Seasonal Ornaments in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Create Seasonal Ornaments in Illustrator Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic design for lunch class. Create seasonal ornaments in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach us a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now today we're going to look at creating seasonal designs in Illustrator. Every one of these designs uses different techniques. You'll learn to use blends and live paint to rotate shapes and make patterns and use a symbol sprayer. You'll see how easy it is to make 3D objects, map art to 3D objects, and you'll create Christmas lights and a tree of lights using handmade brushes. This class is a great way to get to grips with a range of handy Illustrator techniques. At the same time is making a series of fun seasonal art projects. Once learned, these techniques are going to be handy additions to your Illustrator skillset. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please if you enjoy the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend the class, and secondly, write in just a few words 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. 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. If you're ready now let's get started creating seasonal designs in Illustrator and learning a few new Illustrator skills. 2. Pt 1 Create the Basic Ornament: For our first set of Christmas ornaments, I'm just going to create a document that square, but really you can make this any shape that you like and any size that you like. I'm happening to use 3600 by 3600 pixels and also using RGB color mode. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, you're going to have a slightly different dialogue, but these basic settings are all going to be available. I'll click "Create". Now we're going to create our ornaments all from one ornament and we're going to use the pen tool to do it. But that's okay because we're going to use the Pen tool just to make two points and it's very very simple. You're going to start off in the document and you just going to click and drag and that's all one movement and you're going to keep your left mouse pointer press down so that you can head off in this direction and just make a line of about that length. As soon as I let go the left mouse button, you can see that I have my rubber band showing and that's going to help me draw the rest of my shape. I'm going to come down to a position that's immediately underneath my starting point and I'm going to click and drag again and I want to drag Alt and down towards the bottom right of the document and I want a shape that looks something like this. If you don't get it right the first time, it's okay because you can adjust it. As soon as I let go the left mouse button, you can say that I still have my rubber band here so I'm just going to press "Escape" to stop drawing. I can now go to the selection tool and select either my shape. I'm going to increase the stroke weight a little bit and I am going to turn to fill off. Now at this point, if you don't like your line, go to the direct selection tool and select over either of these points and you can now adjust them. If you want this to be a little flatter at the top and perhaps a little pointier over here. I'm just going to adjust these points a little bit. As soon as you've got your basic shape and you're happy with it, select over that shape and we're going to flip it. I'm going to choose Object, Transform, and then Reflect. If you turn Preview on, you'll see what your reflection looks like and we're going to reflect over the vertical and I'm just going to click "Copy". Now at this point, if part of this shape is obscured, it's probably because you've got to fill, you just don't want to fill. Make sure you remove it from both pieces. Now we're going to take this piece and just move it across so it's lined up against the first piece. We've got a shape, but it's not closed up it's actually made from two distinct pieces. That's really important because we're going to use the Blend tool. Now, If I don't think that that's looking too good right now, I can just squeeze it up a little bit. I am actually going to squeeze it up by holding down the Alt or Option key as I just drag in on the shape to make a better-looking shape. But I still have two pieces. I'll select over my two pieces and chose Object, Blend, Make, and now I have a blend and what you see here is going to depend on how your Illustrator is set up and what you've been doing with it. I've been doing some blends today so I've got a lot of blending happening here. You may just have a single line, it's fine, whatever you've got, go and double-click on the Blend tool here and we're going to set it to specified steps. We're going to turn Preview on and we're going to use something like about six steps. This is more like what we want to say. If you use an even number of steps, you're going to have a gap in the middle, if you use an odd number of steps, you're going to have a line down in the middle. I think it looks better with an even number of steps, but choose whatever makes sense to you. I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to select all of these shapes and I'm going to expand my blend. I'll choose Object and then Blend, and I'll choose Expand. Now in the last palette, I will have just those lines. Here we have a group and we've got a series of lines in that one path for every one of these lines. I am going to choose Object, Ungroup so that we're just working with lines right now. Have all my lines selected what I'm going to do is start coloring them and for this, I'm going to use the live paint. I'm going to choose Object, Live Paint, Make. The benefit of using live paint here is that we don't actually have shapes, we've just got lines. But if we've got lines, live paint can fill in the gaps. It's just a really handy tool to create the illusion of filled shapes when you don't actually have shapes to fill. Now I'm going to also get some colors so I'm going to go to Window and then Color Themes and I'm going to look up some color themes. This is attached to Adobe Color and you can go and look up color themes and you may want to look up ornaments or Christmas or something like that. I actually have saved some colors. I'm just going to go and get them now. I'm going to open my Swatch Library and I have saved them in User Defined, and they are called Christmas. These are some color themes that I just grabbed out of Adobe Color themes about five minutes before I made this video. Let's go and move them across. What I'm going to do is just drag and drop them in here. [inaudible] some of these were fairly similar color schemes. I just liked the colors so I wanted something that I could work with. When you look up color themes here in Adobe Color themes, you see something that you like, well, let's just go and find something. If you see something you like, you can just click on this Icon here and choose Add to swatches. It's automatically going to be added to your swatches library. I've already done that. Let's just go back to our image. Now we've already converted this for live paint which means we can now go to the Live Paint Bucket tool, which shows a toolbar position with the Shape Builder Tool. I'm going to click on the Live Paint Bucket Tool and I'm going to choose the first of my color. I'm going to use these two colors. I'm going to click on this blue here, and I'm going to drop it into every alternate box here. Now, I can either go and select this color or you can see in that little color picker there, that the blue I want it is to the right. I'm going to press the right arrow key and that gets me the blue I want it and I'm going to dump this lighter blue into these areas. Now, if you're live paint tool doesn't work the same as mine, what you're going to do is double-click on the live paint buckets so you make your settings available. I've got Paint Fills select and I don't have Paint strokes selected, so I can't select or paint the strokes. I find that really handy to turn that off because I want all my strokes to be colored the same way later on. Turning off paint strokes just means that you're not trying to dodge the strokes when you're trying to fill the shapes. I have the Highlight turned on so you can see the area you're about to paint in and I have a Cursor Swatch Preview turned on. Those are my settings. If you have those settings, you should be able to apply color in exactly the same way as I am applying it. Having applied the color, we now need to expand this shapes. Again, I'm going to the Selection tool, select over my shape, choose Object, Live Paint and this time we want to expand it and what that does is it expands it into its component shapes. We have a set of colors for our lines and we have a set of shapes that are all colored for our fills. That breaks everything apart. Now, this time, I'm going to select my lines here and I'm going to target my line color. Now, I want use the blue that we've been using in this shape here so I'm going to click on it, but I want to darker a version of it so I'll double-click on it and just drag down to use a darker version of it. If I want to store that blue away, I can just drag it into my swatches palette and have it sitting there in case I need it later on. Now I'm also going back to this group of lines and when I opened it up, you'll see that the group is made up of individual lines. One of the things that you can do to lines to make them more interesting is to apply what's called a brush profile to them. To do this, you need to select the lines and you'll come up here to the stroke area and drop down to this thing that says uniform and a series of brush profiles is shipped with Illustrator and I've got a couple here that I created myself, but I'm going to use one of the ones that shipped with Illustrator. I'm gong to use this one. Having applied it to lines, I'm now going to increase this stroke weight so we can see things a bit more clearly and as I do, you can say that the heavy part here, the thickest part of this brush profile, has been applied to the bottom of the lines would look a whole lot better if it was applied to the other end. What I'm going to do is dark across here to the appearance panel. You can get to this by choosing Window and then Appearance. I'm going to double-click here to get to the content because I need to get to the individual lines and here is my stroke, here is my color. Going to open up the Stroke panel here and down at the bottom is your brush profile. This is the same list as we have up here, but we have something else here, we have a flipper long option and that flips the brush profile on these lines. Instead of it being applied heavily down here, it's now applied heavily up here. Just allows us to adjust the way that the brush profile is applied to that shape. Now I'm just going to decrease the line weight because I didn't want it to be that heavy. I just wanted to be able to point out to you what was happening. Now I'm going to put a little cap on my ornament, which is going to be done using the rectangle tool. Nice, simple little rectangle on top of my shape. I can color coordinate that with the lines if I wish, I think that looks pretty good and then we need something to hang our ornament with and for this we're going to make a brush. We're also going to create multiple ornaments from this one. I think it's time to finish up this video and we'll continue on in the next video. 3. Pt 2 Fine Tune the first ornament image: With our first ornament made, let's go and create a chain to hang this ornament with and to do this, I'm going to choose the Ellipse tool. I'm going to press letter D, so I go back to my default colors and I'm going to turn off my fill so I just have a stroke. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a really small circle. Now, this is a bit difficult to see, so let's just zoom in. With my circle selected, I'm going to increase the stroke weight because I want it to be a little bit thicker. This is going to be an element of a chain that I'm going to use to hang my ornament. I've got my circle, I'm now going to add a bar into it. I'm going to drag out a line holding the Shift key as I do so it's constrained to a straight line. It's got the same four pixels stroke weight as the circle and that's what I want. Go into the strike panel and then give it rounded ends so it's going to look good when it's created as a chain. Now I think my circle is a little bit big so I can resize if I hold Alt and Shift or Option Shift at the same time, it's going to be resized from the center. Let's move this line back into position a little bit. Now if I want this to be a chain, I need to create as a pattern brush, but I also need to set an overlap for it, so I'm going to select the Rectangle tool. I'm going to drag a rectangle over this shape, but I want it to be inside the line so I want it to be roughly where I want this side of the circle to appear when it's all overlapped. Now, we're seeing a little bit of confusion here because it's got a strike on it so let's turn the stroke off and let's zoom in so we can say what's happening. When I create a bounding box like this, this is marking out where this part of the pattern brush can come in to create the next element. If we don't have that, our pattern brush is not going to look correct. This is looking like a pretty good rectangle. I can even it up around the shape if I wish, no real necessity to do this, but it will make sure that it paints on a nice line. Now I'm going to grab this rectangle alone and I need to move it behind these elements. I'm just going to choose object, arrange and send it to back. Doesn't matter that's behind everything, it matters that it's behind these two elements so that's the easiest way of dealing with that. Now I am going to select over everything here, the circle, the bar, and this little rectangle, little rectangle is marking out how the brush is going to overlap. Go to brushes palette if you don't see your brushes palette, choose Window and then brushes, you'll click here on New Brush. This is going to be a pattern brush so we click on Pattern brush and click "Okay". You can see here that it is overlapping, it's doing a really good overlapping job so we've got a nice little brush here. You can determine to do corners or not. Since we're only going to be doing chains we don't actually need a corner. In the fact that that corner didn't look very good anyway, we can just ignore it. I'm just going to do straight lines with this. If I want to be able to recolor it, then I need to set the colorization method to tints. Done that, I'll click "Okay". My brush is now created, let's press Control or Command 0 to zoom back out, I'm going to add a line to this, so I'm going to the Line tool. Let's click and drag up a line, hold the Shift key so it's constrained to being perfectly vertical. With the line selected going here to the brushes palette and click on our Pattern brush. Now at this stage, if you think the pattern is too big or too small, you can alter it. Because we are going to be using this chain for all of our ornaments, I suggest that you make your alterations on the brush itself. Every one of the ornaments is going to have the exact same chain. Double-click on this and you can make adjustments. For example, if you want it to be a little bit smaller, you can adjust it to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to do that so that we can see the change in place, click "Okay" and yes, you are going to apply it to the stroke. Now, in future, this brush is going to paint exactly like that on any line so we're going to have nice even change for all of our ornaments. We don't need this piece any longer, so I am going to select it and remove it. This is my first ornament so I'm going to select all of it, I'm going to group it with object group. It's now a single grouped object so it's going to move as a single object, that's always very handy. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on the Mac and drag a duplicate out of the way. Now, at this stage, I want to lock this one down and I want to start working on this one so let's go to the Layers palette and let's find out which one is which. Well, this is the one at the back. I actually wanted in front of the other ones, so I'm going to move it in front and I'm going to lock it down so I can't touch it. This is the one that is at the back and now I can ungroup it if I want to. Right now, I am going to ungroup it at least at the first level, so I'll select it and I'll choose "Object Ungroup" and that has allowed me to get the lines separate. This is a line here because I'm going to need to make that a little bit longer. It also lets me select over the actual body shape of the ornament but leave the other paces out and what I want to do here is make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to hold the Shift key and the Option key, Shift Alt on a PC and drag it out to make it a little bit bigger and then move it down so that it's in the correct position. This one I want to recolor, so I'm going to select it and this time I'm going to the recolor artwork tool. Here are my three colors, they're all mapped onto each other and I have other colors accessible to me. They are in the color swatches so I can get to them by double-clicking on a color here and go to Color Swatches and then I can move down to find these color swatches and they're going to be towards the end because that's where they were in the color palette. For this blue one, I'm going to replace that with this pale pink and click "Okay". I'm going to double-click on the darker color, going to the color swatches and I'm going to replace that with a dark color. Then for this color, double-click on it, go to Color Swatches and I have a darker pink, this one here, the richer pink here, that will go nicely with it and I'll click "Okay". Of course I'll need to change the top here as well so let's go and find the fill color. Let's go to the Swatches palette and we can just click on a color to use. We want to use one of the colors that we've used in the pace of art and I don't think that's the one, is it? With that chain, we want to make it a bit longer, so we need it up here so let's go and select over the chain and let's drag upwards. If you are finding it difficult to drag it in a perfectly upward direction, add the Shift key to it. Now that we've finished with this shape, we can go and regroup everything. We already took care of grouping and locking this first shape, we can actually even make it invisible. Now let's go and select everything that goes together to make this second ornament and let's group it back up again so we've got a nice neat layers palette here with each of these ornaments on a separate layer. I want another copy of this one, so I'm going to grab it and drag it onto the new icon that just makes a duplicate of it. If I want it positioned behind this one then I'm going to take one of those and move it just below the pink ones. It's now in a different stacking order, let's target it and let's move. I'm going to move it using the Shift and Arrow keys because it's behind everything, can be a little bit difficult to select to start off with, but as soon as it starts moving, I can identify where it is and let's put it into position. Aesthetically, you're going to choose a nice place for this. We're going to do the same thing as we did with the last one, we're going to ungroup it just so that we can work on the individual paces one thing we're going to need to do is to increase the length of its chain. We may also want to work on the colors of this as well, select it, go to the Recolor artwork tool, double-click on a color to make changes to it. Now I'm thinking I just might use this color here on it so let's go and find it here. I think this is it so getting a slightly different color combination, let's go to the blue and let's find something in our color swatches that is a better blue for this. You can even go light if you want to. I think I'm happy with that, so I'll just click "Okay". Before I finish off, I want to select this entire shape and I want to group it back again, again, keeping this last palette as neat as you possibly can because particularly when you're creating a document that has lots and lots of elements, the neater your layers palette is the easier it's going to be to manage it. I want to put a little star in here, so I am going to the Star tool and I'm going to click once in the document. I want a four pointed star, I want the radius to be something like about 50 and I want radius two be really, really small. I'm thinking something about 10. Radius one 10, radius two 50, four points, click "Okay". Let's click away from this and see what we've got. We've got a very, very small star here. I think it needs to be a bit bigger, let's just increase that size. I need two of these so I'm going to select it and then Alt or Option drag a second one away. Hold the Shift key as I rotate it so it's vertical. Now I want to put both these on top of each other, but I want this one to be bigger so I'm just going to hold Shift and Alt as I increase the size of the one that is vertical and horizontal and now I'm going to put the cross one just right over the top of it, lining up the two centers. If you have a bit of trouble with that, select over both the shapes and use the align options. If we go to the Align panel, you can choose Show Options and just make sure that you're aligning to selection. Then choose horizontal lines, center and vertical lines. Center to make sure that they're centered perfectly on top of each other. I think this one is a bit big, so let's shrink it down a little bit. Select both of them go to the Pathfinder palette, if you can't see it, go to Window Pathfinder, it's going to unite these into a single shape. This gives us something like a Christmas star shape. I'm going to the Direct selection tool, I'm going to target this point here and hold the Shift key as I drag it down so I get this look to my star shape. It's way too big, hold the Shift key as I drag it down to make it the size I want it to be. Now I can fill it with one of the colors that I'm working with. Let's go make sure that it's filled, it has no stroke and with the fill color targeted, let's go and get one of the colors that we're working with, this red, for example. I'll place it up here and then duplicate it below here. To keep the last palette nice and neat, I would probably group these stars as well so that they're in a single group, so they're going to travel together. There's the first of our ornaments in Illustrator. This has been created using a very simple shape and the Pen tool, a blend of live paint for painting it, a brush profile for adding some dimension to the line. We've created a pattern brush for the chain and we've created a Christmas star. There we have it, the first of our ornaments. 4. Pt 3 Create a Snowflake: For the next of our ornaments, we're going to create a snowflake. I'll click "Create New" and create a document 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size, RGB color mode. I'll just click "Create". Now I want a line that is in 45 degrees angle, so I'm going to line segment to just hold the "Shift" key as I draw a short line that is 45 degrees in direction. When you hold the "Shift" key as you draw your line, you either get a vertical or a horizontal line or one at this angle. So I'm going to increase the Stroke weight, and I'm going to the Stroke panel here, and I'm just going to give it round Caps as well. This is the line where starting with, I want a reflected line across here, so I'm going to the Reflect Tool. Targeting the Reflect tool, I'm now going to place my mouse pointer over this anchor point here. Hold the Alt key on a PC, Option key on a Mac and click once, and that sets that point as the reflection point. Now what I'm going to get is a V shape as soon as I click here on copy, and here's my V shape. I'm going back to my selection tool, I'm going to group these objects, so now choose Object and then Group. Now, I'm going to apply a transformation to them with Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. I want three copies of this, so I'll have an original plus three copies, I'll turn Preview on. I'm just going to start increasing the vertical. I'm just pressing Shift and up arrow here in this little box to increase the vertical value until I get what I want for my snowflake and I'll click, "OK". Now this is a transformed shape, so I'm going to choose object and then Expand Appearance. I'm going to choose object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option, and then I'll just choose object group. These are now grouped into a single object. They're going to move together. Now I want a line to go down the middle, so I'm going back to my line segment tool. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just drag out a line for the line of my snowflake. Now at this point, if I think these are not centered, I can grab all of them by just dragging over all of them to select them and going to the Align panel, click here on Show Options. I'm going to make sure that I'm aligning to the selection, not to the art board, and I'll just click here on horizontal line center, just to make sure everything is nicely centered. At this point, I'll choose object Ungroup, and do that until ungroup is no longer an option, and I'll group everything back again. What I did was broke up the group, and then put everything back in just to make sure that it's going to travel again just as a single object. Now I need to rotate this, so I'm going to select the shape and we're going to the Rotate Tool. Click on the Rotate Tool, and as we did when we reflected, we're going to Alt or Option click on this anchor point here to set this as the point around which we will rotate. I'm going to set my rotation to 60 degrees, and because I want the original plus this one, I'm going to click "Copy". Now I could do that over and over again, or I could just press Control or Command D, and if I continue to press it, I'm just going to copy and rotate the shapes until I have my snowflake. I'm going to select everything. I'm going to choose object Ungroup again until ungroup is no longer an option. At this point, I want to create this as a snowflake, so I'm going to have a look at it and see if it needs any alteration. I think that the lines need to be thicker, so I'm just going to increase my stroke weight. When I'm happy with what I've got, I'm going to choose object and then expand. I'm going to expand the stroke because there is no fill. I'll click Okay. Now I have a series of objects. Each one of these is a filled object that has no stroke but it has a fill. I'm going to the Pathfinder panel, I'm going to click unite, and that creates this as a single object. This is going to make manipulating it a whole lot easier. At this point. If I wanted to do it smaller, I'm just going to select it and shift drag on it. This is now my snowflake, we have a few things that we can do with this snowflake, which we're going to do in the next video. 5. Pt 4 Snowflake pattern: One of the things that you can potentially do with this snowflake is to create a snowflake patterns. I'm assuming that you're working in Illustrator CS6 or lighter because we're going to use the pattern make tall, going to select over my shape knowing no, it's black and that's just fine right now, because if we make it white and if we try and make a pattern out of it, we are going to be in trouble because we're not going to be actually able to see our pattern. I'm going to leave it being black. I'm just going to undo that and we're going to work with a black snowflake. I'll select the snowflake with the selection tool, choose object pattern, and then Make, click OK. The pattern doesn't look very good. I'm going to change the tile type from grid to brick by row. I'm going to set the brick offset to 1.5. You can choose whatever value you like. I'm going to click on this so that the width and height are both linked, so changes to one will change the other and then pressing Shift up arrow to just increase the value. If it's going up at too fast a speed, then I'll just use the up arrow without the shift case. I'm just going to adjust this until it looks fine to me. The number of copies I'm seeing right now is five-by-five, but you can also say, for example, seven by five. Whatever you choose here has no impact on the patent itself. It's just giving you an idea as to what your pattern will look like. When you're happy, you can just click done. I'm going to move my snowflake out of the way and I'm going to make a rectangle that is size of the art board, which is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. Click OK. I'm going to align this up to the art board from the Align panel. I'll make sure that it's set to align to art board and then click horizontal line center and vertical aligned center. I want this shape to be filled with my patent, at the moment it's filled with black, I'll target the fill so it's at the front and let's go to the swatches panel, where our pattern is stored, and here it is. I'm just going to click once on it to fill my shape with my pattern. Now, I wanted another rectangle immediately behind this, so I'm going to the rectangle tool and make another 1,000 by 1,000 pixel rectangle. I'm going to fill this with a blue, move it behind the shape that has the snowflake filled by selecting it and choose object, arrange, send to back. It's still selected, so I can now click here on the horizontal line center and vertical align center to make sure that my blue filled shape is again centered over the art board. From the last panel, which I appear to have lost, so let's choose window and then layers to see it. I'm going to lock down this blue rectangle, so it's not going to move. That will allow me to now select over the topmost rectangle because I've locked the blue one, it can't be selected. So we have selected the object that is filled with our black snowflake. Let's make our black snowflake white with the shapes selected, I'll target the recolor artwork tool. This is the black snowflake color. I'm going to click here to make sure that there is an arrow here which will allow us to remap black to a different color. I'll double-click on this color and select white. Click OK. Now, I have a white snowflake as my pattern and I'll click OK. What illustrate has now done is it's made a second pattern. There is a black snowflake pattern, but because we recolored it, we now also have a white snowflake pattern. It's very easy to create this by making a so flight pattern in a color that makes sense to you so you can actually see it and then go ahead and recolored if necessary later on. Making a pattern like this is just one of the ways that you can use your snowflake design. In the next video, we'll see some other ways that we could utilize it. 6. Pt 5 Organic Snowflake Pattern using Symbols: For something else to do with my snowflake design, I'm going to discard the rectangle that is filled with the pattern. I'm going to select the snowflake and make it white. I'm going to make it a symbol. With it selected, I'm going to the symbol panel. If you don't see your symbol panel, you can always get to it by choosing window and then symbols. I'll drag and drop the snowflake into the symbols panel. I can name this if I wish to, and click okay. Naming, it's probably a good idea because it's very difficult to say what it is, because it's white. This particular snowflake I might want to use again for another purpose, so with it selected, I'm going to unlink it from the symbol snowflake, it's not going to be affected by my symbol. Symbols can be sprayed onto objects, so with the symbol selected, I'll click here on the symbol sprayer and there are a lot of tools here, but we're going to start with the symbol sprayer because that lets us spray our symbol. If you're symbol sprayer is too big, you could double-click on it, and then adjust it's size so you could make it, for example, 100 pixels instead of 200. You can also adjust the intensity and the density of the symbols that you're about to spray. What I'll do, is just spray on some symbols. The snowflake is now appearing in my document. It's also possible to just click to add snowflake so you don't have to actually spray, you can also click. With this object, which is a series of sprayed symbols selected you can go to the symbol area here and choose other tools. For example, the symbol sizer tool allows you to re-size your symbols. Alt or option, click on a symbol to reduce its size and just click on it to increase it. In this way, you can add some variety to the size of the symbols. If you need to move them, you can go to the symbol shifter tool and then click and drag on your symbols to move them around. To rotate your symbols, you'll go to the symbol spinner tool and click on your symbols to rotate them. This allows you to break up the pattern so everything doesn't look totally upright. Using the symbol sprite in this way allows you to create a more organic style pattern of your snowflakes. In the next video, we're going to say how we would map snowflakes on two or three-dimensional object. 7. Pt 6 Create a 3D snowflake covered ornament: The next thing we're going to do with these snowflakes is to map them onto a 3D object, that's going to require quite a lot of processing power. For this, I'm going to select and remove the rectangle. I'll open up this panel here. I want to save this path which is this shape up here. You can see it there, but I don't want the rest of this so I'll select it and delete it. All we're left with is this snowflake shape, which we're now going to fill with a darker color so that we can say it more clearly as we create a small pattern from it. The pattern we're going to create, we're going to do by hand, because we can't use these patterns here because when we break them apart, they fracture into lots of little pieces. It's really not an appropriate pattern designed to use for mapping onto 3D art. We're going to make the pattern ourselves. Select over this shape, choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then transform. Turn preview on, increase the copies a few times so that you have enough to have a look at. Click on Reflect Y and then start increasing the horizontal value and the vertical value. What we want is an offset pattern of the snowflakes. But what's really important is that we have space between them. We need space on this side. From the right-hand edge of this snowflake, we need to be able to draw a line and not run into the left-hand edge of this one and ditto across the bottom, we want to be able to have a distance, a small distance between the bottom of this one and where the next one starts. It's going to be really important when we come to mapping it onto the 3D object. Simply because the most recent versions of Illustrator are really, really poor at this. There's something that's gone a bit wrong. I'm going to show you how you can overcome it to some extent. I'm going to add a few more snowflakes into my pattern here and click Okay. Everything is associated with this one, snowflake here with it selected Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. We are going to apply a new effect, turn preview on, increase the copies, and then start increasing the vertical value. Until we get our snowflake design. When we're happy with that, click Okay. Again, everything is still attached to the single snowflake up here in the corner with its selected will choose object and then expand appearance and then object Ungroup, and continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. Once it's no longer an option, then just select group. All of these shapes now individual snowflakes and they're all in a single group. There are also black. With the group selected and the fill selected will click on white so that now we have white snowflakes. With this object selected, we're going to make that into a symbol. We'll click on the symbols panel. You can also get to this by choosing Window and then Symbols. We'll drag and drop this into the symbol panel and I'm going to call it snowflake pattern and click Okay. Now we no longer need this set of grouped objects, so we'll select them and press delete. We have a document that's just an art board. There's nothing in layer one, but we do have our snowflake pattern as a symbol. Next up we'll choose the Ellipse tool. I'll choose a stroke but no fill and I'm going to use a dark blue for my stroke because that's going to be the fill color of my ornament. I'll drag out a circle holding the Shift key as I do so. Click to select the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle over half of the circle. With the rectangle and the circle selected, we'll go to the Pathfinder palette and click minus front because the rectangle was drawn second, it's going to cut off half of the circle. I ended up with a half circle. This is going to be revolved to create our ornament. But if we want a nice top to our ornament, the time to do that is now. I'll click to create a rectangle. Just going to use the smart guides to line everything up here. And I'll just drag out what's going to be half the top of my ornament. I'll zoom in so I can see this a little more clearly. With the direct selection tool, I'm going to target this one anchor point and drag it out so that intersects with the path. With it's still selected, I'll click here to convert it to smooth anchor points. Now I can just shape it. This is 1.5 of what's going to be the top of my ornament, I need to be a little bit taller. I can make it so. Once we have that drawn, select over both shapes and from the Pathfinder palette, click Unite because we want just a single Shape. Control or Command zero to zoom back out. It's time now to make this into a 3D shape. With it's selected, will choose Effect and then 3D revolve. I'll turn preview on. Right now we have plastic shading. I'm going to make that diffuse shading. I'm going to set this to just fronts, so we have a very plain shape, not a lot of 3D rotation here. With my diffuse shading, I can move the light sources around. I can also dial down the ambient lights, so the ambient light is going to control the darker areas. We can add additional lights here using the New Light option to just light the top corner of our shapes, should we wish to do so. When you had a play around with the lighting, you can click Map Art and we're now going to map the art onto this 3D shape. This is where we run into problems because the lowest recent versions of illustrator seem to be creating a lot more surfaces than you would need in earlier versions of Illustrate. And we're going to have to get this to line up properly. We're just going to sample our surfaces right now. Just go and see what we've got, is a possibility this is the surface we might need to map out too. We don't want to do it to this one. I probably won't be bothered doing it to this one. Possibly we will need this one. No, no, no. Possible. Let's try one of the possibles with the surface selected, I'll go and select my snowflake pattern. We know that this is a surface that we need to map onto because the snowflake pattern when it's placed over the dark area here on this surface is actually being mapped to it. In some cases, you'll drop a pattern in over the top of a dark area and you won't see it. The reason for that is that the surface is at the very back and right now we're seeing the front surface, but you will also say surfaces for the back. Here I'm concerned about this line across here. That's why we made this pattern so that there would be plenty of space between our snowflakes because we want to make sure that we end up with a whole snowflake here when we drop in another pattern at the top. Let's just say whether it's at the top or the bottom. Well, it doesn't really matter. I'm getting it to work perfectly here, but I just want to say a whole snowflake here. Once I'm happy with that, let's go and pick up the surface, it's going to control the top part of this ornament. It's not that one, or that one, or that. Good chance it's this one here and here it is. We'll move this design into position and just try and line up our snowflakes. We've got plenty of snowflakes to do this with. Just need to make sure that our pattern lines up nicely. Again, here making sure that we've got whole snowflakes and not partials. If you think that your pattern design is too big or too small, then you can adjust it so you could just drag in from the edges, hold the Shift key as you do so though, so that you're constraining it to the correct proportions. Then once you've done that, you will need to move your pattern back into position. Just make sure that it looks good on this surface. As I said, earlier versions of Illustrator seem to have worked this a whole lot better. I'm really, really not happy with the most recent versions and what's happening with the 3D rendering engine here. Once you've got a reasonable look, just click OK and then Okay again. For the cap on our ornament, we're going to make a fancy cap. Let's start with a shape that has a fill. Let's do a black Fill button nor a stroke and will create a large rectangle. Just drag out a good size rectangle for now, I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Zig Zag. Make sure preview is turned on, increase the number of ridges per segment. So we get quite a bit of action along the bottom edge here. We're really only interested in the very bottom edge here, the rest of it we're going to get rid of in a minute and then adjust the size to suit. So if you want a bit more of a ridge, then increase the size. If you want it to be a little shallower, then decrease the size when you got what you want, just click Okay. Now this at the moment is a rectangle with an effect applied to it. For us to be able to work with it, we need to expand it. With the object selected, we'll choose object and then expand appearance. Now it is a shape that has anchor points all the way around it. We now need to crop off the pace that we want. I'm going to make a rectangle, but I'm going to give it a edge that we can see. Let's just give it a nice stroke and we'll drag out a rectangle to provide our cutting line. What I'm looking for is something that's going to go over here. I'm going to shrink it a little bit later in size, but I do want the edges to be like this, some marking out where I want the edge of it to be. I'll select both the shapes, the rectangle at the front and our zig zag shape rectangle at the back and go to the Pathfinder palette. Because our rectangle is on top, we can click the Crop tool to use it as a crop shape. We've lost our fill and stroke, but that's just fine. Let's go to the Layers palette and see what we've got. We've just got a single path. With our path selected, we can now click on the fill and fill it with a color so you can see that we have the shape that we want and we're ready to put it into position. Of course it's much too big, but it's very easy to just shrink it down in size. I would like this to be filled with a metallic look. With the fill to the four, I'll go to the swatches panel, click the fly-out menu, choose Open Swatch Library. I'll go to Gradients and then choose Metals. The metals gradient gives me access to some metals gradients that I can just apply to the shapes. With the shapes selected, I'll just click on the gradients that I want to test out. You can experiment with these, just select one that you like. As you select them, they're added to the Swatches panel. We would just finish this off with just a simple loop. Again, I'll choose the ellipse toll, just drag out a nice circle here. I'll flip the fill and stroke. I'm actually using the same metal gradient on the stroke and just size it to suit. There we have our ornament which we created by creating a snowflake pattern by hand and then mapping it to a 3D object. 8. Pt 7 Strings of Colored Lights: The final seasonal element we'll create will be lights. We're going to use the light to then create a Christmas tree, but I'll click "Create New" to start. My document is going to be 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. I'm using RGB color mode. I'll click "Create". The black in RGB color mode isn't quite black, and I'm going to use that property as part of my design. I'll drag out in ellipse using the Ellipse tool. This is going to be my light. I'll fill it with black and I'll turn the stroke off, and we'll just have a look at the black that we're filling it with. You'll see that the CMYK values are not all 100 percent. That tells me that it's sort of black, but it's not quite black, and I'm going to leave it as that because that's the color that I want. To create my shadows and highlights, I'll select this shape and then choose "Object", and then "Path", "Offset Path". Using this dialogue, I can create a shape that is exactly the same shape as this ellipse, but a little bit smaller. Tone preview on, and I am going to set this to a minus value. Minus 10 is a little big, so I'll just make it minus six. Tab away and I'll click "Okay". I now have a novice shape that is slightly smaller than the original. I'll just click and drag it out of the way. I'll Alt-click and drag a duplicate away again. Now, I have my original shape and two slightly smaller versions of it. The two slightly smaller versions of it are identical in size. I've just colored one a little differently so that it's a little bit easier to see. Move this shape on top of this shape, but not quite on top because we're just going to borrow this little black, say shape. Select over both shapes, go to the Pathfinder palette, which you can get to by choosing Window and then Pathfinder. Because the orange is in front, I'll select "Minus Front". That gives me just this shape. I am going to use it as a highlight on this side of my light. I'll select it and choose a slightly lighter gray, and then moving it into position. We know it's going to fit perfectly because it actually came from the original shape. Next up, we need as shadow pace. So select the basic shape. Again, choose "Object", "Path", and then "Offset Path". I'll again use minus six pixels as my size. Click "Preview", and click "Okay". Drag this shape out of the way. Alt option drag it another copy and re-color the most recent copy. Select it and place it over the second shape looking at this black area, because the black area is the bit that we want. Select over both of these, go back to the Pathfinder, and click "Minus Front". Now, I only want part of this shape, so I'll use the Eraser tool. I will select the Eraser tool and then double-click on it because I want to make sure that its size is correct. I have the size set to 10 points, probably be a little bit larger because I just need to curve off a couple of paces from this shape. I'll click "Okay". I'm just pointing out the areas that I don't want here. I just want a little piece here that I can use as my shading. I just don't want it to interact with my highlights, so I'll just make sure it's pretty small. This needs to be jet-black, so with it selected, I'll double-click on the color here. I'm going to set the color to 100 in all of these, CMYK values, and then click "Okay". We'll zoom in and then move this shape into position. We just want it to be a shadow on our light. With it selected, I'm going to the Appearance panel here, going to save its blend mode to multiply. So that ensures that it will always darken the color underneath. Let's zoom back out and we'll add a top to our light, and that's done using the Rectangle tool. Just drag out a shape, zoom in. Let's make the shape a lighter color, and we'll place it over the light so that the corners of the shape intersect with the very edges of the light. If you need to perfect that, select over just the light elements and group those together, then select all the elements and align them using the Horizontal Align Center. But you may first want to check to make sure that you're not aligning things to the artboard, I'm going to the Align panel and make sure that it's Align to Selection, which it is. When we select Horizontal Align Center, we want be aligning things to the artboard. Now, if you can't see your Align panel, choose "Window" and then "Align". Now we need some highlights and shadows for our light. I'll choose a rounded rectangle. Just drag out a very small rounded rectangle, which is going to be the highlight. Drag that over into position. Let's just zoom in so I can see things a little more clearly. They tend to move a bit better when you're closer to them, and let's make that lighter still. Then will go and create a smaller pace in a slightly darker color for the shadow on this side. Again, to select the Selection tool, I'm just pressing the letter V. Let's make sure that it is a darker color. I think I want these two to be aligned to each other. So with them selected, I'll select here on "Vertical Align Bottom" and then just use the Up-Arrow key to move them up a little bit. Select everything, and we'll choose "Object", "Ungroup" to ungroup everything, and then select "Object", "Group" to group them. So this light is now I single group. It's white too big, so I'll select "Artboard", hold the Shift key as I size it down. I'll make a duplicate by Alt-dragging a duplicate away just so I have a second one in case I need it. Now, we have our light bulb. Let's make a pattern brush from it. I'll select the "Light Bulb", go to the Brushes palette, click the "New" icon, choose "Pattern Brush", click "Okay". The colorization method will be tints and we don't want any corner. I'm going to turn off any auto-generated corner. I'm also going to space this a little apart. I can do that at this stage by just increasing the spacing value so that the lights aren't sitting on top of each other. I'll click "Okay". Now, we can go ahead and test our lights. I'll do that by creating some lines. With the Pen tool, I'll drag down, go to about halfway across my document, try and line up with my starting point, and drag just slightly up. Now, I still have my Left Mouse button pressed down because I want to hold the Alt or Option key and just spin this handle around. Then I'll let go the Left Mouse button. Ignore the fact that we have a filled shape here. We're going to get rid of that in just a minute. We'll go back to approximately opposite the starting point, click and just drag upwards. We just want a couple of loops for our lights. I'll press "Escape" to finish. Go back to the Selection tool, press the letter V, and we'll spin this across so that we have a stroke but no fill. Now, we have our line, we can apply our pattern brush to it. You can say that our pattern brush, even though the brush start off looking very, very dark here, you can see it's much lighter now, and the reason for that is that the stroke color is this light gray. This brush is going to change color if we change the stroke color. Because we used a Multiply blend mode with this dark shadow, we're going to get even dark shadows when we choose a quite highly saturated color. Let's select the line and make it red. See here, we're getting this dark color. Even though you can't really see it in the original brush, we needed that dark color to be able to ensure that we would get a proper shadow on our brush. That's one thing that might concern you about these lights, and that is that they are being painted across the middle of the line. It would look better if the lights actually hung from the line, would give us a little bit more of a possibility for actually creating a string for our lights as well. The solution to that is to go back to our original light. I'll zoom into this area so we can see what it's looking like. I'm going to the Pen tool. I'm going to hover over the very bottom middle of the light here until I pick up that anchor point, and I'll click once, and then I'll press "Escape". All I've done is I've created a point which is just a single point, and its right over the bottom most point of this light. Now, I'll go to the Reflect tool, and I'll hover over the top of the light and hold the Alt or Option key as I click once. What that does is it sets this as the reflection point. I've got one here, I've got the reflection point here. What I want to do is to end up with this point here or up here. I'll choose a horizontal reflection. I'll turn preview on, and this is the point is this move from here all the way up to here. I don't want to copy, I just want that point, so I'll just click "Okay". Now, I'll make my brush not just out of this light, but the light plus this point, and that will ensure that the line that the brush is applied to is going to run through the middle here, and that's going to be along the top of the light. Let's go back to the Brushes panel. We really have the brush created. We just want to replace it. So let's drag this edited version of our brush up into the Brushes panel and hold the Alt or Option key as we place it in place of the elements that are already there. As soon as I let go, the panel opens again. All the settings that I have are still implies, so I'll just click "Okay". I want to apply it to my strokes because I want the change to be reflected wherever I've used that brush. I'll press Control or Command 0 to zoom back out. Now, when we select our row of rights, you can see that the top of the light is running along the string. That would give us the possibility of selecting that string, make a duplicate of it by choosing "Edit", "Copy", and then "Edit", "Paste in Place". Removing the brush from it, I can just select Basic and just enlarge the stroke. So now I have a string of lights. Now, there are lots of other things that we can do with these lights. We're going to come back in the next video and make a Christmas tree from them, but along the way, we're going to find a really fun way of re-coloring the lights so that they are different colors. 9. Pt 8 A Christmas tree of lights: Before we can create our Christmas tree of lights, we're going to need to create a few bits and pieces to use. One of them is going to be an art brush. We already have the lights as a pattern brush, but we need one as an art brush. I'm going to use the one that has this extra point here. We know that when it's painted across a line, the line is going across the middle of this brush. It's really important that you select this one to make the art brush. Out of selected, click the "new icon" at the bottom of the brushes palette. This time choose "Art brush" click "OK". We will want this to be able to be recolored, that's really important, so we will select "Tints" as the colorization method. We want the direction of the painting to go through the brush so I'm going to select this arrow here. If everything looks like this, you can just click "OK". The next thing we need is some dashed lines. I'll choose the line segment tool here. I'm going to click once in the document so that I can create my lines of unknown length and unknown angle. Zero is going to be my angle, so they're going to be horizontal lines, and I want them to be 10 pixels in length, so I'll type 10. If you're unsure as to what dimensions you're using, you can just type px and that will ensure that whatever dimensions you're using it will be a 10 pixel line. Click "OK". Now this is a very small line. You can see it here, it's just tiny. We'll select over it and make sure that it is one of the colors that we want to use for our lights, so I'm making this red. I'll select the line and hold the "Alt" or "Option" key as I drag a duplicate away. This one I'll select and recolor a different color. I'll color it green. I'll do the same thing, "Alt" or "Option", drag a duplicate away and make it yet a different color. This one will be blue. Let's do it again "Alt" or "Option" drag, and I'll make it orange. We want to make sure that these are properly spaced apart. Select over all of them, go to the align panel, make sure you have "Align to key object" selected. Then you'll set the spacing in here. Given that our lines are 10 pixels in length, I think a spacing of about eight pixels would be ideal, so I'll make it eight. Again, if you're unsure the dimensions that you're using type px and then press "Enter". We'll click here on "Horizontal Distribute Space" because that will take each of these shapes and it will distribute them all with eight pixels of space between them. We just make sure that they're nice and evenly spaced. Now, I did my math for a reason, because I need to add an extra eight pixels of space on the end of this to be a brush. I've got four lines that are each 10 pixels in length, so that's 40 pixels in total. I want 1, 2, 3, 4, spaces that are eight pixels in length four eights are 32, add that to 40 and you'd get 72. I need a rectangle that is 72 pixels in length. I'll select the Rectangle tool, click once. I want it to be 72 pixels and the height can be anything, I'm just going to make it one pixel and click "OK". This is my rectangle that is the exact right length. I want it to have no stroke and no fill and I'll move it up and align it perfectly over the end of my red shape here. It's going to stick out eight pixels on this side. I need to make sure that the shape that I've just created is moved behind everything else because what it's going to be is area that marks out the ambit of my brush and for it to work like that, it has to be at the back of everything. If you're unsure, open up the last pallet. Let's just go and make some larger panel options. Here is the shape I just created and we need it to be behind these four lines. These four lines are just here because I created them most recently. I'll just drag this shape so it's behind the lines. Select over everything, and this is going to become a pattern brush. I open the brushes palette, click the "New Brush" icon, choose "Pattern brush", click "OK". This time we do not want a colorization method, so we're going to set that to none. We're going to deselect any corner tile. We don't want any corner tiles at all because they're just going to be distorted and they're going to get in our way, and we'll click "OK". The pattern brush is created and our globe brushes created, we're ready to get started with our Christmas tree. I'll use Control and zero to zoom back out so that we can see the area in which we're working. I no longer need these lights so I'll select them and we can just work out where they are here in the last pallet. I'll lock both of them down, there two objects in the last pallet, lock them down and turn them off so they can't be moved or selected, but they're also not going to be in our way. Also, I want to get rid of this set of lines, which was our brush. Again, I can just lock them down and just hide them because I don't want them anymore. To draw out the Christmas tree it's going to be really helpful to have a reference triangle so I'll choose the polygon tool. Click once in the document, set the number of sides to three, doesn't matter what the radius is and click "OK". I'll now drag this out so I can use it as a template for my Christmas tree shape. I just want an idea as to what a triangle looks like so when I start drawing my lines they're going look correct. I'm going to lock this down. I don't want it to move, but I also do want to say it right now. Next up I get to draw my Christmas tree and I'm just going to draw a series of loops. You can do this in one of a number of ways, but probably the Pen tool, even though sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to use, probably the pen tool is the best tool to use. I'll select the "Pen tool". I'll start up here towards the top of the Christmas tree. I'll drag in the direction I intend going in, but I don't want my handles to be very long. If you make your handles too long, you're going to lose control of the shapes really, really quickly. I'm just going to make shorthand rules. Let's go to this point on the Christmas tree edge and drag out in the direction that we're going in. Now we'll hold Alt or Option and swing the handle in. Again, we don't want this handle to be very long. Coming back to here, I'm going to drag out a little bit, hold Alt or option swinger handle round, and head off in this direction and I'll continue all the way down the Christmas tree, just making sure that these handles here are very short. Don't let go the left mouse button until you swing the handle around. We'll finish in the bottom corner of the Christmas tree. Press Escape when you're done. You can hide the basic triangle because you no longer need it any longer. What we have here the basic shape that's going to be our Christmas tree shapes, that's going to be a very abstract Christmas tree. Ultimately, we're going to use this dashed line that we created to create the colored lights. But I just want to show you something that we're going to run into as we create this that we need to solve. I'm going to select my Christmas tree and let's just go and put this pattern brush on it. Now, my shapes are way too big so am going to make them quite a bit smaller, but I just want you to see what the problem is. The problem here is that the lights are hanging very nicely off this part of the Christmas tree but now they're pointing upwards and then they're down and then they're up and down and then they're down and then they're up. We need to solve the problem of the lights going in the wrong direction essentially. This is what we're going to do. We'll select over our Christmas tree shape and we'll go to the Scissors Tool. You'll find the Scissors Tool underneath the Eraser Tool. We've just got single anchor points here on our lines because that's how we created them in the first place. What we'll do with the Scissor Tool is will hover over each of these anchor points and just click once and that breaks the line. It's important that you see the word anchor before you click. Just ignore everything that's pretty much happening with your Christmas tree in the process, we just use these lines as an example of what the problem is. We also need to use them to work out which of these we need to change the direction of. We're going to look at the last palette and look at our Christmas tree all at once. I'm looking at this path and everything's pointing in the right direction here. I don't want to be able to move or change this one side, I'm going to lock out one down. This one is a problem, so I'll leave it. This one is correct so I'll lock it because I don't need to do anything with it. I'll go through and identify all the ones where the lights are hanging in the correct direction. What's left and what is selectable are only those lines where the lights are going in the wrong direction. They're pointing upwards instead of pointing downwards. Next, I'll go to this line because I need to change its direction. The way that you change the direction of a line is that you click on the end of it here with the Pen Tool. We'll select our line with the Selection Tool, go to the Pen Tool or press the letter P, and then click on the anchor point here. Now when you do the lights should flip across to the other side of the line but you've got the things still attached to you so you just press the Escape key. Let's go and get the next line. I'll press V for the Selection Tool, I'll grab the line, I'll press P for the Pen tool, I'll locate this anchor point and click and the lights flip over. Then I'll press Escape to stop this attraction the Pen tool was still attached to that points so you have to press Escape to let it go. V for the Selection Tool, P for the Pen Tool. Click once on this point until the lights flip over, press Escape to stop the Pen Tool working, go back to the Selection Tool, select the last set of lights, P for the Pen Tool, click on this anchor points so the light flip over and press Escape. At this point you can go back and unlock the lines that you locked down because now everything is going in the correct direction. We've done pretty much everything that we need to do now to make this a Christmas tree made up of colored lights. The only thing I want to do before I go to the next step is to just move every second row of these lights across a little bit so that I avoid the problem of the lights running into each other at the very ends. That will just tip them off a little bit and give us a little bit better of a result. In the next step, we're actually going to get rid of these solid lines so this is the last chance we get of working with a single line. In a minute these are going to be broken up into separate lines. We'll select over these lines that are making up our Christmas tree and click here on this Pattern brush. We're applying this pattern brush now to the lines so that we can create some colored lights. When I click away, you can see here that we've got a series of dashed lines. Each one of these lines is now made up of our colored dashes. My little bit concern about this one because it seems as if the dashes are a little bit longer than they should be. I'll go and select this line. I'm just going to shorten this line a little bit and that will probably avoid this problem. We want the dashes to be pretty much the same length as the dashes on the other lines because each one of these dashes in a minute is going to support a single light globe. If you think any of these lines need to be extended just a little bit to make the dashes bit longer, you can do so at this point. Select over all of the lines and now we're going to expand them with Object Expand Appearance, and then Object Ungroup until Ungroup is no longer an option. Now we have individual dashes. Each one of these dashes is an individual line and there's a little path here in the path palette for each and every one of them. We're going to make them straight lines. We'll choose Object Path, Simplify. We'll select Preview and make sure that they are set to be straight lines. We can adjust the Angle Threshold to the minimum possible number of points which means that each of these lines is now only going to be created using two anchor points, one at either end and click Okay. Because they're straight lines, that will mean that the lights that were just about to apply to them should not be distorted. With all of these lines selected, let's click on our Art Brush. The Art Brush is now applied, one brush to every line. If we don't like the way it looks and I don't like the way this looks, I'll click here on Options of Selected Object, and now I can adjust the size of the brush. Making sure the Preview is turned on and just make sure that my lights are a better size. You may also get better results with Proportional. You can work out whether you prefer proportional value with size, a larger light or no proportional and just adjust the size of the lights to suit. When you have what you want, you can click Okay and then just click away from your Christmas tree. This process of creating these multicolored lights using a dash brush is very similar process to the one I used to make a bunting brush in an earlier skill share class. I'm going to link to that in the class project area just in case you want to revisit that class as well. There is the final example in our ornament theme. In this one, we've created colored lights in this case, and the shape of a Christmas tree. But you could also create colored lights and loopy lights across a document. Your project for this class is to reproduce one or more of the ornaments that you have made in this class and show us a image of your completed element in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class on that you've learned things about Illustrator for which you were previously unaware. As you were watching this class, you will have seen a prompt which asks if you would recommend it to others, please, if you did enjoy this class and if you learn things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend this class to others and secondly, write in just a few words about why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this too is a class that they could enjoy and learn from. If you would like to leave me a question or a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your questions and comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. I wish you all the compliments of the season for 2017, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode of Illustrator for launch soon.