Transcripts
1. Stylish Doodles to Make and Sell Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, stylish doodles to make and sell 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 creating some stylish doodles and we're doing this for a couple of reasons. One is that they make a really good project to put together in a collection and either give away on your blog or you could sell the collection. They also showcase a whole range of illustrated techniques. They're a really good place for, say, beginner Illustrator users to get started with Illustrator. Of course, if you're an intermediate Illustrator user, you should find some techniques here that will be able to be added to your skill set. We're going to be avoiding the pen tool where we can and just using the pencil tool. That was introduced in Illustrator CS4. It's a little bit different, a little bit better with later versions. But even if you're using Illustrator CS4, you should be able to follow along with this class. By the end of the class, you're going to have learned a range of techniques and built a range of skills for creating designs and for knowing what to do when you need to do things and the solution is not immediately apparent. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend the class and secondly, write, even in just a few words, about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now as you're watching, if you see the follow link, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now, if you're ready, let's get started with stylish doodles to make and sell in Illustrator.
2. Inspiration: Before we get started with this class, I want to show you where the inspiration for it came from. I'm here at Shutterstock, and this is some work by somebody called Karanta. I really loved these lines. Sometimes when I have an hour or two to spare, I'll go and play in Illustrator. Just do something, pick some style of art and try and reproduce it because that stretches my knowledge of Illustrator, and I'm continually learning. As I was making lines like these in Illustrator, I realized just how many tools and techniques I was using to create them. I thought it would make a really good class, particularly for beginner Illustrator users because we're going to look at a range of tools that you can use to create very simple but stylish art in Illustrator. Of course, because they do it in lines, we get to use the pencil tool and we don't have to use the pen tool, which is good news too. I just thought I'd introduce you to the person whose work has inspired this class.
3. Pt 1 Make a Flourish: To get started with our project we'll of course create a brand new document. Now because we're going to be creating a lot of different elements. I'm thinking I'm going to use a document the size of my screen because that just makes the document appear screen sizes. There's not lots of empty space around there, so that allows me to maximize my work area if you like. But because we'll be creating a lot of elements, I'm going to increase the number of art boards to four. I'll have plenty of space to work in. Let's click create. I'll target the first art board by just clicking over it and press control or command Z. That just zooms in so that you can see the art board more clearly. Now we're going to look at a range of different basic designs. From there you'll be able to take the ideas and perhaps make a collection of designs. One of the designs we're going to make is one that has symmetry in it. I'll go to the pencil tool which is at toolbar position here with the shaper tool. I'll select the pencil tool. You can also press the letter N for it. That's really helpful. I'll double click on the pencil tool so that I can check the options. Now, in earlier versions of illustrator you might have a couple of sliders. Here what you are looking for essentially is to have illustrator do some smoothing for you. If you select accurate, then it's going to follow every wiggle that you make with the mouse or with the tablet. If you choose smooth, everything's going to be smoothed out. I think for this project, probably just backing off a little bit from smooth will be ideal. Now, I want illustrator to close the parts when the ends are fairly close. I'm using 20 pixels, you can use some value like that. I do want to edit selected paths, so that will allow me to edit my paths with a pencil if they need a little bit of extra work. I'm using 20 pixels here, you can set it to something like that. None of these are set in stone. Now there's also an option here to have the alt key toggle to the smooth tool. That can be really helpful. It means that you don't have to come up here all the time and select the smooth tool. If you hold the alt key while you're using the pencil tool, it actually becomes a smooth tool. When you let go the alt or option key, then it's going to revert back to the pencil tool, of course on a Mac that would be option. Think this looks pretty good. I'm just going to click okay. For the first of our shapes, it's going to be a symmetrical shape and it's going to be a loopy shape. I'm using my mouse just to prove that you don't need to have a tablet to do these. If you have a tablet, that's great, but if you have a mouse, that's just fine. I'm going to start drawing out my shape and I'm really not worried about the fact that things are wiggling around a little bit. If you don't like the shape you've made, just go to the selection tool, select it and try again. I'm pretty happy with this shape that I've drawn. If you think it needs a little bit of smoothing out, go back to the pencil tool and you can hold the alt or option key as you smooth it. You just going to drag over the line to smooth it out. Some of the anchor points are going to be removed in the process and that has a smoothing effect. Of course, you can also just go and select the smooth tool and it's going to look like this little circle. You have to have your lines selected for it to work and you can just drag over it to smooth it out. But I'm pretty happy with what I've drawn here. Now it's got no fill and it's just got a black stroke. That's just perfect. I'm going to move it over to about here and then I'm going to reflect it now. Ultimately I'm going to discard this reflected object, but for now I'm going to reflect it just so I can get a feel for what it looks like. I'll select it, choose object, transform, reflect, turn preview on. I'm going to reflect it over the vertical so it's going the opposite way. I'll click copy because I want the original plus a duplicate. Now with the duplicate still selected, I can just drag it out of the way to position it if I hold the shift key, it's going to move on a horizontal plane, so it's going to be aligned perfectly to the previous shape. That's a really good idea to do that because you want these two shapes to be lined up. Now I want to put some circles along this line, but I want to get a feel for how the whole thing is looking as I do that. I'll go and grab the ellipse tool, and I'll drag out a small circle. I'm using the shift key as I drag, and I'll drag it into position over the line here. Now, if you're working with a lighter version of illustrator, you might have some problems dragging things because these shapes are special things. They're special shapes and they're live shapes. There's all other things going on which makes them a little bit more difficult to drag than they were perhaps in earlier versions of illustrator. If you want to turn them from live shapes just into regular shapes selected and choose object shape, expand shape. I find those just a little bit easier to work with. I'm going to place this shape along the path here. I do want it to have a fill, so I'm just going to add a white fill for now. Then I'll alt or option drag a duplicate away and then do the same thing. I'm just looking to evenly spread these along the line. When you creating things like this, threes are better than twos. Always odd numbers rather than even numbers, they just look better. Now if we want to make sure that everything is lined up really well, this is what we're going to do. We'll choose view and then outline. What outline view lets you do is you can see your paths and you can say the center of your shapes. That lets you see that things are lined up properly. This one's pretty good. This one's slightly off. I'm just going to nudge it using the arrow keys and this one's pretty good too. You can just get an idea as to whether you're in the position that you want to be in using this outline view when you're ready to go back, just choose view and then preview. I'm going to put a heart up here. Let's see how we could create a heart nice and easily. We'll go to the ellipse tool. I'm just going to drag out a tall ellipse. With it selected I'll rotate it slightly, probably around about 25 degrees, something like that. Now I'm going to reflect it with object transform, reflect. We're going to reflect again over the vertical. I need a copy plus my original so I'll click copy. Now let's go and get this shape and we're just going to move it across so it intersects and forms this heart shape. I'll select over both of these shapes and go to the pathfinder. If you don't see the pathfinder here, you can choose Window and then pathfinder. What you're looking for is the unite option. That will unite these two shapes into one. You're going to end up with a heart shape. Now if you think it needs a little bit of smoothing, well, you know what to do. Go to the smooth tool and just drag over the shape and you can smooth it out. The shape has to be selected of course, for the smooth tool to work. Now I think it's worth learning two keyboard shortcuts if you're not already familiar with them. V for the selection tool and A for the direct selection tool. They'll be helpful throughout this project and they're generally just helpful key strokes to know. I'm going to press V for the selection tool here and select over my heart and just place it up here. If it's too big or too small, then I would just re-size it. But I think mine's a pretty good size here. I'm going to put a diamond down here. Let's go and create a diamond shape. We do that from a rectangle, and that is created as a square. I've got the rectangle tool selected. I'll hold the shift key as I drag out a square. I'll rotate this around 45 degrees. I'm looking for this rotation arrow here. Start dragging and add the shift key to constrain it to a 45 degree rotation. Let go the mouse button. Now we'll go to the direct selection tool again, you could press the letter A. I am going to click outside here to deselect, everything and then just drag over these two anchor points here. If I select the scale tool, I can now drag in on one of these points and the other one moves as well. Now that won't normally happen and you should use the scale tool. I'm just going to make my diamond shape and let go. They, for the selection tool, you can say that the bounding box was rotated 45 degrees with the shape. If you want the bounding box to look more like this square over the shape, you can do that. With the shape selected, choose object and then transform and then raise that bounding box and it just squares it up. It also makes it just a little bit easier to re-size it. I'm just going to put this in here in approximately the position I want it in. I'll add a circle at the base. Now, because I've already got circles here, it's going to have me to either make this circle here much bigger or much smaller or use the exact same size. Because that's going to give my piece a more balanced look. I'm going to alt or option drag, a duplicate of that circle away. This is my basic shape. I just need to do a few things. I think I need to adjust the spacing just a little bit because I think it's not perfect. I think that's better. I'll just double check with the outline view that that shape is pretty much in position, that's close enough. I'll just go back to preview. Because I've got this element complete and this one is not, I'll select over everything and group them with object group. Now there are a couple of reasons for doing that. One is that they're going to travel as a unit and that makes really good sense. The other thing is that I can space things out if this is a group. If I try and center this and it's not a group, then all the objects are going to be centered over the top of each other. If I use a group and try and center things or adjust the spacing, then the whole group is going to be treated like a single shape. Let's select on this and let's choose object, transform, reflect because I need to make this shape over here, it's vertical. I'll click copy. Now I've already got a guide as to roughly where I want it. I'm just going to move this grouped shape across and line it up pretty much with what I had previously. I'll go to the last panel. I just need to isolate the shape that was there previously and get rid of it because we no longer need that. That's going to be this one here. I'll just drag it onto the trash can. I've got two groups here, and I've got these shapes here. What I'll do is, I'll select all of these group, shape, group. I want to make sure that this space and this space are identical. I'll go to the align panel and I'll select here on Horizontal Distribute Center, that ensures that they shapes are going to be distributed nicely so that the spacing between them is going to be the same. But I need to double-check first just to make sure that our alignment is not to the art board. Because if it was aligned to our art board as it is right now, look what's going to happen. Everything's going to be splashed all over the place. I'm just going to undo that and I'm going to make sure instead that it's aligned to selection. Now when I click here, it will just adjust those spacings. You can say that the heart just jumped a little bit. Let me show that to you again. Click on here, the heart move just a little bit, just enough to tell me that it wasn't in the right place, in the first place. Now, these are evenly spaced out, but I'm not sure about these. I'll click on the heart, I'll shift, click on the diamond and shift click on the circle. We know the heart is in the right place. If we're moving anything, we have to move the diamond and the circle, not the heart. To do that, I've let go all the keys on the keyboard and I'll just click again on the heart. It gets this blue highlight around it. That tells you that it won't move and these other shapes are going to move relative to the heart. I want everything centered. I'll click here on Horizontal Aligned Center. After diamond and the circle were in an incorrect position, they will move and they will line up perfectly with the heart as they have done so. Here is the first of our shape elements. To keep things really neat, at this point I would select everything and group them. You can see that we've got our parts here in this group. I would probably leave these two elements as groups. That makes good sense because they are grouped elements. I'll select over everything and again, put them inside a group. Now how you group things is a personal preference and you'll develop some skills over time with what makes sense to you in terms of grouping. I might call this flourish. When you're selling stock or when you're giving things away, it makes really good sense to package everything up nicely and neatly. Because we are going to be creating one element in each of these videos, I'm going to make sure that when I finish each of those elements is isolated inside the last panel. That's going to make it very easy for a purchaser or somebody to whom I give these designs to, a blog rater for example, it's going to make it very easy for them to work out exactly what's happening and where things are that they might want to use.
4. Pt 2 Make a Curvy Line: For our second doodle, we're going to make a line that has an arrowhead on the end. So let's go to the pencil tool. Roughly, I'm going to add some loops to this line. We're going to loop back on ourselves and maybe loop underneath as well. The settings for the pencil tool are as they were previously. Let's just go and create a line. I'm using a mouse and if you're using a tablet, you might be able to create some more accurate lines, but the mouse will do just fine, particularly if you've got that smooth setting set on and just don't be too critical of yourself as you draw because, you want to give illustrator a chance to smooth everything out because the most bumpy of lines can actually end up looking really good by the end of it. I'm really liking this. However, I want to show you what's going to happen, it's if you don't like this end, but you like everything else. I suggest you go to the eraser tool, double-click on the eraser tool so you can set its size. I'm just going to adjust the size, so I can see it clearly, click okay. If I didn't like this end, then I would just erase it. That's just removed out from the line. We'll go back to the selection tool again, you can press the letter V to select the line. Go back to the Pencil tool, and you can just continue it on. If you wanted your arrow to go down, for example, you could do so. If you don't like what you've done, you can just undo it and try again. I'm going to call this good, you know now what to do if you like most of your line, but not all of it. If you ever need to smooth things out, you can do so by going to the smooth tool or press Alt, you've got the Pencil tool enabled, the line has to be selected, but you can smooth things out. When we are adding decoration to a line that is part of a collection, like this is going to be part of a collection. It would be really appropriate for us to use the same shapes as we've already created. Once you've got a heart shape, for example, you'll probably want to reuse that shaped throughout your collection. Let's see what we're going to do. I'm going to the group selection tool because this is buried inside groups. I'll click on it to select it, and then I'll press the letter V, so that I have the entire shape selected. If I Alt or option drag this away so I could use it down here, the duplicate is going to stay within these groups, which is not what we want because we already talked about how we were going to keep the layers palette, neat and tidy. If we want to make a duplicate, we have to break it out of the group. We don't break this shape out, we have to break the duplicate out. I'll choose edit, copy, and then edit, paste. And what happens here, let's go and have a look at the last pallet, which I've just lost. Instead of this duplicate heart being created inside this group, it's being dropped at the very top of the layers palette so it's not in this flowerish group. That's exactly what we want to be the case. We want to be able to bundle it with this line later on. While you might be used to doing the Alt or option dragging, this is not the time to do it. Let's go and put the half on the line. I'm just going to add it to a line above here. What I'm doing is placing the bottom of the heart roughly where I want it to be. I'll select the heart and I'll go to the rotate tool. I'm going to Alt, or option click on this point at the bottom of the heart. That means it'll rotate around this point. I can just go and rotate it into position. Then I'll click okay. The heart is appearing along the line. If I think it's too big, I'll select it with the Selection tool. As I drag in to reshape it, I'll add the Shift K so that it's constrained to the original proportions, and I'll add the Alt or option K, so it stays in its current position. It's going to be sized from the middle. The middle's not going to move, the outsides are going to move. That is Shift to constrain it to its proportions, Alt or option to scale it from the middle instead of from the edges. We've now got a heart on this line. This point, if you want another heart, now you can select it and you can Alt or Option Drag it because the duplicate is not stuck in this collection down here, or in that group down there. Let's just position it roughly in position. I'm making sure that this point here is pretty much on the line. Now I can go to the Rotate tool, Alt or option click on this base point and then just use this selector here to rotate the heart into position. Obviously you'll need preview turned on or that won't work. I'll just click okay. I've got a couple of hearts on my line. I am going to use these three shapes as well. With the group selection tool, click on one, shift, click on the edge of another, and shift, click on the edge of another, and then press the letter V for the Selection tool. So you've got all these three shapes selected. Copy it with edit, copy, or you could use Control or Command C. Click away and then choose edit, paste, or you could use Control or Command V. These three circles are appearing outside of this group down here. That's really important. Let's just drag them roughly into the position we want them in, and rotate them around and move them pretty much in position. They're not quite right, but it's going to be easy to position them by going into view and then outline view. Select on any of these in turn that you think need moving and just adjust their positioning. I'm not going to be able to get these dead accurate, but this one certainly does need moving. When you're done, view and then preview. We can determine it this point whether this is going to be a line or an arrow, and it could be either. There are a few things that you can do if you want it to be aligned. You may want to finish the ends off. One of the way is to finish a line off, is just to use a circle. Let's go back and let's select this circle. Press the letter V and do copy and paste, Control or Command C, Control or Command V, just to make sure that the copy comes out of this group up here. Just going to move this down into this position. I'm just going to place it over the end of the line. You could place another one over the end of the line here, or you could go and get another heart. In this case, I'm going to get this heart, Alt or option, drag it into position, rotate it around, place it over the end of the line, and then determine whether that's the right angle for it. If it's not, you already know how to adjust the angle for it. If you want to increase your angle by an increment of ten, hold the Shift key as you press the up arrow key. If you just press the up arrow key or the down arrow key. It goes one percent at a time, but shift, up arrow or shift, down arrow moves at ten degrees at a time. That's going to be in any of the dialogues in Illustrator, just be aware that the up arrow key is a really good nudge key and add the Shift key to it, and you get sort of an extra big nudge if you like. I like this line, I'm pretty happy with it. I'll go and select over it. I'm selecting only the objects that are part of this line, nothing that's part of this one up here. Object group. Everything is nicely grouped and that means that it's going to travel as a single object. This line would make a really nice arrow too if we just put ends on it. Let's go and grab this and let's copy it. I'll use control or command C to copy it. I'll go over and find a new art-board because I'm chewing up art-boards pretty quickly here. I'll choose edit, paste. That will paste this shape, a duplicate of it onto the art-board. I've still got the original, but I've got another version and we're going to make this an arrow in the next video.
5. Pt 3 Make an arrow: To make this shape into an arrow pics, so I'm going to be pulling paces offered and perhaps we're rearranging things a little bit. I'm going to ungroup everything, so I'll choose "Object ungroup". That's going to make it easier for me to select and remove portions of this line that I don't want. Right now that's going to be the end points. I wanted to put a flare on the end of this arrow. We're going to use the pen tool, even though I promised you that we wouldn't use the pen tool, but we're only going to be using it to make straight lines, so it's pretty easy. Go to the pen tool, make sure you select it and don't pick up this line. You don't want to be hovering over the end of this line. You want to be just a little ways offered. That's going to be important because we don't want to join up the line. We want to create an individual shape. I'm going to click where I want to start and then I'll just create a flare. It's almost like a set of flames if you like, but they're going to be just line. I'm just clicking where I want the lines to be, now these can be edited later on. If you do as I have just done and cross things I've, rather unattractively, that's just fine because we can adjust them. We'll go to the direct selection tool and we can click on any of these points and just move them. Then I'll go back and select the whole shape with the selection tool. I'm just going to move it into position over the end of the line here. Just click away and see how it's aligned, it's pretty good. I'll select it. I'm going to the rotate tool. I'll Alt or Option click on this rotation point because I want to rotate the shape, makes sure previous turned on. Let's just take it so that it looks like it's coming off the end of the line. That's finished with our little flash over here, the tail of the arrow. Now we're going to put a pointy end over here so I'll just zoom into that area, the area that we'll be working in. I'll use a triangle as the basis for the arrowhead, so I'll select the polygon tool, click once in the document I'll set a three-sided figure. The radius, it doesn't really matter what it is just use whatever the dialogue gives you and click "Okay". This is the triangle that we'll be creating our shape on, but it's very regular shape for something that the rest of the shape is pretty organic. Let's do some adjustments to it now. I'm going to make a duplicate of this before I start, because people who are using earlier versions of Illustrator won't have these live corners and won't have all of these tools. I'm just going to make a shape there that's going to look like what you get when you make a triangle. This is for people using the most recent version of Illustrator that has these live corners. This is the widget here, you just click on it and drag into round the corners of the shape if you want to have them round and I think they look better if they are a little bit rounded. Earlier versions of Illustrator you'll select the shape and choose Effect, and then Stylize, and then Round Corners. Turn preview on and then adjust the corners to soothe, I'm using about six pixels here, click "Okay". Now, most recent versions of Illustrator have this re-shape tool which shares a toolbar position with the scale tool. To use it, you first have to select the anchor points that you're going to be adjusting. You can do that with the direct selection tool or you can do it with the lasso tool. Let's see how the lasso tool works. It's just a really nice selection tool because you just drag over what you want to select and it gets selected. Let's go to the re-shape tool now and we can drag in on those edges. You can say that what we've done is we've selected these two corner points, and this one over here is just stable, it doesn't move. When we drag, we just reshaped the shapes so I'm going to drag in on the edges a little bit. Let's go back again to the lasso tool, click and then drag around these edges, go back to the re-shaped tool. Going to reshaped this point a little bit more. Then we can select the final two combination of anchor points here. Go back to the re-shape tool and perhaps drag in on it. Just creating something that is a little bit more organic in shape, can just rotate it into position and then just position it over the edge of the shape. Now if you have an older version of Illustrator, you could use the pencil tool to reshape this shape. I'm just going to enlarge the shape a little bit so that I have more working area. I have the shape selected, I'm going to the pencil tool. If I pick up the beginning of this curves, I just make sure that the pencil tool is in this curve. If I then drag around and pick up the curve again, you can see that I'm actually editing the curve. You could also of course, just draw this triangle with a pencil tool, but you can get some interesting results just by drawing it with a pencil tool. Of course, you've always got the smooth tool that you can get to smooth the edges out once you've drawn them. Whatever tools you have available at your disposal, what you're looking for is creating something a little bit more organic as the pointy end of your arrow. Now, the other thing that you probably will want to make sure is that the stroke weight is going to be the same on the line as it is on the arrowhead. If for example, you scale up this arrowhead, you may find that the stroke weight alters, if that's the case, you'll want to set it back to whatever value it was for the rest of the line so that you don't have different white lines in your design. The reason why these are scaling up is a preference setting, so you can go to edit preferences general. On a Mac it would be Illustrator preferences general, and it's this option here, scale strokes and effects. That means that when you resize a shape, the strokes get wider if it gets bigger, they get narrower if it gets smaller. You may not want that to be the case in this illustration, we don't want that to be the case so you could disable that option that would allow you to re-scale things without the line weight changing. That's going to be pretty important. Now, that's been in Illustrator for ages so it's not like you're not going to have that setting. Let's just go back out, this is what our shape is looking like right now. I think my arrowhead is too small for the rest of the shapes. I'm just going to adjust its weight. Once you're happy with that, just select over all the shapes and go and re-group them. We then have an arrow group in the last pallet. This is going to be the arrow, we're just going to call this arrow. While I'm here, I'm just going to call this curvy line. In the next video, we'll create another line and this time we're going to use a blend and then we're going to create a frame in the one after.
6. Pt 4 Reflected Dots and a Heart: Well, I make shape. We're going to do another one of these reflected shapes. Again, we'll start with a pencil tool line. We just going to create a curly line. If you're not happy with it, you can redraw it. If you think it just needs a little bit of smoothing out, then just hit it with the Smooth tool. Now, along this line we're going to put a series of decreasing size dots. For this we're going to use the blend tool, before we do so, we have to select and create a dot. I'm going to create one circle here. It's about 40 pixels in size, and I'm going to create one here, which is going to be about 10 pixels in size. I find it quite difficult to create really small dots, so I just draw something and then adjust its size using the Control Panel options up here. Now, I want these two to be on the same plane, so I'll select them and choose vertical aligned center. Next, we'll create a blend and for this we'll just select either these two shapes, and then click the Blend tool. You'll hover this shape until you see that little asterisks. You're looking for the asterisk and click once to add that to the blend. Come over here, look for the plus sign and click when you see it, now what you'll blend looks like might be different to mine and that's just fine. They can be different. To set up the blend the way you want it, double-click the ''Blend tool'', click "Preview" so you can see what you're doing and select specified steps. Now, you can just adjust the number of steps either up or down to suit your needs. I'm going to do mine looking about like this, so I'll click "Okay". In a few minutes, when I add my blend of circles to this shape, I'm also want the shape itself and right now, if I add my series of circles around the shape, I'm going to lose the shape. It gets swallowed up in the process. So select over it and I'll choose edit copy, and then edit paste in place because that's going to leave it in the exact same position, but it does mean that I've got two copies of this line. Here they are, going to lock one down and just hide it, so I can't select it for now. I'll select over my blend and the line that I have left unlocked. I'll choose object and then blend and choose replies spine. Now, we've got elements going from the largest to the smallest around the spine. Now, if you think your circles need altering at this point you can do so. I'll go to the Group Selection tool and just click on this circle and then press the letter V to select it. Now up here, in the width and height, you can adjust the width and height. You want them to be the same, if you want to work with circles. When you do that, the blend will re-size from this size down, so everything will adjust automatically. I'm thinking that I'll do the other end, and increase it slightly. Again, I'm going to just try and pick up just that shape, press the letter ''V'' and then I'll increase its size. I'm going to take it up to 15 by 15. Again, the cycles get to be a bit bigger. Now, let's have a look in our layers palette. This is our blend and this is the path that we hid, so I'm just going to make the path visible again. The path is underneath the blend, but my circles don't have fills. If you do that and your circles don't have fills, again, go back to the ''Group Selection tool'' and just click on the circle you want to change, press the letter ''V.'' At this point, you can add a filter to it. Then I'll go to the one at the other end and just edit it. It is possible to edit blends by just targeting the shapes that you want to effect. Now my blend is of filled circles, so they're white filled circles. I'm going to bring this heart down to fill in this space here. Again, let's go and get it. I'll click it with the Group Selection tool, press letter ''V'', copy it with Control or Command C, and then paste it with ''Control or Command V''. We have to paste it because we want to break it out of the group that it's currently in. I'm just going to rotate this back around a little bit and let's place that roughly where it will go. For this shape here, I want to remove some of the dots. To do that, I'm going to need to expand that, so I'll select over the whole of the shape and I'll choose object and then blend, and we'll expand the blend. What that does is it breaks the dots out of the blend, so here's our group and here are all of our dots. The dots are inside a group. To make it easy as we're working with these ongoing to ungroup them as well. Just choose object and then ungroup now that breaks them out of the groups, making them just a little bit easier to select. I'm going to work out, which ones I'm going to remove, select them, and then remove them. Just making sure that, I'm only selecting the circles that I want to remove. I'm leaving them in some bundles of uneven numbers. I'm using 5's and 3's. I think I'll finish off by just removing this one. I'm happy with what I've got here, so I'll go back and reselect everything except the heart. Now, I'm going to have a bit of difficulty doing that, but the Lasso tool is the ideal tool to do that, because that just grabs everything. I'll click the selection tool. So I make sure I have everything selected here and I'm just going to group it. Grouping it allows me to do a few things, that just means that all of these objects are going to move as a single object. I want to reflect themselves, select them and choose object transform and then reflect in total reflect as one whole object. I've got preview turned on, this is how it has reflected. I'm going to click "Copy", so I get two sets and I'll move the copy to the other side. Now, actually think it would look better the otherwise I'm actually going to just move these around again. Let's go for this because I like this better. I'm looking for the approximate position of the pieces that go to make up these shapes. Now, I seem to have a shape here, that has a different stroke amount than the other so I'm just going to make that a one-point stroke, so it looks a little bit better. I've got the approximate spacing that I'm looking for, so I'll select all three objects, will go to the Align tool again. We don't want these to align to the art books, we don't want them to spread out, we just want them to adjust as they are, but to make sure that this spacing is correct. I'll click here, on horizontal distribute center and the heart moved just a little bit. Now, I've got another element, I'll select over it and I'll make a group out of it, so that it will be a group inside the panel here. I'll call this dots and art.
7. Pt 5 Loopy Frame Shape: For the last shape that we're going to create, we're going to base it on a circle. So I'll draw out a regular circle, but we want this to have lots of little loops around it. To do the loops, we'll go back to the pencil tool and what I'll do is draw just a single loop. I want it to be a loop that looks like this. So it does have a tail on it. At this point, if you don't like your loop, you can smooth it a little bit, but I'm just looking to make sure that I've got just a few anchor points. This is pretty good, so I'm really happy with that. I'll click away from it. I'm going to click this anchor point here, and I'll shift click on this anchor point because I want these two anchor points to be at exactly the same level. I'll choose object and then path, and then average. When I click horizontal and click OK, these two points are going to be adjusted and they're going to be adjusted to an average position. So this one will go up and this one will come down. I'll press OK. Now they're on the exact same plane. So when we put them around the circle, they're going to look just fine. So I'll select the over this shape and I'm going to make a pattern brush out of it. So I'll go to the brushes panel and click here on new, and I'll make it a pattern brush. I'll click OK. Then I'll just click OK again. I'll select my shape here and apply my pattern brush to it. I need it to pay quite a bit smaller. So I'll go to options. I selected object and just wind it down. So I am looking for something that looks a bit more like this, and I'll click OK. Next up, we'll break our brush out of this shape. So we'll choose object, expand appearance. Then I'll choose object ungroup and continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. So that means in the last panel over here, we're going to have a whole heap of little ropes going all the way around the shape, so they're still selected. Now I'll choose object path and then join. When I do that then all joined up to a single path. Now this path is very regular, but I want it to be a little bit irregular. So I'll select over it, go back to the smooth tool, and now I'll just smooth different parts of it. It's not going to do the same place on every one of these shapes. I just want to get a little bit of variety into the shapes. I can do that with this smooth tool. Now it won't be a lot of variety, but it will be enough to make it look like it's not a sort of regular shaped like it's not perfect any longer. Because pattern brushes really are perfect. They just paint the exact same way every time you use them. So I want this to look a little bit irregular, but without having to draw it irregular myself, because it's really difficult to do this with a mouse. Let's just have a hit at this and let's click away. So now it has some irregularity built into it. What I'd like to do is to add some little dots in various places around here, perhaps a few little dots around here. So let's get rid of our loop and let's go and make the dots. I'll click here once and add a dot that's 15 by 15. I'll alter option, drag it away so I create a second one. I'm going to make a blend out of these, and I want five in total. So I'll click on the blend tool. Click on the first one, click on the second again looking for the asterisk and the plus sign, double-click on the blend tool. I want specified steps. I want one at either end and three in the middle. So this is my three in the middle. Click preview, and you'll see that we've got just that and click OK. Now I want to take some pieces out of this shape. I'm going to select this shape and going to make a duplicate of it exactly over the top of this one. Edit, copy, edit, paste in place. Now I'm going to lock this down and I'm going to hide it because it's going to be too hard to say what we're doing otherwise. So I'm going to erase away the bits of the loops and just leave where I want to put my dots. I'm thinking some dots in here would be nice. I'll go to the arrays and make sure that I have my path selected. I'm going to erase away the bits that I don't want, so if I want dots around here, just going to erase this area here, just leaving the line that I want to use for my dots. Let's do some dots around this loop here. So I'm just going to cut off part of the loop here. Then let's cut it off here. So the dots are gonna go around the top there. Let's erase that. Down here, let's put some dots around this loop. So let's just cut it here and here. I'm going to put my dots around the loop here. So I'll just deselect these objects, go to the group selection tool, target this line here, and just delete it. The target, this line, this line and delete it. I just want to leave in place anything that I want to apply dots to. So that's going to be this and this and this over here. I'm going to remove this. So I've got my blend here. I'm going to alt or option drag a duplicate blend away and then alt, option drag another blend away. So this one and this one are going to be together. So I'm going to select both of them and choose object, blend, replace spine. that adds these dots to that spine, that path that we selected, that's going to be path of the one that we're sitting here. Then we'll grab this one and this blend object, blend, replace spine. Then we'll grab the last two. Now that I've got my dots, I can bring back in the shape that I had. You can say that the dots are sort of appearing around the shape. So now I've got dots that are appearing around the shape as if they have been attached to the shape. But they're actually blends of dots applied to spines that we created by erasing things from this shape and just leaving the bits that we wanted to add the dots too. So now we've made a whole series of different shapes. It's time to have a look at how we could color them. One of the things that we're going to encounter is that none of these little loops here are actual things. They're not things that can be colored individually. Well, that's not unless you use a tool like the live paint bucket tool. In the next video we're going to see how we could use that to color these elements.
8. Pt 6 Coloring the Shapes and Using Live Paint: Now we're at the point where we're going to color these elements. Now there are a couple of things to consider, one is that you may want the black and white versions. If you want the black and white versions, first of all you come in here and break out these blends, and fill these circles with just white color, if you didn't want them to be see through. Then you would save this document as a black and white version. I've already done that, I've also saved it as a color version, and this is the version I'm going to create as color. That's just going to give me two alternatives for creating a set of elements that I can sell, or give away. When I'm coming to color these, I'm going to look for some inspiration, so I'm going to window and then color themes. In earlier versions of Illustrator, this might have been called something like Adobe Color. You can type a word in here. I'm typing princess because I'm looking for color themes that are princessy if you like. If you see something that you like, open up this little flyout menu and choose add to swatches. Now, I've already added this set to my swatches, but you can just roll down and see if there's anything else that you like here, add it to your swatches panel. If you don't like princess, look for something like forest flower. Whatever you type in here, Illustrator is going to look at the Adobe Color themes that are available, and shareable through the Adobe Creative Cloud, and it's going to send you back color themes that match whatever it is that you've asked for. You can just type words in here like beach, or whatever, circus and you'll get color themes, some of which might be appropriate to what it is that you're trying to color. Now as I said I've already got one in here, so I've got the princess one here. I'm going to use it to color these elements here, so I'm going to select on one with the group selection tool, press the letter V, so I've got the entire shape selected, and then I'll click to fill it with color. You'll need to select each shape individually, and then color it. Because this is a closed shape, we can also color that. Now this shape is colored and we could just distribute it looking like that. This one that will be pretty easy to color too, because we've broken out all these circles into individual shapes, so you'll be able to select them with the group selection tool and color them. The one I want to look at is this one here, because we all want to break these little dots out of the blend so we can color them. But there are also some issues with these particular shapes here, so let's just go to the layers panel. Let's select these three blends because we want to expand these blends. Object, blend, and then expand, and you get groups of dots. Now we can choose object, ungroup, break them all out, and then just choose object, group, so they're all in a group, all of these little dots and they're all selectable. You'll just click on them with the group selection tool and then you could color them with your color. Now where things are going to get a little bit tricky is this shape here, because if we select it and try and fill it, this is what's going to happen. All of the loops get filled and so too does the middle, and what I want is for some of these loops to be different colors and I don't want anything in the middle. I'm going to set this to no fill, and we're going to look at the live paint bucket tool. Because the live paint bucket tool is the secret to coloring the loopy bits. I'm going to lock down and I'm going to hide for now, these groups of little circles. I'm just focusing on this single shape, which is where the problem lies. With it selected, I'll choose object and then live paint, and I'll choose make, and that makes this shape as a live paint object. That means that we can use the live paint tool on it. Here is the live paint bucket tool, we'll click on it to select. I'm going to double-click it because I need to make sure what I'm painting. I want to paint fills and I don't want to paint strokes, so I'm just going to turn off stroke so it doesn't mess with me, as I'm moving around. We're just painting fills, and we're going to see a yellow highlight when we're over an area that can be filled, so I'll just click OK. I'll go and select one of my colors, and that's now the middle color in the little swatch of colors immediately above the live paint tool. If I press the right arrow key, I'll choose the next color along. If I press the left arrow key, I'll go back through the colors, so I can navigate through the colors in my princess color theme. I'm just going to choose this color here, this one, it's highlighted here. Now I'll just hover over something I want to color and once I hover over it, you'll see it's highlighted. I'm just going to change the color here because it is a little bit difficult for you to see. Now it's clearer, you can see that there's red highlighting. Now these areas will not able to be colored independently just by adding a fill, but when you use live paint, you can fill them with color. I'm just going to click to fill a few of these with color. Then I'll go to another one of the colors from my color palette. I'm not going to fill all of them, but I am going to apply some of the colors to this, shape. I think that's all I'll do, so I'm just going to click away from it. Here we've got an element that has been colored using the live paint bucket tool. Once you're done with the live paint bucket tool, you can choose object and then live paint, and then choose expand, and that expands these shapes, and it creates these as independent shapes. Now I'm a bit worried about this line here. Here is the line, so I can go and grab it here, and I just need to set it back up to one pixel. It's a little bit thin. But here is a group that contains the actual colors on these little petals here. Now one of the things that you can do with this shape, if you like the colors but you'd like to see something just a little bit different, is to grab the group of colors, so these are only the colors. I'm going to move them by pressing the right arrow ones, and the down arrow ones, and this is what we're getting. We're getting this offset look. This is another interesting look that you can use when you're coloring elements. If you just move them slightly away from the line, it gives the shape a whole lot more dimension, and if you'd like that, that's a possibility. Now if you like that and you want to apply it up here, what you're going to need to do is to grab these shapes, and press the letter V, and then I'll expand these. But before I expand them, I want to make sure that my strokes are one pixel strokes so that it's consistent throughout. With the shapes selected, I'll choose object, expand. I'm going to expand the fill and the stroke, I'll click OK. That separates the fill and the stroke, so let's go and see where this shape is. It's in this arrow here. Here's the group that contains that, so this is the line and this is the fill color. Well we can go and target just the fill color, and again I'm going to use one arrow to the right, and one arrow down, and that's just offset these colors from each other. But in each instance here, you're going to have to manipulate the shapes, selects the shape, makes sure that before you do anything, that the stroke is as thick as you want it to be because that's the last time it's going to be a stroke. Object, expand, expand the fill and the stroke. Now locate the group that they're in. Locate the fill color, and just move it wherever you want to move it, and I'm just using one right arrow and one down arrow. There are some of your options for re-coloring these objects. As I said, I would highly suggest that you make a black and white set, but you also make a colored set.
9. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to make some of these doodles yourself. I suggest that you make three or four doodle shapes, and incorporate into them some of the things that you've learned in this particular class. Post an image of your doodle collection, as your class project. Now, as you're watching these videos, you would've seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, would you do two things for me: firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class, and secondly, write even in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the follow link visible on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, 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™
