The Mind Blowing Appearance Panel: Non-Destructive Editing Made Easy!

1. Class Trailer: Hey. What's up Internet? Welcome to The Mind-blowing Appearance Panel: Non-destructive Editing Made Easy. It's a dramatic name, but for a good reason. The appearance panel is one of the hidden gems of Adobe Illustrator. Knowing how to use it will make you way more efficient in your day-to-day workflow. For example, you may not have known how to add a stroke to editable text and still keep that text nice and easy to change. It's going to make your files a lot easier to work with when you're working with clients or even when you're working with yourself so you know how to set files up the most efficient way possible. On top of that, we're going to learn how to do things like gang up on a sheet, and we're also going to play around some crazy eighties effects, a little bit of neon. I'm even going to show you in the student project of making your own watch face. I'm going to show you that using just one circle, you can make a really complicated piece of artwork, just using the appearance panel and that one circle that adds all the effects to it within there. I'm sure that by taking this class, you are going to at least learn one thing that you'll be able to use in your daily workflow moving forward. It will make it a lot more efficient using the program. I highly recommend this class. I actually did a Illustrator speed course in the fall, and I did one little tidbit of this class in it, and it's most requested course I've had since then. Even though the appearance panel may not sound super exciting, I think it's going to be really useful class that you should check out. So keep playing and we'll see you in a second. 2. Adding Strokes To Editable Type: So to start off with, we just want to make sure that you have the appearance panel open so that you can follow along or look at it if you need to. So if it's not showing for you, just go to Window and then head down to appearance and it should pop up somewhere on your screen. I have it in this little toolbar here, and this is the appearance panel. This is where we are going to be doing the majority of our work. I do and it obviously using the color I use my swatches. I probably won't use the character so we can hide that, and then I probably will use my stroke and transparency. So these are the main windows that I'm going to be using for most of this. I made dabble into layers and things like that. But if anytime I'm talking about a panel that you don't have opener you can't find, just go to Window and it'll probably be in there somewhere for you so you can see what I have checked on right now, its appearance, color, stroke, swatches, and transparency. So that's all you need really to open and follow along in your toolbar over here may look a little different because I'm using a custom one, and I've talked about this in my illustrator speed course if you want to learn why I use the toolbar or the way I do. So chances are if you've used Illustrator a few times, you've probably doubled in a few different effects that end up showing up in the parents panel and then maybe you've clicked on them to change them. The most common being probably the drop shadow, and you can see it shows into our appearance panel and at any point you can just click it, and then it'll open up a little window like this, and you can make changes to the effect that you can lower the opacity. You can mess around with the offset, that is how far it goes down or to the side. So those are pretty common in the same idea with the Outer Glow again, it shows here. So chances are you've worked with those things. But I'm going to show you something a little bit more advanced to start off with. So I've gotten a lot of files from a lot of different illustrators and artists that will send graphic design files to me for print or whatever, and a lot of artists will do this. They'll have this layer that's editable here, and then sometimes we'll have this layer that's either editable or it's outlined like that and maybe it's got this blue. But in any effect, they're using this stroke on top of this text. The reason for that, if we just go, I'm just going to bring this down here. I'm going to change its color just so that you can see it nice and cleanly, and I'll just move it over here. So we've got this weird yellow, make it more yellow, and if I want to add a red stroke, a lot of the times you would click on this stroke here so that it's on the forefront and you'll just click red from your swatches panel. That looks okay. But then maybe you want it to only work to the outside, and even though it looks like it's selectable when you click it, nothing is happening, and when you're using your stroke, it's actually eating up into the character a little bit and you can't make any changes to that. So to get around that, that's when people will do this thing. When they have the double layers will have the stroke layer behind, the editable text and then the text layer in front. That works obviously visually, these two things are the look the exact same. But let's just say in this case, the client has three requests. They went Aloha, Mahalo, and I think it's Hale. So let's just change this here. So if we go to Mahalo, now we've got to change the size, and then we're going to have to try and go back in here, change it, hit the wrong key, Mahalo and they're going to have to shrink this down and so on and so forth. You can see it's a pretty tedious process and then you've got to make sure that these are the same size. So you're going to play around with those things. So let's see if it takes a long time. Whereas this way that I've created it using the appearance panel, we can simply just type the text, and of course we'll just have to shrink it down to size. Just like that. We've been able to make a change and it retains the stroke, it retains all the information. So I'll show you how to do this. It's actually quite simple. So coming over here, we're just going to make another one, says Mahalo, and I believe that this Tiki tropic font that I found, is this a free download, but you can use any font, it's not really important. So let's just go ahead and we'll cover that with a dark blue. We're going to put a stroke on it. So as you can see, same problem where it's eating is the text. So there's a clever way to avoid this, but you have to know how to use the appearance panel. So what you want to do is set your stroke to none and your fill to none. That's that little X with a red stripe in it, and going over to your parents panel, make sure just click off, maybe click again and make sure you're not within the group, and we're just going to click here which is add new fill, and it'll automatically also add a new stroke. Now the weird thing about it is it will look almost the same, but it's on top, these fills and strokes on top of your characters. So you'll see what I mean in a second. So if we go here to the stroke and then we changed that to that light blue, we're going to get a similar-looking issue happening here. But the difference is in this case, I can actually drag the stroke below the fill, and now it is working just like a layers panel. So now that stroke is there, but it's actually behind the text. So now we can of course change this to anything and it's going to look nice and clean. You can quickly go back in there and mess up the kerning and things like that, and that is how I made this. It is a much more efficient way to set up a stroke. If you have a background that you want your text to pop off, and you can easily make changes and it just makes your life a lot easier, and these are the funny things about using the appearance panel is little tiny changes like this, although might take an extra second to get used to using it. Once you do it, it'll be way easier moving forward because you can make changes and better than that, all your information is still editable. It's very non-destructive so you can make changes on the fly. Your hand, of course, change the font, change anything you want to change, and it'll still look nice and clean. So that is the cool thing about using the appearance panel to add a stroke, and we will go on to the next video. 3. Class Project Option #1: For the class project, what I want you to do is to really push what you can do with the appearance panel. I'm going to show a little later in the class how to actually make this watch using the majority of the time, just the appearance panel and an oval and you can get most of these details. Some of the things I did mess around too much with are like the ticking hands and some of that stuff. You could actually do them, but I don't want you to waste hours trying to do things in the appearance panel, you'll never do again. It's more of an exercise so that you understand what you can do in the appearance panel. To get an idea of what I'm talking about here, this is my watch. When I originally made it, I made it with all kinds of little layers and circles and little things like that, just like probably most people would. But in learning how to use the appearance panel effectively, what I try to do is essentially take all of those layers that are used up right there and to make up that watch, and I managed to put them all into one appearance panel. As you can see, it's all there and if we go to our wireframe mode, that's all the different circles and pieces and this is just one simple circle. One simple circle with all that information in it. That's using the appearance panel really just show you how amazing it is and what you can do, and the cool thing about using that, you can do similar with your layers but sometimes you start clicking in here and you start clicking the wrong layer, and you're trying to get to it. But the beauty of it is in the appearance panel it's nice and organized, you can really easily see what you want to get rid of and so you can hide, in this case, the camo sometimes that might've taken a little bit to get to or that shadow. So being able to use the appearance panel this strongly and get a grasp on all the different things you can do and how many layers and things you can put in it is really useful. I think it'd be a really great exercise. So I want you to make your own custom watch. You can base it on a watch, this one was based I think on a movement watch and then customize it to fit your style and see how much of it you can make in the appearance panel, and just to show you, I didn't go crazy with it, but even more ridiculous is you can turn that oval into a rectangle and you can even do things like make the strap even within your appearance panel. It's pretty crazy that all of these things are all coming from one single oval and just using different effects in the appearance panel you can go pretty crazy. We'll get to that a little more later in the class, but start thinking as I'm talking about what your custom watch is going to look like, and maybe we want to sketch as I'm showing you the different examples. 4. Flat Shadows Done Right: If you ever tried to do a flat drop shadow and that is basically a shadow that's coming down, that's a little 3D as you're seeing right here, and they're not the easiest to make. There's a few different ways that you can make them. I'll show you in the past what I may have done is I may have grabbed my texts, I might add it a stroke to it, converted it to outlines, added a shadow behind it, put all of this together went to blend options. Make sure I've got about 20 steps. You can try smooth as color, but it never seems to work very smoothly. Then go back to planned and make so on. Now I got to undo this because it was trying to convert the whites, and then will go here I do it again, is showing you of course, how tedious it is, even on doing it fairly fast, and even that didn't work so cleanly for some reason. This is not a group that I swear I'm not even trying to make this drag on as long as it looks like I am. There you go, that's your finished artwork. Not so bad, but once again, completely not editable. Little bit of pain in the butt. I can show you how to actually make this using the parents panel, and then you can very quickly change it. Again, you can change the font, you can change the colors, you can change whatever you want, nice and super editable, and it's all using the appearance panel. The way that we do this is that we're going to add our stroke, as you can see there, but the important thing is to add a transform and this is going to show us our settings here. What I'm going to do is I'll just delete that so you guys can follow along nice and cleanly here. If we go right back to the beginning, we've got our nothing, no stroke, and we want to make our fill, so we're going to add it here. We're going to add it white and go to our stroke. I'm going to use that teal color. It was at 20 points, and we're going to make sure we click and drag this under the fill, is a bit repetitive from what we did for the one video, but I want to put it together and sometimes that repetition will really help you remember those steps, because unfortunately, if you don't do the steps in the right order, things are going to [inaudible] pretty quickly. Here's the cool part. You want to make sure you can apply different effects to each of these layers, so the stroke only or the fill only. We want to make sure that we have the stroke selected. We've got a text selected and we have stroke highlighted as you can see in the appearance panel. Then we're going to go to effect distort and we're going to go to transform. Another quick way to do that is right here this little FX button you click that distort and transform. This transform effect panel when you're working with typography, is actually extremely useful when you're working with the appearance panel because you can do a lot of crazy things, and this transparent effects panel is how you're going to do a lot of that crazy stuff like make your watch because you can change so many different things in your file and it'll all be within the appearance panel. What we want to do in this case, I'm just going to set the horizontal to one pixel and the vertical to one pixel. I'll show you what that looks like, all it's doing is adding just a teeny little shadow. Turn it off, turn it on you may not even be able to see it now. It's very subtle effect, but what we want to do is if I add 20 copies, much like 20 steps when we were doing the blend version. It is now doing that 20 times, one pixel 20 times, but the cool thing of course, is that that is now fully editable, so that is how simple it is to make that text, as you can see, completely editable, really fast and simple, and again, we can pick any fonts that we want, so it's nice and clean, easy and this is really useful if a client wants to make changes for you, but just making your artwork more simple again, you can adjust kenning after the fact. You can address your stroke weight like maybe you don't want these little tiny lines in there, so we'll just add a little thicker stroke and so on and so forth, and it affects everything equally and cleanly, so this is a really good way to make a flat drop shadow. 5. Gradients & Grain: So if you're not that familiar with using the appearance panel, you may not understand that simply stacking the things in the appearance panel will change how the artwork looks. So when I made this lighthouse and I made this a few years ago, so I might have made certain things different at this point. But you can see that, let's just select just the shadow part. So it's all group, group grouped. So I'm just ungrouping at all with Command Shift G so that we can hopefully get to this. So I have just the shadow editable right here. So you can see what I've done is I've added a grain, but importantly, I've added it only to the fill. It's not the biggest deal with this case because it's on a separate layer. But if we're getting some complex artwork then what you want to make sure is that you're adding the effect only to the part you want. So if this had a stroke, for example, and let's just say the stroke was grain. I'll blow that up so you can see it. You can see that the grain is also affecting that. So what you could do, we're just going to check what our grain settings are at so that we can duplicate it. That's 4655 sprinkles. Sometimes it'll remember it once we've looked at it. So if I delete that grain right there and let's say we only want it on the Fill. Make sure we have Fill selected and we're going to go to Texture in Grain. Now luckily it's remembered all of our settings and we'll click Okay. You can see the difference now that the grain is only applied to the Fill, It is not applied to the stroke like it was before. This is an important difference for depending on what your artwork is and what you're making. So we'll go ahead and we will delete that stroke because we don't want it in this case. Again, just to understand what I've done here, if we turn off grain, all I did is make a shape the exact same as the one beneath it. I added a gradient. What I did is I made it black to zero percent opacity. Now if you've never done that before, you can just normally you'll have a black and white and this opacity will be set to 100 percent. So all you have to do is make sure that you set it to zero percent. Now it'll actually fade out, clear and it'll show whatever artwork is underneath it nicely. All I've done is add a little grains on there to give it some texture and give it some of that kind of nice half tone look. If we zoom out, that kind of gives it a cool effect. Whereas if we select some of this stuff and we just get rid of the grain just quickly. This gives you an example like, yeah, it looks okay. But it doesn't have as much effect as adding that grain. So a lot of illustrators and artists will use that grain just to give their artwork a different effect. So this is the importance of making sure that you have your effects on the right part of the appearance. 6. Strokes on Strokes on Strokes on Stokes: If you have used Illustrator at all, there is a good chance that when you have played with the appearance panel, you have maybe messed around with strokes. But just for the couple beginners watching we are going to graze on this really quickly and then move on from there for the more experienced users. But if you were going to make this exact design, you may do it looking at wire-framing and with a bunch of circles or we could do it with the parents panel. Now the benefit of using the parents panel in this scenario, is that you can get a lot more precision. There are ways to do it, of course, mathematically, you can increase it using your scale tool and you can make sure that you are increments are the exact same or you could go in and actually use the measurements up here. You could change it so that you do the math, so that each one of these is the exact same amount of steps. But of course, if you ever want to change it, you are going to have to group it, put it together, things like that. It's just a little less convenient and a little less ideal and depending on how you are doing it, it's not going to be so easy if you want to change the colors, it's a little slower. The beauty of that is using the appearance panel. All we can do this all really fast as you can see right there. It's nice and clean. It's just a nicer way to make a file. All you would do is make your circle. I have got a stroke on it here, so we will just get rid of that. I should say that when we were doing type before you have to click out and get to main group. It's not so importantly shapes. You can actually add strokes and do the things with more editing. It's just for some reason when you are using active type, you have to get out of the group and then add the fill and stroke in the appearance panel rather than using it here. Not such an issue with shapes luckily. We are just going to add that dark blue stripe. Let's see what we used here. I had 30, so it's a nice, easy increments. Just type 30, make sure our stroke is set to the outside. Then all you want to do is just click it again. Now the thing to keep track of here is when you click it, you actually want to select the one that is below the layer. This is actually below that layer. We are going to make that light blue. Using another plus 30, we are going to make it 60 and as you can see, it's starting to show up. Again, you just want to keep clicking the layer beneath it, make that dark blue. Turn that to 90. It's just not easy. Just make sure that you are always selecting the layer beneath it. Otherwise, you will have some layer issues. Of course, you can click and drag and move them up and down. But this is definitely in my opinion, the better way to do it. I would definitely recommend if you are doing strokes and if you are playing around with those things, to always create them in this fashion. It's just going to be a lot easier for you to keep your artwork clean and be able to move forward just like that. You can see they all do look the same. This is again, the difference of being a more experienced user of Illustrator or even if you are using other software versus a novice, is just how you prepare your files and to make sure that you are making them as clean and easily usable as possible. That you can go back and make changes, especially if you are doing client work is really important to be able to do that. This is a basic one that a lot of you may have already understood how to do, but I just wanted to show up for some of the more novice users. 7. Ganging Up Your Art: This is another thing that you may not have thought about when you're playing around with your Transform and your Appearance panel is how far you can push it and how useful it is for different applications. This really isn't a class about learning how to make a really fancy shiny button or icon and something that you're not going to use all the time. It's about showing you that using the Appearance panel and using some of the effects can actually be extremely useful in your day to day workflow. That is, if you're an experienced user, you're still going to be able to use it and if you're a novice you should hopefully be able to understand it. In this case, I have this little invite or this little ballot for Brunswick Bierworks. Let's just say hypothetically in this scenario, that they want to print it and they're only going to do small amounts so they're going to print them themselves on their own home printer. Now their file is set up and it has this little artboard that's important to make sure your design has a a rectangular or a simple shape behind it for one of the steps that we're going to do here. It's set to two and a half inches by three and a half inches. Let's say in this case, what they want to do is they're going to print it on an 11 by 17 sheet so they want to fit it nicely on the sheet. Of course what you could do and I've set up a little guide here just for the edges. If you don't know how to do that, I will go ahead and show you. If we use our rectangle tool, which is M on the keyboard and I'm going to bring it in a full inch so instead of 11 by 17, I'm going to make it 10 by 16. Up here in the Align, I want to make sure it's aligned to artboard and I will click ''Horizontal Align Center'' and ''Vertical Align Center''. Now if we hit Command 5 or Control 5 on a PC, that will now turn it into a guide and then what we need to do is hit Command Option semicolon which will lock it. Command is Control, Option is Alt if you're using a PC. That shows it there. Now a lot of people would do this, right? I have smart guides on which is Command U. Some of these things I'm grazing over because I've talked about them a lot in other classes so if you want to learn a little bit more about smart guides, check out some of my other classes. You might do this thing all the way down and see how many you can fit. You can't go there, so that's about it and that's okay. Then you can add some crop marks, maybe you want to draw them in. It's a really slow process. I know it only took a couple seconds there but now let's just say, we want this to say, "Hi, keep me informed.'' Now if they want to make this change on everything, we're going to have to manually click and drag and add it and all that stuff. I will show you an easy way to do this with the Transform tool. Again, very straightforward. With our group selected, we're going to go to Effect. We'll do it down here, Transform and now what we want to do is we'll just click ''Preview'' here. Now remember with this selected, it's two an a half inches wide, so we want to move it horizontally. Two and a half inches, which you can see moves it to here. But we want it to be a copy and we think we can fit 1, 2, 3. If we put three copies there, click ''Okay'' as you can see you now it has copied it nicely across. This is all just exact copies of this one file, so you can't even select these over here. Now if we do it again, so again click the ''Group''. Click ''Distort and Transform''. Hit Transform, apply new effect, that's okay. We're going to apply effect on top of an effect. This time the vertical is three an a half inches and I think we can fit three again, 1, 2, 3. If we fit four it'll get cut off the page. Just like that you have all of those duplicated on the page and of course you can make any changes. The beauty of that is because they are all just copies. You can simply just select this here and say "Hi, keep me informed.'' That little space or two there and the beauty of that is that it automatically changes that across all of your copies. That's pretty useful and pretty convenient. Another thing we can do and this is getting a tiny bit more advance so try and follow along with me. Let's go to our layers here for a second and we're just going to copy this. That's Command C and then I'm going to lock and hide that layer. I'm going to add another layer. I'm using Command F, which is Control F. Basically we're just copying and pasting the same thing. Let's go back to our Appearance panel and we'll leave these transforms, but what we want to do is double-click into this layer and we're going to delete everything but the box. Just let's make this a color just so you can see. It's still there, it's still duplicated, but it's just the white box. Go back to white. Now if we go to our Effects and we go to Crop Marks, it's going to add crop marks but you're seeing it's only adding them in the four corners because it's adding them after the Transform. If you put it before the transform now it's adding the crop marks to every single one. This is pretty easy. Now when you go to cut it, but we've got some extra crop marks in here that we don't need. This is where we're going to have to break the old non-destructive and we're going to do Expand Appearance and now all of these are all little editable elements. Using my direct selection tool, I'm going to click over in this corner and I'm going to drag down to this corner and again, select all that and hit delete. Now if we go back to our earlier layer and we show that on, we've now got a nice easy to use ballot with crop marks. You print this out on an 11 by 17 and you know to cut here and so on. If you've ever used crop marks before, you'll understand how this works. But that's a quick fast easy way to add crop marks and basically gang up your artwork on our sheet using the Transform tool so that you can easily edit it later. Also using the Transform tool in this case, will save you file size, especially if your artwork is complex because Illustrator knows that these are all just copies. Whereas if you actually click ''Drag'' duplicate it, you're duplicating all of that art in all that information every time and even though it's the same Illustrator doesn't look at it that way. It gangs it all so that it's a big heavy file so this will help you save file size as well. Just things like this that you want to think, you can really go crazy with the Appearance panel. I'm barely touching on it in this class, but I'm showing you a few random things to get you thinking as to how far and how crazy you can actually go using the Appearance panel and how useful it will be for you in your daily workflow. 8. Eighties Style: He has won. It makes some super '80s artwork. Using the appearance panel, of course, you can go crazy. You can add effects on to effect, on to effect, on to effect. In fact, you can take it a little too far. This works at the 80s theme, which is why I'm showing you it this way, because this is all nice and really editable. But let's not remember, especially if you're a new aircraft designer. Does anyone remember Microsoft Word when they had Word Art? Let's calm down. Just because you can use these effects, just because you can make your text looks like it's coming from outer space with crazy blends, and all these kind of things. Just because you can make it super wavy and Comic Sans doesn't mean you should. That's an important lesson from a graphic designer to another. Calm down. Don't use too many effects. Don't be too fancy unless the theme calls for it, like the '80s. In this one, we're going to go ahead and show you how to quickly make this again nicely editable. You can go 2,000, which wouldn't make sense, but you can, of course change your text to whatever you want that is the beauty of the appearance panel. Doing this, all I've done really simply is I added the fill and I've added some strokes. My fill is this gradient, which you can see here. Then on top of that, I've added a white stroke, which is this little guy of course, beneath that fill. Then I added this other crazy stroke, which is the gradient that's the cool thing you can do in newer versions of illustrator is you can actually add gradients to your strokes. I should have mentioned at some point, if you're using an old version of Illustrator, you may have problems during some of these effects because I believe at some point you could not add gradients to your strokes. But we're living in the now, so we got to keep moving forward. That's a quick run down of how you can do that kind of thing. We even have some small subtle texts on here. If you're wondering how I did that, I actually added a stroke with the fill, so it's got a fill. Then it has this gradient here, as you can see right here, which actually goes to transparent, so it's nice and clear so you can see the color underneath. Then I actually had to add a little stroke on top of it so that you can still see you that fill color underneath, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it, but that's just a little shine to it and makes it a little bit more interesting, I thought. That shows you again how crazy you can go. Feel free to go crazy and have fun with the appearance panel, especially for your editable text, for the sake of the class or for the sake of practice so that at least you know what you can do. But just try and calm down when you're doing normal artwork. Just because you can go crazy, doesn't mean you should. 9. Quick Sun Exercise: For this quick little creative exercise, I'd love for you to actually follow along with me and all we're going to do is make a sun. I do have my sock guides on, that's why you're seeing this thing that says center. Using the L key that will select my circle, I'm going to click on the center. I'm holding Shift and Alt or Shift and option and I'm just dragging it out so it's a perfect circle so we can make it around there. Since it's the sun, we will go ahead and make it yellow. I'm not going to go crazy with that ingredients and effects since I think you guys know how to do that. But it's just giving you the idea. If you don't know how to do it, we'll just do one little quick ones. Adding another fill, we'll go to our gradient. I'll drag this yellow in here, and I'll drag that yellow there and selecting that bit, we can make it a little darker and we will change that to radio. That shows giving you that gradient effect and of course that is all in our appearance panel. I'm not going to go crazy on those that just gives you an idea. Now another thing we want to make those flares from the sun, and this is a little bit more interesting. You may not know how to do this. All of these things, of course, are playing with the effects. We're going to go ahead and clicking this little new icon with the one selected will duplicate it. We're going to grab the one underneath it, so it's the lowest layer affects, distort, and transform. You'll notice I use that one a lot. I find that to be one of the useful ones for creating different vector artwork. I rarely use much else. I definitely don't like to mess around too much with these Photoshop effects. The grain one's fun and obviously I like using warp here and there, but a lot of these other ones I find a little bit too overboard and not as useful, but feel free to experiment. Clicking zigzag, I'm going to bring that up here and we're going to click preview. You can see we're getting a little bit of one and if we play with the size, it'll go out further and further, and reaches per segment we'll add to that, and we have a smooth or we have a corner. Make sure you have absolute selected. If you use relative, sometimes it'll go a little bit crazy, depends on the artwork. In this case, it actually looks a bit cool that way. But a lot of times you're going to want absolute. Maybe we'll use relative in this case. But just like that, you have a pretty good sun effect. Then, of course, if you wanted to, you could on top of that fill, you could play with the gradient there. You could select something like this and then you actually have the gradient applied to the stroke as well. It just gives you a bit of an idea. We're going from light to dark as well. Just shows you another creative use for playing around with the appearance panel. Hopefully, you'll do that creative exercise and maybe you'll stylize your sun more and out of face and go crazy with the effects. But just giving you an idea of what you can do. 10. Neon Style: So here's a cool on neon sign that I made for I Am the Storm, which is an artist. His name is Trevor. He's actually from a band called Thousand Foot Krutch and he's putting out a hip-hop side project, his album actually should be out soon. I think the Kick-starter is over so you can look them up if you're interested, but this is a good example of also using the appearance panel. Now all these letters are not editable because I had to make them custom. So that they had that neon look to them where the letters weren't actually connected as you can see here. But the cool thing about it is you can show I just made a plain simple stroke, just a single line with a rounded cap on it and that allowed me to put all these effects. If we see I actually had all of the white groups and all the effects are on top of it. All I really did is add a stroke that certain different colors and add a little Gaussian blur on top of it so that's another nice little effects. Sometimes having the blur, having the drop shadow. Of course, when I get this close it's starting to look a little pixelated, but basically we have a white and then that blurred out to gray and that blurred out to a darker gray and then we have a drop shadow. Then I added the little connector black bits to it as well. You can see they have some nice highlights. It's a good way to actually fool an effect like this and then I did add a circle that had a vignette effect on the fill that went to multiply. That made it look like the light source is actually reflecting on the wall and it gets darker the further it is from the light sources. It's little things like that that'll make your artwork more realistic. I'm not going to break down exactly every bit of this because I don't want this class to be repetitive in anyway. All I want to do is show you what you can do with the Appearance panel so that you can get excited about it and try and be creative and come up with your own unique uses for it. 11. Graphic Styles: It's worth noting that when working with the appearance panel combined with graphic styles, you can create a cool-looking appearance and then drop it in the graphic styles and pick it up on a different shape, a different design, and here's an example of when you're going to find that useful. So I've got the Instagram logo here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to just separate it. So I'm just going to grab just the camera icon itself away from the background. I want this to all be considered one piece as far as the illustrator goes. So by doing that, we go to Object, Compound Path, and Make. Then now this is all seen as one path. So it's all one thing in the appearance panel and it's nice and easy to work with. So it's going to depend on the look that you want to go. But I want to try and show you kind of a cool way to do this. So one thing we're going to do to make it really straight forward. Is we are going to leave that fill as white, and we're going to make another fill, and we're going to set this one to some kind of dark gray. We're going to do our typical thing. You have done this a lot now, this flat shadow, but I do like how it looks. I think it's kind of cool, so we'll continue on with that theme. So I'm just doing one pixel, one pixel, and 10 copies. Note that I'm sitting out. Let's just make it a nice even 180, its 180 by 184.936 pixels, whatever. So that shows you just having that nice little shadow on there. Now if we want to make a background like they did Instagram. Of course, you could easily make this whole design again. In the parents panel, especially since it's just gradients. But we're going to make our custom style ones. So we're going to make another film, just duplicating it, and this time what we want to do is also go to effects. You'll note that when I duplicated it already had transformed selected, and I click the one beneath it. So see how these two are the exact same when I'm clicking the one beneath it. It's already got the transform on it. That's important to note. Then what we're going to do is convert to shape, and we're going to make it a rounded rectangle. So that looks pretty good. Now, one important thing do is relative, again, is relative to your actual design. So what it's doing is it's taking that 180 pixels, and It's adding 18 inches. Sorry, 18 pixels, and it's taken out a 184 pixels and adding 18. This works, but the problem is I want to use this on Facebook and things like that, and then the shape will actually change. It'll look more like a tall rectangle that's thinner rather than a square which I want it to be. So to change that we want to make sure absolute is selected. So that's quite important, and we want to make it around that much bigger. So let's say 200 by 200. That's probably not quite enough, 250 by 250, somewhere in that range. Then we want that corner radius. We can crank that up. So that's similar to the original Instagram one. In this case, that's the look I want. We're going to change that filter to a lighter gray, maybe something like that, and then what we want to do is actually duplicate it again. Then this time we're going to delete the transform action right there, and then clicking the one beneath it, we're going to go with maybe a darker gray again. That way it matches. So we've got kind of 3D and 3D. So that's a pretty straightforward, nice, easy way to make it nice, clean vector icon that kind of has that flat depth to it, which is it sounds like an oxymoron, but it has the shadows yet it's still just a flat icon. Then the cool thing here, I'm going to go into my symbols and I'm going to grab some of these other ones like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you've never used symbols before, I talk about that, I believe in my illustrator speed course. I've definitely talked about it before. They're super useful for keeping things that you're going to use all the time like clients logos or your logos and of course things like social media. So I deleted all the background, just going to ungroup everything, delete all the backgrounds so we're left with just the white. Let's just make them a different color from the minutes. So again, LinkedIn, because it's two pieces, I want a compound path it. Facebook and the Twitter icon are totally fine as they are. So an easy way to do this so that we don't have to repeat all of those steps again is simply you can see all these effects in the parents panel. I'm opening my graphic styles panels, lets window and go down a graphic styles, and I'm simply going to drag this in, make note of where it lands. It's going to be right there, and then clicking the Facebook icon and then selecting that. You can see LinkedIn and then again for Twitter. So it's a nice, clean, fast way to make icons. Together with the graphic styles panel, the parents panel becomes just that much more powerful, and it becomes much more easy to use and repeat those effects along a variety of shapes. Just so you can see what I was talking about before about that relative, I'm going to do is move these over and get rid of that now. Bring these down, and if I go here, I go back into my appearance, I go to that rounded rectangle and now I make it relative. Make this relative. You'll see what I mean, see how the shape doesn't retain that information, even though on the Instagram one it still looked like a square, it just doesn't follow through with the other shapes. So that is why it's important to have absolute set on the way that I showed you. So that's how easy it is to make really cool icons and together with the graphic styles. So you can easily transfer all those different appearances to a different looking icon. 12. My Watch Project: Now they have a pretty good grasp on how to use the appearance panel and all of the different effects that you can make. We're going to put some of them together again, not all of them because we don't want to go too crazy. But we're just want to show you that, you can add all these nice layers into one cooler effect, and of course you can actually add a drop shadow, you can add the grain, you can go insane. So that's why I thought it'd be really fun for you guys to make your own watches as the student project, because you can go crazy with the face styles, and you can use some of the information that I'm showing you here, So that you can make your own. What we're going to do to make our own, we're going to start with the outer most shapes so that one is the largest. So that's what I'm going to work with, and using my direct selection tool, I'm just going to delete the inside, so that's just a circle, and the only reason why I'm doing it is so that I can make sure that it matches my other circles. Now that we have that circle selected, what we want to try and do is build up this layer. So what we may want to do is get this kind of gray layer. So that's a 92. What were going to do is we're going to go ahead and create that. We could do is add a stroke, and we're just going to click 90 here, and I'm going to manually change it to 92 right there, and you'll see if we bump that up. That gives us a really thick stroke. Now, you wondering why that is so thick. Well, I'm going to show you. You can see right now it is centered, and what that means is that it has part of the stroke on one side of the circle on part of the stroke and the other. So we can change that inside. But the problem is, I want to have black. So we have that set to 30. Now there's a few ways we could play with the transform tool, but that might get a little bit complicated for this one. So instead I'll just add another black and I'll make it 20, and again that is on top of the gray stroke there. If you get confused as to which ones which you can always just hit they the eye icon, it'll hide it and show it and then you'll know which one you're playing with. So that gets you the outside, the inside. Now, the main bit bottom, the fill of it is actually a 93 percent. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to have changed our fill to 93 percent black, just like that now it's going to look a little bit light, but we're going to add some effects on top of that to give it the next effect. So at this point, if we're going through here, we've got this part added, we've got this part added, and we have this added. So these are the things that we still need to add from there. So we can go ahead and mess with this grain now. To speed it up a little, I'm not doing too much guesswork. I'm just going to copy my gradient into there. But basically using this fill, we're going to double-click that and we're going to hit a gradient. All that is the radial gradient. As you can see, it's just going from black to white. Nothing too crazy, but it gives you a bit of an idea. If you want to copy it, you can see that's location 100 percent. The middle is 87 and the white is at 54.1 percent. It gives you a bit of an idea, and I have it set to radial, and that just kind of gives me a nice fell there. From there we're going to click and make, this is important again, make sure you have that filled selected because I want to put a green on it, but I only want it showing there. We're going to texture, then grain, and it's copying all the settings from before. So you can see it showing up just a little bit there. Now the important thing again, only on this film, we're going to select it. We're gonna go to transparency and we hit multiply, and then you're going to see the grain starting to show on to that gray behind it. Now, the next thing we need to do is add this camouflage pattern. This is a little bit tricky, a little bit more advanced, but if you have a pattern or a design that you want to use, but you can do is make it a square or make it so it fits in within there, and you can just drag that to your swatches panel. I've already done it. It's right there. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to duplicate the fill isn't on top of the original fill, and we're gonna change it to that camouflage pattern. We want to make sure that our camo pattern, or in my case, camo patter and I want you guys to try and use something else. You don't have to use a pattern either, you can just do flat color, you just want to make here is creative and interesting, and of course that is under that gradient fill so that I've got that nice green kind of showing a given cell like a bevel. Making sure that we have that filled selected, we're going to go and we're gonna click multiply. Actually it was actually soft light. We're going to go to soft light, see I forgot to make sure it was selected. So undo that, makes sure that fills selected and go back to soft light. There we go, and it was 25 percent. I only know this because I played around with this already wants to recreate this. But of course you're going to have to do some messing around and try and figure it out. Now we're going to get into like the little tics that the dials will hit to show you the seconds, and the minutes, and they're a little bit trickier. Not because they're harder to make just because it's an exact amount of math and you want exactly, every five seconds you want every five minutes, and you want each minute to be able to hit and you want all those things in the exact right spot. It's just a little bit more playing around to get to that spot for you. What we're going to do is we're going to go to the top of our parents panel here, and we're going to add another stroke. This time we do want it to be black and this is going to be our minutes. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to set those 213 points, and then as you'll notice that you can't actually see them right now. That is because they are behind all of this stuff. So making sure that selector, we're going to auto effects and we're going to go to transform. And we're going to bring it in. I believe it was about 85 percent. Actually, it might have been 80 percent. So we'll go ahead and we'll select 80 percent. Now, you can see that the line is in there. So the next thing we want to do is make sure we have our stroke selected at random. Go ahead and click dashed line. This is where I would take some time to try to figure out all the math, but luckily, it's remembered at all for me. So I have a four-point dash, a 20.7 gap. That probably won't work for you. You'd have to make sure your measurements are exact. Your circle would have to be exactly the same size of mine. You're going to have to play around a little bit with the dash and gap to make sure that your seconds and minutes all line up. So from there we're just going to duplicate this, and we're going to make another layer, and we're going to make this one 38 points thick.so they comes out a lot longer, and this of course, is going to be the main five minute increments. The only thing I have to change here is the gap, which should be 119.5, and again, I only know this because I played around with it before to make this one. That it has most of the effects down there. You can go crazy, we could add this little beards line that I have to my strokes as basic. It turns into a pattern when you drag it into this watches, and then we can move that down, and there's probably lots of ways to make it more. But I don't want you guys to do things that you're not ever going to use before. It's just good to get practice doing like the seconds in the minutes. It's good to get practice doing circles, and playing with patterns. But don't do anything that's too crazy just because you can. But if you don't believe me and you think, how could you even do something crazy like that? I'll show you how simple it is to kind of go a little bit more nuts. So just to show you how crazy we can go, I'm going to go ahead and make one more fill. I'm not going to finish this because again, I don't think it's realistic that you would want to do this, but it's just allowing you to understand how nuts you can go if you want to. So clicking effects, we can go to convert to shape as an important. And we're going to turn this circle into a rectangle, which is a weird thing to wanna do. But it, it's going to allow you to have all of these things as one effect in the appearance panel, and then we're going to play around with this width to get it to where you want to as far as making it your strap thickness. Also, I should note that depending on the speed of your computer, you may start to find that it's going to get a little bit slower. As you add effect on top of effects. It's just depending on how New York computer is and the specs that you have in it. If we say that, that's where that is and we'll get rid of some of this extra height. Then basically from there will make sure that fills selected, and we can go to just store it and transform, transform it. And we could vertically move it down until we have it in place. Just because it looks like it maxes out there, you can actually just enter in larger numbers and it works just fine. Maybe a moral x six and half. So that gives you an idea. You could add that, you could do it again on the top, and that'll give you your straps. You can then add all I've done here to make it look like stitches is basically the same effect of your new added dotted line. If we grab this here, you can see the stroke is set to that. If we change the stroke and we make it say two point, and then we're going to make the dash lot longer, say even 24, and then we'll make the gap 24 as well. You can see that that starts look at stitches. So you can use that dashed line to get your stitch effect in the leather if you're doing a leather band. Of Course, you can do the steel band and use some of the ideas with the gradients and things from the eighties design that we were doing there. So it just shows you from really go crazy doing a watch, and all this is, is all one big experiment, just so you can understand a little bit more about the program and this one's specific panel. I really want to see what you guys come up with, what you kind of create for your creative watches. Will go ahead and delete this because we don't need to look at it. That is my finish watch, and I want you to kind of go crazy with something awesome like this, and build a reasonable amount of it using the appearance panel. 13. Class Cover Effects: So although I've showed you how to create a flat drop shadow, like in the cover for this class. I do want to show you how I made this effect, which is pretty straightforward and these lines to it, all I did is I had a stroke and then I selected something called a USGS 8-bit [inaudible] bit-bit. I don't know why it has such crazy name. All you got to do is click these little arrows beside swatches go to Open Swatch Library, navigate over to Patterns, to Basic graphics and Textures and although it gives you a bunch preloaded so you can play around with the different ones here. I'll show you but each has a different effect and look a little different. The crazy thing is you can add effects on top of effects, which then starts to get a little bit messy or sometimes you'll happen upon an awesome accident. That shows you how I got that and all these little characters here, these are different things. If I go here, these little circles, I've got this with the stroke off set we using the transform tool. I've used the Roughen tool to give that rough edge. That's really helpful when you're doing some topography and you want it to look a bit sloppy and not so perfect. I played a little bit with some of those crazy effects. That is, the SVG filters, which often times are a little bit ridiculous seeing what I want to use. That's the sketch tool. That's an interesting one because you can add it on top of some texts and things like that to give it a cooler look. Oh sorry, that's called Scribble. You go to Stylize and then Scribble that shows you all these different effects and a little bit of the war panel. Again, I didn't feel like I could and should touch on every single thing you can do because all it is really, is playing with the different effects. You want to try and find a clean and nice way to do it, but I thought because this is the class cover and because it's a little bit different than anything else I'm showing in class. I should at least show you how I did this letter specifically. Generally when you have things like all these different effects and your text is as large as this which I made it for this cover, you can see it's 1200 point. That's going to really bog down your computer and make it really slow even if you have a fairly fast computer, which I think I would consider mine reasonably fast. It still takes forever. I'm actually going to do is I'm going to cut it and I'm going to shrink it way down. I will say by the way, even though I am time-lapsing this, just to show you how long it took because I've got all these different effects on it. If painfully along, I mean, it would probably only take a minute and a half to change it and then change scale. But it's very frustrating when you're trying to work and you're working fast and you're used to computers bending to your will and doing everything quickly for you to have to wait a minute and a half to stop for anything, even at this much smaller size. Now it's a 126 points. It's still going to be graphics intensive. Let's just go ahead and type Bob, for example. You can see it is taking a minute, it even hesitated. As you can see, most of the progress is to do with grain and the outer glow and stuff like that. This shows you how crazy you can take it. But I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to delete that outer glow and were going to see how much that makes a pretty big difference. Now the computer is moving much faster and that gives you an idea. You have that glow and it looks pretty cool on a dark background, but it will slow your computer down a lot. Be a little bit careful when you're using a ton of effects like I have here. But the same idea, I've used that flat drop shadow I've got a nice stroke here. Most of the things that are the same. The only thing I didn't show you is this stroke, the teal stroke I have it transform so it's slightly moved over. It's actually leaving the letter, as you can see, which is an interesting effect. But again, I like to try and do everything a little bit more subtle so it doesn't get a little too crazy. Then the other thing that I've done is I have added two different strokes that you can see here. Each one has a gradient on it. What I've done is I've put the gradient in two different directions and I find what that does. You can see it goes from really light down here. Let me turn my smart guides off. It goes really light down here like a white, then it goes to a light gray here and on the other stroke it goes from light gray to basically a black. Having those two things gives it a lot of depth which is an interesting thing. One thing I didn't touch on too much is that you can use these fills much like I was showing on the appearance panels stroke and you can actually effect them here so that is from the same one is Mezzo tints. I've added a Mezzo tint filter, that's what's giving it these black speckles. Then I put a green on top of it, which tone down the speckles a little bit. So if we get rid of the grain, you can see how much bolder they are. Once you put the grain on it, it's cutting out some of those textures. Its again, a little way to add a little bit of flavor to it. One of the fills I have a nice light blue to dark blue gradient. That's another suggestion of mine from a graphic designer standpoint, is if you're going to go crazy using gradients, a lot of the times, I highly recommend that for the most part you're going from one tone to another tone. A black to white gradient is rarely going to look good unless you're trying to get these chrome effects and things like that. But a lot of the time you want to go from one tone, say a blue to a darker blue or red to a darker red, or things like that. A light gray to a dark gray. But when you have that really stark, crazy contrast, obviously, it usually looks a little bit unprofessional or cartoony. Of course, depending on what you're doing that maybe the look you want or just calm down a little with your gradients. Anyway, this shows you, again, go crazy, have fun. I wanted to make sure that I showed this appearance panel one from my actual cover. Otherwise, I'd be a little bit weird to not have the cover image in the actual class but it's not that crazy. It's just a little bit different than what we're doing in the other parts of the class. 14. Alternative Class Project - Option #2: I don't think I've actually done this before in previous classes, but I have this class put together, I just needed to edit the intro and publish it online. I decided that instead of just having the watch, as a class project, I was missing a really good opportunity, I thought for everyone to make their own initial. That can be your first initial, or your last initial, both initials, however you want. But I thought that might be a little different project for some of you. Some of you maybe won't be interested in making your own watch, but I'm sure a lot of you are probably interested in making a really cool stylized version of your initial. I want to propose an alternative class project. You can still do the watch, you can do both, or you can just forget about the watch, and do still your initial. I just wanted to give you a second option because I thought that maybe you'd be able to be more creative with your letter. That you can choose fonts and colors and you can go a little more crazy than a typical watch. That it would be something a little more useful for you because maybe you want to print it out, put it on your wall, or do whatever it is that you want with it. For that reason, I went ahead and I made my initial for my last name Brahmin, it's just a B. I played around with a bunch of effects. I've made this on the left here entirely in the appearance panel, of course. You can see it's got a bunch of grid on and stuff that might look a little bit distorted and pixelated, just because it has slower time rendering some of this stuff. I'm sure if I change it on the CPU, you might be able to see it better. But this is one of those things that will look nice and clean when it's printed out, or when I export it and things like that. It just looks a little bit rougher in this preview because of all the effects that I have on it. But it's the grain that's giving it that really textured pixelated look. If I got rid of that, it would look a lot cleaner or just be clean gradients, but I do like that look. I'm going to show you how to make that, so that you can get an idea. There's a lot going on there. There's a lot of different levels to what's making it look the way it does, and even the background and everything is all made out of the same things. Of course, we can change it, it is going to take a second now, because of all these grains and things. My computer is a little bit slower for it, but you can see that that's another letter. Pretty cool, once you set it up once, you could change it. This kind of thing is actually pretty good for selling prints or something on Etsy or even like invitations or cards or something. Because you can say that you've customized it to someone's initial or name or whatever. You've done all this work upfront and now you can just simply type in their name and it will work beautifully, whereas it would take someone a lot of time to recreate this. It's cool for that purpose. I'm going to show you how to recreate it, as close as we can. A lot of this as experimenting, I did write down what I did to get there. But it was just a lot of playing around to try and come up with that effect. It's not super in my memory, but we're just going to try and make it. I've got some notes and we'll see if we can figure it out. The font I am using is called Ultra. I believe you can get it from fonts or I think that's where I got it. You should be able to download it. Otherwise, of course, just use any font or just use a font that you want, and you can maybe follow along to start your letter along with me. But maybe just use different fonts, and play around with the effects or do completely different style. That's totally cool, if anything, that'll be more awesome. What we're going to do is, we're going to get rid of that fill, because we don't want to fill in a character. To get started, we're going to add our stroke here, and to save time, I've already preloaded my gradients that I used from this one. Just so that I'm not messing around too much. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but basically this way you'll still be able to get the general gist of how I set it up without going too crazy. I'm going to copy my settings from the original one as closely as I can. Some of the things may turn out a little bit different, but you'll get the general idea. I've got my stroke, gets set to 28.933. You'll note that that's my point size, in case you do decide to follow along exactly. The other thing I need to do is, go into my gradient and set the angle to minus 45. That's going to make it darker, and here you can see that's the darkest and then it's slowly going to fade to white over in this corner. Going back over to the appearance panel now, we can add our transform. I'm going to go and make sure we have stroke selected. By the way, I should mention a few times, if you click off of your letter, you'll note here that it looks like I have the selected cell, and then I'll make changes. Then I wonder why it's not applied, I don't know why it does this. Maybe it's a glitch in Illustrator of this version. But make sure you have your letter selected and then the cell selected. Because otherwise you'll be affecting nothing. Like I said, I think it's a weird glitch, because it shouldn't show anything in there. That's happened to me a few times when making this class, so I should point that out to you. With that set up, we're going to go do the effects. We're going to go to transform, you should be fairly familiar with that by now I think. Then we're going to type in 0.191 and 0.0191. We're going to set that also to 20 copies, and click okay. Now we're getting that flat shadow that I've talked about before. I'm calling it flat, because it just doesn't have that same 3D look, it's like a fake 3D. It does have a little more with gradients. But a real 3D would be darker and then go to lighter or maybe darker here, come to lighter. But you get the idea. The other effect that we need here is the grain. We're going to go to effects, texture and grain. This is the stuff that will maybe start to slow down your computer a bit so you could maybe add your grain effects afterwards, if you're even going to be doing that. But the grain definitely start to slow things down, once you add in these Photoshop effects. I'm going to make it 6554 and the grain type is stippled. Go ahead and click "okay". You can see that's our base layer for what we got here, that's that base flat shadow. From there the next thing we want to do is to add another stroke. We're just going to go down here, and that's going to duplicate that stroke exactly the same. You see I have two that are the same. Now, we're going to change this to just a Grey, just like so. Then we don't need the transform, I'll just delete it and we're going to set the grain settings this time to 7039. I know some of these numbers are weird, it's just because I was experimenting and scrubbing in along to see if it looked better. I thought that was cool, if you look here a little zoomed in, that gives the face a little bit of a nice highlight. Then the 3D shadow pushes off there even though I'm calling it a flat shadow. But just gives you a little bit of separation and is making you have some levels to your colors. Again, we're basically and I'll repeat this process. I want this stroke selected and we're going to hit the new button down there. It makes a duplicate of that, and this time what we're going to do is, we're going to add a little gradient. We're going to fall along here to this lighter gradient and of course, these gradients, if you wanted to follow along, you're going to have to play around with them. That shows you the RGB, but essentially, I don't necessarily want you to recreate this exactly anyway. I want you to do your own thing and use totally different effects. I'm just going along to show you how exactly I made mine, so you can at least understand what I did, and maybe grab some ideas from how I did it. This time the grain is going to be the exact same, but we're going to change the thickness of the stroke to only 16. This is only something that you can do in newer versions of illustrator, but we can change the stroke here, where we apply the gradient across the stroke. That means the whole thing is going to go dark to light. That gives an interesting channel like feel to it. It adds almost a different level inside it, it's like inset from there. I think that's just neat looking effect. Next from there, we're going to make a new one again, and this time we're going to fill this one with white. We're going to set it to 11 points. It's still got the grain on there, it's not a pure white. It's going to have just a light grain and that looks pretty good. Then we are going to make another one, and this time we're going to set the stroke to only two. For both of these, we'll go back to the first thing here, we're going to add a transform. Effects distort and transform. We're going to set it to minus 0.16 and minus 0.016, go ahead and click "okay". Let's moving it up into the top corner and then for our thin little guy, we're going to go to distort and transform. Same thing as 0.09, 0.09. Basically, we recreated it exactly, but you notice that the background isn't there. The background, you could add as a separate element or a separate shape. But again, just because I like to show you how crazy you can go with the appearance panel, we're also going to add that as well. We're going to go down here to "fill", which we skipped earlier and I'm going to pick this radial gradient and I'm going to fill it in with that. As you can see, I'm not selecting non-line shape, I made that mistake a few times. Now I've just selected, "fill", we'll hit that "radial gradient" right there and what it's going to do, of course, is fill the letter B. In order to make that a rectangle, it's actually a simple step. You just go to effects, convert to shape, and we're going to turn it to a rectangle. By default, illustrator will want to put that rectangle around the letter, so that's a little taller than it is wide. But we're going to make it absolute, which in this case, instead of being 0.25 inches around the letter, it's just going to automatically make a 0.5 inch square. When you blow that square up quite a little bit, we're going to want it to be 16 by 16 and that's because my canvas is 15 inch by 15 inches. That's going to depend on the size that you make your canvas. I'll make it a square, so that I can put it on Instagram or something of that nature. Once in a while when you're doing this stuff, you might find where your graphic isn't showing like I have here, and that's just because we're doing some pretty intensive work, I think illustrator glitches out. But usually for me if I click "okay" if it ends up not working, which it did in that case, another thing I've tried to do, I'll hit "command Y" to go to wire-frame, "command Y" again and it will usually appear back. If it disappears on you for a second, don't freak out, it's not gone, it's just illustrator not catching up. At this point, you should probably save once or twice, just to make sure that you're not losing anything you have. We're going to have to select that again and we're going to make sure that we have "fill" selected here and we're going to go ahead and add a grain to it. We're going to change that grain to 1546. It's going to be a nice light grain this time, that way we have some contrast between the letter itself and the background. Then because I found the background to still be pretty dark. Selecting that fill, I went over to my opacity in the transparency panel and I hit 50 percent. To just lighten it up, of course, 50 percent. I did out a transform that slightly offset it, it's not so noticeable with the "B". But when I had my first, which was the letter "J", the "J" because of the shape of it, I'll show you here, actually, I'll do it on this slide. Might take a second, but basically, because of the shape of the "J", it looks very unbalanced. It looks like it's weighted down towards the bottom right here. Then what I found is that, this circle of my gradient in the background, didn't seem like it was centered over the J. I actually took my background and I just put a transform on it. It moved over a little bit, that way that white was nice in the middle of the J. It's not necessary, but you could do that. If you find that that whites not landing nicely in the middle of your character. That's it, that's how you do it and that is my letter. I challenge you to make an awesome one. I'm really excited to see how they turn out. I think these actually look pretty cool, and I might play around with doing these more often. That is your alternative class projects, do it up. 15. Thanks: Thank you so much for taking the class. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, one of the most natural next classes or next steps for you, will be to use the Adobe Illustrator Speed Course. It's super useful that shows you a lot of tips and tricks to make your workflow faster every day. One of the things I talked in the class, one little tiny video, was the appearance panel and a whole bunch of students requested that I do a more in-depth class on it, which is what this is. That class makes lot of sense, of course, the Pen tool, any Illustrator classes are really good. Accompanying him on, the Monoline Illustration is a very good one as well, for learning how to use the Illustrator most efficiently, but I've got a ton of classes. Make sure you click "See More" multiple times because there are more and more there. I may relay that out so you don't have to click that every time, but that gives you the idea. Also, be sure to click "Follow" so that you can see any new classes that I put out that's pretty important. I am on Instagram @Jonrommet. That's where I'm the most active. You can see lots of different artwork pieces that I'm working on and probably lots of stories with my dog Layla. Lastly, you can go to jonrommet.com. You can check out my case studies. You can, of course, click over to digital shop, which will show you some dirty inkwell brushes that I did for Procreate. You can draw your own cool art illustrations, using my brushes, they are really ain't expensive, only eight bucks. They are also available on Creative Market and at my Etsy shop, which I also have some physical goods, if you like, pins and patches, and pencil cases and our prints and fun stuff like that. Thanks so much. Be sure to click "Follow" and will see you next time. 16. & Goodnight: Thank you so much for taking the class. I hope you enjoyed it. Please make sure to click follow when you go to my profile so that you can see all the new classes that I'm putting out. As always, I really appreciate everything you guys do. I hope you guys are able to learn from it. You can always contact me. That's info at John Rama dot com. If you have any questions, you can leave comments and discussion. You can get me on all social media, very accessible and ready to help. Okay, thanks so much, we'll see you guys next time. 17. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing. I'm adding this. This future Jon Brommet talking to you. I hope you enjoyed the cast 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, just 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 in 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 at Jon Brommet on Instagram, so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing. 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. I obviously advertise a bit in 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 Tabitha Park. Plan to do that stuff more often and if you head over to Jonbrommet.com, I've newly updated my website. I have a digital shop where 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 pins and different art things that I've created. 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. I just recently started a threadless shop which you could click here. Of course, there's about and Skillshare and contact. Everything's linked from our website. 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, so 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.