Real Time Mirror Drawing in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Real Time Mirror Drawing in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, real-time mirror drawing in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at setting up a document so that we can do real-time mirror drawing. As we draw in one part of the document, everything is reflected automatically in the other side of the document. You're going to see how to set up a document and then use the document to create a mirror drawing. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave 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 setting up a document for real-time mirror drawing. 2. Pt 1 - Make the Shapes: We're going to start by creating a brand new document in Illustrator. Now, if you're familiar with watching my tutorials you know that I am really reluctant about telling you what size to make things, what colors to use and so on. I usually suggest what I'm using and say do whatever size you like, well, today is different. Today you're really going to want to set things up the same size as I'm using because we've got a lot of layers and shapes and things to be working with here and they need to be correct. So I'm setting my document to a 1000 pixels wide, 600 pixels tall, I'm using RGB color mode. That doesn't matter, the rest of the size does, I'll click "Okay". You're going to need your layers palette, so I'm going to bring my layers palette all the way out here. To help you see what's going on, I'm just going to make my row sizes just a little bit larger. So I'm going to create a rectangle, I'm going to a rectangle tool, I'm going to click once in the document, this first rectangle is going to be the size of 1000 by 600. I wanted to be no fill, no stroke. That's pretty important. So now, I'm going to the align panel and you can get to that by choosing window and then align, and make sure that align to is set to align to artboard. Now I'm just going to center this object on the artboard. It's also going to be valuable to you if you name these shapes. Again, very seldom do I bother naming shapes, this time, it's really important for understanding what's going on and for sorting out problems when they occur. So I've just called this shape artboard clipping shape. The next shape we're going to make again is a rectangle. This time it's going to be double the width and double the height. So that makes it 2000 by 1200 pixels. Click "Okay", and again we want it centered. Now this one, I like to give it a stroke, so I'm just going to give it a red stroke. We're not going to save that right now because it's way outside everything, but it can be helpful to give it a stroke. This is going to be called don't paint outside me. I'm trying to give them names that are going to be indicative of their place in this process. The next shape is again going to be a rectangle. This time it's going to be 500 pixels wide, so it's half the dimensions or half the width of this document but it's going to be the same height, so it's 600 tall, I'll click "Okay". Now this one here is going to be placed over this side of the artboard. You're going to click here on "Horizontal Align Left", and then "Vertical Align Top". It inherited the red board or the red stroke from the previous shapes. We're just going to turn the stroke off on this, and we're going to call this work area clip. We're going to need another shape the size of the artboard, so again a rectangle, 1000 pixels wide, 600 tall, we'll click "Okay". Again, we're going to center it on the artboard. This one's going to have a white fill, or you could give it a color fill if you wish because this is going to be your background. With this object selected in the last palette double-click on it and call it Background. We also need a guide. So to add our guide, we're going to choose view and then rulers, show rulers. You're going to drag a guide out of the ruler here on the left-hand side of the page, and you're just going to drop it in the middle. Up here, you want to make sure that its x value is set to 500. That means that it's in the very middle of the document. It doesn't matter what its y value is, it does matter what its x value is. It's just called guide in the last palette that's just fine. Now that we've got all the shapes that we need to prepare our document, we're going to go ahead in the next video and we're going to set this up. 3. Pt 2 - Create Layers and Clipping Masks: Now that we've got our shapes, we're going to need some more layers. I'm going to click here on Layer 1 and I'm going to click here on the "Create New Layer Icon", and I'm going to press that twice because I want Layer 2 and Layer 3. I'm going to bring Layer 2 down and drop it inside Layer 1 so it's a sub-layer of Layer 1. Then I'm going to bring Layer 3 down and I'm going to drop it right on top of Layer 2. Layer 3 becomes a sub-layer of Layer 2. We've got this stepping stone thing happening with Layer 1, then Layer 2, then Layer 3. Into Layer 3, you're going to pick up this Work Area Clips. You're going to drag and drop it onto Layer 3 so that when we open up Layer 3 using this little disclosure triangle, work area clip should be inside it. The guide is going there too. You're going to drag and drop the guide onto Layer 3 and it will appear in there as well. "Don't paint outside me" is going into Layer 2. You're going to pick it up and drop it right on top of Layer 2 so it appears above Layer 3 in the stack. You have an art board clipping shape here. It's going above Layer 2. We're just going to pick it up here and we're going to drop it onto Layer 1, which will place it immediately under Layer 1, but well outside of Layer 2. The background is going to stay where it is. It needs to be at the bottom of the stack because we're going to build our image on top of it, but it's just in Layer 1, it's not in Layer 2 and 3. We can prove that by closing up Layer 3. You can see that the background is still visible. If it were in Layer 3 by accident, it would've disappeared. In detail, when we close up Layer 2, background is still hanging around outside. It's in Layer 1 but not in any of these nested layers. Now, we're going to focus our attention on Layer 3, and I'm going to take the work area clip and put it immediately under Layer 3. It has to be the top-most thing inside Layer 3 and it also can't be selected. I'm going to the Selection tool. I'm just going to click away so that nothing here is selected at all. None of these little dots are selected. I'm going to just click on Layer 3. I'm not selecting Layer 3, I'm just clicking on it to target it. From this drop-down menu here, I'm going to choose "Make Clipping Mask." You know that your clipping mask is working because work area clip now has an underline underneath it. That tells you that there is a layer clipping mask. Now, a lot of people don't know that you can have layer clipping masks in Illustrator. Well, this is a layer clipping mask. I actually have a class on clipping masks that you might want to watch if you want to learn a little bit more about layer clipping masks. But for now, this is what we need. We need another one up here, so I'm going to target Layer 1. This art board clipping shape is going to become a clipping mask for Layer 1. Again, I'm going to click the drop down menu and choose "Make Clipping Mask." The result of that is that art board clipping shape now has an underline underneath it telling us that it is a clipping mask for the whole of Layer 1. The good thing is, that if you've got this far and if your layer palette looks like mine, you're pretty near done with the organization. The last thing that we need to do is to put in our reflection. I'm going here into Layer 3. I'm going to target Layer 3. I'm just going to put a shape in the document. I'm going to fill my shape with a color and I'm making sure that it is somewhere inside Layer 3. The way that layer clipping masks work is that when you create them, they have to be the top-most thing in a layer. But once you've created them, they can appear anywhere in the layer, so it doesn't matter that we've pushed the work area clip out of the way. Once it's been used as a layer clipping mask, it can be pushed out of the way. Now, we've got a shape, and this is going to be the area in which we're going to draw our reflected drawing. But right now, the reflections aren't happening. The last thing that we have to do is to make the reflections work and we're going to do that in the next video. 4. Pt 3 - Reflect and Test: To set up the reflection, first of all, I'm going to just zoom out of my documents so I can see things more clearly on the screen. I'm going to target layer 2 here, that's the one that has don't paint outside me and layer 3 in it. In this case, unlike when I was making my clipping masks, I'm going to select all the contents of this layer, and because layer 3 is inside layer 2, we're selecting all of layer 2 which includes these layer 3 objects. So you should have something lit up just like this. We're going to choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. To create our reflection, we're first of all going to turn Preview on so we can see what's happening. We're going to set one copy because we want the original here plus 1 copy over here, and we're going to click "Reflect X". When you do that, you can see that this shape here is reflected over here, and the distance between the left-hand side of the document and this shape is the exact same distance as the right-hand side of the document to this shape, and you'll just click "Okay". At this point, you can now lock things down. So I suggest to lock your background so it doesn't move. I suggest that you lock your guide so it doesn't move. The guide is just telling you where the center of this document is and where the reflection is going to take place. You can also lock down don't paint outside me. I'm going to explain in just a second what that means. You can lock down your art board clipping shape. Now it's time to test and make sure that everything is working, so I suggest that you make sure that nothing is selected. You could do that by clicking on the "Selection Tool", just make sure you click away so nothing is selected here. I'm going to the Blob Brush, I'm going to select it, and I'm going to select a color for the blob brush. So I'm going to use a blue color. I'm going to make sure that layer 3 is selected because that's the layer that we're going to paint on. Now I can just paint with the blob brush and just see what happens. Now, if you've set this up correctly, what you should see is a mirroring of your object. You can experiment with a few shapes and just make sure that they're going to mirror. You can see that when they mirror across the center line, whatever was dumped into this area of the image is just disappearing. So when I draw a line like this that crosses the center line, whatever is on the right-hand side of the document is just disappearing. The mirroring effect is only mirroring what's on the left of the document and the clipping mask, this work area clip that we created, is ensuring that nothing that is outside the left-hand side of this document is being seen. It's just being hidden, it's being clipped away. Now I'm going to zoom back out a little bit more because I want to show you the reason why we had this path. This path here is the don't paint outside me path, and it's there for a really good reason. I'm just going to go back in here and I'm going to paint with the blob brush again outside the art board. You can see that nothing's happening. Nothing is disturbing our document. But let's see what happens when I paint outside the art board and outside the shape that's called don't paint outside me. Well, this is what happens and that's why that shape is there. It's a warning for you, even though that path didn't go in the right place. It's a warning to you that by placing something outside the area that's called don't paint outside me that you're going to break the document, so it's just not going to work. Since we made don't paint outside me so much larger, it's double the width and double the height of the document, it would be unusual if you did actually paint outside that area, but you know what the problem is if that happens to you. So if you go and paint something and if your document fractures as soon as you've painted something or as soon as you pasted something into the document, you will know that the very last thing that you did was outside this don't paint outside me area and you just need to undo it and everything will be re-established to what it was originally. Once you've set up your document like this, we can go to layer 3. We're just going to isolate all the shapes that are in layer 3 and we're just going to send them to the trash can. The document is now set up and ready for us to create our mirror art. 5. Pt 4 - Draw the Skull: Before you get started actually using this document, you may want to save a copy of it so that you could use this fresh copy anytime that you wanted to create a mirror drawing, and then go ahead and work on a duplicate of that just so that you're protecting the original that you spent so much time making. We're just going to make a skull shape. I'm going start with the pen tool. I'm going to start just on the opposite side of the drawing. I'm going to come around here and create my skull. One of the nice things about this mirror drawing is because it is a mirror drawing, you can see exactly what's happening as you're going and so you can make adjustments pretty quickly. Now something like this happens to you and you say that you're just not getting your mirroring. It's time to have a look in your labs palette. What's happened is that these two shapes that I just created haven't gone into layer 3, they've gone into layer 2. Well, it's an easy enough process to just drop them into where they should be. As soon as they're inside layer 3, you can say that the mirroring has worked. Now that's going to happen to you every soft and something's going to appear where they shouldn't appear. But it's easy enough to solve it if you know what the problem is and you can recognize that quickly enough. I'm just building my skull up from a series of shapes. It's all very simple stuff at this stage. Once I've got the basic shapes in place, I can select either this and increase the stroke weight. So I'm going to make them quite a bit thicker. I'm now going to add some additional features and I'm going to use the paintbrush tool here. I'm going to the brush tool palette. I'm just going to click here on this round paintbrush. That means that every time I click now, I'm actually creating a paintbrush dot. As I'm going along painting, I'm hitting the open square bracket K a few times between H paint stroke, just to get a smaller brush stroke each time I click on the brush. Now I'm again going to use my brush. This time I'm going to open a brush library. I'm going to the brush fly out menu here. I'm going to click on open brush library. I'm going to decorative and I'm going to Elegant Curl & Floral Brush Set. There are some brushes here that you can get an interesting effect with. I'm just going to test them out on this side of the document. So you can see when I draw from left to right, this as what I get, but what if I draw from right to left, I get a different look to that brush. I'm going to draw a line for my brush and I'm just going to set it up just above the skull so I can move it down once I've got it in position. I'm just going to draw it. Then with a line selected, I'm going to apply the brush to the line. Now if I go to the appearance for this particular line and open up stroke, I can increase the weight of the line and that's going to give me a different effect. Then I can just pull the shape into position. I actually think I just wanted on top of the head here, so I'm just going to bring it down here. There are other elements that you can use that are brushes that we'll have interesting effects. Actually going to brush this one on. So I'm going to go and get my floral stem and I'm just going to create a line for it. Now if you don't like the way that the brush has gone on, you can just select the brush line with the selection tool and then just select a different brush stroke to go on it. If you decrease the stroke value on the brush, you're going to get a different effect as well. So thinking I like this one, I'm going to use that. I'm also going to put some pen lines around here. I'm just going to create some little loops with the pen tool, just using the Alter option K to swing the pen line back. Now I'm going to run into a riskier. I really want to put the end of this line over this point, but if I start clicking on that point, the line is going to join up. So I'm just going above that point. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit closer. Now I'm going with the direct selection tool. I'm going to grab this and just put it into position, but not in such a way that it's actually going to end up joining up with the line around the face. Now with this line, the stroke settings have meant that I've got pointy ends on my stroke. I'm going to select the line, I'm going into the stroke and I'm going to select one of these join options that's going to give me a softer join and not a spiky join. For the eyes I want to add a sort of loop around the eyes. So I'm going to select the eye, I'm going to the stroke. I'm going select dashed line. I'm going to set the gap to about 20. I'm going to set the dash to zero. I'm going to increase the weight here to about 20. I'm going to make the caps round. The upshot of that is that I get the circles around the eye. I just want to scale those up until they're pretty much what I want them to be in terms of size. When I've done that, I'm going to the fill and I'm going to set the fill here to white. I have my fancy strike and behind and underneath it is a filled circular shape. Well, if I reverse the stroke and fill and moves the stroke underneath the fill, then I get this effect. That was what I was looking for the eye. 6. Pt 5 - Finishing Touches and Wrap up: I'm going to draw a heart shape, and I'm going to do it from an ellipse. I've got my ellipse here. I'm just going to press the letter "D" to default to the default settings. I'm going to target this topmost point here and just drag it down and then use the "Alt" or "Option" key to just break these handles apart, so that I can create more of a heart shape. Down the bottom here, I'm going to the "Pen Tool", I'm going to click on the "Anchor Point Tool", which shares a toolbar position. So I end up with a nice little heart shape. I don't want my heart to have a fill, but I do want it to have a stroke. I'm just going to wind up the white on this heart, and size that down a little bit. I'm going to place that right in the middle of the skull. I can make sure it's in the middle by checking its x value here. Its x value for the middle of the heart is 500 pixels, so making sure that it's centered exactly in the middle of the skull. I'm going to select it, choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". I can use a transform effect to sort it. I'm going to click "Preview" on. I'm going to rotate it around its base. I'm going to add two copies of it. I want to rotate it, something like this, but I also want to move it at the same time. I'm going to move it in a negative horizontal direction, and I'm going to scale it to about 75 percent width and height, so it gets smaller on every single one of its iterations. I'll click "Okay". Now I want to finish off my skull with a flower and I'm going to get one from the symbols collections. I'm going to choose "Window", and then "Symbols". From the symbols collection, there is a [inaudible] that I can use and probably will use, but I'm just going to show you where you can find additional symbols. Click the fly-out menu, choose "Open Symbol Library", and you've got a whole series of symbols that you can use. If you go to flowers, there are plenty of flower symbols that you could use, and I was just looking for something that was nice and round that would work in the eyes. I'm just dragging and dropping a symbol into the left eye. Of course, it's just going to appear in the right eye as well. I want to break the link, so I'm just going to click "Break Link to Symbol". That means that any changes that I make to this flower are not going to be reflected in the Symbols panel itself. There's obviously plenty of other things that you can do in creating a skull. I just wanted to give you a project that you could enjoy using this mirror technique in Illustrator. Your project is to go and create a skull illustration of your own using the template that you will have created for this mirror drawing. Post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something that you didn't know about working in Illustrator. If you did enjoy the class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up, and if you would write a few words about why you enjoy the class. Recommendations like this help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is 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.