Efeito de tubulação no Adobe Illustrator — um curso Graphic Design for Lunch™

1. Piping Effect in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, create a piping effect in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that take a range of tips and techniques, for creating designs, and for working in applications, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, I'll show you how to create a wonderfully fun piping effect in Illustrator. Now this project makes use of a range of interesting illustrated tools and techniques. Everything from 3D effects to blends, and from brushes to scripts. There's a lot to learn along the way as you make this fun piped text. Now that I've hopefully tempted you with what we're about to create, let's get started. 2. Pt 1 Make the Blend: To get started with our pipe texts effect, we're going to create a brand new document. I'll choose "File" and then "New." My document will be 1920 by 1080 pixels. Doesn't have to be an enormous document because we are creating vectors. The basis for the pipe text effect is going to be a blend made from a star. So I'm going to select the Star Tool and I'm going to click once in the document. Now you probably have very little idea as to what the settings are going to give you in terms of a star. For this project, you need to know what that is. So I'm going to click "OK." We're going to investigate what a radius one of 25 and a radius two of 50 gives us in terms of a star. Well, radius 1 being 25 and radius 2 being 50, the number 25 is half of the number 50. So that's giving us a hint. So what we're seeing is the distance between the outside points and the inside points is roughly the same as the distance from the inside points to the middle of the star. So we've got a distance A and then another distance A. That's not the style of star that we need for this pipe text effect. In fact, we need the inside points to be much closer to the outside points. So with that information in Hamlet's, delete that star, and let's go and create another one. In this case, to bring the inside points closer to the outside points, I'm going to increase the radius one and I'm going to set it to 35. So there's less distance between the outside points and the inside points, and more distance between the inside points in the middle of the star. That's basically what was set up there. I want my star to have 12 points. I'll click "OK." So that's giving us a star that's going to be much more appropriate for use as our piping shape. Now we want this shape to have a fill and it must not have a stroke that's really critical. Otherwise your blend isn't going to work the way it should. So no stroke and a fill. So with the shape selected, I'm going to switch the fill and the stroke. So I've got a black star now with a white stroke. Well, I'm going to click on the stroke and I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to focus on the fill. Now for the fill, I want to use a gradient. So with the star selective, I'll come across here to the swatches panel. I want to source a gradient from the gradient collection. So I'll go to Swatch Libraries menu and I'll go to gradients. There's a pretty good set of gradients in their pastels. So, I'll click that because they have gradients that lend themselves to icing if you like. So I'm going to click here on the red radial gradient and unclose that panel up. I need to tweak this gradient. So I'll go over to the gradient tool and let's have a look and see how we tweak the gradient. Well, we only want to stop somewhere to light and a dark. So I'm going to drag this stop right off the gradient. Then I'm going to drag the gradient slider this little point above it, all the way to the right well as far as I can get it to the right. What that's doing is it's pushing this darker color here into just the points area of the star. So the lighter color is starting pretty much in the area of the inside points. But I also think this color could be darker. So I'll double click on it. When you're trying to select something that's a slightly darker color on a gradient, the easiest way is to double click on the color and then go to the HSB or the hue saturation brightness adjusters. So I'm going to click here and go to HSB. Now I can add my color a little bit more saturated and perhaps if I wanted to, a little bit darker. So there's my gradient and I think it's looking pretty good, I'll close this panel. But I also want to save that color that I just use. I'm going to click away from my star because you can see the color that I just used is just sitting here. So I'm going to click on it to make it live if you like. I'm going to the swatches panel and I'm going to click here on new swatch. That will just added as a swatch and I'm going to set it to a global color. So I've saved that pink away just in case I needed, and I probably will need it. So let's go and take this star up and we'll put it in the top part of the document. I'll hold the Alt or Option key if I was using a Mac and drag a duplicate star out of the way. I'm going to line these up using those smart guides that doesn't have to be lined up, but I like things to be neat. So now we'll make our blend. To do that, we'll select over both stars. I'll choose "Object" Then "Blend" and "Make". You will see something at this point. It may be different to what I'm saying. But don't worry because as long as you've got a something, as long as things changed a bit, then you've got exactly what you need for now. 3. Pt 2 Test the Blend: At this point, now that we've created our blend, it's probably a good idea just to see how it's going to work. I'm going to the pencil tool and I'm just going to draw a fairly simple, fairly smooth line. I'm going to make a duplicate of my blend so that I've got a spare. I'll hold down the "Alt" key on a PC that would be option on a Mac, as I drag a duplicate away. Here is my line. Let's just give it some color so that we can see it. I've got my line and I've got my blend. I'll select both of them, the blend and the line. I'll choose "Object" and then "Blend," and I'll use "Replace Spine" because this is what's called a spine and this is my blend. What's going to happen is that the straight line spine that is currently being used by my blend is going to be replaced by this curvy spine. My blend is now appearing along my line. But of course, it's just a few shapes that's not nearly enough to look like a pipe defect. Well, to make it look more like a pipe defect with it selected, I'm going to double-click on the "Blend" tool here to get access to the blend options. I'll turn preview on so I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to choose specified steps. Now the number of steps that you can use maxes out on the most recent versions of Illustrator at 1,000. Let's try something like about 750 for this particular line and I'll click "Okay." We now get this sort of piping look. You can see the variation of colors in the line. Now we're going to use this look to create our piped text. Now I don't need this any longer. It was just there for test purposes. I'm going to select it and delete it. We're going to look next at creating the text for the word piping or whatever other text you want to use. 4. Pt 3 Create the Text Line: To create the pipe text effect, you're going to need to create a line art piece of text. Now if you're not confident at doing that, what I suggest you do is find a font that you can borrow from. Now there's a really excellent font available at 1001 fonts, and I'm going to give you the link to download it. I went looking for handwriting fonts and the selection wasn't particularly good until I got to this particular font, which is called pecita. Now there are a couple of things about this font. One is that it's a really nice font for this effect and also it's available free for commercial use. So I always like fonts that I can use free for commercial purposes. So you're going to click to download the font and then you're going to install it and then you'll go back to illustrator. Now at this point I suggest you create another file, so I'll choose File and then New, and I'm going to make another document the exact same size as the one I created previously. I'll click on the text object, click in the document. I'm going to set my text to much larger than it is, something like 200 points and then I'll go and select my typeface. So I'm typing the letters p-e and that's picking up pecita. So now I've got my font, I'll start typing. So I'm just going to type the word piping and then I'll select it and make it considerably larger. At this point, you've got a couple of choices. If you're pretty confident in your ability to use the pen tool, you can go ahead and just create a pen path which follows along these lines. I'm going to do that right now and just show you how it's done. But if you don't want to do that, skip forward to the next video because in that video I'm going to show you an alternative. It's not quite as good, but it does work just fine. So if you're confident with the pen tool, this is what I suggest you do. Firstly, select over your text and just drop down its opacity because we want to be able to see what we're doing. So I'm going to take the opacity of this down to about 15 percent, and I'm also going to lockdown my texts so it doesn't move. So I'll open up the layers panel, locate the text and just lock that. I'm not locking the layer, I'm just locking the paste of text. Now I'll choose a color to work with, so I'm going to flip the stroke and fill. I'll double-click the stroke and just choose a color like red, something I'm going to see clearly over the background. I'll zoom in. I'll go to the pen tool and start working. So I'm going to start approximately at the bottom of the letter p, and I'll click and drag up towards the top left of the document. When you're using the pen tool you want to avoid, if you can, putting an anchor point on a bend. You want to go past the bend and put the anchor point there. So I'm going to put mine over about here. I'll click and drag and just make that curve shape. Down here I'm going to click and drag to put another anchor here again, just beyond the band. I'll click and drag here just to finish off the letter. I do want to give it a little bit of shape at the end, so I won't just click, I'll click and drag. Then to finish off so that I'm not attached to the pen tool any longer. I'll press escape. Then I'm going to look at the rest of the letters. Now I know that I'm going to have a few problems here, so I'm going to make this distance a little bit wider than it is in the original font. So let's click here, click and drag, I'm going to come over here just past the bend and make that shape. I'm going to come up here, but you can see that already my line isn't going to fit. So if I hold down the Alt or the option key and just dragging on that handle, I'm going to get the line to fit better. So I'll click and drag again to make that curve but I don't want to drag a really long way because I am going to buckle our line when I do, you can say it's buckling. I also want to turn this handle around so I'm still got my finger on the left mouse button. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key, that will be option on Mac, and just swing this handle round. So now I'm heading in the opposite direction. I'll let go the mouse and then let go of the Alt key. I'm going to come all the way down to the bottom here, and again, click and drag. Again, hold the Alt option key as I swing the handle around because I want to head back in the opposite direction. As I said, I'm going to make this a little bit of a wider V than it was on the original font. I'll come up here and make this curve, and I'm going to swing all the way around to the end of the curve here. We could probably even do here, but I think I'll be safe and just do it to here and just make that curve. Now you can see that I've not made a particularly good job of it, that's fine we can fix that up in a minute. If I want to adjust this handle as I go, I'll hold the Alt key on a pc, option on a Mac, and I can just bring it in and make it shorter and that will get me around that corner. I'll click and drag hold Alt or option so that I can head in the opposite direction. I'll make it all the way up to the top of the eye, so I'll just click and drag to make that curve. Again, Alt option, so I can head back down in the opposite direction, just beyond the curve. I think the tail end of this handle is going to be too long. So at this point I'll hold the Alt option case so I can shorten it, but still try and leave this in a straight line so that the two handles form a tangent to the line. We're going to go up here and let's see if we can get all the way around this corner with this curve. Again, Alt or option maybe just to shorten this line a little bit, then come around the curve. Again, alt or option to shorten the leading handle a little bit and make it round the corner. Now at this stage, I'm running out of space a little bit so I'll hold the space bar down, and that allows me to move everything across. As soon as I let go of the spacebar, the pen tool comes back. This handle is a bit long, hold Alt option to just shorten it. Again, I'll shorten the leading handle and again, shorten this leading handle. This doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to get basically the shapes in place. Using a font like this just allows you to focus on using the pen tool rather than having to draw the lines at the same time, think about where the lines are going to go, I'll press escape because I'm going to finish up. If there are some points you need to change, go to the direct selection tool, which is the white arrow tool, and just adjust the points you can get access to the handles for those individual points. I think there are a couple that I want to alter a little bit. You'll find that you get the smoothest lines when you have the handles for an anchor point as a tangent to that line so that they're smooth along the line. That way you won't get any bends in it. This one is not very good at all. So I'm going to make the handles a little bit longer and just make sure that they are at a nice tangent to the line. This one's a bit sad too. Once you split a set of handles, they're not going to work with that teeter totter affect any longer so you're going to have to manage how they interact with the line manually. So you'll have to make sure that each side of the anchor point, the handles are roughly tangent to that line. That's looking pretty good. You can test your line by turning the visibility off on the text layer and just check to make sure that your text looks okay. I think this is looking pretty good. The one thing that I do want to do is to just mark the spot that I'm going to use for the dots on the eye. For this you could use something like the blob brush. So I'll go to the blob brush tool. It's just set to a really small dot here and I'm just going to click where those dots are going. Now we're not actually going to use the blob brush to make the dots, but I just want to mark where they are. So having done this and now that we've actually got the type, we can pick that up and take that back to our other document. So what I'll do is select either everything in the document, because I've locked down the actual text. If I select over everything, I'm going to select everything that I created and not the text itself. I'll copy it with Control or Command C. I'll go back to my document and I'll paste it in with Control or Command V. Now if you're not happy doing those pen lines, in the next video, I'm going to show you a method for extracting a line from a piece of type. 5. Pt 4 Trace to Create the Text Line: If you're not happy with creating your own line, let's see how we're going to get somebody else to do the work. I'm going to lock down all of my pen work and just turn it off. I'm going to unlock this piping word that I created using that font, and I'm going to increase the opacity back to a 100 percent. I want to be able to see my text really clearly, we'll take this text to an online sites. So first of all, I'm going to choose file and then export, and then save for Web Legacy. I want this to be a ping 24 image, because that's going to give me a transparent background. I'll just select that and click save. I'm going to put it on my desktop, just because that's a nice, easy place to locate it, so I'll click my desktop, and I'm just going to call this piping. Now let's head to the web, and I'm going to give you a link to this particular site. It's; onlinerapidre-sizer.com/tracer PHP, and when you get here, you're just going to click on upload a file to trace. I'm going to grab my Word which is on my desktop, so let me just go and locate my desktop, and here is my Types, so I'll click it and click Open. It's now uploaded to the site and what I want is a Centerline Trace, so I'm going to click on Centerline, and this is the Trace that you're going to get now it's not great, but it will do for the purpose. You might be able to get some mileage by adjusting the sharpness, but it's doubtful because this was pretty clear type in the first place. I'm going to select to download it as an AI file, so I'll click AI and I'll click Download. This is going to be downloaded to your downloads folder, so you will go and locate it in your downloads folder and open it in Illustrator. When you open the file that you've just traced in Illustrator, this is what you're going to say, just the word somewhere loose on the document. What I suggest you do, is you select it with the selection tool, and then you press Control or Command X, and that will just delete it. Then press Control or Command zero, so you can find your art board which has just gone walk about a bit, and then paste it back in with Control or Command V, and that puts your text, your line back in the art board. Now you can see where I'm seeing that this is not perfect, there's some little loose lines here and there. The letter G doesn't look particularly good, but you know what, for the purposes of what we're doing, this would be just fine. But let's see what it is that we're actually got here, because it's not exactly what we want. Let's open up the last panel, if we have a look in the last panel, we're going to see what that site gave us. What it's given us is what's called a compound path. Now what we have to do, is release this compound paths, so you are going to select your compound path, and you'll choose object compound path release, and that just releases into the various pieces that go together to make up the text. That's all you need to do at this point and you've got all the elements that you need to create your piping effect. Now the last thing that you need to do, of course, is to take this into your main document, so you will select everything, press Control or Command C to copy it, go back to the document that has your blend in it and paste it in with Control or Command V. Now, I'm just going to move it out of the way for now, but just be aware that I've got both pieces of text in here, we're going to have a look and see, how you would use this text. I'm going to do most of the work on the one that I have actually traced. 6. Pt 5 Apply the Piping to the Text: Now, it's time to put our blend on our piping text. I've cleaned up my file a little bit. I just want to show you what I've done. I've created a brand new laugh for the element that we created online. Inside that layer, I've got the text and also a copy of the blend. I've locked it down and I've turned it off, so we're not even seeing it. We're going to come back to that in a minute, but we're going to focus on applying our blend to this actual element that we created by hand. So just being clear about where everything is right now. Now, one of the problems with a blend is that you can only use up to 1,000 shapes. Well, that's going to be fine to get around the letter P. It's not going to cover the whole of this word. There's just way too much happening here that we're going to lose the effect. We're going to get jagged edges, if we try and apply our blend to the whole thing. So what we're going to do is cut this up a little bit. So I'm going to the scissors tool, the shears in the toolbar position with the eraser tool. I'm just going to locate some places where it makes sense to cut this. So I'm thinking that if I cut it here at the tip of the P, that would be good. So I'm going to hover over that anchor point and just click once to cut that in two. I'm also looking for another spot where I can cut it. I'm thinking probably just before the letter G will be fine. So I'll click on that anchor point too. So let's just breaking my line up into a few pieces. So let me just select what I've got here. I've got the letter I and the letter P. Then. I've got I, N, and then I've got the letter G as a separate character. So that's going to allow me to get a better blend result. For each of these elements, I need a copy of the blend, so I'm going to alter, option, drag, a duplicate of the blend away. As nice as that might be to think that you could apply the blend to every single one of these lines in one step, unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. You have to apply the blend to each line individually, which means we've got quite a bit of work to do. So the sensible thing to do would be to speed it up with an action. So what I'm going to do first of all is just show you the process and then we'll create our action. So the process is going to be selecting the blend and then selecting a line, whatever line that happens to be. We're going to choose object, and then blend, and will choose replace spine. We will put the blend on that spine. Then, we're going to double-click the blend tool. We're going to set it to specified shape, and we're going to crank the number of steps up to 1,000 and click "Okay". That's a smarter way of doing it because it ensures that it's actually going to work and not bog your version of Illustrator down. So having done that, let's see how we would create an action to do it. But beforehand, we need to set everything up, so we're going to alter, option, drag, a duplicate of our blend and we're going to select our lines. I'll shift click on the line I'm going to apply the blend too. Now, I'll go to the actions palette. I'll choose window and then actions. Now, the only actions I've got here right now are the actions that are shipped with illustrated, the default actions. So I'm going to add my own set by clicking here on "Create New Set". I'm going to call this Helen's. Click, "Okay". Now, I want a brand new action for what I'm about to do. So I'll click "Create New Action" and we're going to call this apply blend and increase steps. Now that I've got its name, I'll just click on "Record". What I need to be careful about is that from now on, everything I do is being recorded. So I am going to step through those exact same steps as I did previously, object, blend, replace spine. Double-click on the blend tool, set it to specified steps. Type 1,000 as a number of steps and click "Okay". Now that I'm done with everything I want to be recorded in my actual click down here at the bottom of the actions palette, stop playing recording, and that has recorded that as an action and I can play it back and use it as often as I like. So now let's do that. Let's go and use that action. I'll Alt or option drag a duplicate of the blend. I'll select the blend and the element of line that I want to apply the blend to. Now, it doesn't matter what order you select these in so you can go backwards if you like, and select the line, and then the blend. It doesn't matter. I'm going to click on the action and before I run it, I'm going to turn this off. What this is, it's about to show me the dialogue as we progress through. I don't really want to see the dialogue, that's just going to be a waste of time. It's going to be confusing. So I'm going to disable the dialogue and then just play the action straight through. In other words, saying to Illustrator, "Don't bother showing me the dialogue, just use the settings that I used when I saw it last". So I'll click here on "Play Current Selection", and that just plays the action. Of course, that applies the blend to the line. Alter, option, drag my blend away, select My Blend, and by line run my action. Now at this point, you can say that things are not perhaps as well ordered as they could be. I'm thinking the letters I, N could be in front of the letter P. So I can choose object, arrange, bring to front, that will bring them in front of the letter P. The letter G, probably, it's better if it was in front of everything as well, so I'll bring it to the front. You can also experiment with reversing your spine. So you could take a spine like this one here on the I-N and reverse with object blend, reverse spine. Just see if that gives you a better looking piece of text now. I like that. In that case, this letter P needs to come forward. I'm going to select both these elements here and just bring them to the front object arrange, bring to front. So you can experiment to see what is going to look best for what it is that you're trying to create. I'm not actually sure that I like that result, so I'm just going to undo it. I like that better. Well, for now anyway. So that's how we apply our piping effect to the type that we traced. But in the next video, let's have a look and see how we do that to the element that we were able to download that was already traced online. 7. Pt 6 Apply the Piping to the Traced Text: The tryst element that we downloaded from online, we've already gone ahead and expanded it out of the compound path but the result is that we've got a group of objects. We're going to need to ungroup that group of objects. I'll select the group and then choose object ungroup because we won't be able to apply the blend within the group. We're going to have to apply the blend to individual elements. We're going to do exactly the same as we did with the type that we had created ourselves. Only this time we've already got action created so things are going to be a little quicker. I'll choose "Window" and then "Actions". Let's go and run out action. For each of these line elements, we're just going to create a blend or drag away a duplicate of the blend, grab our line, and then run our action. Now we're left with a few paces over. There's a little line in here, you can see it there and there's a little piece in here and another one here. We can probably get away without these two. We might want this one here. Let's just go and create a blend for that. We don't need such a big blend, we don't need 1000 shapes for this particular blend. But I'm going to run the action first and with this still selected, I'm going to double click on the ''Blend" tool and just reduce the number of steps to about 250 for this very small shape. I'm going to try reversing the spine on this one and just see if it looks any better. I think that's better there with this little tail off to the end. But again, you may decide that you don't even need that, so you could remove it and just leave this as the tail of the g. I'm going to get rid of these little lines in here because I don't think that they're helping the design at all at this point. But we do have one here that we need to do, the tail of the p. Let's just do that. If something doesn't look as good as you think it should, try reversing the spine and see if that gives you better results. There is the piped result for the text that we created online. Not as good a quality as the one we created ourselves, but still acceptable. 8. Pt 7 Create the Tips: From now on, through this class, I'm going to be focusing on just one of these type elements because everything we're doing is going to relate as much to the type that I created by hand, as it would to the type that we created online. I have the type that I created by hand, and the things that I need to do now are to dot the I's and I need to finish off these strokes. We're going to concentrate firstly on finishing off these strokes. I'm going to target the letter P, and I need to find it in the layers palette. I'm going to press the F7 to bring up my layers palette, and here is the blend that is my letter P. I'm going to open up this blend because here inside the blend there's a path, and then there's the start and stop shapes. I need to determine which of these shapes is the one down here. I think it's going to be this one here which it is. I've located it, and I have it selected, and nothing else inside this blend or indeed inside this document is selected. What I'm going to do is drag and drop this on the new icon down here. That makes an extra copy of this shape. I'm going to drag it out of the blend, because it shouldn't have been there in the first place. Here is this spare shape. Now I need another copy of it as well, so I'm going to drag and drop it back onto the new icon, and these are going to be the elements that I'm going to use at the end of this design. First of all, I'm going to turn one of these duplicates off, and I'm going to select the other duplicate. Effectively, I got a star sitting right on top of the original star, which is part of the blend and that's there for a really good reason. I want this star to start off being in the exact same place as the star for the blend. Now the way that we create this little pot tips is using a 3D effect. I'm going to choose Effect, 3D, and then Extrude and Bevel. From the Position, I'm going to choose Front, so it's going to be facing us. I'm going to turn Preview on. Now you'll see a warning here that gradients are going to be rasterized. What's going to happen is we're actually going to lose our gradient, and we're also going to lose our color, but I have a method for getting some color back in a minute. From the bevel drop-down list, we're going to choose Complex 4. You'll see here now that you have a height setting. What you're going to do is click in here and you're going to start increasing the height. I'm going to take mine up 10 at a time, so I'm up to 20, and now I'm going to start slowing down, because there's a sweet point for this height. For me right now that's 24. If I go too far, you'll see that things start breaking up. It's critical to get the exact right value, and for me, it appears that it's going to be something like 24. Then I get that pointy tip that I'm looking for. Of course it's grayscale, but we knew that we were going to have that. I'm just going to click OK. Now this is the end of my pipe shape, but it's also something that I could use for the tops of the letters I. I'm going to do that in just a minute. I'm going to turn on the spare copy of this shape that I had, I'm going to target it. Now if you remember very early on, we saved the color pink that we used in our gradient. I'm going to the Swatches palette, and I'm going to fill this shape here, the second star, the one on top, with the solid color pink that we saved when we created our gradient. Having done that, I'm going to go to the Appearance panel. Now you can get to that by choosing Window and then Appearance. We're going down here to the Opacity setting for the entire shape. There's an opacity setting for the stroke, and there's one for the fill, and we're going to the one for the entire shape. We're going to drop down this panel here, and choose Overlay as our blend mode. What that does is it blends a solid color shape in with the shape underneath. Having done that, we could now create these two objects as a group. I'm going to select both of them, and choose Object, Group. Then I'm going to make a duplicate, and another duplicate. Because I'm going to leave one in the position here, but the other two, I'm going to use as the dots on the letter I. I can get rid of these big dots here that I just created as placeholders, because I don't need them any longer. I'll select both of these and just press Delete. Now, I'm going to have to do that same process with each of these elements here. You want to build them up by hand simply because that will make sure that the star is in the exact right position. Otherwise, it can be difficult to line everything up. I'm selecting this shape here, I'm going to open up my blend, I'm going to locate this star here which I think is this one which it is. I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'm going to drag this duplicate out of the blend, because it shouldn't even be in there. I'm going to make a second copy of it. I'm going to turn the topmost one off, and I'm going to focus on the underneath one because this is the one I'm going to apply the 3D effect to. Effect, 3D, Extrude and Bevel. Turn Preview on, and you're going to select Front. Then you'll select Complex 4, this is exactly what we did previously. I'm assuming probably that 24 is going to work perfectly which it does, so I'll just type that and click OK. Then I'll turn Visibility on for the topmost shape, I'll target it and fill it with my pink color. Then I'll select the Appearance panel and set its Opacity blend mode here to overlay. Then we'll just do that with the final shape. 9. Pt 8 Adjust the Contrast of the Tips: Now, depending on the color that you chose for the gradient that you're using for your piping, you might find as I'm finding, that these little dots on the end of the type and the ones that we used for the letter I, are lacking a little bit in contrast. The darks in this shape don't really match the darks in the piping. I'm going to show you how to fix that if that's a problem that you encounter. First of all, we're going back to the last pallet. Then I'm going to locate one of these grayscale objects and they're going to be really obvious because they are going to look grayscale in the layers palette and I've got this one selected here. For this shape, I'm going back to the appearance panel so you choose window and then appearance. I'm going to click here on 3D, extrude and bevel. That's really important that you edit the existing 3D extrusion and you don't go and apply a new one by choosing effect and 3D. It's critical that you edit the one you've already got. I'm going to click here and that opens this dialogue. I'm going to turn preview on so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to open up more options. I'm sticking with my plastic shading surface. But what I'm going to do is to decrease my ambient light. I'm going to come here and decrease this too, maybe about 40 percent and you'll see that as I decrease it, it's becoming more contrasty. So I'm just looking for a sweet spot here. In fact, I think I'm going to take it down to about 35 percent, but you can experiment with what value you want to use and that's matching this up a whole lot better with the piping effect. I'll just click Okay. Then I'm going to go and do that for every single other one of the shapes. Let's just go and select this one. It's really clear to me which ones haven't been adjusted, this one looks a whole more contrasty and this one not nearly as contrasty. Go to the appearance panel, 3D extrude and bevel, you'll find that the dialog opens up properly for you this time so you can see exactly what you want to adjust. Will turn preview on, I'm going to take ambient light for me down to 35 percent and click Okay. Now I think some of the others that I need to adjust are actually inside groups, here's one of them. There is the last one. While I'm here, I'm going to put these in a group together just so that they travel together. There is another set here that needs to be put in a group. Adjusting the contrast just gives us a slightly better result on these little piped tips. 10. Pt 9 Create the Sprinkles: Now the last major thing that we need to do with this design is add some sprinkles. I'm going to start by making a sprinkles brush, and to do this I'm going to reset my fill and stroke colors by just clicking here on Default stroke and fill. Now I wanted to have a fill but no strokes, I'm going to fill it with black and choose no stroke. Here is my rounded rectangle. I'm just going to drag out a very small rounded rectangle. Now I've had some problems with this inheriting the overlay blend mode that we used on the star-shaped. Before you go any further, I suggest that in cases is going to happen to you, you select your shape and you go to the appearance panel and you just make sure that the opacity is set to default and it doesn't say, overlay. Now this is fine. It's working just perfectly. With my rounded rectangle selected, I'm going to open up my brushes palette. If you don't see your brushes palette, choose Window and then brushes. I'm going to click here on New brush. I'm going to make a scatter brush. I'll click okay. At this point, I'm just going to click okay again, and I'm going to delete this shapes, I'll just select it and delete it. Going to my brush tool, that's my paintbrush make sure that my scatter brush is selective and I'm just going to test paint it. Well, that doesn't look at all like sprinkles, so we have some work to do. I'm going to double-click on the brush. The reason why we didn't set it up previously is we didn't have anything to look at. I like to set up my scatter brushes, just add the brush shape, then draw a line and then come back and fix it up because you've got something to look at to see if it's working or not. For the size, I'm going to reduce the size it's way too big. I'm thinking probably something like about 50 percent will be a better size. I'm going to set spacing, scatter and rotation all to random. Now scatter is going to move the shapes either side of the basic brush line. I'm going to drop it to about minus 10 on one side or minus 20, and then take it up a little bit more on the other side. It's just moving the shapes away from the lines. Now, if I think that's not enough, I'll add a bit more later on. For rotation, we want to rotate the shapes around, so let's increase it so that they're rotating around. You could try and negative direction rotation as well. I want mine to look like they're going in the same direction, but with some variety. I think that's a pretty good setting. I might reduce the spacing a little bit to have them a bit closer to each other and if I want the spacing to be random, then I'm going to adjust the second spacing value. It's going to be somewhere between 82 and 92 percent. This is basically what my scatter brushes looking like now, and if it's not what I want, then I can continue to work on it until I get what I do want. I think I need a bit more scatter and perhaps a little less spacing. When I'm happy with the result, I'll just click, okay. I'm going to select apply to strokes, but it doesn't really matter what you select because we're not going to use that particular stroke anyway. So I'm going to select it and delete it. Let's go to the last palette because I would like to put my scatter effect on a new layer. I'm going to click to add a brand new layer and target this layer. Let's go to the brush tool and let's brush on some sprinkles. I'm not worried that a few of these sprinkles are going over the edge because I can fix that up in a minute. If things are scattering too much, you might want to go back and fix up your sprinkles brush or you can simply undo the line that you've created and try again. I think I've probably got a bit too much scatter on this brush, but not going to worry too much about it because we have some other work to do with the brush and we're going to be able to recover the situation pretty easily. Right now our sprinkles brush is black and we would prefer our sprinkles probably to be colored. We might also want to be able to move them. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to select everything that's on this layer and that's why we put all our sprinkles on a separate layer and we're going to expand them. So we'll choose, object and then expand appearance. We're going to keep an eye on what's happening in the last palette because that's going to be crucial to getting this thing to work. You'll see that every one of my little brush lines is now a group. I'm going to start un grouping things with object un group. I'm going to keep doing that until un group is no longer an option. You can see now that ungroup is not an option anymore. But if we have a look in the last palette, you'll see that for every single one of these sprinkles, we also have something that's called a no fill no stroke rectangle. If I select this alone, you can see it's got no fill and no stroke. Now, when you expand scatter brushes, you're always going to have this occur and it's always going to be a problem. Because if you select all the objects on this layer and say, for example, I want them to be pink sprinkles or actually purple. Let's make them purple. What happens is that we are losing our rounded edge sprinkles because what's happening is that there's a square edge rectangle here and the no fill no stroke rectangles are being filled with the exact same color as the actual elements, those round of rectangles that we created. I'm just going to undo that with, edit, undo. Here is our rounded rectangle, but for every rounded rectangle we also have a no fill no stroke rectangle. Little bit hard to see here, but it's really clear from the last palette. What we have to do, and you're going to do this every single time you expand a scatter brush and want to color the objects, you're going to have to get rid of these no fill no stroke rectangles, and there's lots of them. The easiest way to find and delete them is to select one of them and so I'm doing this in the last palette so I can see clearly that it's here. Then I'm going to select, and I'm going to choose same and I'm going to choose Fill Color. In other words, Let's select absolutely everything that has no fill. I'm just running through this and saying what's happening. Now I'm going to lock down my actual artwork just in case there is something that doesn't have a fill in my artwork and I know there is actually, so I know that I have to lock that down so I can't get access to it. All we're doing is selecting the no fill no stroke rectangles that are in this layer that is filled with air sprinkles. With them selected, I'll just press, Delete. And so now the only things that are left are these rounded rectangles and when I recolor them, they're re-coloring as rounded rectangles and may not got that square age. I'm just going to undo that for a minute. We've solved one problem. We can get rid of the excess by just selecting them and deleting them. If you don't want all the ones that are sort of round the edge, you can just grab hold of them. You can also use the Lasso tool to grab hold of them. I'm just going to clean up a few of them. You would go ahead and clean up any that you don't want. Now, as far as re-coloring the sprinkles, that's going to pose a challenge because there's likely to be a lot of them. What I suggest you do is use a script. In the next video, I'm going to show you where you can find, download and how to use the script. 11. Pt 10 Color the Sprinkles using a Script: To get access to a script that's going to help us recolor our sprinkles, we're going to this site online. I'm going to give you the download link. What you're going to do is go ahead and download this RandomSelect script. You'll click "Download." It's going to download as a ZIP file, so you're going to click it and choose Open. Now on a Mac, it's going to probably automatically expand for you as soon as you double-click on the file to open it. On a PC, you're going to have to extract the files yourself. I'll click "Extract All Files" and I'll just click "Extract." I'm going to extract everything. Then I'm going to choose the JavaScript files because they'll run on Macs and PCs. I'm going to double-click to open this, and this is the script file that I need. I'll right-click it to copy it to the clipboard and you would do the same on a Mac. Then you need to navigate to your folder. Now on a Mac, that's inside your Applications folder, you'll go and locate your version of Illustrator. On a PC, I'm going to have to go to My Computer. I'll go to Program Files and then I'll go to Adobe and then open up the corresponding folder for the version of Illustrator that I'm using. Here, I'm using Illustrator CC 2019. Let's just go and open that up. Now ignore this Scripting folder, that's not the one you want. You want Presets and then your English language and then I'm going to Scripts. I'm going to locate that file in this folder. Now, I've already put it in there, Random Select JSX, but you would just paste it in there. You're going to need to locate it in that similar folder on a Mac. Then you want to close and reopen Illustrator. But as I said, I've already installed mine, so I can get access to it. To run the script, first of all, I'm going to select one of these sprinkles. Then I'm going to use that to select all the sprinkles, so I'll choose Select and then Same, Fill Color. All my sprinkles are selected, nothing else is selected. I'll choose File and then Scripts and then I'll choose Random Select. What I'm asked to do at this point is to determine how big a percentage of my selected objects I want to leave selected. I'm going to color mine in five colors. The first value I'm going to type in here is 20 percent. I'll type 20 and click "OK." Now, 20 percent of these sprinkles are selected and 80 percent remain unselected. I'm going to select my first color which is going to be orange. I'll click away and then go and select a black sprinkle again. I'll choose Select, Same, Fill Color, and I'll re-run my script. This time, I'm going to type 25 percent because that's going to select the exact same number as I selected for the orange. There's a sequence to this numbering and I'm just giving you the sequence. Now, I'm going to make those green. I'm going back to select a black one, choose Select, Same, Fill Color, run my script again. This time, we'll use 33 and we'll choose a color, so I'm going to choose purple this time. I'm going to make it a little bit lighter. Go back and again, select the black one and then select all of them, run my script. This last value is going to be 50 percent. Then we'll apply a pink color this time. Then we have an equal number of sprinkles that are left black, so I'm just going to select those and just color them. Now all the sprinkles are colored. At this point, you can just go and individually move sprinkles, perhaps, into the shape or just position the way you want them to be. 12. Pt 11 Finishing Touches: To finish off this effect, I'm going to clean things up a little bit so I'm going to the layers palette. I'm going to grab all of the sprinkles that are on this layer or by themselves. I'm going to select the entire contents of that layer and choose the object group and that just puts the sprinkles in a group or by themselves. They could then go back down into the main layer. Just grab them and pull them into that layer, which gives me a layer I don't need anymore. I'm going to hide this blend because I don't need it any longer. But I tend to think that it's not a bad idea just to leave the blend there just in case you need it later on for any reason. I'm going to add a rectangle behind everything so going to the rectangle tool and I'll create a rectangle, 1920 by 1080 and I'm going to fill it with a gradient. At the moment it has a black to white, just the standard gradient. Going to position the rectangle over the artboard. If it doesn't go in the first time, just click to select align to artboard and then center it on the artboard. I'm going to adjust the gradient because I want a gradient that is from navy to purple, really really dark. I'm going to open up the gradient panel, I'm going to double-click on this one and set it to a really dark purple and I'm going to double-click on this end and make it a navy color. No, don't think either color is dark enough so I'm going to the color selector here. I'm going to select HSB because that will give me access to brightness and saturation. I'm just going to dull down the brightness on this color, so it's really dark and then we'll go to the one at the other end. I'm still HSB, so I'm going to wind down the purple so it also is very dark, but there is a very slight gradient there. Now my gradient is running at minus 90, so that's lighter at the top, darker at the bottom. The rectangle is above everything else. I need to move it behind everything else, so I'll select it and choose object, arrange, send to back, and then it appears behind the piping effect. I'm going to lock it down because I definitely don't want it to move. Now the only thing that you might consider as a very final effect, is to make these little pipe dots a little less regular. I'm going to select over this one, so I have it selected, and I'm going to choose effect and then warp and I'm going to choose twist. Now you could use twist or you could use in flight, but you get some value from these warp effects because they just going to do something to these little in paces that's going to throw them off being a 100 percent regular. They're going to have a little bit more character to them. Select one, choose effect, and then warp, and then choose something to warp with. I like twist, I just think that gives an interesting effect and you can adjust the horizontal and vertical amounts. You don't want it to be very much, but you do want it to be something if you just want this to look a little less regular. You could also do it for this end paces, but again with these, you don't want to move them too much because you don't want to move them away from there been lined up with the rest of the piping effect. 13. Project and Wrapup: We now have finished with the video portion of this class, and so now it's your turn to play with this piping effect. Create a word of your choice. You can use the word piping or you can use any other word of your choice and create your blend and apply it to your letters. Make your little ending bits, and make some sprinkles to add to your design. Post an image of your completed design as your class project. Now as you are watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you complete the online survey as this helps other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, then click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. Please, if you would like to leave a comment or a question, 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. 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.