboard, and then I'm going to click to center it on the artboard. Now let's go into the gradient panel because this is the gradient we've currently got, which is a light to dark gradient. Let's just turn it 90 degrees, and you can see that it's operating, pretty much, as a background. It's nice, but we just might want to add a bit of color to it. What we can do is, double-click on this end of the gradient and right now it's white. If I go to the hue saturation brightness, I can change the color of it. What we're doing is, we're changing the color of the white end of the gradient. This is the black end right now, this is the white end. So we're picking a color for the white end, and you can choose whatever you like. I like to use this one because it allows me to concentrate on a color for starters, and so, I'm going to go for my color. Then with the brightness, you can actually dial it down a little bit. With the saturation, you can lighten up the saturation, so you're getting more of a gray-blue than a blue. But being able to target the hue, first of all, just gives you a little bit of a choice of the actual color that you want to see. I'm pretty happy with that. If you want to add another color, you can do so. I'm actually going to click on this color because this is the color I want to add. I'm just going to click here, so I'm adding it in a second time. It's not actually changing the gradient much but what I wanted to do is, get to this end and I want to add a yellow. I want to suggest city lights. I'm going to add a really bright yellow orange to this, so a nice bright orange. We're not seeing that right now, but we will if we start working on the gradient. The gradient's filling the entire rectangle, so right now the orange is pretty much down here. What I'm going to do is, pull this lighter blue up a little bit, and let's pull the yellow up a little bit and let's just see if we can start seeing it in the image. There we are, you're just starting to set in the background here. These are the main colors, so this is our orange, this is our blue here, and this is our black. At the top here, is the meet point for the transition between orange and blue. What I'm doing is, I'm pushing the meet point a little bit closer to blue. So, I'm getting the hint of this yellow orange in the horizon. If I took it further away, then it's all going to disappear. I'm just crafting my gradient to suit the image that I've got here. What I've got is mainly black sky and the transition to the light blue is happening very steeply and so, we're getting lots of black sky and then just this hint of light blue. But again, we can pull these over a little bit if we want a bit more of the yellow. We can soften even the transition between these, just depending on the effect that you want. This is a really good exercise for fiddling around with gradients and just getting a real feel for creating awesome gradients. I think this might be a little bit too light, so I'm going to double-click on it and I'm just going to go to my hue saturation brightness just because that's a better slider to use for this. I'm just going to darken off my blue a little bit, I just don't want it quite so light. There is the sky. Let's go and get that inside the background layer and let's lock that down because I want to add some clouds. For my clouds, I'm going to do my typical cloud which is four circles. I'm going to hold the shift key down as I drag out a big-ish circle, not worried about what it's filled with right now. Then I'm going to drag out a next big circle, and I'm going to position it over one end of the cloud. Then I'm going to drag out a next bigger size circle, not quite as big as the one before, and place it on the opposite side. Then let's go and create the smallest one, again, a circle and put it just between these two, and there is a typical cloud. I'm going to grab all of these shapes, I'm going to the pathfinder, and we're just going to group them together. Now we have to find something to fill them with, so let's for now, go and fill them with a single color. At this point I just want to have a look at my cloud, I'm just going to move it into position. I'm going to duplicate it as well, and I want to put a couple over here. I want to flip this one, so I'll choose object transform reflect, and I'm going to reflect vertical. Let's click "Okay". I might do a second one, so I'm just going to size them a little bit, change their sizes just a little bit. But I really want them to look like fairly stylized clouds, because this is a stylized illustration. I'm not worried about the fact that I've only got one style of cloud. In fact, I think the entire effect's probably going to be better for it. Now I've got my clouds, let's look at how we're going to fill them. I think a gradient fill would work well here, so I'm just going to click on the gradient tool and let's just go and put in the default gradient so that we have something to work with. I'm going to double-click on this end and I'm going to use a blue-gray for this. Again, I'm going into my blues and deciding what sort of a blue I want and then just adjusting out the color of it. Now let's go to the black end, and I'm thinking maybe I'm going to add a little bit of yellow into this. Let's go to hue saturation brightness, let's bump up the saturation and brightness to neutral level so that we can go and get our orange. Now, let's go and tweak that. I want it to be mainly black, but just with a slight hint of the sun coming through here. Just being caught in the cloud. We've got a 100 percent opacity on each end of this gradient. It might be nice if we just wound this down to about 90 percent, so the clouds will be partially transparent. Which means one cloud is going to impact the other clouds. Let's just take this down to 90 percent and just see how that's going to look. We want to make it radial, so I'm just going to click on the radial gradient. Let's go to the gradient tool and let's, I think, reverse this gradient, because I want the lighter end to be the middle of the gradient. Let's have a look and see what it looks like, so let's call that good for that cloud. Let's go and get this cloud and use the same gradient in it. We'll just need to apply the gradient manually using the gradient tool to make sure that we get it in the place that we want. Let's go and get this cloud, eye dropper, go and get the gradient. It's just centered on the object, so now we have to go to the gradient tool to actually find the position that we want for our gradient. Let's go and do the last one. We've got very stylized clouds in this illustration. If you don't want them to be a 100 percent opaque, you can actually dial down the opacity on the clouds themselves so that they, again, are going to interact with each other a little bit. They'll also interact with the background, so that's another possibility for this.
8. Final Tips, Project, and Wrap Up: Now this is my completed Nighttime Cityscape. Before we wrap up this class, there are just a couple of things that I want to show you because these were really helpful to me when I finished this illustration. One of them is being able to say what it is you want to work on. I'm going to say, let's have a look at this building here because I want to work on it. Well, when I select this building, you can see immediately the lab that it's on in the Layers palette. If I hold the Alt key on a PC, the Option key on a Mac, as I click on this eyeball icon here, look what happens. Every other one of these layers is turned off. Its visibility is disabled so we can't see it and so we have the ability to concentrate on the one we're working on. Now at the same time, you can also Alt or Option click on the lock icon. Well, at least the spot where the lock icon would be if you're able to select it for this particular lab. But because we're holding Alt or option, what we're doing is we're turning the lock on on everything else except the area that we're working. Now we can happily go ahead and work on this particular building to the exclusion of everything else. Now if we want to undo that, all we're going to do is come back here to the layer level. We're going to Alt, click on the lock icon position and that unlocks everything else. Then we'll Alt or Option click here on the visibility icon and everything else comes back. Knowing that you can Alt click on the visibility icon and/or the lock icon might give you a better control over the image as you're working. Just a refresher, just make sure that you're aware that the group selection tool will allow you to select an object within a group. Even though these objects are all embedded inside groups with this tool, I can just click on any one of these objects. That was really helpful in terms of changing the building lights and getting some variety in those lights. For these smaller lights here, I just created small rectangles to go over the top of this really long strips. But everything else was pretty much just a case of selecting something that we have already created or that was created using the techniques that I've taught in this class and then just making changes to it. Your project for this class is going to be to create your own Nighttime Cityscape, draw your buildings, add some elements to them so that you're practicing working with the transform tools and with some of the Pathfinder tools and then add a background, some clouds and maybe some foreground detail. Post an image of your completed project or even if you want to post it halfway through project, that's fine too. This is a big illustration so I really hope that you have fun with it and you get a chance to hone your skills for working in Illustrator. Now 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 enjoyed the class and learned things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations will help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now 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™
