Shape Up! Drawing in Adobe Illustrator

1. Class Introduction: Hi. Welcome to Shape Up Drawing and Illustrator. My name is Tim Aggert I'm a freelance illustrator, and I do a lot of different work, especially vector work. I used to think that artwork had to be complex or very detailed in order to be captivating. Like this painting, there's a lot going on in so much detail. And this is my favorite album cover of all time. I just love the storytelling and just all the details, all the little intricacies. But what I've learned is that artwork doesn't have to be complex to be good. It can be very simple and you can do a lot with very little. In this class, we'll learn to draw with only shapes and we'll make a landscape. What we will learn is how to draw shapes and modify them, how to use the pathfinder tool, how to compose a landscape, how to draw using some simple shapes and how to create objects with simple shapes, and then using color and gradients. What you'll need for this class is a laptop with Illustrator. Now let's hear about our class project. 2. Class Project Overview: Our class project will be to make a simple landscape out of basic shapes in Illustrator. What we'll do is choose an image, which I have some that you can reference. And then the steps that we'll go through are choosing the reference image, making our main basic shapes, adding more complex shapes and adding detail, and then incorporating color gradients. At the end, you'll have a colorful landscape built out of just some simple shapes. Alright, let's get started. 3. Drawing and Modifying Shapes: Okay, we're going to start drawing and modifying shapes in Illustrator. I'm an illustrator here, and I have an artboard that's set to 8 " by 8 ", just big enough that we can draw some shapes. So we're basically going to learn how to draw shapes, and then we're going to learn how to modify them in a couple of ways. And then we're going to use pathfinder to do three tricks that I use often in my work. So Alright, to start drawing shapes, we'll start with the circle. We're going to do three shapes. It's going to be circle, square, triangle. So to get to the circle or ellipse, you can press L, or you can go over on the left side here and click Ellipse. I like to use shortcuts when I can. So you have that cursor there. And we're going to be doing this a lot of drawing shapes. So you're going to click hold Shift and drag. And then let go of everything. I'm gonna take my stroke off. When you hold Shift down, it's a very symmetrical. If you didn't hold Shift down, let's delete that. Let's do it again. So I'm just going to click and drag. You see how now it's an oval, it's not symmetrical. I'm going to do shift. Boom, snaps into being symmetrical. Alright, so there's a circle. And now this is another key command that I'm going to use a lot, so maybe you want to practice it, or maybe you already know it. So to make a duplicate of this, I'm going to press Option. See the two arrows there. I'm going to click on it, but don't drag it yet. Now press Shift and then drag it. And then it stays by pressing Shift, it's stayed perfectly aligned. It's just something that I use a lot. And then we're going to do it again. So I'm going to have it clicked. Option, get the two arrows, click Shift, and then drag it. And I'm going to do it one more time because we're going to build something here. Alright, so we have these all in a row. Now, if I don't hold shift and I pull from the side, you can make this in any size you want. So we're gonna kind of mix this up. This is how we're gonna start modifying. So now I'm I have kind of an oval shape. We're gonna make an even bigger oval shape, and then one that like, we'll do that one. So now we have three shapes. Now we'll start using the pathfinder tool here, which you can either go up to Window and go down to pathfinder, or I have it over here. So the first tool we're going to use is Merge, which is right here, or Unite, I guess. It's called Unite. So I'm going to click on that. And you see how here I'll do Command Y. See how it's three shapes. I'll select them, do unite. Boom, now it's one shape. And Command Y just turns it into like a wireframe mode so you can see. Alright, so now we have this. And now we're going to use our second pathfinder tool. I'm going to draw a line this way. We're not using the pen tool in this class, so I'm going to do it this way. I'm going to click drag and hold Shift. So now I have a line with no stroke and no fill. I'll go to Wireframe so you can see it. So now we have this line. I'm going to hold Shift, click on our shape, and now I'm going to go to divide. And now this whole thing's grouped together. I'm going to go to object, ungroup, and now I'm going to delete that. So now, we took a circle and we made like maybe it could be a bush if you had a few more circles, maybe, or a cloud. I use this a lot for clouds. So that's the circle tool. Now we're going to move on to our second shape, which is going to be the rectangle tool. So you can either go up here or you can press M. So once again, I'm going to click Hold Shift, drag it. So it's a perfect rectangle. Alright. And now we're not going to do a ton with rectangles in terms of pathfinder, but here, we'll duplicate this, so we'll do option, click Shift. So once again, I'm not going to hold Shift, but I'm gonna pull this over. And now I'm going to go I'm gonna press A for my direct select. And now I have one corner highlighted. Do you see how this is blue, and the rest have a white fill? I know it's very subtle. So now all I'm going to do is press up on my cursor. I pressed V to get it to get it off of direct select, and I'm just going to click anywhere on my Rboard. Alright, so now we have this, and you might say, Oh, that's kind of boring. What is that? Well, I use this a lot for land, like horizon lines, large masses of land. Like in our landscape, it'll come in handy. And now I'll kind of show you. So I'll take this. I was on the arrow tool V. I click Command C, Command F. So now I have a duplicate in front, which doesn't look very interesting. I'm going to make sure I'm on my fill. And now I'm going to just do a gray Alright, so now I have a gray box in front of a black box. I'm going to click on this. Using the A, direct select. I'm gonna click on that. Hold Shift. Click on that and then cursor down. So now I have a box on top of a box, and they're perfectly aligned. Now I can do something like this where I take one corner, kind of bring it up. And so I'll do things like this just to add dimension or add You know, if I added color gradients, this would actually be a lot more interesting. But rectangles, a lot of times I just use it for land. I'll put a rectangle on a rectangle and then kind of modify it like we did here. So that's rectangle. Our last shape we're going to do here. Now, I don't know of a key command for triangle. What we do is actually go to polygon here. So this is gonna make a six sided shape. I'm not I'm not gonna hold shift, but what I am gonna do, so I clicked and dragged. I'm still dragging. I'm gonna go with your cursor or your arrow key, sorry. Go down, down, down, hold shift, and you can drag here. So I'm holding shift. You have a perfect perfect triangle, equilateral triangle. So that's how without doing a pen tool, that's how I draw triangle. I start with a polygon and then click drag, arrow down, and then have shift. And a lot of this stuff comes with practice. If it's like, Oh, gosh, this is tough. So I click on it, and then I'm going to do option, click drag. Alright, so here's what we're going to do here. I'm actually going to make this smaller hold shift. And triangles I use a lot for mountains and trees. So we're going to do I'm going to do A for direct select. Yeah, I can do this one of two ways. I'm actually gonna click on it, and you can just drag it up. And then, boom, you have a simple tree. And then I can do M for rectangle. I did eye for Eyedropper. I clicked on that to get the dark color, and then I'm going to click on it. Command X, Command B for behind. And then we haven't aligned anything yet. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to click on both. Go up aligned to selection, and then center it horizontal align center, and boom. So now you have a real simple tree. So I'll move this over. And then sometimes I do a little more complex. I'm going to do option, click drag. I'm going to make this. Oh, this is another important tool or, you know, trick, I guess, tip. So I'm going to click on this. I'm gonna go up to my corner, and I'm going to hold Option. I'm going to click Option Shift and then drag down. And that is going to make it smaller from the center. If I didn't do that, click Hold from the corner, do Shift. It's just going to go like that from the corner. I don't always want that. Alright, so I'm going to take this, go down. And then I'm going to do Command C, Command F, move it up. Command C, Command F, move it up. And now I'll just take these three and go back to align, make sure I'm aligned to selection and not aligned to artboard, and then I'm going to do vertical distribute Center. And that's just going to make sure that all these three are equally, like equidistant. So now we added a little more complexity to our tree. And then there's one more thing I want to show in terms of pathfinder. We'll do copy paste. So I'm going to do copy or Command C, Command B. I'm going to move this. Let's make it a different color. And then I'm going to scale it from the corner, hold shift. And now I'm going to do Command X to cut it, Command B behind it. We're going to select both. And now I go to pathfinder. So we've done Unite, we've done divide, and now we'll do minus back. You can play around with these others. I don't use them as much. But here's minus back. I use this a good amount. So whatever's behind the shape, it'll take out. So, boom, now we have a moon. So here, we've made we've made a cloud. We've made land, we've made tree, and we've made a moon so we did all these simple shapes, and that was just with modifying and doing pathfinder. So let's move on and really start our landscape. 4. Composing Our Landscape: Now that we've learned how to draw shapes and modify them in different ways, let's start our landscape and start thinking about composition. So, no matter what you're going to do in terms of your landscape, whether you're going to use one of my sketches or a photo of your own, let's talk about composing it and breaking it down. So it's not like we're going to take a very complicated photo and draw it exact. What we're going to do is take it and think about simplifying it and breaking it down into shapes. It's not going to be a mountain anymore. It's going to be a series of triangles. It's not going to be a tree anymore. It's going to be a series of maybe circles and things like that. Your ground is going to be a rectangle. Alright, so here we have a mountainscape with a lake in front of it, and then some trees. Instead of making this super complicated, let's just break it down. So my mountains are going to be some triangles, and then I'm going to have the mountains and then some hills and then the lake. And those are just going to be a series of rectangles. And, of course, I'm going to modify these. And then the trees off to the left, I think I'm going to make them a series of circles so they have like this rounded element, but that could change. So now we see the original photograph. Here it is. And then here's my shapes on top of it, just to give you an idea. And then what I'm going to do is sketch this. So here that is. I've already sketched it. And so that just shows you a simplified interpretation. And that's what I'll draw on. So now you can either use one of the sketches that I've done for you. I've supplied a few, or you can take a photo that you like and simplify that. But I really love to get you to look at things, start looking at things and seeing, you know, not a car, but, like, Oh, that's rectangle, rectangle, circle. You know, like, start looking at things when you're drawing and breaking them down. That's really the point. So let's start working on our landscape, bring this sketch in and start laying down the ground in the main shape. 5. Drawing the Main Shapes: Alright, now that we have established what we're going to draw, whether you're going to do, you know, a photograph of your own or a sketch of your own or use one of mine, I'm going to work in a size. It's going to be 6.4 " wide and 3.6 " high. And I know that sounds like an odd size, but it's the same dimensions of, like, 19 to six ratio, which would be like a video or a wide screen movie. And it's going to be the same size as my sketches. So if you want to work for one of my sketches, feel free. So I did place. I'm just going to click on it, and it's the exact same size. So this first layer first layer, I'm going to call FPO, which is just, like, a term for positioning only. You could also call it like sketch or something like that. And then I'm going to draw on top of it. I'm going to label it by, like, background midground, foreground, kind of. So I'm going to do mountains that's my background. You know what? I'm going to I unlocked it. I'm going to go and just make it. I'll just make it like 45. Less than that. 30%. So I can see it, but it's not gonna be distracting. I'm going to lock that layer, and now I'm going to start drawing my shapes. And this particular video, this segment will be pretty brief because we're just blocking out the main the main shapes. So here's my polygon. I'm going to bring it down. I'm going to make this very wide. And you don't have to feel like you have to match everything exactly. So I did the move where I pressed option to duplicate it. And I will fill these in with color pretty soon here. Actually, I'm going to work in grayscale. I know it's going to sound weird, but it's just to kind of simplify it. And then we'll add color. So I'm going to do this. I'll just work in these default it's gonna be pretty light it's towards the back. So it's my first mountain layer. And I'm gonna do the next. And that's gonna be I'll do a triangle for that one. Another triangle. And I'm going to This is going to be bringing it to the left. And I'm going to do direct select, that's A and just drag it so that it's just flush with the left side, and then I'm going to drag this over. I'm going to give this kind of a darker color. And there's my hill. So already, it's looking like I know it's simple, but it's looking like a, you know, we got a landscape going on. And now I think what I'm going to do I'm going to do this one more piece on my mountains. I'm going to start with a rectangle. So I'm gonna do and just, like, do this over here. I'm going to select it. Select the same colors my mountains. What this is going to be is kind of a we'll see if it looks good. It's like this jutting out piece. I think it'll be fine. And then I'm going to I don't love it, but it's okay. So I'm gonna keep it. It's just like a piece of the mountain that's still going. Alright, so now I'm gonna make these go away, and I'm gonna put my lake in the front of these Lake. And that's just gonna be a rectangle, all the way across. I'm gonna make this pretty light. So you take away our sketch? And then I'm gonna take these away. Now I'll do these two pieces of land that are, like, on top of the lake. I don't. I'm not being very inventive in my You know what I'm gonna do? I'm actually gonna take this, copy it, and I'm gonna duplicate it. And then I'm just going to modify it like that and then modify it like this. You know, as much as we're not using the pen tool, well, I don't have to break the rule. I'll show this just to show it to you. Anchor point tool. So it's not the pen tool. You can take that and drag one of your pieces to give it a little bit of a curve. So I'm going to make all these visible. I'm gonna make this darker 'cause it's getting closer to us. So it gave it a little bit of a curve there, so it's not so geometric. And now I think I'm going to do the same thing. I'm gonna copy paste in front, drag this over. There we go. So now this is really looking like I know it's simple, but it's getting there. And I'll do sky as my back layer. And then in the next video, what I'm going to do is do any kind of detail or anything that's complex, which in this one, there isn't much. It's gonna be basically shapes. And I'll do a little bit in the sky on the next video. But, yeah, just by doing well, I didn't mean to do that. Alright, so just by doing a couple of basic there's our sketch. And then here's the main composition. And as I'm looking at this, I'm going to make a few tweaks simple. But I I want your eye to kind of go up like this, so I'm gonna go like here. I'm gonna bring this up a bit. I'm gonna move it over a little bit. I want your eye to kind of move this way. So I made it kind of like a little staircase there. But here we go, just by doing those couple rectangles, couple triangles. And even though we're working in gray scale here, we've got our main composition. And now in our next video, we'll add some details. 6. Adding Details and Objects: Now that we have our main composition, we're going to add some details. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to take my sketch, put it up at the front. I dragged it up in layers, and I'm going to lock it. I think that'll be good enough. And since it has some transparency on it, you can bring it to the front and it won't you can see through it, of course. So I'm going to do some true Let's do some clouds first. They're basically going to be made the same way. So I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to start drawing. I'm gonna lock everything, but the layer I'm on. And I'm going to go to white and I'm just going to start drawing these circles. I'm going to do one, tilt it. C, control F. I'm just going to do it in front. Since I'm drawing on white here, I can always go to my Command Y wire frame and it makes you see it better, you know what I mean? So I'm going to duplicate these, and they're just going to get smaller. You can also kind of squish these a bit just to mix them up. And I'm just making like So I just have a series, and I'm going to go back to this. I'm gonna go still got pathfinder over here. I'm gonna unite them. I know it looks kind of silly here, but I'm gonna do So I have a line going through it that doesn't have a stroke and doesn't have a fill. That I do because if you have a stroke on it, it's weird. It can be a little weird when you when you do the divide. So now I have this complex shape and a line, and the complex shape is a fill, and I'm going to do divide. And it basically divides it, but it's group. So then I'm going to go to ungroup, and now I'm going to delete that and boom. There's a cloud that I I'll drag it over here so you can see. I like that, so I'm going to keep that. Don't worry. This thing is going to come to life when we add color, and now I'll do trees. And that's really the detail we're adding in this one. Not too much. Go to my layers. So we have clouds, and now we'll do trees over here. And we're going to do trees the same way. I don't always do trees with circles, but when they're kind of bushy and stuff, I kind of like doing it. Oh, and I'm going to show you another trick, as well. Now, in this next part, I'll speed up a little bit. I usually don't speed up, but all I'm doing is taking the shapes and aligning them and kind of moving them around, like we made our cloud. So what I'm going to do, I'm making a series of these, and then I'm going to take a line and just divide on the bottom, just like we made our cloud, and then I'm going to put it beneath our hill. The land here, put it above the trees. So, boom, you see how that looks? Now, this is fine, but I want to add a little bit of, like, movement to it. And to do this, I'm going to actually duplicate this and just move it over here. It's just out of sight in case I need it again. But I'm going to take these that I've made, and I'm going to go up not scale, but shear. And I'm going to just I don't know what your default settings are, but I'm going to click hold Shift and just just move it a little bit. And all that's going to do is give it a little bit of a slant to the right. And I held Shift down it kind of just it makes it along the horizon, so it doesn't just, like, start it's hard to explain, but just, like, start shifting around. So I'm going to kind of there we go. So it gave it some movement, so it's kind of leading your eye towards the mountains there. So now we have some detail and some clouds and some trees. I'm going to do one more thing, and then we'll add color in detail here. And here's the one thing. This is just a subtle thing that's going to help us once we add color. I'm going to add some We're gonna add some, like, bands of color in the sky, which right now won't do much. Who would we add? When we add the color, it'll work. I think it'll work. We're actually gonna take these Copy and put them above the lake lake highlights. Bring them down here. That'll become useful when we add color. So yeah, now we're going to add some color gradients, and this thing's really gonna come to life. 7. 07 Shape Up Adding Color: Now that we've added some details, it's time to finish up with some color. So I'm going to make my sketch visible. I'm going to delete that. I don't really need it anymore. I'm going to add a layer to the bottom, new layer, call it colors. And you can choose your color palette. You can you can literally search color palettes. You can look for photos of mountains and sunsets and then pick from there with the Eyedropper tool. I recently, you know, planning this class, I did an illustration that I enjoyed that was kind of training to do this landscape. And so I'm going to actually bring that in because I like the colors of it. You'll see the similarities of these drawings. And I just love these colors, so I'm actually going to use I'm going to draw some how I'm going to choose my swatches here or make my swatches is just by making some squares. And then, that's going to be my light sky. That's going to be my darker sky than my mountains are going to be. And I'm going to change these a little bit. But this is going to be kind of a guide for my colors. Let's see. And then this will be a good starting point for my swatches. So I'm going to go over to my swatches here. I'm going to do Select All unused. And sometimes I do this at the beginning of a project. And now it deletes anything that's not being used. I'm using the gray scale here, but I'm going to do these and then go over and do add selected colors. So now I have a nice little palette, which I'm going to add to, but it's at least a good starting point. And for gradients, it's very helpful to have these colors in your swatches so you can just, you know, slide over and get your let's move this over here. So I'm going to use gradients and swatches a lot. Alright. So now to do a gradient, I'm going to click on a gradients, it's going to be very garish. It's not going to look great, but it'll only last a second. And then you're going to choose your light color and then your other end, which is the gradient. It's like you're choosing one color on one end, one color on the other. You can also play with opacity. And this is set for light to dark here, light to dark, but then I'm going to do G and then have it go. My light colors down here and my dark colors up here. And then I'm gonna select these, make them very light. And then I'll keep them like that for now, but I will play with opacity. And now I'm gonna have my foreground be a dark color. And then mid let's make that a little lighter. And then we'll see how these bushes look. They're either gonna look good as this dark purple or I'm gonna make them into something like this. Let's see. 'cause I do want my foreground to be darker, midground lighter, and then these will be I'm gonna play around with these. I know this example, they're dark, but we'll probably go a little lighter than that. Let's see what we got here. I think we want something like this. Gonna have this one be darker 'cause it's more forward. And then here You know what? I'm gonna have that I'm gonna have that be closer to this. And a lot of this is playing around. Once you have your palette, you're just kind of playing around with what colors work. And then I'm going to reflect the sky. Do G again, and I'm going to go from light to dark. And these bars that I added in the last video, they're going to serve as kind of a little like kind of not really reflection, but more kind of like a little highlight. So I did copy paste in front. We'll see how I like these. And these are going to be like a light very light. I'm going to do this here. We did gradients with 100% color going to 100% color, but now we're going to do something different. So this is the color that they are. I'm going to click on my gradient, and then I'm going to choose that shouldn't change, and then slide this over. So it's going to go from one color to one color, which doesn't sound interesting, but this side's going to be 100 and this side's going to be zero. Maybe, we'll do zero. So now it's going from this light color to zero. So down here so it just gives it this nice little I'm actually going to flip that. Yeah, we'll see how that works. It might not. It's more subtle. Then these I'll just make transparent. So I'm just going to bring them down to about 70. And then I'm going to do a little trick here with these. Let's go to my layers. I'm gonna lock everything except for those. And I'm going to do direct select and then just choose the one side, and I'm going to bring these up and then bring these down just to kind of mimic the angle that the that the mountains going. Now that we have that in the sky, what I'm going to do is make a new layer here. We're gonna add some trees to the left side. So I'm gonna press M for rectangle. And I'm doing this so that there's something in the foreground over here so there's, like, foreground, midground background. I think I'm going to make these. I don't know if I've explained much what I'm doing over here with a color picker, and I apologize if I haven't really shown you that. So I'm going to do an eyedropper for the ground. That was eye. And I want it to be darker, so I don't have that in my color palette, so I'm going to go here, double click. And then you kind of just drag around and find here are your main here's your main spectrum of colors. And then within that, you can do tints and shades, which tints would be lighter, shades would be darker versions of that color. So I chose a darker color. And then check this out. We're going to start reusing pieces that we already have. So I'm going to take this cloud, copy, and then I'm going to do a bush on the left. Drag it over here, make it dark. And I'm going to do O for reflect. Option click. And then it did the vertical flip. And if I did a copy, it would make a copy, but I'm just going to do Okay and it's not going to make a copy. So I'm just doing that. One, we already had it. So we basically took I'm going to make that darker. So it just adds a little bit to it. I'm also going to do I'm going to take this little Cloud, and that's going to become two things. I'm going to make leaves holding down shift in the corner. Let's see if this looks good. I zoom in. She doesn't really want to give me the corner. Not sure why. All right, so we're going to just make these. And so I took my cloud and then made it into some leaves here. So you can, like, reuse pieces, and these will probably get smaller. Yeah, play around with shapes and see what works. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't. And, you know, that's all part of it. I'm also going to take all these, so I'm gonna hold shift and click. And then I'm going to do shear, hold shift, and then bend it. Oh, did something there. I'm gonna do it again. And now I can kind of move these around if I want. Now I'm going to take this piece. This will be the final thing we do here. And then I want to add a little reflection in the lake, so I'm going to do I'm gonna make it white just so it's I'm just going to copy and then paste in front with F. And I'm just going to make a bunch of these. It's just to add a little bit of, like, reflection in the water. And you can keep adding little details to what feels good and do it. You know, you can experiment. Then one last step here. We're gonna do some I want there to be a highlight on the cloud, so I'm gonna I'm gonna go to my gradient, select that. And I want the orange to be reflecting from the sun. And so I'm gonna go to gradient and press G and just do the top. So you see I don't do G to the whole thing or don't do the spectrum to the whole thing, the top here. I could do my eye dropper, just do the top of that. And I'm going to do it to this one, as well. Apply my gradient. And then just the orange on the other end and then just do it subtly at the top. Al step will be to go to File, Export, do Export As. And then I'm gonna save a JPEG here, use artboards, because then it'll just be the size you want. And I'll do Export. I'll do RGB, just so it looks good on screens. You can do CMRK if you're printing it. But, yeah, now we have a final landscape that's a nice JPEG there. Alright, let's wrap it up and do our closing. 8. Class Closing: In closing, thank you for taking this class. I hope you've learned something, and I really hope that you created your landscape and finished your class project. If you did, please post that. I'd love to see them, give it feedback, and I just love to see what you've done. Lastly, if you could leave a review, that would be amazing. Reviews mean so much to Skillshare classes. So please leave one if you have the time. I hope you've learned some things, I hope you've drawn with me, and I'll see you in my next class.