Road Trip! DIY Brushes & Live Paint in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Road Trip Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, road trip, DIY brushes, and live paint 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's lesson really is quite short. This is a very quick and easy project. You're going to learn a little bit about live paint. You're going to create a special brush to create the lines on this illustration. When it's all done, you're going to move the actual filled shapes so that you can create these off ridges to print look to the illustration. 2. Road Trip - Part 1 - Create the Outlines: To create our retro vehicle, I'm going to choose, "File", and then, "New". I'm using an image that's 700 by 700 pixels in size, and RGB color mode, but you can choose the size image you want to be working with. I think squares are going to work pretty well for this particular illustration. You can either go ahead and draw your own vehicle, or use mine. To use mine, you'll download it from the link that I've given you, and then choose, "File'' and then, ''Place'', go and find the image, select it and click, "Place." Then just drag out a place for it in your illustration. Go to the Layers palette, open up the Layer here and just lock it down. When you lock it down, it won't move, so you can draw over it more easily. You could use the Pen Tool to do this drawing if you're handy with the Pen Tool, but I'm going to use the Pencil Tool because a lot of people really dislike the Pen Tool. I'm going to click on the Pencil Tool, I'm going to turn off the Fill, and I'm going to make sure that I have a stroke color selected. That's going to make it easy for me to see my lines as I work. I've also increased the stroke to three points. I'm just going to well, double-check the Pencil Tool options before I start, by double-clicking on it. I want it to draw pretty smoothly, so I have a halfway selection between accurate and smooth. These four check-boxes are disabled and this one is enabled, I'll click "OK". Now, I'm just going to draw over these shapes. If I make a mistake and don't like something I've drawn, I'm just going to press Control Z to undo it. That's Command Z on the Mac. I'm just going to undo that one. I'm also going to increase my stroke weight just a little bit. The stroke weight is only temporary so you can make it as big or as small as you like. Now because I'm just going to be drawing over all of these shapes and because it's going to be as enthralling as watching paint dry, I'm going to not say anything and speed up the video and come back once the drawing is complete. When you've finished your drawing, you can smooth out the lines, select the over a line that needs smoothing, and come here to the Smooth Tool. I have this Smooth Tool set to really quite a smooth selection there, I'll click "OK". I can just draw over the lines and they'll be smoothed out, so that will smooth out any bumps in them. You'll need to select the line first and then run over it with the Smooth Tool. You may also want to go to the Layers palette and just turn off the Image Layer, so you can see a little bit more clearly where things might need to be smoothed out. You can also select the Direct Selection Tool, zoom into an area of the image, and for example, remove any excess anchor points. It looks to me like I've gone a little bit too far here, so I'm going to take this anchor point up and I've got some extra ones here that I don't need. I'm just going to remove it. Press Control or Command 0 to get back to looking at the image and just make sure that everything is working. I'm going to bring this anchor point down a little bit. The anchor points are always going to be at the very end of the line, so you can just see where it's going to be because they're always just there. I seem to have got an extra little bit in here too. It's going to be an anchor point at the end of this line, let's just go and pick it up. Here it is here. I'm just going to delete it. You will want to tidy up your shape just a little bit. This one's smaller because the stroke weight was different, so I'm just going to come into the Appearance Panel and just increase the stroke weight a little bit just so it looks a little bit more like the others, just so you're not confused about that line. Let's go down here with the Zoom Tool. I think in actual fact, that this one might need a point created a bit more here. Not quite so smooth, so I'm just going to adjust the handles a little bit. I can also join these together by moving them close together, select over the two ends and choose "Object", "Path", "Join", and the paths will then be joined. There are a few that you might want to join. This one up here, is one of them. You probably want to just separate the anchor points a little bit to make sure that they're sort to each other but not bent in funny directions before you join them, and these here. I'm actually going to remove this one and pull this up a little bit closer, select over both of them and join them. Once joined, if you don't like the join, if there are two anchors here, you can just click on one to remove it. Then if necessary, just run over the join area with the Smooth Tool. I've joined these, and now I'm going to get rid of one of these points because it's looking pretty untidy. Zoom out, and then run over the join with the Smooth Tool. When you're happy with the shape that you've created, you're ready to progress to the next step. 3. Road Trip - Part 2 - Create the Brush: For the next step, we're going to create a brush that we're going to use to give this illustration a sort look. I'm going to get the pencil tool. I'm going to select a black color here, because I'm going to use black-outline or black lines for the drawn look. I'm also going to decrease the stroke weight to just one. I'm going to draw some wavy lines, just marginally wavy lines, and I want a few of them. They need to be roughly the same length. I've got five lines here. I'm going to select over all the lines with the selection tool, and then I'm going to choose Object, Path, Average. I'm going to select the Horizontal and then click, "Okay". What that does, is it flattens the shape out, so that the bumps are not quite so obvious. I'm going to select over the shape again, and I'm going to just squeeze it up. Because I wanted to look a little bit more like a black line. Well, that might be just too much like a black line, I might separate it just a little bit. This is looking really good to me now. I'm going to open my brushes palette. You can go to Window Brushes if it's not here. Select over the line, and just drag and drop it into the brushes panel. You're going to create an Art Brush and click, "Okay". The direction of this line and the direction that we're going to paint it in is this one stroke from left to right, so I'm going to select that. I'm going to select stretch to fit/length, and then just click "Okay". I'm going to hold my brush down here just for now, just in case it doesn't work out. If it's not perfect, I can come back in here and fix it, I don't want to have to re-draw it. I'm going to open my layers. I'm going to select over the entire car here. Then I'm going to choose edit copy, and edit paste in place. That creates a second version of the car on top of the first. I'm going to hide this second version and lock it so that nothing can happen to it. This is the car down here, this is the one we're going to work on first of all. What we're going to do is replace this pink stroke with the brush that we just created. I'm going to my brushes panel. I have my entire objects selected, and I'm just going to click on my brush. If you are happy with that, if you're happy with the line effect, then you're done with this step, you don't need to do anything more. If you don't like it, go back to your brush and make some changes to it. For example, we might want it to be a little bit thicker, a little bit more organic. I've just stretched a little bit, so I'm going to drop it into the brushes panel again, I'm going to choose Art Brush and click, "Okay". This is called Art Brush 2, it has all the same settings as previously, so I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to select over my shape again, and this time I'm going to select Art Brush 2, and you'll see that it has a slightly different look to it. You can continue to work with your brush until you get something that you're really happy with. Actually quite like the second version, so I think I'm going to settle for it. I'm going to select my brush piece here, and just delete it because I don't need it any longer. We'll come back in the next step and apply the color effect to our car. 4. Road Trip - Part 3 - Finishing Touches: The next step of working with our car is to color it. I'm going back into the last panel and this time, I'm going to lock down the drawing layer that we've just done. I'm going to make the other layer visible and unlock it. I'm going to select over it. Now, this object we're going to create as a Live Paint object. I have a whole video on Live Paint, but we're just going to use it to fill this object. We're going to start by choosing Object Live Paint Make. Then we're going to select the Live Paint Brush tool, which shares a toolbar position here with the Shape Builder tool. We're just going to click on Live Paint Bucket and then double-click the Live Paint Bucket tool because we want to make sure that paint fills is selected. You also want to say Cursor Swatch Preview and make sure that your highlight color is something other than this purple color. You'll be able to see what the highlight looks like and click "Ok". Now I'm going to my swatches panel. I'm going to paint my car in these colors. I'm going to start by selecting a color. I'm going to switch these colors so that we're working with the fill here and I'm going to select a color for the front of my car. I think a green color will be good. You'll see just above the Live Paint Brush tool that there are three swatch colors and green is in the middle. That's telling me that if I click now this area that's outlined in yellow, which is the front fender of the car, it's going to be painted green. I'm going to click once here. I'm going to click here on this fender because I want that to be green too. Now I want to use yellow, I'm going to come up here to select yellow, and I'm going to put yellow into these areas here and here. I actually think that's probably a little bit bright, so let's go and get a different yellow. Then I'm going to get this pinky color here. Then I'm going to drop it in here on the side mirror, and here in the middle section of the car. I'm going to get this gray. Now I can get the gray by selecting it here, or you'll see that it's the third color in the color swatch. If I just press the right arrow key, I'll select that gray, and then I can just click to drop it in here. Now I want the blue. It's the color to the very right of the color swatch. I'll press the right arrow key and then drop blue in. I can always check over here to make sure that I've got the right color selected. Now I'm going to get black because I want black tires. When I'm happy with this, I can go ahead and select the entire vehicle. I'm going to select the stroke color and I'm going to make it no stroke at all. Then I'm going back to my layers palette. I'm going to unclick this lock and I'm going to put the lines on top of the color. That's going to give us the effect that we came here looking for. We've got this sketchy lines and the color behind. But what I really want to do here is to give the colors used in this car a slight off register print effect. Right now the colors are inside the shapes, but I want to move them a little bit. I'm going to go here to this layer because this is my color filled object. I'm going to click on it to select it. I want to expand this because I want to be able to get access to the shapes right now it's a live paint object. I want to convert it into just regular illustrator shapes. I'll choose object Expand, and just click "Ok". Now in the layers palette, if I click here, I'll say that I have a group and another group. But below it are the objects that go together to make the car. There's a black filled tire here and there are the side mirrors and the middle piece of the car. Then there are the fenders. By expanding my Live Paint object, I've been able to get access to these color filled areas. I can do something with them. I'm going to grab this fender and I'm just going to press the Right arrow key a few times and perhaps the Up arrow key. What I'm doing is I'm moving the color away. I can also slightly adjust the size of this unevenly so I get little white areas. I'm going to go and get the blue area here. Let's just select the blue area and let's move that out of register. We get some white leaking into this area here. We're just getting more interesting illustration. In print terms, what we're doing here is we're doing something that printers might have done in the past where they're trying to line up color plates and they just not getting the alignment perfect. The color is not going in exactly the spot where it's supposed to go. Well, we're deliberately creating this effect by moving these colors around inside Illustrator. We can also move the colors in order so I can take this color, for example, and just move it below the green color that it's next to so that I'm getting the yellow behind the holes in the green. I'm just going to continue to select pieces of my illustration and just move them a little bit. Maybe rotate them a little bit, but just getting this interesting off register effect. Now you'll find that because they're in a group, they're hard to select by just clicking on them. You better to use the layers palette to just select each object by clicking on it in the layers palette. That way you get to move it around a little bit. Then when I'm done, I'm just going to click outside the illustration to just check. Well, I've got a small problem in here in that the two pieces are moving away from each other. I'm just going to move this back to join them more visually together. There's our completed project. It's a retro Volkswagen vehicle. It's being created with some organic brush lines around the shape. Then we filled it using live paint, expanded it and move the individual filled shapes to create this off register print effect. 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.