Transcripts
1. String Art Inspired Designs Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class; Create a String Art Inspired Design 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'll look at some patterns and some designs that are inspired by string art. I'm going to show you the basics of string art. Then we'll see what patterns and concepts that we can develop from the basic designs. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating some designs inspired by string art.
2. Pt 1 - Create a Basic String Art Design: Before we go ahead and start making string art inspired designs in Illustrator, just in case you don't know what string art is, I thought that we would have a look at that first. Traditionally, string art has being made by nailing nails into a board and then winding string around those nails, and this one here is a pretty typical design. One of the beauties of string art is that it allows you to create really beautiful curves, but you're doing it with straight lines of string. This is a Google search that I did and I looked up string art parabola. These are some of the designs. This is the thing that we're going to create in Illustrator. But you could also do it with pen and paper, and you can obviously do it with string and nails on a wooden board. We're going to start our exploration of string art inspired designs in Illustrator with a brand new document. I'll choose File and then New. My document is a square document, 700 pixels by 700 pixels in size. Doesn't really matter too much about how big your document is. I'm working in RGB Color mode, and I have Align New Objects to Pixel Grid disabled. If you're working in Illustrator CC 2017, the option for aligning objects to the pixel grid is up here in the top right corner of the screen. So just look out for that once you've created your document. I'll click okay. Now we're going to start by drawing a line. So just apply a black stroke to line, no fill at all. We're going to click on the Line Segment Tool, click once in the document. I'm going to make my line 200 pixels long, and it's really important that it is a vertical line. So we're going to set the angle to 90 degrees. I'll click okay, and that gives me just a single line in the document. We'll now rotate the line using the Transform tool. So with it, select to Choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. Now the settings we're going to use here, at least for this initial design are pretty critical, so you'll want to follow along here. Firstly, turn Preview on so you can see what's happening here. Then we're going to rotate around the top middle point of this line, which is this bot here. There are nine little boxes here, so you want to make sure that the middle one in the top row is the one selected as your rotation point. Now we're going to rotate each of the lines that we make around at 10 degrees. We're going to make nine copies. What that does, is it ensures that we get a rotation that goes all the way around 90 degrees. Now, I've lost my Preview here, so let's just turn that back on again. We've got a 10 degree rotation, so we're going from vertical to horizontal. We've got nine copies, which gives us 10 lines in total, and we're rotating around this top middle position. Then what this gives us initially is the lines that we need for our string art. We can't actually create the string art design just from this dialogue. What we're using this dialogue for is just to get the lines at the right angles. Then we're going to line them up so that they look like a piece of string art in the next step. I'll click okay. Next we're going to expand this because right now we just have one line, which is subject to a removable rotation. We want to bake this into the design if you like. We'll choose Object Expand Appearance, and that gives us 10 individual lines. They're going to be grouped and they're going to be grouped in two groups here. We've got a series of lines here, and in each of these lines themselves is another group. To keep our last palette really neat and tidy, we're going to both stays out of the group. Select the line and choose Object Ungroup and then do it a second time. Now we just have 10 paths. With our 10 lines, we now just need to align them so that they'd look like the starting point for a piece of string art. I'm going to select either all of these lines. I'm going to align them firstly to the left using the Horizontal Align Left option, and then I'm going to align them to the bottom using Vertical Align Bottom. That just gives us a parabolic curve created by a series of straight lines, all of which are the exact same length. We're going to take this design in the next video and create a pattern from it.
3. Pt 2 - Create the design: Now that we have a starting curve of lines, we're going to take all of these lines and we group them together with object group. That just means that they're going to move as a single object and they won't split apart. I'm going to make some duplicates of those lines. With this set selected, I'm going to choose object transform, and I'm going to choose reflect. I want to reflect this over the vertical. I'm going to click preview on, so you can see that I'm getting the other half of the parabolic curve. I'll click copy to make a duplicate. These two are just lined up perfectly with each other. I'm going to leave them exactly as they are. I'm going to select over both of them, I'm going to do the same reflection but this time, it will be a horizontal reflection. I'll choose object transform, reflect, I'll choose horizontal and then click copy. Now I have four sets of these lines over the top of each other. That's very similar to one of the string art designs that we saw in the Google search. I'm going to group all of these together with object group. I'm now going to take this design and I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees, object transform, rotate. I'll rotate it through this 45 degree. So I got the 45 typed in here, and I want to make a duplicate, so I'll click copy. Now that we have the basic shape that we're going to work with, what I want to do is to build a shape behind this one that has a solid fill on it. Now, it's not as easy to do as you might think it should be in illustrator but I'm going to show you a process for doing this. I'm going to select over the shape and make a duplicate of it by holding the alt or option key as I drag a duplicate away. Now I'm going to work with this one, the original one we were working with. Here's my process for creating a filled shape to go behind this one. First of all, these are just lines. So we're going to turn them into shapes by choosing object and then expand. We'll just click okay. Now instead of lines, I have a really as series of very narrow rectangles. Because these are now shapes are not lines, I'm going to the pathfinder pallet and I'm going to click unite. If you don't see the pathfinder pallet here, choose window and then pathfinder to display it. You'll click unite to create a compound path. So if we have a look in the last pallet here, what we have selected is this as a compound path. Now we're going to use a feature in illustrator that allows us to create a line around shapes and it's the offset path tool. We'll choose effect and then path, and then offset path. I'm going to click preview. The default offset is 10 pixels. So what's actually happening here is that each of these shapes they were lines, they're now shapes, has got a 10 pixel stroke around it. Because some of these lines are so close together, the 10 pixel strokes are actually running into each other and that's the process that we want to use to try and create this shape that is the combination of all the lines that we had in the original design. If you want to get rid of these dots here, you could simply increase the offset. That's one way of doing it. The larger the offset, the more these spaces are going to be closed up. Now there's an alternative because there were just so few of them, you could also have removed them from the compound path later on. You get a choice of two options or you may wish to leave them in. I actually want to leave them in my design. So I'm just going to return to an offset of 10 pixels and I'll click okay. What I have here now is a compound path that's made up of a series of long narrow rectangles that has a stroke around each of them. What I want to do is to put this all together, get rid of all of these lines and make it all into a single object. We're going to use expand to do that. So we're just going to select it and choose object expand appearance. That just gets rid of everything. It just merges it all into a single object. Now I have an object that has the same shape as this one. If I wanted to get rid of these shapes now, here's another way of doing it. I could zoom into these and I could go to the direct selection tool and I could go and click on each of these anchor points in turn, and remove them. That's one option. The other option is because they're so small, I could draw a filled shape to go on top of them for example, a rectangle. So I'm just going to draw a filled rectangle to go on top. I'd select both of these shapes and just go to the pathfinder and click unite. It would again create a solid object but what we're doing is putting a rectangle and a shape together and just asking illustrator to merge them into a single shape. Now, I want to just undo that, so I'm just going to press control Z until I get things back the way they were. I'll press control or command 0 to zoom back out. Now I'm going to put this shape on top of this one, but black on top of black isn't going to be very visible. This is still just a set of lines, we didn't make these into shapes. You can see that they have a stroke and no fill. Well, I'm just going to give them a white stroke. Then I want to group them as a single group, right now they're two separate groups, so I'm just going to choose object group to make a single group out of them. That means that I could for example, align these more easily as a single group. I'm going to take them and put them back over the top of the shape that I created. I'll select both of these and I'm going to use horizontal align center and vertical align center to just make sure everything's nicely aligned. I can go to this back filled shape and change the color of it should I wish to do so. So I'm going to choose the dark turquoise color here. There we have the first design created inspired by String Art.
4. Pt 3 - Create the Lines for a Second Design: For our next string art inspired design, we're going to create some flowers. I want to choose File and then New. Again, I'm using a square document Align New Objects to Pixel Grid is disabled. I'll Click "OK". We're again going to start with a vertical line. So I'm just going to click to create a line that is a 100 pixels tall and that is at 90 degrees, so it's a vertical line. I'll click "OK". I'm just going to move it down to where we can see it a little more clearly, I'll select it. Now we're going to do another transformation on this to get our starting point. I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. Now for this transformation, I suggest that you use the same values as I'm using. So we're going to move these lines horizontally and vertically by five pixels. So I'm going to type five and five here. I'm going to turn Preview on, and I'm going to set this to 15 copies. So you'll see that we've got some movement in these lines. The lines are going to be exactly the same length, but they're moving and we're also going to rotate them, but by a very small amount. We're just going to rotate them by four degrees. We're going to choose the point around which these are rotating as the right bottom points. So out of these nine little boxes, we're going to choose the one in the bottom right corner. That's going to give us this overall shape and this overall repetition of lines. I'll click "OK." Now we're going to expand this shape to turn it from one line into 16, the original and the 15 copies that we made. So we'll choose Object, Expand Appearance. Then we need to ungroup and we need to ungroup it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it's going to make the Layers palette a whole lot neater if we do that. But secondly, we want to use the alignment tools here. We want to work with the individual shapes not with a group. With the group shapes selected we'll choose Object, Ungroup. We'll do that until Ungroup is no longer an option, and it's no longer an option now. The alignments that we're going to use here, we're going to use it through the Alignment tab, which you can get to by choosing Window and Align. I'm going to open this little fly out menu here, I'm going to choose Show Options. So I'm going to make sure that I'm set to Align to Selection here, not Align to Art-board. I want to Align to Selection. What I want to do is to align to the left and the bottom. So I'm going to click here on Horizontal Align Left, and I'm going to click here on Vertical Align Bottom. This time we have a very different starting point for our shape. We've got a whole series of lines that are sticking out here. It's as if we haven't completed the full set of rotations for our parabolic curve. Well, that's going to help us to create an interesting floral design.
5. Pt 4 - Create a Flower: This shape is going to become one half of a petal of a flower. I'm going to select over all of the lines and choose object and then group so that all of the lines will move as a single group. I'm going to add a guide here to make things a little bit easier, so I'm going to choose "View" and then "Rulers" and then "Show Rulers" because that's going to allow me to drag a vertical guide into the document. I wanted to somewhere here where I can see it. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can see the guide and this shape here. I'm going to take the shape and I'm going to rotate it around. I'm going to position it and just test it's positioning because what I want is for the to here to be on this line. I'm not totally concerned at this stage about the bottom, but I do want to align the top here so it's looking pretty good right now. Now, if you're bottom doesn't align to this line here, we can use the shear tool to bend this shape a little bit better. I'm going to select the shape and I'm going here to the sheer tool, it shows a toolbar position with the scale tool, but you just click on the "Share Tool". Then you're going to click here on this anchor point and you're just going to start bending it. You'll see that you are able to pull this point over so that it touches this line, and if you wanted to, you could even go further than the line which will give you an interesting effect at the bottom of your flower. I'm actually going to go a little bit further. You can see I'm touching a line here and I've used the sheer tool here to pull this in over this line. The sheer tool is a very handy tool for bending things, in this circumstance, it works really, really well. I'm finished with my guide now, so I can just select it and press "Delete" because a guide in Illustrator is just another object. I'm going to make a duplicate of this shape now that I've got it bent the way I want it to look by choosing object transform. I'm going to choose reflect, I'm going to reflect over the vertical. I'll turn preview on, so you can see that this is the shape I'm going to create. Because I want the original end of this copy, I'm just going to click "Copy". Now, I'm going to drag the second shape to align with the first. I'll select over both of them and I'm going to click here on vertical align top that just make sure that their tops are connected, and I'll just move it across until it's perfectly positioned. Now, it's not going into position perfectly here so I'm going to move it out about half a pixel by just making an adjustment here to the X value. Now, that I've got my shapes overlapped really nicely, I'm going to group those with object group. I'll press "Control" or "Command Zero" to zoom back out. Now, this is going to be the petal of my flower, but I think it's a bit thick right now, so I'm going to select over the shape and because it's just made up of a series of lines, I can go and change the stroke width, I'm going to make it 0.25 pixels. Now, my line weight is much lighter. I could also reshape the petal at this stage, for example, making it a little bit wider and a little less tall. The other way we've got the petal, we can create the flower by just doing a rotation on this group shape. With this selected, we'll choose effect, distort, and transform, and then transform. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to set my angle to start off at 30 degrees and I'm going to make about six copies. Right now the transformation point is in the middle of the shapes, so this is not looking anything like a flower. The two best transformation points for this particular shape are the middle top and the middle bottom of these nine boxes. The middle top will give you a flower where the spiky bits are on the outside. The middle bottom will give you a flower where the spiky bits are on the inside not on the outside. You can see with 30 degrees and only six copies, we don't have enough copies or enough rotation to make a flower. You can just experiment with various values. You can increase your angle to create a flower like this or you could decrease the angle and increase the number of copies and you can also experiment with which of these two rotation points is more of interest to you. I think this rotation point is more interesting because I like the uneven and spiky edge. But I may want to increase my copy. I'm going to set it to 12, and I'm going to start decreasing the angle to see if I can find something that is of more interest to me in the final design. I'll leave you to experiment with those settings to find something that you really like. However, before you leave this dialogue, I suggest that you check the number of copies. You may find that by increasing the number of copies, you actually build some more detail into the design. You may also find that by reducing the number of copies, you get a more balanced to design, so just make sure that you haven't got copies that you don't need in the design and that you've got as many as you need to get the result that you like. I'm just adding a few extras in here. I'm going to click "Okay". There's our second design inspired by string art so we could do something similar to what we did in the previous video and perhaps put this inside a shape. In this case, I might put it inside a circle. I'm just going to create a circle, that will go behind this shape. When I drag it over the shape, you will see that it's in front of the shape and the layers, so I'll choose object, arrange, center back so it's behind. Then I could go and get this shape and for example, change the color of the lines by just selecting an alternate color. For our final piece of string art inspired design, we're going to create a heart and we're going to look at how we would use the Live Paint Tool to color it.
6. Pt 4 - Extra Design Options: Before we finish up looking at this particular rotation, I want to show you some of the design possibilities that you have.So I have a few designs to go through with you. In this one, what we've got is the basic floral design. But you can see here from the stroke that I've used a gradient. This is just a linear gradient from a light blue through white to a another lightish blue. The flower itself is colored with a gradient. Then let's have a look at what's behind this. It is just a circle. The circle here has a gradient fill. It's actually got a radial gradient on the circle and there's a linear gradient on the rather stroke around that circle. When we put it all together, this is the design that we get. Let's go and see another option here. In this case, I have again used a rotation of the flower rotation, but the spiky lines here are on the outside. I've also colored the lines using a gradient. If I click on the basic shape, you'll see here that I've used a radial gradient, this time from a darker blue through white to again slightly darker blue. You can see that the white area is really quite small on this gradient. Let's have a look at what's behind the flash shape. In this case, I just have a basic hexagon that itself got a radial gradient fill. Now, if you're looking for gradients to use, you can always find them via the Swatches panel. Click they flyout menu, choose Open Swatch Library, and then click on Gradients. You'll find there are a lot of different gradients that are shipped with Illustrator that you can use. I'm going to select Gems and Jewels. Here are some gradients, Gems and Jewels gradients that we could use, and you would just select a shape and then select on any of these gradients to apply it to that shape. If you want to turn it into a radial gradient, you'll just go up here and click Radial. Now, if you don't like any of these gradients, you can just press the arrow keys. Then you'll load different types of gradients from that gradient collection that you could have got through the flyout menu. But you'll just find that once you've got one set of gradients visible here, this is the easier way of progressing through the other groups of gradients that are available in Illustrator. I'm just going to go to the next shape and let's see what else we've got here to look at. Well, in this case, again, we've got the basic string shape and it's been filled with a gradient. Here's the stroke gradient, it's a radial gradient. It's going from a very pale blue through to a mid blue. But what's interesting here, is the rotation that I've used, because instead of creating a flash shape, I've created a very different shape. Let's just have a look at this rotation. I'm just going to open up the Transform dialogue, turn Preview on. The rotations that we were using earlier were these. We were using a rotation point in either the bottom middle or the top middle of these nine sets of options. That either gave you a flower with the spikes on the outside or the spikes on the inside. Well, if you choose a different rotation points such as this one, you an see that the petals are lying one after the other around the shape, and the spikes are going in an outward direction. I really liked this basic design and really challenged me to say what I could do with it. Well, what I did with it was I added behind it a circle filled with a gradient, but I also added a star. Now, this is a star that's got rounded edges. You can see that the edges around, but you can still see that it was a star I selected it and I just ran a rounded corner effect on it. That just made it loopy instead of a basic star shape and more traditional star-shaped. That was that design. The last one I have to show you is this one here. In this one I've used the rotation where the lines, the spiky bits are on the inside rather than on the outside. The stroke is a radial gradient, it doesn't actually need a fill here that's not providing anything of much use at all. But it's really this stroke that is very interesting. Then underneath that is just a circle that's filled with a gradient and using these opposing colors below, and it's complimentary color of orange is giving us a really beautiful effect with this design. You can see that radial gradient filled shapes behind these rotated flowers are giving you some excellent potential for perhaps a starting design element for a logo or even the basis for a pattern.
7. Pt 5 - Make the Heart Shape: For our heart-shaped design we're going to create a new document. Again, it's going to be 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size RGB color mode. I've disabled align new objects to pixel grid and I'll click "OK". Now, for this particular shape it's fairly important the starting values that you're using and I'm going to show you why in just a minute. But let's just start with an object that is a line and it has no fill and it just has a black stroke. Click on the "Line Segment Tool", I'm going to make a line that's 50 pixels long and it's going to be 340 degrees. That's on a slight angle and I'll click "OK". These are the settings we're going to use for the transformation here with a line selected we'll choose Effect, Distort & Transform and then Transform. We want the line to grow as it transforms, so we're going to set both horizontal and vertical scale to 110 percent. We want it to move as well, but we only want it to move in a horizontal direction and we want it to move minus eight pixels, so I'm going to type minus eight in here. The rotation we're going to use is 16 degrees. We're going to rotate it around the center point, and we're going to make 20 copies. Now if I click "Preview", this is what we get. What I'm looking for in this particular design is this little spaces that are four sided figures that are tracked with lines because I'm going to fill them with color. The other thing I don't want is too much beyond the vertical. This is going to be the vertical line of my heart. I don't want too much happening over here, which leads me to think that I've probably got too many copies here. I'm going to back the number of copies off to 18. But this is looking pretty good as a starting point so I'll click "OK". Now why it was important to start with a line at an angle with something like this, I'm going to show you because I'm going to turn this around so it's vertical. Let's say the difference when we start with a vertical line. Well, this looks nothing like the transformation that we just got. Transforming the line using a starting value that looks like this is a very different result. You'll find that even small changes in the starting point will adjust the heart shape or the half heart-shaped quite a bit. I'm going to settle for something that looks pretty much like this. Again making sure that I've got these trapped little shapes in here. If these lines fell short of meeting this line here, I would adjust my rotation until they meet it or crossed over it as they're doing here. Going to select over this shape and I'm going to expand it with Object, Expand Appearance. I'm going to ungroup it with Object Ungroup, and I'll continue to do that until Ungroup is no longer an option. Now I know that what I have in my layers palette is just a series of lines. With those lines selected I'm going to just group them into a single object. Now I'm going to take this shape and I'm going to rotate it around so that this line here is pretty much vertical. Well it would help me to make this vertical if I had a guide. I'm going to choose View, Rulers, Show Rulers. I'm just going to bring in a vertical guide here. I'm going to select this shape and I'm going to rotate it around, and then I'm going to move it across and just try and get this pretty much to line up to the guide that I've made. It doesn't have to be perfect but as close as you can to getting that line vertical, the better it will be for the final design. Now if you're having a bit of trouble with the rotation you can select the object and you can choose Object, Transform, Rotate, because this rotation rotates around a center point and if you've got Preview turned on, you can just adjust it by just up or down arrowing through the angle here. I've just knocked mine around one degree and that's a pretty good result so I'm just going to click "OK". I'm going to select this guide because I don't need it any longer and I'm going to delete it. Now this is half of my heart-shape, but before I go ahead and do the coloring, I need to do a couple of things. Firstly, I need to work out how much of this side I can color before I rotate it over here and where the overlaps are going to be. I'm going to select this shape and just for now I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Reflect, I'm going to reflect over the vertical and I'm going to make a copy. With this duplicate selected, I'm going to make sure that I have my stroke selected here. I'm going to color it red because I want it to be a different color. Then I'm going to move it in so it lines with the other heart. Now I'm going to look at what I've got and I'm looking at is I've got too many lines happening down here. I've probably got too many lines here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and just get rid of this one. I'm doing that by just continually clicking on it until I get into isolation mode until it alone is selected, and then I'll press "Delete". Now, this is the matching pair out here so I'm going to click on it and get rid of it. Even though I'm actually going to get rid of the whole of the red shape in a minute. Right now I just want it out of my way so I am going to press "Escape". The only other thing that's concerning me is that these two lines are very close together and so it's going to look a bit cluttered. What I'm looking at is that this black line here would be better if it stopped at this point and didn't go all the way through to here. What I'm going to do in a minute is take this line and I'm going to cut it off. But now I know pretty much what I'm doing. The other thing I want to know is how much of this side I can color and then reflect. I'm going to just click on the Pencil tool. I'm just going draw around here to encompass those areas that are not covered also in red. Drawing around this area, I'm going to select it. I'm going to flip my fill and stroke colors and I'm just going to dial down the opacity here. I'm just using this area here as a guide as to the areas that I can fill in color, and in a few minutes I can flip over to make the other side of the heart. This is just going to let me create a heart that is colored exactly the same on both sides without having to do all the work of finding the corresponding shape on the other side and color it the same way. It's just to make things a little bit easier. I'm going to select over the red one and get rid of it because I don't need it now. Now, we need to lop this line off. I'm just going to zoom in here. This is a line here that I want to cut in half and I can cut it in half with the Scissors tool. The Scissors tool shares a toolbar position with the Eraser. I'm just going to come in here and make sure I've got that path selected and I'm going to click on it with the Scissors tool where I want to cut it. Having done that, I can then go to the Selection tool, make sure I've selected that shape. Let's just make sure that I selected this piece here and I can just delete it. I can come in here and I'm just going to move that align along just a little bit so that it's lined up a little bit better here. Press "Escape" to come out of isolation mode. This is going to be my heart-shape now. If you want to test it before you do the coloring, this is what you're going to do. You're going to lockdown this pink thing here, and you could even turn it off. You're going to select the group here which is this shape here. You're going to choose Object Transform, Reflect, reflect over the vertical click "Copy". Then you just going to move this back into position. Click "Away" and just make sure that you've got a design that you like. You can say that the work we've done on this line has improved it. I do think the line is a bit long but I can fix that in a minute, but just making sure that everything is looking good here, which it is. Now I can go on with my coloring and I'm going to do that by removing that half of the heart again because I still don't want it. I'm going to loft this off before I go too far. I'm just going to come in here. Again with the scissors tool, just cut this path and then go and select the bit that I don't want, which is this end here, and just delete it, press "Escape". I'm going to turn back on my coloring area. In the next video we're going to come in and do the coloring and the reflection and put this all together.
8. Pt 6 - Paint with Live Paint: Before we go ahead with the coloring, we're going to isolate this pink-filled shape and just lock it down so we can't do anything with it so it's not going to get in the way. I'm going to select this group here, and I'm going to choose Object, Live Paint, Make. That makes this as a live paint object. Now, I went and created a color scheme that I want to just grab here. I'm just going to open my User Defined swatch library of colors and I'm just going to bring them in here. If you have a color scheme that you'd like to use for your heart, you could do just that. Now we're going to the Live Paint Tool, which shares a toolbar position with the Shape Builder Tool. Going to click on the "Live Paint Bucket" and then you're going to double click on the tool itself to open the options up. In the Options, you want to select Paint Fills and you want to deselect Paint Strokes. You do want Cursor Swatch Preview and you do want a Highlight, so I'm just going to click "Okay." What that means is now whenever I hover over something that can be colored, I'm going to get this little red bounding box showing me what can be colored. I'm going to zoom in so that I can see things a bit more clearly. I'm going to start by clicking on the "Live Paint Tool" and select a color to work with and green is now the middle of those three icons above the Paint Bucket Tool. That's telling me I'm about to paint with lime green and so I can just click on some of these boxes to fill them with lime green. You can use the arrow keys to arrow through the colors here and you'll see that the colors that you're about to use are selected here in the swatches palette but you can also just click on a color if you want to use a specific color. There are more boxes here than it looks like there are. Just be aware you probably want to add quite a few boxes of any particular color because although it doesn't look like there are many boxes, there are quite a few. You only want to color things that have this pink tinge underneath them because when we created that pink tinge, it was because the areas that are over the top of this are areas that are going to be duplicated when we create the other half of the heart. They are not areas that are going to be covered which these areas are, and we're going to have to do these manually in a minute, but this is going to save you quite a bit of work in coloring your art. You want to make sure that you get into these really small triangles around the edge here as well with color. If you miss a box, it's not a big problem, but you do want to get as many of these colored as you possibly can. When you're done, press "Control" or "Command 0", go back and select the shape with the Selection Tool and choose Object, Live Paint, Expand, and that stops this from being a live paint object. We're going back to the Layers palette and we don't need this pink-filled path any longer, so I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the trash. I'm going to select my shape and I'm going to reflect it again. Object, Transform, Reflect, and I'm going to reflect it over the vertical and make a copy. Then I'm going to move the duplicate back over the original. You can see that by coloring just half the heart and then reflecting and I've saved myself having to match my colors, and I've got a heart that is perfectly symmetrical and perfectly symmetrically colored. Now, I'm going to select over the two shapes here. I'm going to choose Object, Live Paint, Make, and that makes the combination object now a live paint object. I'm going back to the Live Paint Bucket. I'm going back to my color swatches, I'm going to fill in these areas down here. Now the only thing I need to be careful of here is that if I've got pigeon pairs like this shape and this shape, that I'm coloring them the same color but there are a lot less that we have to be careful about now than we would have had if we hadn't done the coloring the way that we did it earlier. Having filled in at the bottom, we're now going to check the top and we're going to fill in these areas as well. Again, making sure that we're coloring both sides if there are two shapes on opposite sides of the heart. If necessary, you might need to zoom in a little bit closer just to make sure that you get everything. Press "Control" or "Command 0" when you're done, we're going to need to select the entire object, again and again, choose Object, Live Paint, Expand, so it's no longer a live paint object. Now, having created your color scheme, you can go and change the colors. I'm going to select over my heart, I'm going to Alt or Option-drag a duplicate away. I'm going back to this original version and with it selected, I'm going to click the "Recolor Artwork" option. Now I'm going to choose Edit and what I can do is unlink these color harmonies here and I can start dragging this around to create a more monochromatic color scheme. All I'm doing here is changing the colors to be more in a blue, purple color scheme by just dropping these color swatches here into this area. If you want some lighter and some darker ones, then you need to drag them closer towards the center. You may want for a little bit of variety to take one color, totally opposite to add a little bit of a complementary color to the artwork, and sometimes that helps just brighten it up a little bit. I'm going to click to create a new color scheme from these colors and click "Okay." There is our heart recolored, but because we took the time and effort to make sure that we had a perfectly balanced set of colors. When we recolor them, they're going to be colored with a perfectly balanced set of colors as well. Of course, this shape could be the foundation for a pattern in Illustrator. I've got plenty of classes on making patterns in Illustrator, and you could create this as a pattern, for example. There are string art inspired shapes in Illustrator. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of the shapes and to post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned a bit about working in Illustrator. If you did enjoy the class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up and please write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other people to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all your comments and questions, 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.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
