Stipple Texture Effect in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Stipple Textures - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Create a Stipple Texture in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at making stipple textures in Illustrator. We're going to start by looking at a stipple effect that's created using a gradient. We'll make a stipple effect using a gradient mesh, and finally, we'll make a custom stipple shape effect. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you, who want to learn more about Illustrator, and if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started on creating stipple textures in Illustrator. 2. Stipple Textures - Part 1: For our first stipple effect, I'm going to create a new document. I'll choose File, New. I'm just going to create a square document that is 1000 px by 1000 px. We're working in RGB color mode. It is important that you're doing that. I'll click okay. Now we're going to start with a circle. I'm going to the Ellipse tool and I'm going to drag out, slightly off-center, a circle. So I'm holding the shift key as I drag a circle. It needs to be about that size. Now I don't want it to have any stroke and I do want it to have a fill. I'm going to select a nice sort of bright color as the fill. I'm going to choose this one here. Now we're going to zoom in because we want to see what's happening in here as we work. Now for our stipple effect, we're going to apply a gradient to this shape as well as the current fill. If we go to the appearance panel, which we could get to by choosing Window and then appearance if it was not visible here in the panel. You will see that we have no stroke and a Fill. I'm going to close up this fill. I'm just going to collapse this fill here so that we can see exactly what we've got. We've got no stroke and a pink fill. Well, I'm going to add another fill. I'm going to click here and click Add New Fill. This adds a second fill, and by default it's the exact same color as the previous fill, but we don't want it to be that. So I'm going to go across here and I'm going to select gradient for this, so that this is now filled with a gradient. I want it to be a radial gradient, so from here I'm just going to click Radial. But, I do want a black and white gradient. I want it to look just like this, white in the middle, black around the edge. The only change I might make is to push this slide here, this little indicator a little bit closer towards the black. That's going to move the transition from white to black, closer to the black area. We're going to have more white and less black. It's also going to be a very steep transition. It's looking pretty good to me right now. Now we're going to add our stipple effect, and we'll do that by choosing Effect and then Effect Gallery. We want to see what effects we have available to us. Now down here, I'm just going to click and choose Fit on Screen, because I want to see it as we go. Now, these stipple effects that we're creating are actually raster effects, they're not vector. But provided you don't plan to make these billboard size, it's a nice easy way of creating stipple textures for your images. There are a couple of tools you can use. One of them is this grain option. When you're working with grain, you get an slider for intensity, so you can make this more or less intense. Probably around about halfway is a good option. You want to see some white in the middle and some stippling around the edge. You can also adjust contrast, but again, about the middle is looking pretty good for this. You'll have a Grain Type. Now, I've got Sprinkles selected and Sprinkles is a really good choice. You'll find that there are other choices here, but a lot of them have color noise in them. What we really want for ours is this black and white. That's one sort of Grain that we could use. The other is up here in the Sketch options, and it's the Graphic Pen. Now with a Graphic Pen, you get a Stroke Length, so you can increase or decrease the Stroke Length, probably something like about two, it's not bad here. You can also adjust the Light/Dark Balance. To push the stipple effect closer to the edge or to bring it closer into the middle, you just get a choice as to where you want it to be. You can also change the direction, so you can change the Stroke Direction just to see if you can improve the effect that you're getting here. Now, I'm going to settle for Grain for mine, so I'm just going to go and re-select grain. Because I have these settings already in place, they've just gone back to those settings. So, if I'm happy with that, I'll click okay. Now we have a circle filled with a gradient that has this stipple effect on it. But if you remember rightly, we also filled the shape with pink. So we've actually got two appearances here, we've got a gradient and the original fill color. What we want to do is to blend these together. I'm going to open up this fill here. I'm making sure that I'm on the Gradient fill. You'll see that it has a grain, a filter attached to it, but also has its own opacity setting. I'm going to click on that opacity and I'm going to set it to multiply. What's happening is that this in multiply blend mode is now allowing us to see through it to the underlying color. I'm just going to bring in the opacity a little bit, just dial it down a little bit. Let's click away from this. Now press Control zero to zoom back out. This is the shape I'm now working with. Let's go ahead now and create a small illustration using it. Now for our illustration, we're going to need to make sure we've got this whole circle selected, not just part of it. I'm going to the Select tool, I'm going to drag over this shape and make sure that I have the path selected. I'm not going to just be working on, for example, this gradient fill. I need to be working on the whole shape. That's really critical. Otherwise the shape's going to start breaking up. So we're going to choose Effect and distort and transform and then transform. We're going to turn preview on because I want to say what I'm doing and I want five copies of this shape and I want to start moving them. I've already experimented with this. I know that around about 90 to 100 is a good horizontal movement. I'm going to do that same value in vertical movement. Now I'm going to start increasing the angle. What happens when I increase the angle of rotation is that they start to curve around. So I'm getting an interesting effect here. Let's also adjust the horizontal and vertical scale. I'm going to make these 90%. What's happening here then is that this shape, as it is rotating around, every single shape is reduced by 90%. The size of this shape is 90% of this one, and the size of this is 90% of this one. So it's going to get smaller as we go. Now, I've probably got too big a horizontal and vertical movements. I'm going to bring this down to, I'm thinking about 80 each. I'm pretty happy with that. So I'll click Okay. Let's have a look in the last pallet and see what we've got. Well, we've got layer one and we've got a path on it, and the path is this shape. Before I continue, I'm going to expand this. So I'm going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance. That's expanded the shape into lots of separate shapes. The benefit of breaking the shapes into individual shapes is that I can go ahead and recolor them. I'm just going to see what's happening here in the layers palette. Well, each of these shapes is a group. So it's going to open this up. You can see that this is the color fill for this path and the stipple effect is on a separate object. I'm going to open up the next one. I'm going to select its fill and I'm going to go and recolor it. I've got some colors here from a color swatch that kind of I like to use. I'm just going to go through and recolor every one of these objects But just making sure that I'm opening up these groups and I'm selecting just the path that I want to recolor. Now my set of shapes are already colored and I can just go back here and close everything down. I have just a single group that represents all of these shapes. Well, I'm going to go and transform this. With the group selected I'll choose Effect and then, distort and transform, transform. Again, I want to see my previous. I'm going to click on Previous so I can see what's happening. I want five copies of this and I want to rotate them around. Because I've got five copies and one original, I need to rotate this around so that six shapes are evenly spaced. I can just type 360 divided by six and Illustrator will do the math for me. This is what I get right now because right now I'm rotating from the center of the group. But let's see what happens when we choose a different rotation point. Each one of those, particularly these ones at the very edge, is going to get me a different looking object. The one that I want for today is this one here. So I'm just going to select it and click Okay. Now because this entire rotated shape is created using this group here, I can just move it down and the entire shape will move down. There's an interesting rotation effect with steeple shading on Ash shapes. It's all created using these effects from the Effect Gallery in Illustrator. 3. Stipple Textures - Part 2: For the next ripple effect, we're going to look at creating Gradient Meshes. I'm going to choose to create a brand new document and I'm going to use again a square 1,000 by 1,000 pixel document RGB color mode, I'll click "Okay." I'm going to start with a circle, so I'm going to the Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag out a nice big circle. I'm going to fill it with a color. I'm going to be working in the reds to yellow, so I'm going to start with mid orange color and I'm going to turn off the stroke, so I have only a fill on this shape. Now if you've never worked with the Gradient Mesh tool before, I think you are going to really like it. Let's go and find it, it's over here on the toolbar and it's called Mesh tool. With the Mesh tool, what happens is when you've got a shape selected and when you click, Illustrator is going put some lines in the shape. Let's click once and let's see what we've got; well, we're getting a curved line down here and one across here and if we click over here, we're going to get another two lines at that point. You can create all sorts of lines across your illustration, across your shapes. I'm going to do a few here. Now if you get a line in the wrong place, you can just press "Control Z" to undo it. You can also move these lines. These are just anchor points like any regular anchor point. You can go to the Direct Selection tool and you can select on an anchor point and you can move it. You can reshape these lines, but right now you're looking and probably thinking, well, why would I reshape these lines when they're not doing anything? Well, that's the beauty of the Gradient Mesh, is that these lines can hold color and they are going to hold gradient color. Let's see what that means. I'm going to select one of these points, this one here, and I'm going to open up at the Swatches panel; I'm going to click on a lighter orange color and what happens is that illustrator makes this a lighter orange and then blends it out into the rest of the object. We can select on any of these anchor points and add color to them. I want to make sure that I've actually got it selected and add the color. Now that's a much lighter yellow and it's flooding in to the shape. Then we can move this around, and if we pull it around, you can see that the color is going with it and the gradient is being rebuilt every time. Using a Gradient Mesh, you can actually create really colorful objects. I'm going to quickly go ahead and do some work on this. I can select the outer points here, there is points all the way around the very edge of the object; I'm going to select this one here and then go and hit it with some color and you can see it's got a darker red. Sometimes these are used to create sphere, so you can actually get a lot of shading on a sphere very quickly by selecting over these points and applying color to them. This tool here is also really handy at this point, it's the Lasso tool, and what it allows you to do is to go in and select just the points that you want so you won't need to select over a rectangular shape, you can just select whichever points you need. It makes it nice and easy to find and select things. I'll leave you to experiment a little bit with the Gradient Mesh tool, but I think you're really going to like it. Once we've got a gradient mesh in the color effect on our shape, let's go and add a stipple to it. We're going to open up the Appearance panel, you can see that we have a mesh selected here. I'm going to add a new fill, so I'm going to click here to add a new fill and it's black, and that's fine. Now with this new fill selected, I'm going back to my effect and Effect Gallery. Again, I can choose either grain or I can go to the sketch options and choose graphic pen; it doesn't matter which I select, it's just the effect that I'm looking for. I'm going to select the graphic pen. I don't want this to be a really heavy stipple, so I think something like this is probably going to be pretty good and I'll click "Okay." Now what I want to do is to blend this in to the colors underneath. This fill here that has the graphic pen associated with it also has its own opacity and its own blend mode. I'm going to click on "Opacity", and now I can select a blend mode, I could select for example, multiply or overlay, there are a number of blend modes here that I can use that will give me an interesting effect. Now, also with this fill, it would be possible instead of a solid fill to have a radial gradients. Let's just see how that would work, I'm going to apply a radial gradient here, and with my Gradient tool, I'm just going to click on the "Gradient tool", you can see that I've got my gradient that's running as a regular radial gradient. Well, I can move it. Let's just move it so that the lightest part of the gradient is over the lightest part of our gradient mesh and then I can just shorten it and adjust it as I wish to. Then I'm going to click back away from this and this is the effect it's having on the shape now; the white area of the gradient is not holding any of this stipple effect. Now if we wanted it to hold a little bit of the stipple effect, let's re-select the shape; let's go back to gradient, I'm going to make sure I have the gradient selected here and here I'm going to set this to a pale gray rather than a white. If I add a pale gray to it, you can see that the stipple effect is starting to move inwards here on the gradient, this is white and these are grays. I can come all the way in if I want and get a little bit less stipple effect in the highlight area. This is my gradient here, I'm just going to click away from my shape. There is a way of using the Gradient Mesh to get some really interesting color in a shape. The stipple effect is created using either of the effects that we've been using through the Effect Gallery, either this graphic pen or create it using the grain. Then if you want to get something even a little bit more sophisticated on it, instead of just using a black fill so that the stipple effect is completely over the shape, go and create a radial gradient or a linear gradient, so that you can control a little bit where the stipple effect is, based on what's in the underlying colors and your gradient may shape. 4. Stipple Textures - Part 3: To finish up looking at creating stipple effects, let's have a look at how we would create a custom stipple effect. I'm going to make a small tree, I'm going to start with the Ellipse tool. I don't want a strike, but I do want a green for the tree canopy. Let's go and select this as our green, going to drag out an oval shape. Now I'm just going to reshape it so it's no longer something that I could apply just the standard gradient to, it's a different shape and it's going to need a little bit of extra work here. Now that I've got my tree canopy, let's go and make a trunk. I'm just going to select the Polygon tool, I'm going to click once in the document, make sure the sides are set to three, click ''Okay''. I'm going to fill this with a brown color. I'm going to select over just the bottom pieces here and just drag down. I'll hold Shift as I do so, so I create a nice element that will be my tree trunk. I'm going to duplicate this by Alt dragging a duplicate away. Again, I'm going to shrink this down, but I'm going to do it with the Selection tool so that I'm shrinking the whole shape. I'm going to put this in here, I'm going to make a duplicate of this, rotate it a little bit, put it in over here, test this against my tree. Probably make the base a little bit longer. Now I'm going to join all those pieces together using the Pathfinder. If your Pathfinder is not here, you can get to it by choosing Window and then Pathfinder and you want this Unite option which just makes a single shape out of these smaller shapes. Now, I've just seen something that's probably going to bite me a little bit later on. I've got some extra anchor points here, so I'm going to get rid of this one here. The simpler shape that you've got to work with here, the more likely the effect is going to be to work. I'm just going to make sure that I really don't have an extra anchor point in here. I do so I'm just going to get in a bit closer so I can get rid of it. So think I'm right there with just simple anchor points. Let's have a look at creating our stipple effect for this tree. The first thing I'm going to do is to make a duplicate of this shape. One way of doing that is Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Place. That just puts it back on top of itself. We go to the last palette, you'll see that we've got two versions of the tree canopy. Well, the bottom most one I'm going to lock down so I can't move it and I'm going to turn it off so I can't see it. All the work we're going to do is going to be with this top version for now. Now we're going to create our stipple effect using this, but we need a smaller version of this tree canopy. I'm going to show you a technique for making a smaller duplicate of a shape and that is to use Offset, Path, Offset Path. Now, by default is probably set to 10 pixels mine's being used today already, so it's set to one pixel. What we want to do is to drop this shape inside this one so we're actually going to type something like negative 20 and just test it. You'll say the line here so you can see if it's enough or if you want a bit more, I think I'm going to add a bit more so I'm going to go to negative 25 and click ''Okay''. Now what's happened is I've just created a duplicate of this green shape that is smaller than the original, while it's still selected, I'm going up here to the Swatches panel. I'm going to click ''White'' to fill it with white. Now, when you're working with these shapes, you really must be working with filled shapes that have no strokes, if you've got strokes, things are going to start falling apart really quickly and somewhat spectacularly too. I'm going to select these two shapes with my Selection tool, I'm going to make a blend out of them, so I'm going to choose Object, Blend, Make. What should happen is you should get a seamless transition from the green through to white. If that doesn't happen, just double-click on the Blend tool here while you've got everything still selected and make sure that this says smooth color. If it doesn't just select Smooth Color from the list and press ''Okay'', and things should be okay. This is our gradient that we're going to make our stipple effect from, I'm going to select over it and choose Effect, Effect Gallery. Now, again, I can use either of these two. If I use these sketch graphic pen option, I'm going to get black stipple. If I use the Grain option, I'm going to get green stipple. It's going to be based on the color that the gradient was. Now, if I alter the gradient later on, I can get black. I'm thinking that this is probably going to give me more flexibility. I'm going to select the Grain option here and click ''Okay''. So now we have our stipple effect, it's just this white in the middle. But remember we kept a copy of the tree canopy here. Let's make these panel options a little bit larger so you can see them a bit more clearly. What I'm going to do is unlock this tree canopy, I'm going to make it visible and I'm going to move it above my blend. Now I have a solid green tree canopy over a blend. I want to be able to put these two together so I can set a blend option for this top path that will let me blend this green shape into the stipple effect underneath. With this path selected, I need to click on it here to select it going to the Appearance panel, which I could get to by choosing Window and then Appearance and I'm going to set the blend for this entire shape. I'm going down to this version of the opacity setting, you'll say that the stroke has an opacity, fill has an opacity, and this opacity affects the whole shape. This is the one you want, and I'm going to set it to multiply. Then we get this green stipple effect showing here. Now if I wanted this to be black, I could do so. What I would do is I would open up this blend. This is the white path here, this is the green path that is the outside piece of the blend. With it selected, I can come in here and make the fill any color I like, including black. If I make it black, then I get black stipple. If I were to use this, I would probably want to decrease the fill opacity a little bit so that I didn't get quite such a dark stipple effect. But I'm going back to green. Now to finish off it would be better and neater if I put these two shapes together. I'm going to select both of these, click on one, Shift-click on the other, and I'm going to group them, Object, Group. Then this becomes the tree canopy, and if I'm being really smart about this, I'll be double-clicking in here and call this tree canopy. It's very clear what this is and where it is in the last stack. Now let's go and turn our attention to this tree trunk because it's going to be a little bit more of a challenge. Again, I'm going to make a copy of it. Now, before we did Edit Copy, Edit Paste in Place, the other way that you can make a copy is just to take this and drag and drop it onto the New Layer icon and that just makes a duplicate. I'm going to turn it off and lock the duplicate down. We're just working on this shape here. We need now to make our Offset Path effect. I'm going to choose Object, Path, Offset Path. This time we don't want a really big Offset Path, we only want a very small one. I'm going to set this to something like minus five pixels and just see how that looks. Well, I'm a little bit worried about all of these points in here, but I think we can probably solve that in a minute, so I'm just going to click ''Okay''. Let's zoom in here and see just how many points we have. This effect is going to be a little bit better if we have the same number of points in our inside shape as we do in the outside shape and right now, I've got one more. Just going to select over here because this looks like being some of the problem and I'm just going to remove this point here. I'm going to move this one down a bit. But I think something's happening here too, so I'm just going to select over this, I do have two points in here, so I'm just going to go and remove one of them. Let's Control or Command zero to just zoom out and see how are we going here. Here is my inner shape, and I have an outer shape. The inner shape I'm going to fill with white. I'm going to the Swatches panel, just click to fill it with white. Now let's go and make our blend with these two shapes selected. I'm going to choose Object, Blend, Make. Now we've got a nice blend, a nice transition from brown through to white. I'm going to select this again and go and apply our stipple effect, our grain. Effect, Effect Gallery. Let's go back to the grain we had before, we can increase the intensity if we wish, or not and the contrast click ''Okay''. Now I'm a little bit concerned with the changes I made to the points around this tree trunk that the tree trunk copy that I tucked away may not be an exact duplicate of this tree trunk, so I'm actually going to unlock it and trash it. I'm going to get a duplicate of the tree trunk from inside the blend. I'm going to open up my blend, and in here is the white middle bit and then the brown outside. I'm going to go to the brown outside, I'm going to drag and drop it on the new Layer icon. This puts a duplicate of the outside trunk into the Layer palette, but you can see it's stuck inside the blend right now. Well, I'm going to take it and I'm going to move it on top of the blend. Now we have our tree trunk and underneath it is the blend that has the grain effect, so we need to go to the tree trunk and we just need to set it to multiply blend mode. Go down here to the bottom opacity, it's the opacity for the whole shape that we want to effect and set it to multiply. There we have our tree trunk. I'm going to put these two together so I'm going to select the tree trunk and then the stipple effect for the tree trunk and I'm going to group those. If I'm being complete, I'm going to type in here tree trunk. Then because I want the tree trunk on top of the tree and not underneath it, I'm just going to switch the order of these two in the last palette, just drag the tree trunk above the tree canopy. Now I can just move it into place. There we have a stippled texture effect that has been created this time using offset shapes in Illustrator. Your project for this class is going to be to create 1, 2, or all three of these effects in Illustrator. You can go and make the stipple effect using a gradient. You can make a stipple effect using a gradient mesh or go and do the Offset Path effect or all of them. When you've created these effects, post your finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and you've learned something about creating stipple texture effects in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.