Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey what's up Skillshare. My name is Jon Brommet. I am a graphic designer and illustrator and in this class we're going to be talking about symmetrical illustration. The idea behind symmetry is it is in many beautiful things. It's in human faces, it's an animal faces, its trees, it's in all kinds of different objects and things around us, whether man-made or not. Symmetry is something that's really important and it's just really nice on the eye to see something if it's on this side its also on this side. Of course, there's many asymmetrical things that are also amazing but for this class, what I want to do is try and put you in a box, little box, and force you to try and come up with a really cool illustration that is symmetrical. Again, meaning if it's on this side, it's also on this side. That's also called mirroring, and I think the idea is that it's going to force you to try and be creative within a certain confinement and sometimes that's a good way to really push yourself and create something really extraordinary. The class project is pretty obvious it's going to be for you to create your own symmetrical illustration or to copy mine and make sure that you are learning along with me and that you're practicing all the different things that I've actually shown. Trust me, I've been there, I've watched something and just assume, I don't even need to try it, I'm now an expert on it because I saw somebody do it in a video. No, you should try it yourself, actually practice, that'll definitely make the difference between just watching something and actually internalizing it, so you can remember it going forward. Also in this class, I try something that I haven't done a long time, which is, I'm bringing you along for the ride. Instead of just having a perfect illustration that I've already finished and then I show you how to recreate, I'm actually starting from scratch, I'm going along and taking you for the journey. That sounds interesting to you, keep watching, let's get started.
2. Live Mirroring Trick: If you're anything like me, you'd like to learn something right off the bat and I want to give you probably one of the coolest tips into class right from the get-go and that is live marine without needing to download any plugins or pay for anything. All you have to do is open a new document, it can be any size that you want. I also recommend that you have smart guides on, which is Command U or you can go to View down to Smart Guides. First, using the Pen Tool, I'm just going to click at the top of my artboard and then holding Shift to make sure that it's a straight line, I'm going to click the bottom of my artboard. Now, I'm going to move over just to the normal arrow tool and we're going to select that line. Going up here, I just want to make sure that Align to Artboard is checked and I want to align it to the center. Once that's done, we want to make that a guide permanently rather than a vector piece of artwork that we can edit. All you have to do is hit Command or Control on a PC and the number 5 and that turns it into a guide dead center. That's where you'll know that everything on the left is a mirror image of everything on the right. Once you have that done, then we're just going to make a rectangle, so that's M on the keyboard, or you can come over here and click the rectangular box tool. Then anywhere just right on the left, again, you want to make sure that you're getting the exact edge of the page, that's why it's good to have your Smart Guides on. You're going to click and drag over to the right side. It doesn't really matter where this is, but I think it's probably best to make it center on both alignment values, so that way it's exactly center in your document. From here, you want to make sure that you have your Layers panel open. Once you have your Layers panel open, and if it's not showing, just go to Window and then go down to Layers, make sure there's a checkmark there. You're going to hit this little box to the side of Layer 1 and basically just make sure you're grabbing every element in Layer 1. Now, we're going to use the Appearance panel. Again, that's Window and go down to Appearance. Then what we want to do is hit this little Effects button, it' s near the bottom left of that dialog box. We're going to go down to Distort & Transform and then over to Transform. The key here is just to reflect x and we'll make the copy, one. You click "Preview", but you won't really see anything at the moment and just click "OK". Now, what you want to do, this is a pretty important step, is go down back to your Layers, open up this Layer panel and right here you'll see rectangular and you want to hide that, so you can't see that anymore. Now, what should happen is, anytime you draw something on the right here, it will immediately also appear on the left, whether it's a rectangle, a circle, or if you're using your Pencil Tool, as you can see, it'll show up there, even using your Pen Tool, let's say you draw something here, here, and here. Now, as far as I can tell from experimenting a little bit with this, if you want your lines to actually connect from one side to the other because this is a weird digital thing where it's not there but it's there because you're tricking it. If you want to finish your artwork, let's just say you make something like this, I'm just going to quickly. Your artwork is over here, but nothing is here and select Ebola, that's going to be annoying when you're finishing steps. Probably, what you want to do is just save another document and then what you should do is go into your Appearance panel and you want to select everything, select Command A, and you'll see that this is where you have your Effects. Just make sure that you have everything selected in your Layers panel and show that rectangle again. Then you're going to hit that same Selection Tool, go to Appearance, see that Transform, and we're actually just going to delete that. Now, it's gone, we'll delete our rectangle. From here, you can select everything. You're going to use Option and Shift to drag it over and then we're going to use our Reflect Tool and Enter. We're going to reflect it vertically, bring it back so it'll snap nicely. Now, you have perfectly editable artwork, and you can connect these lines just by selecting them both and hitting this little tool right here that will actually connect those lines and that becomes one point. Anyway, that's a good way to do it when you're all done and set. By using that Transform tool in the Appearance panel, will allow a tap and live. You can make some really cool, unique artwork that way. I don't end up using that for my project because I just like having Smart Guides and I was making some simple geometric shapes, so it seemed easier to me to just not bother with the confusion of this automatic mirroring, especially if you're making a circle up the center, then you don't want like duplicate lines and all this stuff, but it's a really cool feature to have for certain aspects. Let's get another class and start sketching.
3. Sketching My Illustration: This is the only part of the class that I did not record my audio live while I was drawing, and that was because, I didn't know how long it would take. Instead, I'm just doing the voice-over to explain what I was thinking at the time. To start with, I tried to write a bunch of words that I thought made sense as far as things, objects, or people or whatever that are symmetrical. It just helps rather than slowly sketch each one out just to write all the words down really fast, and then you can get into the actual sketching part. I definitely did a lot of different words, and then from there I can always add to them afterwards, but then I can start sketching once I get the ideas that I like. I like skull, owl and acoustic guitar, then as you can see, I started writing other words like Ferris wheel as I was going, just if more ideas started popping in your head. I was experimenting with different animals, and how I can make the frame interesting. I did find that, I was using that rectangular frame too often and it didn't look that cool, so I thought maybe I would experiment with a different shape frame. Again, I keep drawing that acoustic guitar I played at the Ferris wheel, had the idea of a CN Tower and a skyline, I was messing around with that. Then, for a moment, I just tried drawing frames. Basically I just thought of it as the silhouette and I wanted to make a cool shape, that's just something a little more unique than a plain rectangle. Just because I thought that that might get a little bit boring. At that point, I draw a ticket stub, which I was thinking, it would be really cool with the Ferris wheel as you would need a ticket to get in to use a Ferris wheel. I thought that would be a really interesting way to tie the frame together with the Ferris wheel, and I play a little bit more with the CN tower and a rocket ship. But, at this point, the Ferris wheel just seem to stand out to me as a more unique idea, I roughly sketched out even further what I thought would look cool for it. I tried that a couple of times. You can tell by the way that my sketches are really rough. I don't think you should spend more than a couple seconds on your sketch. It's just getting the idea on the paper, you can keep moving on. But it's important to sketch first because it allows you to just get that creativity and ideas out of your head faster than anything. It's hard to do that on a computer, unless if you have an iPad or something, that's fine too. But if you've got a mouse or you're doing it in Administrator, it's just hard to get the idea down equally as fast as you can when you're sketching on paper or sketching digitally like an iPad or something like that. I also play with the idea of adding that guitar pic to the acoustic guitar. I was trying to play around with that idea of the frame matching the subject, and I came up with a liquor bottle. Some of these things I may actually go back to, and try and create more art with your thumb but, I just want to get down as many ideas as I could. I started thinking more words, I added more shapes and things like that; astronaut helmet, fruits, Popsicle and just try anything you can possibly think of. I thought about getting a little bit weird where there's drivers, in a vehicle driving, vehicles getting pulled in both directions because there's driver on either side. Then I thought maybe you just doing a really abstract tree. Again, there's no real great rhyme or reason why these things popped into my head and why I drew them, but they just popped in my head, so I drew them. At this point, I was just trying to push it with more ideas, more symmetrical shapes that popped into my head. Again, even if you're really happy with one of the ideas that you've come up with, I encourage you to go further, spend another 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever it is trying to come up with even more ideas and make sure that you have the best idea that you can possibly think of once you actually start getting to refining. I thought the idea of a cell phone being plane technology with this real flower coming out of it might be pretty interesting. But all in all, the Ferris wheel took the cake. It was my favorite idea. That's what I decided to move forward for this class.
4. Setting Up Your Artboard: So let me preface this by saying in my last few classes, what I've have actually done most of the time is I've pre-made my artwork. So I already knew what I was going to do. Then, when we got into the class, I would just recreate it so that I could efficiently show you guys how to make what I was making. That wasn't to fool you or make you think that I'm a better illustrator, that ideas coming faster or things go so smoothly and perfectly. But rather, to make the class just streamline, smooth, and not have a lot of filler or confusion. So that's why I did it. But to contradict all that, that's what we're going to do today. I'm actually going to take you along for the ride. I'm creating this totally from scratch. You saw me draw it all out. Now, I'm going to bring it into the computer. I'm just going to start creating this thing from scratch. So you're going to be along for the failures and you're going to be long for hopefully the good stuff. So let's jump in. So to start with, I'm going to be going with my Ferris wheel design that I have sketched, so I'll keep that here with me. So to start with, I want to have a couple of reference images for my Ferris wheel because I was going from memory. I know I overly simplified it, but I'm thinking now that I might actually make it more complicated, and add some more seats, and things like that. So I'm just going to look for some good reference photos. So all I'm going to do is click on the ones I like and drag them in. Of course, I'm not going to be copying any of these per se. Although, it is a Ferris wheel design which is fairly straightforward, but I just want to use them for reference. I'm also looking for a night photo. I want some good night photos like this that show this, the white color and the blue. That's what I'm envisioning for my color scheme for this one, I might bring in some purples and pinks. So I like this photo as well. That's a good reference for at night. So I like those blues. Instead of oranges, I'm going to go for more of a pink tone, but that's good enough. I just wanted a couple of rough images. So now we're going to hop into Illustrator. So I'm going to go ahead and hit "New". I have this setup as a HD video file size, and that is 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. The reason for that is for this illustration, I actually want to make it just for the computer. I just want to show it online only, but I'm going to make it a little shorter in height. Basically, I'm going to make it the thumbnail size that I need it to be for my class because that is the purpose of what I'm going to be using this illustration for. But go ahead and make this any size that works for you. Of course, we are in Adobe Illustrator and we're making vector artworks, so you can technically scale and change things later. But, it's nice to get it as close as possible. Again, because we're working with the Web and I want to just show this on web, I don't have any plans to print it. I'm actually going to use my web colors. So if you have swatches open, just set these three lines to the right and go down to "Open Swatch Library" and click "Web". That should bring up this little web dialogue box that'll show you that. If none of this panel is open, you can go to window and make sure color is checked. I'll give you a moment just to look here that I have application frame, control, stroke transparency, and those are some of the things that I have opened on my window. Mine is a setup custom, but it's based on the default, I believe. So to start with, I'm going to get rid of this black outline and I'm going to make it a dark blue background just like so. I'm actually going to lock that which is "Command 2" or "Control 2" on a PC, that way I can't accidentally click it later on. Then, I'm going to drag in my two Ferris wheel reference images. I'm going to embed them. Let's just blow them up so they're a little easier to see. For the sake of it, we'll make them real big.
5. Illustrating A Ferris Wheel: Starting with, it's pretty simple. Obviously, I'm going to just be using the Ellipse Tool, so that is L on my keyboard or you can go over if you see the rectangle tool, click and hold and go down to Ellipse. We're going to make some circles now. If you've taken any on my class before, you know I'm a huge fan of smart guides that's command U or control U or go down to View and click Smart Guides. Those will make things quick around and all these little lines popup, but they're going to make sure that your artwork is perfect, which is super useful for this. We're going to click in the center and I'm just holding option, which is Alt on the PC and Shift to open that up. I'm going to go with something around here. Again, we can play with this later. I want some bright blue color. I'll go with, I really like it to be washed out so it's real white. I'm just holding it, and I'm hitting Shift X to turn it to a stroke. I'm going to blow that up, deciding I think around there is cool. Let's go eight. We're going to do eight points for now. Now that I have that circle drawn, I'm just going to select it, and I'm going to hit Command C or Control C and Command F or Control F to paste it. Holding option and Shift, or Alt and Shift on PC, and we're going to drag that out. That's going to give us the outside. I have scale, strokes and effects on, so it's actually going to enlarge that stroke according to the size. I'm going to hit I on my keyboard, which is the eyedropper tool, and I'm just going to select this path and now they're the same, they both eight points. Lastly, I want to make one more circles on doing the same process, and I'm going to click this and drag it. It seems to be snapping there. I don't know if that's exactly halfway. Pretty close. If we want to get real technical, what we can do is, we'll draw a box from here to here. You can see right where that center line is, we want a wire-frame here. That is where a halfway mark is, it's right there. Now we know that this circle is exactly halfway between those circles. So far that was pretty straightforward, pretty easy. We want to make up the actual lines that make it. You can see that there is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, so 14 of these lines that are going across. There's a bunch of different ways to make these lines and make them go across the way that you want to do them. I think the easiest, what I'm going to try anyway, is I'm going to draw straight from the center point, straight down at this center point. I want to figure out the math, how much it needs to go over to here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate this. I want to hit R on my keyboard and then I'm going to hit Enter, and it brings up my Rotate options. Let me go with 360 divided by 14. I don't think this is going to work perfectly, but it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to match the reference exactly. Just has to work for what we're doing. It looks like, yeah, that nailed it. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 on this side and seven on that side. That actually worked out perfectly, which is nice. That does not always happen. I may end up making those half maybe four points, we're going to keep certain things bigger and certain things smaller. I might also make this four points, I'm going to play with that stuff later when we get further into it. I was in one of these recently, which is what gave me the idea. I'm going to look up Ferris wheel again. I have two monitors, I'm just going to do it on the lower monitor. I want to get a closer photo of a chair. The first built that I was in real recently, had it like this. These look a little bit more ornate, but something like that. Basically what I want to do is I'm going to draw a rectangle and I will make it square for the sake of it. I got to decide how big I want it. It looks like they're pretty small in comparison to the actual shape. I'm just making this up really, I got something like that. I've put that in the center, so highlighting both. I'm going up here and I'm going to go Align to selection and center that. Opening my Pathfinder, which is Window, and you go down to Pathfinder, I'm going to hit the divide to divide it. Then I'm hitting Command Shift G to ungroup it. I'm going to deselect, so holding Shift I'm just going to click on the outside shape, the one I want to keep. Then I'm going to delete the other part, just like that. Now I think I want to round these. In fact, I think I want to round the whole thing. Something like that works because there was like a gate here and now this came down. Let's undo this. Of course I can make this thing look like anything I want, but for the sake of it I got to make it look like the one that in my mind I was recently in. It looks pretty good. I'm going to use my Rectangle Tool and I'm going to draw up here and I'll snap nicely. I don't want too little of an awkward space. That'll be the roof. I may well extend this point up so it connects to that. I wonder if it should connect right through the roof, and that's how these will connect to the point. It gives me a nice anchor point to connect it off. Looking at my reference images, I can see that these chairs don't line up exactly with the lines like the support beams. In this case there's actually a few in-between. The idea is to get the general idea of what you're drawing rather than overly complicated. As artists, we have the ability to make it look the way we want and not necessarily what's true to life especially if we think it'll simplify it and make the image easier to understand rather than too cluttered. I'm thinking something like that. I haven't decided whether I want this to just be a blob, so if I make it thicker, I almost like the blob. Let's see, we'll go back to that later. I want to connect that point nicely to all of these corners. I should be able to just select these, group them, and I'm holding Option and Shift to drag them over here. I'm going to use the Reflect tool. I have an action set up so that I automatically can reflect, which is in my actions class if you're interested. Now that I've put these on all of the lines, I'm starting to see they look silly as big blobs. Let's try that thin line. I just feel like they're too distracting there. They're taking away too much attention from the Ferris wheel. Then I'd actually be better off going with something more like the original ones where their chairs weigh smaller. I'm going to go ahead and delete everything but the one, we'll keep this one here I guess. I'm going to make it a lot smaller. This is where it's going to get to be a bit more of a pain in the butt now because I want them to be smaller, and I want them to be less noticeable. That means I need a lot more chairs. In order to do that, I'm grouping these two on equal lines and I'm going to have to use my Rotate tool again. I'm going to try and figure out roughly what's going to work for me, and then I'm going to have to hand rotate each one back to the line. I'm going to cut that fast forward this part for you so that it doesn't get too boring. That looks pretty good. I actually ended up doing 360 divided by 40. I'm going to select them all. That's Command A and then command G to group. If you're using a PC anytime that I say command, you can just sub in and control. Some of these things it will do automatically. If I click that and select this outer circle, now holding option, I'm going to click on that outer circle again. It makes it a key line and now it'll force the chairs to line up nicely to that line. The tedious part, I have to go in here and I have to manually make these line up. I'm going to ungroup everything and have to do it twice. Then I'm going to have to try and get all of these chairs to be flat and then drag them so that this little point at the top is right on that line. That one is easy to rotate, but some of these are on random little angles, so they're harder to rotate. What I'm going to do is go to window and go down to transform. You can see this is on newer versions of illustrator that the angle is here, so that means that 99 percent and this one is at 90 degrees. If I hit zero and hit Enter, it's going to put it back to zero. What I want to do is put each of these back to zero. Then I'm going to align this top point here with the point off of the circle. I'm going to go ahead and do that 40 times and fast forward so you guys don't go crazy. Now that I'm halfway down, what I'm going to do is select all of these have gotten grouped, and I'm going to use the Rotate tool and bring them back. They should nicely line up on both sides, aligning them to the key line. I might have to finesse this a little bit to get it to line up. It should all be either on it or extremely close. Let's look at them better. I'm going to make them a more subtle color at some point. Something along these lines anyway. I've also tried to like they probably should be more of a fill like that. Then I'll make the little line strokes, and they're probably going to be something more like this. Something along those lines. Toy at that later. I do want all of these lines above those chairs. Maybe those are too subtle, but we're going to play with something like that. Same idea with I want to get into some bright pink color, and then this should be filled in. Maybe something like that. There will be something to play around with. Try not to get too caught up, maybe something like that. I don't know. I try not to get too caught up with color early on. A fine color can be frustrating to deal with. It's good to have a rough idea going forward at least enough that you can keep your shapes organized. But as you move on, it's better to just keep going and then worry about the color at the end stages.
6. The Class Project: I want to take a break in the action to talk about the class project. In this class, I want you to create your own symmetrical illustration. You should try and come up with something creative. You can copy my design as far as the class that you're learning along with me because I think it's important to actually try the steps. If you want to basically copy my illustration for this class purposes, no problem. If you want to share it on social media, just please tag like, "This is from John Brown's class, it's his illustration, I've just redone it, whatever." Just so other people don't think that you are trying to rip me off or anything like that. But for the sake of the class, I totally understand. If you want to just follow along and draw it exactly like I did. I also encourage you, afterwards, to try on your own thing or just forget about copying mine and try your own thing right away because it's way more fun. It's going to be way more rewarding and it pushes your own creativity and forces you to try new things, and maybe you can use some of the different tools or some of the different things that I use in my illustration as far as my workflow. But you'll have your own creative, unique illustration that's unique to you and your creativity. That's what I want you to do for this class. Can't wait to see your projects. I'm going to be commenting and liking all of them. I look forward to seeing them.
7. Making A Frame: Now that I've finished making the Ferris wheel part, we're going to top in, and try to make the ticket. Here's a reminder to save. Always try and save as soon as possible. If anything, I waited a little bit too long, but that's okay. Make sure you save your work, you can save it as AI, I like to save it as PDF. I just find them easier to preview, but it makes no difference really. I think AI is technically open faster and things anyway. Now I just really need these brace legs, and then I need to figure out how to make all this stuff fit together with my idea of my ticket, and stuff like that. Maybe what I should drew, before I worry about the legs because they can go at any angle, I don't need to worry about this thing actually being solid enough to stand. I'm going to try and draw my ticket. In my sketch, I drew just a generic ticket, something like this shape as far as with that little cut out there. I needed to decide whether that's going to look the best. I definitely want people to be able to recognize that I used the ticket as the frame. Because I wanted to make a frame for this. It just adds a little bit more interest to this illustration. In this case, you definitely don't have to make a frame if you're not interested in doing that. But I thought it was clever to incorporate a frame that actually makes sense to the whole theme. It's not necessarily that it's a circus, but some kind of event, or carnival, or whatever that you're going to, where you're going to need a ticket in order to get onto the Ferris wheel. I think that makes it fun little frame concept. Something like that with a little rips in it, that could work pretty well. Things like this, I have to just think of it as a silhouette more than anything else. It does seem like that cut out is just going to be the most obvious. Normally, the parted line like the dots are only on one side. But because I've given myself these confines of making it symmetrical, I'm either going to have to put both on the dots on both sides or just no dots. Let's figure that out. I do like the idea that this Ferris wheel is sort of busting out of the confinements of the ticket. Right now, I'm using my rectangle tool and I'm just using the preview to get a feel as to whether it's the right size, width-wise. I can always adjust it later on, but I want it to be in line now. Using my align tool here, I'm just going to align it top and bottom. Everything is going to be nice and aligned just like so. I do have my chairs now grouped with this outer circle so they move around nicely with it. It does add a bit of an illusion because technically that shape now ends down here rather than up here. The circle is not technically in line with that piece. It's in line with the bottom of these chairs. I'm going to nudge that down a little bit. I may mess with that later. But I think probably I want the circle because it's going to be more noticeable to actually be what's align with the shape. Okay, so now we're just going to eyeball this cut out. I want of those lines to be directly intersected like that. I'm going to use my eye dropper tool, and grab this, maybe put this stroke, something like that. I just want to be able to visualize it first before I make it a semi-permanent cut. I feel like maybe that's too much of an oval. Something like that, it's not bad. Let's look back in my references here. There are so many different ones, you can't really go wrong. That's interesting too with that shape. That's a bigger circle, I like the semi slightly oval concept. Maybe go like that and maybe make it just a bit bigger. I'm starting to think it should be wider as well, but we'll get there. Okay, so you don't have to make things permanent when you're illustrating. You can always add layers on top of layers, but I like to make it permanent. I can always go back like I know ways to undo things. I'm just going to use my Pathfinder again. I'm going to use that divide and that looks pretty good. Now what I can do here is go to the center of my art board. I'm just going to cut this thing again using divide, and this is the easiest way. Holding option and shift, drag that piece over. I'm going to reflect it. But basically I'm just using the Reflect tool. It's just I've got some presets to make it faster. Let's move this out of the way that so we know what snapping here and here. I'm really going to get rid of that middle point just for keeping my clean vector. Okay, so center this again, now I've got my ticket. I'll decide whether I'll make it go out to the sides a little bit more, but something along those lines. It's pretty cool. Now I need to decide how I fill this frame or I do like the idea of it bursting out at least at the top, it does make sense for it to go out at the bottom as well. I just had this idea too of having a skyline either behind it or even partially in front of it just to give it a way. I think what I'm going to do is one behind it but then a smaller one in the front to give it that depth. What I'm doing is double-clicking, I want to get this circle. I am going to blow that up. Something like so, I'm going to make that pink. I want both of these pink lines to have fills now. This angle up here, I'm making sure I got the foreground and grab this blue color. When you do it, if I just click blue, I haven't set up my Eye dropper tool, so it actually grabs all the different transparencies. If I hold shift and click, that'll take the blue in the foreground but keep the pink. I want something along those lines. This is why it's good to have your sketch. I'm just referring to taking a look at how I had things in line and how things are interrupting. I'm going to decide exactly how I want to make my lines work. I think what I'm going to do here is a bit tricky, but I want to draw a box and I'm going to center it. Then I'm going to undo these. I'm going to delete both of these. Then what I'm going to do is selecting these points, just click anywhere along this line. Now using my direct selection tool, I'm going to grab that point, hit "Delete", and I'll do the same over here. That keeps the fill, but I actually don't want it to align the way it is with that circle right now. What I actually want to do is have to go a little bit beyond. I'm clicking it. I'm going to make it go roughly three. Again, that's something I might play with later on, but I like the idea of it going a little bit beyond, slightly beyond my artwork. Now let's sort of play around with some of our neat stuff that I was thinking of adding. I'm thinking I'm just going to put a little star in here. For some reason in this concept, I feel like a star is going to help give it a little bit of that circus vibe. The funny thing is I don't want it like, the reason why I came up with this idea is because I was recently, like I said, I want a Ferris wheel. But the one that I was on was that like a cool Winter Festival in Toronto. That's kind of the more of the vibe I'm going for. It just like really nice, because I think Ferris wheels are pretty cool, but I'm not a big carnival guy. I want you to think of Ferris wheel, not necessarily carnival. I'm going to redo this line again. At this point, I'm pretty much just experimenting, you know what I think was cool. I'm remaking that. I'm going to blow this up. Get rid of this point by selecting delete at this thickness. I don't want to fill. It gives me that other line. This is why I'm not using that reflect trick too much. It's just so easy for me to at least copy it and just throw it on the other side I find. It gets just a little confusing if too much is going on for me. I just like doing it this way. I'm going to draw a line up here, a hold and shift and hitting down once. Now I want that to align there and then I'm going to go hold and shift, hit it down once again. It moves over. Let's give it a little more breathing room here, something like that. Then group them, grab the shape, key line and film. We copy it over there. This is the beauty to have smart guides. These things just snapped together. It's so easy. It's not hard to make sure that your one side lines up with your other side when you're using smart guides. When you're not using smart guides, it's much more difficult.
8. Adding The Background: The truth is, I'm going to let you in on the behind the scenes because I'm actually making an illustration you're actually following me along. It's not all chopped up in a perfect little pieces. Here's a new video just picking up where we left off a second ago. I think somewhere now is a good time to figure out these support structures. It does feel to me like they probably should follow that line that's already there. Let's just go in and grab that line and that line, copying them and then I'm going to paste them, and then what I want to do is just make sure that they stop here. That line will be thicker. I'll probably use maybe the same background color as the chairs, I'm not sure. Potentially I want to make sure that those go into there. I'm going to set them probably in the background. Maybe just make them thinner. We're going to go in here and definitely want these on top. We'll play with those colors later and definitely I'm going to want this line on top of these. I may have to do some masking but we'll worry about that at a later step. Now I want to make a skyline. All I'm going to do is just make rectangles and I want them to be about the same color as these chairs for now. I'm just going to make them different sizes. Skyline is the one part that I'm concerned a little bit about for the mirroring. Everything looks nice when it's mirrored, but a skyline is something that just isn't mirrored. It's just not something you're going to see as symmetrical in real life. I'm a little worried that that's not going to look great. I may have to either break my symmetrical rule or just not worry about the skyline being slightly different sizes. Probably a good point to just make a separate group for those. We're just going to merge all that. Here is my Reflect tool. Put the shape ring on top of this shape. Merge those. Now I've got my skyline. That's definitely going to mass. I'm going to grab this Command C to select it Command F and I'm going to have to connect those dots just using my pen tool. That's one clean shape. Now, grabbing my skyline and then I'm in Command7, which will make it a mask, and then Command X to delete it. Then I want to go Command F and then drop it all the way to the back. That's just object, arrange, send it back and you can see the key is here to shortcut it. I like something like that, but I definitely don't want this to be so obvious. I want them to be more subtle. That's the color we already have. I'm just going to try and go, light it up just a little. One tricky thing about when you're designing for screens is if it's a little bit lighter or a little bit darker on my screen. It's possible that it doesn't show up in someone else's screen. I want it to be subtle, but hopefully not invisible on anyone's screens. I'll fill in that. Now my thought was basically I just want to test this theory out. If I put this in front, it would have to be lighter. At this point, I think I'm just going to try and hide my reference images. I don't really want to see them anymore. I want to be able to focus in on this. I want to make sure that the Ferris wheel is the focal point and then everything else compliments it really nicely. I'm deciding whether this pink frame here is actually going to work for me or whether I need to go with something a little less obvious, maybe a blue that's darker. Let's give that a shot for the sake of it. I'll find the layerings a little messy. What I'm going to to do is, I'm going to make this end at that point, which is at the point where the ticket is, the same with this side. Then I'm going to delete here so that this is no longer filled and turn that fill to nothing and then I can turn all these fills to nothing. Helps but not my mask on. Now the fills are all nothing, it should be a little bit easier to work with. I'm going to make that it. I think that's what we had for this stroke. I just want to adjust. I have this mask on that is snapping to there. I want to go in and mess with that mask a little bit. I want it to go here and basically just remaking my mask to follow this frame so that the buildings don't get cut off. I'll probably redraw those buildings. I don't want them to be the exact same, but I'm just deciding whether I even want the buildings before I waste my time doing any of that. Suddenly like that's interesting. I need to make sure now because this mask is getting cut off. What I want to do is I'm going to grab this and this frame, paste them. Combine that all together nicely. That's going to be my new mask, mask this. One thing I want to try just for fun, just to see what a gradient will look like in this background. I seem to generally like keeping my artwork flat, but I just want to give this a quick shot. Now I think I want to add in some stars and some clouds. Here's how I like to make my clouds. I'm going to make a line and using a circle and I base it off the edge of that in to the small circle, and then a bigger circle, then maybe another circle over here when I want to stretch it out. Stretch that out a little. Something like that. Then I use my pathfinder tool, merge those together, divide this and that gives me a cloud. Then of course I want it on in the background. I think part of my issues, I went a little crazy with trying to make this Ferris Wheel seem way bigger. I like the idea of that skyline better. I think maybe what I'll do is just add some trees or something in the foreground. But I like the way the clouds look. I think things are starting to take shape finally.
9. The Little Details: Hey, you are still with me? I'm just checking. I know that this isn't glamorous there is a lot of tedious back and forth and making decisions and trying to change things. But that is what design actually is it is not just perfect. You get the thing now down the first time. This is showing you my work flow and working and how a professional designer actually does things. It doesn't all just come together like Lego unfortunately. If you are still with me, thank you and we will continue on. By the way, if at any point during any of the time lapses, I do anything that you don't understand, please leave a comment. Just ask me a question in the discussion. I'll happily explain anything that I may have skipped or missed over. I do so much design, I do this stuff all the time that once in a while, something I think is easy or something I just think I've already taught before or you may already know, I forget to explain every little detail. If you have a question, let me know in the comments. Now I think it's time to make some trees. There's a lot of different ways to make the trees. I'm going to go with the classic way where they're a little bit boring. They're basically just rectangles on rectangles. The reason why I'm going to go that direction is because I've already got so much geometrical stuff happening right now. By the way, once you draw the rectangles like this, if I just bring them down and just get them, they don't have to be spaced perfectly, but something along those lines, I probably can't see this here let me make it a bright color. You see how my bounding boxes all different angles and I want to make it thinner, but I can't because it's all skewed. If I go to object transform and that reset bounding box, now I can really easily make that stuff smaller. I didn't want to make these branches curve. That's normally what I do, but I just think that this style or tree, the more classic boring geometrical thing, is probably going to work a little bit better for this particular illustration because of how geometric it is and how perfect all the shapes are. I just want to steal this mask, some double-clicking, double-clicking, click Paste. I'm just making a weird color. Now that it's masked as well. I just wanted it to be ahead of this Ferris Wheel, so but I want it behind those blue lines. I clicked on this pink line, I hit command F and that did that trick for me. Now I don't want these giant trees, so I'm going to make it a little smaller and I'm not going to worry about making them green. I want them to be blue. We'll play around with the spacing and all that stuff. Of course some trees or bigger or some trees or smaller some trees are thinner, some trees are wider. There's going to be a bit of playing around. Some have a hard time deciding whether I want these to go across in a straight line or if I wanted to have an angle or depths underneath I keep seeing are raising them up and raising them up seems to look better. Then if I raise them, I feel like they need that arc. I'm going to use the arc tool, so I just went to effect. Let's do that again, so effect, warp and then to arc. Then I'm just going to go with a minus arc here. Let's make it a little shorter here, a little taller there and then as I do, I definitely don't want to be able to see the blue in the lines there. I'm just cranking it up a little bit more. Does show that trees are Angelinos. I might actually have to finesse that. I don't really like how the trees look like they're tipping into the illustration. But I just wanted to get an idea of whether I like the look of that. Unlike here where this is headed, let's add in some stars, I'm going to go back to those trees afterwards. Sometimes it's best to just take a little break from certain parts, certainly elements of your illustration, if they are going as smoothly. The tricky thing with this particular illustration that I've made is that I've chosen to try and draw like a real landscape, a real thing that actually exists. For that reason, I'm choosing to create things that never appear perfect in real life. For example, the stars are never actually going to be perfectly symmetrical from one side or the other. That leaves me with some things to work through and decide whether I keep with the theme of keeping it perfectly symmetrical or whether I worry about making the star is like a little more, I don't know if realistically the right word but less patterned. It seems to mostly be working now. I like the general look of this thing. I think the thing I need to do now is dress it up, add in some details and just go a little bit crazy with it. I think it needs more detail. I think that's the thing when you're doing certain types of vector illustrations, when they're so simple, just has to captivate you. It has to keep your eye moving. I think in this particular illustration's case, it needs a lot more detail, a lot of little tiny lines and things going on. Let's go into some time-lapse action. Well, after all that, I don't think I want those trees. I'm leaning towards I like it better without the trees. That helps definitely to make sure that you can tell that it's a Ferris Wheel too, because you can see more of the chairs. You know what? Trees are out here. I like it.
10. Thanks & Goodnight: Once again, I know there was a lot of time lapses in this class, it's something I haven't done before. Normally, like I said, I plan them out ahead of time. Please let me know if you like that. If you don't like that, let me now, and I'll go back to doing what I was doing before. But it's always fun to try new things and try and bring you a class in a new way to see whether you can learn more or if you find that interesting. Just let me know. Boom, it's done. Yes. Actually, let's go over to this camera. Thank you so much. I hope you guys enjoyed the class. Now, I just want to quickly show you a couple of my other classes to see whether they interest you and remind you to follow me on all the places so that you know I'm putting out new stuff. Now that you've done this class, you may wonder what you should do next. Well, I got a ton of classes if you'd like illustration, and you like using Adobe Illustrator. I've got an intro to illustration which talks about some different tricks and tips and different ways to do things that I didn't do in this class. So that was pretty cool. I think that's a good next step. Of course, I go way deep into the Pen tool. Monoline illustration has some overlap with how I illustrated this design. I didn't do totally Monoline, but I did definitely a lot of it. That one's really fun. Now that's, one of my most popular classes, I think you'd enjoy that. Draw your bike is one of the few classes that I've done that was like this, where I really just did the whole class. You watch the whole process. So that one's interesting as well. Of course, I think they're all good. If you use Illustrator a lot, the speed course is huge, same with the action class. Those things are going to save you a ton of time, and if you want to make sure you're printing things properly, that's another good class for Adobe Illustrator. There's tons, and I have so many classes, pathfinder and I've even done some classes where they're like block printing or gel transfers where you don't even have to touch a computer. Although I do a little bit in both of the classes, but you don't have to. Anyway, so many classes, please check them out. Definitely make sure you're following me somewhere over here, I think there's a follow button. Make sure you're following me so you can stay up to date with what I'm doing. I really love it if you guys check out more of my classes and if you want to definitely make sure you're on top of what I'm doing, check me out at Jon Brommet on Instagram, and also I'm going to be doing some YouTube stuff. So that is also at Jon Brommet, that's youtube.com slash Jon Brommet or you can find me there. Now you know. Learn some stuff.
11. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing. I'm adding this, this is Future Jon Brommet talking to you, I hope you enjoyed the class that you just watched. Some of these classes have been recorded a few years ago. I just wanted to give a little up to date on what I'm doing now. You can see that I've put out a ton of classes potentially from the class that you just watched as you may have been watching one of my older classes. If you go over to my profile, you can click it somewhere on the Skillshare website or go to skillshare.com/Jonbrommet, it's spelled just like that with no H as J-O-N. You'll see here I've got things broken down in my newest classes. This may even look slightly different for you because I'm putting out classes once a month right now. I've got my most popular classes, Illustration, Efficiency and Illustrator, Photoshop stuff, and then all of my other classes, and make sure that if it's not already selected, you click "See More" to see the rest of it. So many different classes. I hope you guys will be inspired to learn lots more and hopefully you're enjoying my classes and want to see more. If that's not enough, I'm @Jonbrommet on Instagram so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing and I post all my new artwork there and of course let you know when I'm doing new Skillshare stuff. I've started a YouTube channel where I put short videos that are instructional, and I obviously advertising with my Skillshare class, but short videos that I can't really put a whole class out. I put here on YouTube, and I even do things like have conversations with other teachers, like Tab with a park, plan to do that stuff more often. If you head over to jonbrommet.com, I've newly updated my website. I have a digital shop or you can grab my procreate brushes or other things like that. On top of seeing that my different portfolio elements and things like that, I've also got a Etsy shop, which I'll click here and it would open this. So you can buy all of my pens and different art things that I've created, and I will ship them to you from me. I've gotten them all produced here in my home and they look awesome and I know that they're cool, and I just recently started a Threadless shop, which you could click here. Of course this is about unskilledshared contact. Everything's linked from our website, and this new Threadless shop has all my merch that can be printed on demand on a really weirdly wild variety of things like, I don't know, let's just click one of these things here. It's going to open a t-shirt, but let's just say maybe instead of a t-shirt you wanted I don't know what, a duvet cover or shower curtains. Why wouldn't you want those things? I don't know. Anyway, I've got lots of different things going on. If you'd like what I'm doing and please check out more of that and I'll keep making more things. Thanks everyone. Bye bye.
Jon Brommet, Crusoe Design Co.
