Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Class!: If you pause to watch birds on a feeder or while out for a walk, you'll notice that not only do they look and sound different from one another, they have their own unique personalities, providing a never ending stream of inspiration for illustrations. Hi there, I'm Tracey Capone. I'm an artist and teacher based in the Chicago area, and welcome to my class, all about illustrating textured birds and bird houses using Affinity Designer. I'm so excited to bring you this class because it combines three of my favorite things; birds, texture, and Affinity Designer. I use Designer for the majority of my illustration work because I love the versatility and flexibility that comes with working with vector shapes, combined with the beautiful textures that can be achieved by using raster elements, and everything is combined in one app. In this class, I'm going to show you how you can harness both sides of Designer to create your own beautiful textured bird and bird house illustrations. Best of all, all the tools that you need are already in the app. We're going to look at how to use Designer's built-in stock studio to source not only reference images, but the texture image files that are going to help us add depth to our designs. I'll also show you how to analyze the reference images to get a feel for the geometry that makes up your bird, as well as the markings that make it unique. We'll also explore how to use a combination of Designer's dual vector and raster personas to add depth and dimension, as well as our own unique personality and life to our illustrations, by adding texture from both the stock studio, as well as an original texture brush pack that I created just for this class. Once we create our birds, I'll show you how to use those same tools to create two different settings, because our birds need a place to call home. Finally, we'll finish off our illustrations with background elements like florals, leaf, and tree shapes as well was atmospheric elements, just to pull everything together. Don't worry, I have you covered there as well, as I'll be providing you with a complete background elements assets pack, so you can focus all of your attention on learning how to create the birds. We are going to have lots of fun creating our illustrations, but I am going to be sneaking some learning in there. The process I show you in this class can be used to analyze and create just about any textural vector subject using Designer. Additionally, we'll be focusing on using the shape, pen, and pencil tools to build the base of our bird, and I've set aside extra time to focus on tips and tricks for using the pen tool, which while difficult at times, once you understand how it works and more importantly, your role in making it work, it's an invaluable tool for creating unique shapes and selections in any illustration. Just a few quick notes, this is not a beginner class, it is intended for intermediate users. You're going to need at least some experience with Designer to follow along. If you're brand new to the app, I recommend starting with my beginner class, Textured Florals in Affinity Designer, where I show you all of the tools in the app, and show you how to use them to create beautiful floral and leaf shapes. Best of all, what you create in that class can be used as background elements for your illustrations in this one. I'll be using the iPad version of Designer. However, if you have the desktop version and know where the tools are located, you can easily follow along as the process is exactly the same. The assets pack and brushes that I provide with the class will work in the desktop version as well. I can't wait to see your beautiful bird illustrations, so grab your iPad and pencil and let's get started.
2. Downloads & Resources: The downloads for the class can be found in the projects and resources section of the class. Now you're going to need to access this from a browser and not through the Skillshare app. Once you've located it just click on the ''Download'' link at the top, and you're going to need a password to access it, which I'll put up on the screen right now. Once you're in the Downloads page, you'll find the download links towards the middle of the page. There's three separate links: One for the gritty texture pixel brushes, one for the woodland backgrounds assets pack, and then finally for the pen tool worksheet. These are all automatic downloads. Once you click on them, if you have Dropbox on your system, they'll automatically load there. If not, they're going to go to your downloads folder. Either way make sure that you put them in a location that you can easily access them from the Designer app. Both the brushes and the assets will need to be imported directly from inside the app. So again, make sure that you save the files somewhere that you can access them, such as the Cloud file or directly on your iPad. Let's start with the assets. Now you can import these either from the designer or the pixel persona. The icon looks like nine little squares. I should mention that my screen is flipped for a left-handed person so our icons might be flipped opposite of one another. If you ever can't locate an icon, remember you can always tap and hold on the question mark at the bottom and these labels will pop up. Go ahead and open the Asset Studio. Now, I already have them loaded on my system, but you'll go to the Burger menu at the top, select "Import Category", locate the file and click on it and it should automatically load. Now, it may take it a second or two to load it, but once you do, you can either use the flywheel by tapping in the middle and moving it up and down, or you can use the forward and backward arrows to locate this up. Let's go ahead and import the brushes next. Now, the pixel brushes I provided are of course pixel based. So you're going to need to make sure that you're in a pixel persona to load them. Once you're there, go ahead and open the Brush Studio. Again, I've already loaded it onto my iPad, but you'll go to the Burger menu at the top, select "Import Brushes", locate the file and click on it and they'll automatically load. Just like the assets, they may take a couple of seconds, but once you do, you can either use the flywheel by clicking in the middle here or the forward and backward arrows to access them. Now the Pen Tool worksheet we're going to pull into our document once we get to that video, so don't worry about it for right now. In the next video, we're going to take a closer look at using reference images for your work. So I'll see you there.
3. Using Reference Images: Designer has a built-in stock studio that allows you direct access to image files for uses, both reference images as well as objects to incorporate into your design. Now, before we take a closer look at the stock studio, let's talk a little bit more about using images in your work. We're going to play a little true or false. Are you ready? True or false number 1, using reference images is an indication of my skill level as an artist. Artists of all skill levels and mediums use reference images in their work, and it's no indication of how skilled they are as an artist. There are things that we don't see on a regular basis. In order to create them with any accuracy, we might need to refer to an image. If I'm creating an illustration of a bird that isn't local to me, I'm going to refer to an image to get a better understanding of its color and markings, its proportions in relationship to its surroundings, and the proportions of the individual elements that make up the bird. Additionally, there are artists who have what's called aphantasia, which is an inability to visualize mental images. In other words, they can't see things with their mind's eye and each rely on the use of reference images as a means to create. It doesn't make them any less creative. They're simply using reference images as one of the many tools in their creative arsenal. At the end of the day, it isn't about whether you use reference images for your work. It's about which ones you use and where you source them, which leads us to number 2, true or false number 2, Google is an excellent site to source reference images from. Google is an excellent resource for random facts or where to find your local restaurant, but it's not necessarily the best resource for reference images, especially if you're creating something for commercial sale or to share on social media. The reason for that is, unless you do your due diligence and make sure you have permission to use the image, you may be violating copyright, and in some cases even trademark. Now if you're just using it for personal development and don't plan to sell the work or shared as your own, that isn't an issue. But if you do, you're going to want to make sure it's safe to use the image. Your best bet is to make sure you're using images that you know up front you're allowed to use, which leads us to true or false number 3: free use images are the way to go when it comes to using reference images. One hundred percent true. Free use images are image, video, and vector files that artists put out there with express permission to use as you see fit. You can alter the image, you can use them as reference. You can even trace them or use them in your work, and you can do all of that knowing you have permission to do so. Now, there are some caveats using free use images, and most are the same across the board. You can't take the exact unaltered image, put it on a poster or a mug or something else and sell it as your own. You also can't sell that image to another stock company. Third, if there's a model, any image, you can't use their likeness in any offensive manner. Finally, stay away from anything with logos in it. Many companies, especially the bigger ones like Coca-Cola and Disney trademark their logos. Even if you're using a free use image, if you use their trademark item in your work, you may be violating trademark. Otherwise, free use images are a great resource for both reference image incorporating into your work, as well as learning aids for tracing, which leads us to number 4. True or false number 4, tracing is always a no-no when it comes to creating illustrations. When we were all children, we likely didn't hop on a two-wheel bike for the first time and paddle off into the sunset. We had training wheels, and those training wheels allowed us to feel comfortable sitting on the bike while we learned to pedal and steer and most importantly, break. Then once we felt ready, the training wheels came off and we were good to go. Tracing is like training wheels for learning illustration. It's going to give your brain and hand the opportunity to learn how to work together to create shapes and understand proportions. Now, as time goes on, you'll likely need it less and less, but especially in the beginning or even later in your artistic journey, if you're creating something new, it's an invaluable learning tool. The key is to make your final result your own. If you try something, start to finish and recreate the original image in its entirety. You're not developing your own style or voice, you're simply illustrating that of the photographer. Now, in this class, we're going to use our reference images to analyze the shape of our birds and then trace them out using the shape and drawing tools. But then, we're going to set them aside and transform our birds and bird houses into something entirely our own. The other key in tracing is that just like with reference images, make sure that you're using free use images. That leads us to our final true or false, true or false number 5. Designer's stock studio makes it really easy to use free use images in our illustrations. Totally true. In the next video, let's take a closer look at this studio and how you can use it in your work. I'll see you there.
4. Using the Stock Studio: In order to access the stock studio, you'll need to first have a document opened. I've created a new document here that's 16 by 20 inches at 300 Dpi, you can work in pixels, points, inches, whatever you're most comfortable with, but when setting up your new document, just keep in mind that at some point we're going to be adding texture to these in the form of roster elements, and that means we're going to lose the infinite scalability that's inherent with vector objects, and we need to think ahead to what we plan to do with these illustrations. If you're planning to print yours, make sure that your minimum Dpi is at least 300, and that you size your document to the largest size you plan to print, this is going to help you avoid any pixelation or moodiness of textures. Go ahead, and set up your document if you haven't already. Now, I typically like to start by changing the background color, I don't like working on the stark white background that comes up, I find it a little tiring on the eyes, so I just grab my rectangle tool here with snapping on, and I drag out just an off-white background and you'll see it here in my layers. Now, I can always change the color, I can remove it, I can add texture to it, it's flexible, I just like to have it in place from the beginning. I make sure to lock it so that I don't accidentally move it around as I'm working my way through my illustration. If you don't see the lock here in your layers studio, just go to the Burger menu at the top and make sure that Show Unlocked is checked, it's the easiest way to lock and unlock your layers. I want to note my application is set up for a left-handed person, so if yours is not, our icons are simply going to be flipped opposite of one another, but they all work the same. The stocks studio can only be accessed from the designer persona, the vector side, so make sure that you're in that side in order to get to there, and the icon for the stock studio looks like a little landscape photograph. If you ever can't find a particular icon, just tap and hold on the "Question mark" at the bottom, and these little labels pop-up, so go ahead and open a Stock studio. If it's the first time you're ever using it, the first thing that you want to do is make sure that you check off this box at the bottom that says I understand, and that's going to be on all three sites, and you can access them by using these arrows or by tapping and using the flywheel. This is simply saying that you understand that these three site to providing free use images and that you understand the terms and conditions for using the free use images. Once you've checked that off, you're ready to search. Now, you can either tap in the Search bar and use the Scribble function if you have it set up. Personally, I find it a lot easier to use the keyboard, so I'm going to tap with my finger so that pops up and I'll just type in chickadee, and now all of the searches tagged with chickadee have come up for both Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. For the most part, I find the searches [inaudible] for the accurate, sometimes something it'll sneak in there that was mislabeled, so for example, I think there's a sparrow hiding somewhere here in this search under Unsplash, but overall it's pretty accurate, and that's not coming from designer, it's coming directly from those free use image sites. Now, a couple of things I want to note here, you're only going to be accessing image files here, unlike the browser versions of the three sites, you won't be able to access video files or vector files, just image files. Another thing to note is that there's no large preview, so, well, that's not a problem when it comes to these images, when we get into using the texture image files, sometimes it's a little difficult to see the detail of the texture until you pull it into your illustration, so you might run into an occasion where you just don't like something, you have to delete it and start it over again. In my mind, the pros of being able to directly access stock images right from the app, far outweigh that one little thing, so it's something I overlook. I'm going to go ahead and look for my chickadee, and I know that I want him either sitting on a branch or directly on my birdhouse, so I want something that's facing to the side, so we are going to scroll through here, and I think I see one I like, but I'm going to go ahead and check the other two, and I'm going to go with the original choice, I like this one here on Unsplash, so I'm going to tap and hold and release, and it's going to download it into my document, and now you can see it set up as a separate layer in my layers studio. Now, if you ever downloaded and you don't see it, don't panic, it might be off to the side of your Canvas, so just grab your move tool, you'll see the bounding box and you can just move it into place, you can size it up and down, you can place it where you want it because it's a separate layer, you can also change the opacity of the layer, as well as the blend mode. Now, I always like to lock it in place once I have it where I wanted because I don't want it to accidentally move around as I'm creating my bird, so I'm going to go ahead and lock it just like I did my background, and now I'm all set and that's just how easy it is to use the stock studio, so we're all set to start analyzing the geometry that makes up our bird and build the base, but before we do that, let's take a closer look at designers pen tool where I'm going to show you some tips and tricks to make it a little easier to use. We're going to do that in the next video so I'll see you there.
5. Pen Tool Tips and Tricks: Before we get into the pen tool worksheet, I wanted to go through some of the basics of the pen tool first. Now if you're coming from a background of already using the pen tool and you're comfortable with it, you can go ahead and skip this video and move on to the next one. If not, if you're still a little shaky with using the pen tool and want to practice a little bit before we get into using it later. Feel free to follow along with this video. I'm not going to go into any of the advanced modes on the pen tool because it's outside of the scope of this class. But if you do want to understand the full methodology of the pen tool, I recommend going to the help section through the question mark on the home screen. Serif has a ton of information out there about designers pen tool, and all of the advanced modes. But for right now, we're going to focus on the first part of the contextual screen here. There are a number of ways that you can tell designer what shape you want to create and how you want to create it. The first is that pen tool has four modes. The first mode being pen, which is its default. It's going to allow you to tap out a series of straight lines and curved segments called Bezier curves. Those curves are driven by these handles that you can see dragging out when I pull the pencil back. We're going into more detail about those in a moment. The next mode is a smart mode. That's going to allow me to tap out a series of smart nodes, and designer is going to complete the shape between the two nodes with the smoothest line it considers possible. You can always go in and make adjustments using the node tool, but it's going to determine the initial shape. The next mode is polygon mode. As you'd expect, this is going to allow you to create a series of contiguous straight lines that will continue until you either close the shape by tapping the initial node or by de-selecting the shape with the x down here. The final mode is line mode. That allows you to tap out a series of self terminating straight lines in any direction and they're not connected to one another. We're going to use this one to create some of the line art on the tails of our birds. When using the pen tool, you decide whether you want to use just a stroke, just a fill, neither or both. You'll see down here in the contextual menu when I have a stroke selected, it's going to give you the stroke color down here, and you can either change it down here by tapping on it or up in your color wheel. You can also change the width of your stroke here or in the stroke studio. The stroke studio only allows you to go up to 100 points with the slider. You can always tap on the number and key in a higher number, or you can go down to the contextual menu down here and the slider goes higher than 100 points. I'm going to go ahead and drag this up a little bit so you can see the shape I create. I'm going to go ahead and just tap out my curve, and that of course, is the stroke only. If I were to change this in my color studio to a fill by flipping that to the fill side, and then making sure that use fill is on down here in the contextual menu. As I tap and drag, it's going to create a fill rather than a stroke. I can also create one with both. If I add a blue stroke here and I start tapping out a shape, it's going to create my shape with both. When I'm creating a stroke with the pen tool, if my pressure settings are completely flat in my stroke studio, then the line itself is going to be flat. Now when it comes to creating our liner later, we actually wanted to have a little bit more life to it, a little more dimension. What we're ultimately going to be doing is using our pressure settings here in the stroke studio to adjust the shape of the stroke here. What happens is, this side, if I drag it up and down, is going to impact this node, and if I drag this one up and down, it's going to impact this node. I can tap to add nodes in between and change the shape of my stroke simply by dragging those nodes up and down. I can reset it by tapping in the middle and hitting Reset pressure. Let's talk a little bit more about the curves, the Bezier curves that you can create using the pen tool. I'm going to go ahead and make sure I have a stroke selected, and I'll just tap out a line. Again, whenever I pull out my pencil and create that curve, you're going to see these two handles. Now the handles do not work independently of one another unless I tell designer that I want them to. Right now, the handle under my pencil is going to be the directional handle. It's going to tell designer the next direction I want my next shape to go in. This one is helping guide the shape of that one. If I go ahead and release, and my handles are like this. If I tap here, you can see that the next segment started to go in the direction of this handle, but then veered off because I tapped my node here. If I were to tell designer that I wanted it to go in a different direction, I would go ahead and tap, tap and drag. I can break these two handles by putting my finger down as a modifier, dragging my handle up to mirror the other one. Now when I tap, it's going to start the sediment in this direction and then veer off and finish where I tapped my next node. That's ultimately how you tell designer which direction you want your shape to go in. To put it into action here, when we get into creating the line on the wings for the bird, we'll go ahead and tap, tap and drag. Bring my handle down, and we'll just continue to tap to get all of our shapes on one side. We'll go into the Stroke settings and make changes to the pressure to give it a little bit more depth and dimension. One final thing I want to note about the contextual menu here for the pen tool. If you ever find that you're getting off course with the pen tool. Let's say I start tapping, and I don't like how my segment is going. I can go into Edit mode and I can move my handles as well as my segments, and I can get myself back on track here and I really need a very strange shape. I'm not sure what I was going for there. But it allows me to freely move around the nodes that I laid down, as well as drag the handles that I used to create the shapes. Once I'm done, I can just go ahead and tap Edit mode and I can continue on with my shape. There's always a way of stopping and correcting things. There's also finger modifiers that do the same thing. I just find that the edit mode is easier to use because you don't have to worry about keeping finger modifiers down while you do it. Just make sure that when you're done editing, you tap out of edit mode or else you're not going to be able to continue your segment. Let's go ahead and start practicing by using the pen tool worksheet. I'm going to go ahead into my Document menu and I'm going to pull in my pen tool worksheet. I have mine saved out here in the cloud. Go ahead and pull yours in from wherever you've saved it. When it comes to using the pen tool, you want to think about whether the pen tool is the right tool for the job. When it comes to creating shapes like this, the pen tool is best suited for it unless you want to freehand draw with the pencil tool. But when it comes to creating shapes like these three, the circle, star, and heart, there's actually shapes built into the rectangle tool that will allow you to create perfect circles, stars, and hearts with very little effort. Now if you wanted something more of a hand-drawn look, of course you can use the pen tool to get that. But I always like to decide which tool is best suited for the job because you help to avoid a lot of frustration that way. Let's go ahead and start with our segments here at the top. I'm going to select my Pen tool. Now, once you've determined that the pen tool is the right tool for the job, you then want to determine which mode is the right mode to use. For the straight line, for example, I could either use the line mode, which is going to give me a self terminating line, or I could just simply use the pen tool. I would just tap and tap and add my line here. Now one thing is I missed my mark here, so I'm going to go ahead, go into Edit mode, and I can just drag this node down and put it right where I wanted it. Make sure you come out of edit mode. Then before you go on to the next shape, make sure you deselect. If I were to simply tap, it's going to continue my segment here. I'm going to go ahead and two-finger tap to remove that, and I'll deselect. Now we touched on this type of shape in the last segment. If I tap, tap and drag out my shape, my directional handles automatically going in that direction because my two handles are dependent on one another. If I release and tap again, I'll get that next curve in that direction. I can continue to do that until I finish the shape. Now I'm already off the mark on some of that. I could stop here and grab my Edit mode, or I could just continue until I'm done and go back in and correct. Let's go ahead into Edit mode. Now there's a couple of ways I can change this. I can just take the path itself and move it. I can move the node, and I can also drag my handles and adjust where needed. Here, I'll just go ahead and drag my path down and maybe adjust the nodes a little bit. Now I have the segment I was aiming for. Again, whether you stop in the middle or you fix it at the end, it's really easy to fix whatever shape you're creating without having to start over again when you're using the pen tool because we're working with nodes, so they're always adjustable. Now again, make sure you come out of edit mode. Go ahead and practice that shape a few times. It does take practice to really become comfortable using the pen tool. I will admit, even after using it for many years now, I still have moments where it gets frustrating. Just keep trying these shapes and become more comfortable with both dropping out of creating and using the edit mode to fix it, as well as adjusting on the back end if you need to. Now this next segment is where I'm going to need to tell a designer the direction I want to go in. I'm going to need to use a cusp to break the handles from one another so they work independently. I'll just go ahead and tap, tap and drag. I'm going to hold my finger down and bring my handle this direction. I can continue doing that simply by tapping my finger down, pulling my handle, and continuing my next segment. Now I'm way off the mark on these shapes, but I'm not going to worry about it because again, I can go into edit mode and I can drag my handles, I can change my nodes. I can move the paths themselves, and I can just adjust it to get it to where I want to. Let's go ahead and try that one again. Again, I will start with my half shape here. I want to tell this handle to go in this direction, so I'll hold a finger down and pull down the handle. Tap my shape, hold my finger down, and I'll just keep tapping, putting my finger down and pulling my handle down. It's, I don't want to call it a dance, it's you get a method or a rhythm going when you're creating them, but it does take practice to get to that point where you feel comfortable with tap, tap, drag and put your finger down. I'm going to go ahead and edit this in edit mode, and now I'm good to go. I'll deselect it and come out of edit mode. Let's go on to the next shape. Now this one is a little bit more curved than this one. If I were to simply tap and drag, I would get more of an arch, then I do a half-circle. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. What I actually want to do is cut this in half, it's going to make it easier to create it. I'm going to tap, and then tap to the middle here. I want to drag it out, and I need to keep my handles straight because it doesn't veer down right away, it actually comes straight a little bit first, so I'm going to hold two fingers down to keep my handles straight. I'll release, and now it's going to tell designer I want it to start in this direction, and I'll tap, and it's going to close the shape. Now I can go over here, and just tap out a straight segment. I'll go back, tap halfway through here and drag. Again, hold two fingers down to keep my handles straight, release, and complete the shape, and I'll just continue this all the way across. Again, you want to analyze the shape that you're creating. If simple tap, tap and drag isn't going to give you what you need, break the shape down into more manageable parts. We broke this down into two curves instead of one to make it easier to use. Now, this isn't quite where I want it. I'm going to go ahead and adjust it in edit mode, but otherwise it looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and try that one more time. Again, I will tap here at the end, tap in the middle, and I'm going to drag out and hold two fingers down. I'll release and tap to complete the shape. Then I can just simply tap out a straight line, go to the middle here, tap, hold my two fingers down to keep my handles straight, and tap again, and I'll continue that all the way across. Go ahead and practice that a couple of times, and we'll move on to the shapes. We're going to start with the easier shapes first. These two are not shapes that you're necessarily going to see in the shape tool, so I would probably use the Pen tool to create it. Let's go ahead and start with this half oval here. I'm going to go ahead and give myself enough room to pull down, and I'll tap, tap, and I'm going to drag up my shape here. Now, I need to tell designer that I want to go this direction to complete my shapes, so I want my next segment to be straight, but it needs to go this direction and not this direction. I'm going to hold my finger down and drag my handle up, and then I'll go ahead and tap, and close. What I told designer was instead of having it go this direction, I'm going to give it a cusp. I'm going to pull my handle up so it's right here, and then I can close it with a straight shape. Let's try that again. Again I'm going to tap and drag. I'm going to hold my finger down and drag my handle up straight, so it's going in this direction, and then I'll go ahead and close it. The next shape works a little bit differently, but not much. You're still going to use a cusp to tell designer you want to go in different direction. I'm just going to tap, tap, and drag. I'll hold my finger down and pull my handle to mirror this one, and then I'll go ahead and tap to complete the shape. If you mirror the two handles, it's going to create the same shape on the side that you created on this one. Let's go ahead and try that one more time. I'll tap, and drag, bring my handle down to mirror the other one and release and then tap to close the shape. Now I pulled it down a little bit further than this one, but that's not a problem I'll go into edit mode, and I'll just drag it up, and I'm all set. Now for the next three shapes again, I would more likely use the shapes and the Rectangle tool than I would the Pen tool. You can create these shapes with the Pen tool, but they're going to be a little bit more wonky and have more of a hand-drawn look. Let's start with a star because it's the easiest. You're really just going to be tapping out a series of polygonal shapes here, and you can use the Pen tool to do that, you don't actually have to use the polygon mode. I'm just going to tap out straight lines, and it's going to complete my segment, and then as long as I tap that first node to complete the shape, I have my completed star. I'm not going to go through that one second time, that one's pretty easy. Let's go ahead and look at the circle next. Just like these, I want to break this into more manageable parts. If I were to simply tap and drag, I'm not going to get the shape that I want. I'm actually going to lay down for nodes to create the circle. I'll go ahead and tap, and then drag, and I want my handles to be straight, so I'll keep my two fingers down. I'll release, and now it's telling it I want to start in this direction, but then I'm going to veer off and end it here. I'll go ahead and release, and then drag, and again I want straight handles, so I'll hold my two fingers down, release, and then tap to close. Now, was that perfect? No. But again, I would not be using the Pen tool to create a perfect circle. But I can go ahead and adjust it using the Edit Mode. Let's go ahead and do that one more time. Again, I'll go ahead and tap, tap and drag. I'm going to keep my handles straight by putting two fingers down. I'll go ahead and release, tap to continue the shape. I'm going to go ahead and tap out another node and drag, and again I want to hold my fingers down to keep my handles straight over these, and then finish the circle by tapping that initial node. Now, I don't know why I keep hitting it wrong on this spot, but I'm not going to worry about it because I can just edit it. Go ahead and practice this circle a few times. The heart-shaped can be a little more complicated than the circle, but it's actually less nodes. Let's go ahead and start creating it. I'm going to go ahead and tap in the v shape here first. I'll tap in and pull out so that this handle starts up this way. Now I need to break the dependency of my handle, so I'll go ahead and put my finger down as a cusp, and I'm going to drag that one up to mirror the other. Now I'm going to tap a node here and pull out to get the first half of my heart. Now this part is tricky, it's important to really pay attention what I'm doing here. I'm going to put my finger down as a modifier and mirror this other handle over on this side, but I don't want to release the modifier finger yet. I'm going to go ahead and tap to close the shape and then pull up, and then I can release. Now that's not perfect, but again I can go into my Edit Mode, and I can just adjust. The reason that I needed to keep my modifier finger down at the end there, let me go ahead and start the shape again, and I just drag on my half, mirror it. If I release, and I tap to close, I'm going to get a really funny shape there. Just make sure that you're keeping that final finger down there as a modifier as you're creating it. Let's do it one more time. I'm going to go ahead and tap, and drag, put a finger down as a modifier and mirror that first handle. I'll go ahead and tap down here and drag out the half, bring this up to mirror, I'm going to keep my finger down as a modifier, tap to close it and just pull up that shape. Again, I can go ahead into my Edit Mode and modify it. Again, go ahead through his Pen tool worksheet a couple of times and practice these shapes. But always think ahead to whether the Pen tool is the right one for you. When it comes to the line art we're going to create layer, it is ultimately going to be the best tool to create these shapes. But if you're looking for something more perfect, consider using the shape tool instead. In the next video, we're going to start building our birds using a series of shapes, so I'll see you there.
6. Illustrating a Chickadee: I mentioned it the beginning of the video that you're going to decide whether you want to go towards realism or whimsy, or find yourself somewhere in-between. Regardless of the path that you take, ultimately you want the final illustration to be your vision. When it comes to using these reference images, we're purely using them as reference so that we can understand the characteristics that make up the bird, the colors, the markings and things like that. Then of course, the smaller shapes that make up the overall object, as well as the proportion of each of those shapes in relation to one another. If you copy what you see in a reference image completely, you're ultimately recreating the vision of the photographer and not so much your own. We're not aiming for perfection here. We're just looking to get a basic shape created. I'm now going to go ahead and have fun with it, especially when we get to the texture part of it. Whenever I start an illustration like this, whether it's a bird or another object, I'll typically take couple of minutes just to understand the smaller shapes that make up the overall object. It just makes it more manageable and less overwhelming than trying to create everything in one large shape. I'll show you what I mean. You can either follow along and just watch or you can grab your pencil tool as well and do this on your own reference image. In other words, I can see on this one and I have a large, almost lemon shaped ellipse here. I have a smaller ellipse here, and then these two are bridged together. There is the ellipse that makes up the eye and the triangle that makes up the beak. I'm only going to add one wing to mine. I'm actually not going to do what is shown in this reference image. In this particular image, the bird is tilted down so you can see it more from the top. You're seeing both wings. I'm only going to recreate one wing. I can do that using the teardrop shape, or the triangle shape, or I can simply hand draw it with the pen or pencil tool. Then in my particular illustrations, I tend to lean towards more trapezoidal tails. It's just how I make mine. You can make yours however you'd like. Mine are more blunt and I use trapezoids to create them. But at the end of the day, it's made up of about six or seven individual shapes. Now some of them I'm going to create and combine, and others I'm going to leave separate. When it comes to this base layer, I'm going to go ahead and create the smaller shapes and then combine them using Boolean operations. But in other cases like the black cap that's here or the wing, I'm going to leave them as separate layers because that gives me the flexibility of being able to add different texture image files to them to give that depth and dimension. It also allows me to add some shading where I need it. Again, just to add more to that depth. If you're not quite sure of the direction you want to go with your bird as far as the texture goes or shading or anything like that, my suggestion is to keep things separate as much as possible. You can always change that, that's the beautiful thing about working with vectors is you can always combine them later. But if you start by keeping them separate, you have that flexibility when it comes to adding the texture later. Let's go ahead and get rid of this. I'm going to start creating the bird itself by using the shape tools. The first thing I want to do is go ahead and I want to drop the opacity of my reference image. I want to be able to see it, but I don't want it to block everything out. The next thing I'm going to do is add a vector layer that all of my shapes will be housed in. I'll go ahead and tap the plus sign, and I'm going to drag that vector layer beneath the reference image so you'll still be able to see them, but there'll be somewhat translucent because they're beneath the reference image. Now I'll go ahead and make sure I don't have anything selected, and I want to grab my ellipse tool. I'll go to my rectangle tool, tap on ellipse, and I'm going to create a very bottom white base layer, which is going to help me create this section here as well as here, and then I'll build up from that. I'm going to turn my stroke off. I always work with just a fill unless I need a stroke. I'll go ahead and select a white fill. I'm going to drag out my first ellipse, and this is going to be the larger one here. Now this is a shape, it's not a curve and I need to be able to manipulate the nodes. I'm going to go ahead and tap two curves. Now I can manipulate the nodes however I need to. But first let me go ahead and move it into place. Now again, I'm not aiming for perfection here. I'm not looking to match this exactly, but I want to at least get it proportionately correct. I'll grab my node tool and I'm just going to start dragging my nodes out into place. Now this one I actually want to bring up here. If I bring it as a curved or a smooth node, it's going to curve this up and I'll have to use my handles and move things up and down. The easier way to do that is to convert this to a sharp node first. With it selected, you just tap sharp, and I'm just going to move this up. Now that's creating that nice arch to the back. I'm just going to drag these out a little bit. That's first shape, let's go ahead and create the second small ellipse that makes up the head. Let's go ahead and drag out a smaller one. I'm going to grab my move tool and move it into place, and I want to convert it to a curve again. I'll go to my edit menu and just tap convert to curves. Now I want to drag my nodes out to come roughly in line with the larger piece I've already put in place. Let me just drag this up The chickadee has a flat head-ish. I'm going to convert this to a sharp node again so that I can move it up without worrying about moving the other handles and stuff. I'm going to do the same thing with this one, so I'll tap sharp and I'm going to drag that in line with the lower ellipse. I think I'm going to stop there for a second. Let me go ahead and I'm going to select both of my curve layers and I want to combine them using a Boolean operation. With them both selected, I'll go to edit and add. Now you can see that's giving me a node here to work with, and you can see that this dips in. I'm going to bring this right about there. I'll bring this sharp node down. It is creating a little bit of a crevice there, and I'm okay with that because the beak is going to sit in there at some point. Now I accidentally, when I converted that to a sharp node, it brought this in. That's not a big deal, I'm just going to go ahead and use my handle, drag it up. Again, this is what I love about working with vectors is that you have these wonderful handles and nodes that you can use to create stuff. Let's go ahead and turn the image layer off for a second. It looks funny because it has this little dip in here, but that's where the beak is going to sit. But overall, I like my bird shape, I like the start that we have here. Let's go ahead and finish the base. Now, I'm going to create just some base shape for the tail. I'm ultimately going to be adding additional shapes on top of it in gray, but I at least want to give them something to sit on. I'm going to go ahead and grab my trapezoid tool. Drag out a trapezoid, and I'll go ahead and rotate this and put it in place. Now again, if you want to create it exactly as you see it with the curve, and you can certainly do that. Let me go ahead and convert this to a curve. I'll just move the story I wanted. I think I'm going to move this in a little bit. I want to duplicate this. I'll go ahead and hit "Edit" and "Duplicate". I'm just going to rotate it using my handles here. Bring that in a little bit. Sometimes it helps to turn the reference image off so that you can see all of your shapes together. Somehow those ended up at the top there. Let's drag those down. Let's step back before I combine these and just make sure I like how it looks. I'm liking that. I'm going to go ahead and drag across to select all three of these shapes. Now I want to combine everything together, this again is going to be my very bottom layer. I've done an ad. Now I still have the flexibility of being able to grab nodes and move things in and out if I want. That's not a problem, but I'm just giving something for everything to sit on. Now we're going to go ahead and add some of the additional characteristics like the wings and the black cap, and we'll do that next. It's time to add the black cap. I'm going to go ahead and make sure I have a black fill selected. I don't have a stroke selected. I have my pencil tool select, and that's what I'm going to use to create this, and I want to make sure that you use fill is on. I'm just going to draw this shape out. I'm not going to worry about staying inside the lines of the white base because we're ultimately going to clip this, and when you do the same thing down here. I'm not going to go too far out, but I don't worry about staying exactly on the line there. Now I actually want to make sure both of these shapes are closed. Let's go to the Layer studio, select both of them, and with my node tool selected, I'll just tap Close. It just makes it easier to manipulate the shapes. Whenever you're using the pencil tool, it doesn't automatically close them, so you need to close them yourself. Now it looks funny because it's your sitting outside, it looks like he's wearing a helmet. I'm going to go ahead and clip these to this curves. With them both selected, I'll just drag it down and clip and release, and now we have a little chickadee head. Let's go ahead and add the eye next. Now when you're adding the eye, this is really going to be the part where you decide if you want to go whimsical, realistic, whatever path you want to take. If you create a really large eye that isn't what the chickadee necessarily have, or whatever bird you're creating, you're going to lean more towards whimsy. If you stick with the relative proportions that are in the reference image menu or leaning more towards realism, it's totally up to you a direction you want to go in. You can play around with it too, because it is flexible. These are vectors, so you can size up and size down however you'd like. I'm going to go ahead, my eyes on my birds tend to be rather large, so I'm going to stick with that, and I create them using a series of ellipses. Let me close this. I'm going to grab my ellipse tool again. I'm going to make sure I have a white fill, and I'm going to drag out a perfect circle. I'm going to hold my finger down, drag the circle, and I like that size. I think that's a good size. I want to duplicate this twice. I'll go to my Edit menu, it duplicate, edit, duplicate. The reason I'm doing this, is because this top layer is going to be the catch light, that little glint that you see in the eye in a photograph or an illustration that gives your illustration or photograph life. This one is going to be the iris part, the black, and then there's just going to be a ring around the outside. I'm going to start by turning this one off. We're not going to do that first. I'm going to grab this second one and I want to change the fill to black. I'll go to my Move tool and I want to decrease the size of this just slightly. I have about center on here and it makes it easier to move it in. I'm going to keep my finger down as a modifier and just drag in slightly. You can see I have that little white ring around there. Now let's go ahead and turn our catch light back on and make it smaller. I'm going to do the same thing, I'm just going to drag it down. Now this is also going to help to note the direction that the bird is looking at. If I were to move the catch light here, it looks he's looking off to the side. If I move it here, it looks a little bit like he's looking ahead, so you can decide whichever way you want your bird to be looking. It's totally up to you. That's the eye, let's go ahead and create the wing next. Now, you can pick whatever color you'd like or you can sample colors, and the way that you would do that is, let me just move these eyes out of the way. I'm going to group this together so that I know that that is the eye. I'm going to turn the opacity of my image backup. If I wanted to get this exact gray in here, I'm going to make sure I have nothing selected. I'll go ahead and use my eyedropper and select one of the grays in here. Now you're going to get a number of different colored pixels. You just need to find the one that you want to use. If I release, it changes that dot. If I tap on that, it's going to change the fill to that gray color. Let's go ahead and grab the Teardrop tool here. I'll turn my opacity back down again. Now I mentioned previously I'm only going to create one wing, I'm not going to create both. Mine is truly going to be looking sideways. It's not going to be tilted down like this. I'm just going to go ahead and drag out the gray teardrop, and I'll rotate it. Now again, I want this to be a curve so that I can manipulate the nodes. With it selected, I'll tap "Edit", convert to curves. I'm just going to go ahead and move this into place the way I wanted. I wanted to look more like a wing and less like a teardrop. I'm going to flatten this out. Remember you can always hold your finger down and move just one of the handles instead of both. I don't like how pointy this is at the end here. I want to tap to select that node right there, and I'm going to go to my Corner tool. I want to make sure this is rounded and I'm just going to drag up the radius just slightly. I don't want it to be too rounded, I just want it to be slightly rounded and not so pointy. I'm going to go ahead and just move, I think, this whole thing up a little bit. Again, you can see I'm not matching this exactly, so I'm just using the reference image purely as reference, and I'm creating the wing the way I want it to be. Finally, it has this little peach-toned belly to it. I want to leave this white section alone in this one here. I want to make sure that all of these shapes are dropped below the reference image. I'll go to my Swatches and I'm going to grab one of my peach colors. I want to just bring this up in light value and you can do that by dragging on the swatch here. Again, I'll grab my pencil tool on fill, and I'm just going to draw out that peach belly there. My node tool, just to make sure that's closed. Again, I want to clip this to the white base layer. Now it's sitting beneath the wing because the wing is up here. I'm not clipping the wing to the base layer because if I do that, it's going to clip the wing inside and you're not going to see the actual wing. I want the wing to be sitting on top. All of these shapes are going to be beneath the wing. Now I could move this around if I wanted just to move it up to make sure you don't have both selected. Let's make that a little wider. Let's turn off the reference image for a second. I have a good start, but I can see some problems here. I just moved that up and I moved it too far up, so I need to grab my Node tool and just drag that down so that little white sections not showing. But overall, I like the shape that I'm starting with. Of course, it's a very flat, it has really no character get and we'll add that with the texture and the markings. But we have a really good start here. The final thing I want to do is go ahead and actually not going to use the reference image for this. I'm just going to grab the Trapezoid tool with this same gray color that I used for the tail, and I just want to lay some little gray spots on top of this tail here. I'm going to leave some of the white peeking out. Again, I'll convert this to a curve so that I can manipulate the nodes. This is where I'm getting the layering from, so the picture shows the layering. I'm actually going to achieve that with just different trapezoids here. This, again is just my way of creating the tails of the birds, it's totally up to you how you'd like to do yours. I'm just going to make this a duplicate, make it a little bit smaller. But there we have some layering effect there without really having to recreate the entire thing. I just want to make sure that these two are beneath the wing. Because when I add the texture to the wing, I want these below, so they're the same color. I might actually make them a little bit lighter. With them selected, I'm going to drag up on the light value just so that there's a difference between the wing and the tail. That's a good start which need to go ahead and add the beak. I'm going to grab the Triangle tool and I'm going to grab a very dark gray. I'm not going to make it black because I want it to be separate of the black cab, and the chickadee has a really tiny beak. I'll just move that into place. I want to move this behind the base layer so that I can change this to a curve and use my node tool to get it into place. Now it's curved, this beak, and it's curved down here too. We'll add some texture and line art to that to give it more depth and dimension. But that's a pretty good start. We have the beginning of our chickadee. Now I don't add the legs until I've actually created the location it's going to be in. Because if I have him sitting on a branch, his feet are going to be positioned differently than he would if he were sitting directly on a platform on the bird house, for example. I create this, and then once I place him in the overall illustration with whatever setting I have him, and that when I create the legs. We'll do that a little bit later. But for now, we have the flat vector base of our chickadee all ready to go and we're ready to add texture to him. But first, let's go ahead and create the vector base of our cardinal, and we'll do that in the next video. I'll see you there.
7. Illustrating a Cardinal: We're ready to begin creating the vector base of our cardinal. We're going to follow the same process that we did with the chickadee, where we're going to break it down into smaller shapes, some of which will combine and others we'll leave separate so that we can add different layers of texture to them. Now, I'm not going to use the pencil tool to draw out the shapes here, but you can see that it's made up of a series of ellipses just like the other. I'm actually going to use two triangles to create the beak on this one because that's one of the characteristics that I really want to spotlight on my cardinal because they have a very strong curved beak. I'm going to use some shading and highlight to really drive that home, and I'll of course create this black mask. Now I could use the triangle tool to create the crest of the bird, but I'm actually going to show you how you can easily create it using the ellipse that you put in place. Let's go ahead and start building out the shape of our bird. I have dropped the opacity of my reference image and I've created a vector layer beneath it that we can add all of our shapes too. Now, I'm going to use this kind of cardinal red color that I tend to use. Again, you can certainly sample colors from your image if you want to use the exact colors that you're seeing. I've kept coming back with a pinkish-red and I don't really want that, I really want that vibrant red of mine. I've selected that as a fill and I'll go ahead and make sure I have my Ellipse Tool selected and drag out that longer middle ellipse. I'll convert it to a curve and then rotate it, and move it into place. Now I selected this image because I know that at the end of my illustration. I want the cardinal to be sitting on the platform of the birdhouse facing to the right, but chickadee is facing to the left and he's going to be up in a branch above the house. I'm really just using this to get the position of the bird. Ultimately, again, I'm not aiming for perfection here. I don't want to match the body exactly. I just want to get the proportions and the positioning correct. I'll go ahead and adjust my nodes as needed. I'm going to convert this one to a sharp node and drag it up and we're going to do the same thing with this one down here. I'll use my handles to adjust my paths where needed. Remember, you can always put a finger down and create a cost to just drag one handle. Now, I think I'm actually going to add another node here that I changed to a sharp node and drag it there. The carnal has a blunt end that goes right into the tail. I'll select my "Ellipse Tool" again, and create the head and I'll convert it to a curve. Now the cardinal in this image has his crusted down. I really want to spotlight the crest, so I'm actually going to be creating it much higher than this. But the head is actually okay and the position that it's in. I've converted this to a curve. I just want to select some of these nodes and drag them into place. Go ahead and tap and change that to a sharp node and bring it down. I'll bring it right about there. Now the beak is actually going to be sitting on top of this. You're not going to see this part, but I think I'm going to just bring it in a little bit. No actually, I'm not going to, not just yet. We'll remove that node. Now, I mentioned that you could use the triangle tool to add the crust, but I'm not going to do that in this case because I want it to have a little bit smoother feel and not so geometric. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to select that node and change it to a sharp node and I'm going to drag mine up. I want the crest, like I said, to be nice and high because that's one of the characteristics I really want to spotlight with this bird. I'm going to add another one here that I'm just going to drag in. Now it's a little too sharp. I'm going to go ahead and change that to a smooth node and just drag it where I want. I'll just take a step back and I'm going to turn my reference image off and just see where I'm at. I can see that I'm going to have a little bit of an issue here where I'll have to adjust once I combine the two. and I might have to adjust some things here. But overall, I like how this is looking so far. I'm going to go ahead and select my Move Tool and drag across to select both of these and combine them. This is going to be the very bottom layer, and it's going to have all one bit of texture on it. I'm not going to worry about turning my reference image back on because I'm going to create the tail the way I want it, I want it to be long, of course and facing downward a little bit. Use whatever shape is going to work best for your end result and keep in mind that when you convert these shapes nodes, you're not stuck with the initial shape that you created. I could go ahead and I can carve this out if I wanted or I could bring it in if I want it to be a little pointed, I'm going to go ahead. Actually, I liked that, but let's see. I might just bring that down, and I'll go ahead and duplicate this. I'm going to grab my transform tool and just flip it that way, just to adjust as necessary. If you see any problems, buds don't worry about them, they're easily fixed. I might make this the longer one. I want to combine these three shapes. I have the body and the two pieces of tail. Now this is where it's important that your background and your reference image are both locked, because I'm going to go ahead and drag across the two. If I don't have the others locked, it's going to select them as well. Let's go ahead and release that. Go to my Edit menu and do an add. Now I can make adjustments if I need to, I'll just grab my Node Tool. I might just bring this up, put that down a little bit and I can always adjust this later as well. We're going to delete that node. Sometimes you end up with nodes that aren't necessary, they just create a little bit of a kink in your illustration. You can just delete them. I like how that's looking. I think this needs to be a little smoother though. Here we go. We have the body of the bird. Now I need to add the wing. I want to use the same red that I did for the body, but I'm going to make it a little bit darker. I'm ultimately going to be adding some gray texture to the wing because if you've ever seen an adult male cardinal, it has a gray modeling on the wing, so I'll be adding that with some texture, but I want the wing base to be a little bit darker than the body. I'm just going to drag down on the color dot, select my teardrop tool, drag that out. I'll convert it to a curve and then rotate it into place. One of the reasons I wasn't worrying too much about this spot here on the body, is I knew that the wing was going to be covering it. You can cover things up sometimes with the other shapes. That way you don't spend a lot of time trying to fix something that's not going to be seen anyway. I actually like the point of this because it plays into the point of the crest, so unlike the chickadee, I'm actually not going to change that. I may just adjust the tail though, a little bit, bring this up. There we go with the body and the wing. The next thing we want to do is go ahead and add the eyes, beak, and of course that black mask. We'll do that next. I'm going to add the mask the way that I did with the chickadee's cap. I'm going to grab the pencil tool. I want to make sure that "Sculpt" is off and that "Use Fill" is on. I'll select a black fill. I can turn my reference image on if I want. But in this image, I don't know if this is a younger cardinal or it's just facing to the side, but it has a very small mask. That's another characteristic of the cardinal that I'm really trying to drive home in my illustration. I'm going to go much bigger than that. I'm just going to go ahead and draw that out, draw it down. I'll go ahead and close that with my "Node" tool. I'm going to close it. I want to make sure it's sitting outside of the red part of the body. Now I can just drag this down and clip it. It's, of course, going to follow the path of the body, but it had this nice little spot here. I'm going to step back and deselect it and see how I like it. I can always adjust it later, but for now, I like how it's looking. I want to go ahead and create the eyes. I'm going to do that the same way that I did with the chickadee, I'll grab a white fill and my "Ellipse". I'm just going to draw out a perfect circle by holding my finger down. Again, you can make this a more realistic eye, or you can go large. I'm already seeing that I'm going to adjust my mask because this looks awkward here. The eye is really big and then you have this bloop right into the mask here. I'm going to step away from the eye for a second, grab my "Node" tool, and just drag this back and you can see that it opens it up and lets it breathe a little bit. I'm not worried that it's tucked behind the wing, although maybe I might try to change that. Let's go ahead and move this up. Just going to bring this all in here and maybe bring it up. Let's get back to the eye now. I'll go ahead and "Duplicate" this twice. I'm going to turn off the Catchlight layer, change the second layer to black. With my "Move" tool, just drag it in a little bit. I'm going to turn Snapping off, sometimes that creates an issue. I'll go ahead and turn the Catchlight back on and make it much smaller. Now, because this bird is going to be facing to the right I want him looking back at the camera. So I'm going to put the Catchlight right there just to give direction of his vision. I want to select all three of these eye layers and group them. That makes it a lot easier to move them around where I want them as well as to size them up and down. I'm going to go ahead and do that now. I like how it's placed. Let's go ahead and create the beak. Again, I'm going to use two triangles for the beat because I really want to spotlight that nice strong curved beak. I have this orangey-yellow color that I'm going to use. Again, you can always sample from the reference image if you'd like. I'll drag out that first triangle. Now, the beak is another place where you can show either whimsy or realism. Let me show you what I mean in a second here. I'm going to bring this down. Curve that in. If I grabbed my second triangle, convert it to a curve and rotate it. If I leave that open, it looks like he's chuckling or tweeting or smiling. The mouth can really play a big part in the feel of your illustration. If I bring it up, it's a little bit less whimsical. The mouth and the eyes are really something they're going to help drive home the feel of your illustration. Now, one thing I am finding is I want to curve this guy up a little bit and therefore curve him up. This is one of the things that I love about using vectors is if I find I don't like how something's looking, I'm going to turn my reference image off, I can always adjust it. I didn't like how flat that was. I wanted to curve that up. I'm going to go ahead and adjust my beak to match that. Bring this little guy up. Now, the cardinal's beak is very sharp and geometric back here, so I'm actually going to do that there as well. Then once we get into the texture, I'm going to use some shading and highlights to give more of a curve to it. Okay. I have the beak in place, I have the eye in place, I might just move it up a little bit now that I'm seeing it set back. I'll select the group labeled eye and move it up. The final thing that I want to do is to go ahead and add the cutouts in the crest. We'll go ahead and do that next. There are a few different approaches that you can take to the crest of your cardinal. You could solely use texture to drive home that feathery feel at the top. Or you can do a mix of some cutoff as well as texture. That's actually what I'm going to do here. Now I could take a bunch of thin triangles, place them in the spots where I want them, and then subtract them from the body of the bird. But I find that to be a little too perfect. I actually want something a little more organic. I'm actually going to use the "Pencil" tool with the Sculpt mode on. I'm not going to go into great detail about Sculpt mode. I actually have an entire class where we use that tool to create floral typography. I recommend checking that out if you want to learn more about the tool. But for the purposes of this class, I'll say that it can be a frustrating tool. It takes patience and practice, but once you get used to using it, It's a really invaluable tool for creating more organic shapes like we're going to here. The first thing I want to do is select the curve that makes up the body of my bird. Zoom in here, I'll select my "Pencil" tool and make sure that Sculpt mode is on. I'm just going to start drawing out a series of shapes. I'm going to vary the size and the width. If you run into problems, no, it didn't cause any problems, you can always start at another spot. I'll make a short one right here, and a nice long, fatter one there. These outer spots here are a little too perfect. I'm going to go ahead and sculpt away spots on there as well. You could also use the "Eraser" tool with a texture brush to do that. But I actually just like the control of using the Sculpt mode. All right, let's back that up. It's really easy now, again, these are all nodes. If I select that, you can see that these are nodes. If I don't like something, I can always go ahead and with the "Node" tool selected, I can select some and I can move them. I can delete nodes if I want to, it's all adjustable because we're working with nodes. We have the body of our cardinal in place. We're ready to start having some real fun and add texture to both the cardinal and the chickadee, and we're going to do that in the next video. But before we do that, let's take a look at a few key takeaways from the last two videos about creating the base of our birds.
8. Adding Texture to Chickadee (Part One): I mentioned in the opener to the video that we'll be adding texture to our bird in a number of ways. We're going to start by laying a base of texture using image files that we find in the stock studio. We'll go ahead and build it up a little bit further by using textured brushes, including those that you downloaded for the class and then we'll finish them off by adding line art to the wings and the tail using the pen tool. You're going to be able to take your birds from flat vectors like these, two-dimensional textured birds like these. This is your chance to lend your voice to the final illustration. We're going to set aside the reference images and we're just going to have fun at this point. We're going to play around, we're going to build different textures on top of one another, we're going to add our line art and we're going to have fun creating our final result. I'm going to go ahead and add the texture to the chickadee here in real-time, so that you can see step-by-step how I build up the bird from the base layer to the end line art from start to finish and then I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to the cardinal, but I'm going to do that as a time-lapse because ultimately the process is exactly the same. It's just a matter of the different types of texture that you use. Let's go ahead and get started. I've turned off my cardinal layer and I just have my chickadee up here. Now there's a couple of things that I want to mention before I get started adding the texture. One of the things that I did off-camera was rename all of my layers. The reason I do that is because you have certain layers that I do can be difficult to see here in the icon panel and the layer studio or they look so similar, it's hard to tell the difference between them. For example, the cap and the beard on the chickadee are not only black, so it's hard to see against the background, but they're also tiny and they look very similar. By labeling them when I'm adding the texture, I know exactly which layer I'm going to. Now I will be the first to admit I am bad about naming my layers, but this is definitely I do as I say, not as I do because it will make it so much easier, especially when you start adding lots of texture layers. The other thing that I did is to reorganize my layers in the order that they're on the bird. There's certain ones that I can't move, for example, the wing needs to be on top of the entire bird as a separate piece, but I have those three pieces that are on the base, body, the cap, the beard, and then the belly and these were actually originally flipped because of the order I created them in. The reason I organized them is because there are certain textures that we're not going to be clipping directly to these. We're going to be laying over top and it makes it a lot easier to know exactly where to place that layer when you can intuitively look at this and say, this is the top of the bird. That's just another recommendation I have is just organized your layers where you can. The more organized you are to begin with, the easier the entire process will be. Let's go ahead and start adding our texture. I mentioned earlier that I always start with the base layer of texture using an image file. Now the actual base of the chickadee is the white curve here, if you remember, that was the very first piece we created. I'm not going to add any texture directly to that because it's really difficult to clip textures to pure white without going so far in the opposite direction that it becomes muddy or dark. I'm actually going to focus my attention the first on the belly here. I'll go to this orange layer and I'll go to my Stock studio and I'm going to type in, texture. Now you can get specific with how you labeled if you know that you want to use a particular type of texture, you can type that in. I tend to leave it at an overall texture descriptor because then I can find textures I may not have otherwise looked for. I do know which one I want to use in here. I'm actually going to use a wood grain texture. I tend to use wood green a lot with these because depending on how you place it and the blend modes you use, you can actually give somewhat of a feathery feel once they're in place. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to let this place, I'm going to tap out of it to de-select it. It's really important that you do that because you want to make sure that it gets placed in your document at the size that came in, so it stays at that resolution. Then I'm going to go ahead and re-select it. This is the piece that I just brought in. I'm going to size it down and right now it's not clipped into the orange part. I'll go ahead and drag it down and clip it to the belly, then I can more easily see where I want to place it. I want to make it a little bit smaller, I'll just move it around until it's right about where I want it. I like this section because it's got nice striations in the width there that mimic the feathery feel of the body and I'm going to go ahead and face it in this direction so it follows the curve. You can always adjust it, but that's why I recommend placing it first. Now I'll go ahead and drop the Blend mode from Normal to probably Overlay. I tend to go between Overlay and Soft Light, but sometimes Soft Light takes away too much of the texture and it's doing that here. I'm going to go ahead and keep it at Overlay but dropped the Opacity just slightly. There's one more texture I want to add to the belly before we move on. If you want to take that feathery feel a step further, try looking for title. I'm going to go ahead and release those and I'm going to type in Title and find a nice title texture and I think the one that I want, I believe is here in Pixabay. Let me just check and I'm looking for something that is hat on, so it doesn't have a curve, it doesn't have anything overly decorative unless you really want to go into the very whimsical side and you're not worried about the decoration. You can pull that in, but I'm looking for a curved feel, something like this. That doesn't have too much decoration inside of it. I'm going to go ahead and use this one and Paxil, so I'll tap and hold it. Now, this is a little bit stretched and I actually want it to be pretty small like that. I'm not going to hold my finger down to keep the ratio. I actually just want to move it in and I'm not going to worry about placing at first because this is going to be blended in so much it's not going to matter. Let me go ahead and size this down and just place it in again in the direction of the curve of the body. Let's go ahead and clip it in place. I'll drag it and clip it to the belly. Now, this has a color to it and I don't want that color playing with the orange beneath it. I'm going to go ahead and select it again. I'm going to go to my Adjustments studio and tap Black and White. Because I had it selected, it's automatically going to add that Black and White adjustment layer to that texture only. If it doesn't, then just drag it down and clip it. You don't want that impacting the entire bird. You just want it changing the actual texture layer. Now I just have the black and white texture and it's just going to give me those lines the way I want them. Let me go ahead and select it again and I'm going to choose the Blend mode to Soft Light and just bring it down a little bit. It gives it that feel as if I drew those in with a nice texture brush or something like that. Again, have fun with your textures because it's amazing what you can do with something like a tile photo or a photograph of wood or concrete that can really give you that organic feel that you want. Let's go ahead and focus on the wing next. I'll go back to my Stock studio and I know that the one that I want is in Unsplash, but let me go ahead and go back to texture. I'll go ahead and grab this one again, it's wood, but I liked the fact that this has a lot of lines in it and there's some spotting that I like as well. I'll go ahead and place it. I place the larger bits of texture because they're the ones that are going to show pixelation a lot more than something like that title one. I'll go ahead and reselect it, I'm going to size it down and rotate it so it's going to follow the wing and I particularly like this section right about here because it has some nice grittiness to it, but it also has that line there that's going to add to my wing. Let me go ahead and clip, it will be easier to see it in place. I'm going to drag it down and clip it to the wing layer. I can grab it again and just move it around and see if there's some other spot I might like, thing I don't like about this one is I don't like that line coming down though I do like this, now I could simply mask away the rest of this, but I'm not actually going to do that here because I do like this other section instead. I'm going to bring it right about there. It's totally up to you. It's completely subjective. You got to place your texture, however, you'd like, if you want to include a lot of grittiness, go ahead and do that. It's going to rotate it a little bit again so it follows the curve of the wing and then I'll go ahead and bring this down again to Soft Light. You're bringing the Opacity down. I'm going to be adding some additional textures with brushes to this, as well as line art using the Pen tool. I don't want this to stand out too much, but I want to give it that feathery layered look as well. I'll go ahead and deselect that. I'm going to step away from the wing for right now I'll be adding some more with the brushes. Let's go ahead and focus on the tail. Now we have two parts to our tail: we have the top part and the bottom part and I'm going to put two different pieces of texture on it. I'll go ahead and go into the Stock studio again. I already have texture selected. Again, I know the one that I want is an Unsplash. Eventually, once you start using these a lot, you find your favorites and you remember where they're at. I'm going to go ahead and select this one. It's a image of paper close-up or streamers or something. I'll go ahead and just drop this and I'm not going to worry too much about either so much in that, I'm not going to worry about pixelation there. I'll go ahead and place it and I'm going to clip it to the top of the tail. Now, again, this has coloring and I don't want that color coming through, I want it to remain gray. I'm going to go ahead and make sure I have it selected, go back to my Adjustment studio and tap Black and White. That took away the color and now I can just go ahead and change the Blend mode, until it's where I want it. I'm probably going to go with Soft Light again, and I'll just drop the Opacity. Let's add one more to the background here. I'm going to add this other wood texture, I use it a lot. Wood texture is one of my favorites to use in these, again, because they're so such organic qualities to them and it give such a surprising effect. Now I have that selected so it automatically clipped to there. I'm just going to drag it to the bottom tail and now it's in place where I want it. Again, I'll go ahead and change my blend mode. The reason I used this one is I like some of the circle effects here, it's just a very different texture than the one I put on the top so it gives it dimension. We're also going to be adding some shading to the tail to break it up a little bit more as well. You can go ahead and change to Blend Mode here. You can always play around with the blend modes. I lean a lot towards overlay and soft light. But sometimes other blend modes are going to work better, especially depending on the light or dark value of the piece you're putting it on and just play around and see what works best. The tail is done. Now I am going to clip texture, to the cap and the beard. But like white, black is hard to add texture to unless you have a texture that has a lot of white in it. I'm going to go back to my stock studio and I think that the one I want is in Pexels. Going to look for something that has dimension to it, but doesn't have a lot of black space it has some white space so that it really pulls it in. Something like a nebula shot or something like this where it has some highlights in it, that's the best thing to pull in. Let me go ahead and try this and see what this looks like. Not sure what this is, but I like the actual texture. I think this is the one I wanted. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start by clipping it to the cap. This is another reason that I label the layers because I'm going to end up using this same texture for the beard. But I want to make it easy to know which one is which. I'm going to go ahead and just bring this down. I'll move it to where I want it here on the texture file. What I'm looking for is to have some highlights here on the top of the head. I'm going to go ahead and tip this because I want the lines of my texture to be in the direction that the head is, and I'm going to go ahead and bring this nice chunk of white in here. Now, I'm just going to drop the opacity, I'm not going to change the blend mode. I just want to bring it down a little bit. You could also play around with some of the other blend modes like Glow is one that works really well when you're adding texture to black, especially if you're using a black and white texture. But again, you can also just go ahead and drop the opacity. You still have that highlighted area, it's totally up to you. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this, I have re-selected it, go to my Edit menu and hit "Duplicate". I'm just going to drag it down and clip it to the beard here at the bottom. Now I want to move it around so it's in a different spot. I don't want them to be too much alike. I don't want them to be in the exact same spot on the texture file. I like that there, and I've rotated it so that the direction of the texture is following that of the beard. The opacity is already where I wanted, because I just duplicated the one that I already dropped. If I wanted this to be a little higher, I could just go in and I can make a change to that one, but I'm going to leave it as is. So I've laid all of my base textures that I'm going to, let's go ahead and add some additional texture using some of our texture brushes. Since I'm already on the head and the beard area, let's go ahead and stick with that. I'm going to use the pixel brushes. Now there are some really wonderful texture brushes in the vector side, but the ones that I particularly want to use are over on the pixel side, I'm going to start with the gritty texture pack that I provided, and I'm going to select this spotted brush and just select an off white from my Swatch palette here. I want to go ahead to the cap area. Now there's already an image or a pixel file attached to this. I could go ahead and just draw right on this. This is the texture file, but I'm going to add another pixel layer. The reason I'm going to do that is because I want the flexibility of being able to change the opacity of that layer or the blend mode of that layer, separate of the one that's already there. By default, Designers are going to add all of your marks to one pixel layer unless you continue to add them, and you can do that by going up to the plus sign here and just tapping on pixel layer. I had this image file, the one that's attached to here selected so that it added it above it. So now under the cap layer, I have an empty pixel layer that I'm going to brush into, and I have the original texture image and because these are two separate layers, I can have that flexibility of changing the opacity and the blend mode if I want to. I have my brush selected and I'll just make sure I have that spotted brush. I'm just going to go ahead and drag across and the brushes a little too big, so let's go ahead and drop the size. I just want to hit the top. It's not exactly a texture you'd expect on the chickadee, but I'm actually good with that. Once again, I'm not going to change the blend mode of this, but I am going to drop the opacity. I want it to be a little higher than the original texture layer so that you can still see it pretty well. I'm going to do the same thing now with the beard. I'm going to select the original image file, tap on plus, and add another pixel layer on top of it, so I have 2.5 that flexibility of good changing these to different opacities. I'll go ahead and just brush in here and maybe brush a little over here. I'll drop the opacity again. I like how that's looking. The next thing I want to focus on is adding a little bit of a color pop to the top of the wing here. If you look at the original reference images of the chickadees, they tend to have a color similar to the one on their belly here on the top of their wing. It's an overlay. We're going to achieve that with a texture brush. I'll go back into my gritty texture brushes here, and the first thing I want to try is the, I think the Woody Cross Hatch one. I want to select this color because I want it to match that. So I'll go into my Color Studio and we're going to grab the eyedropper and drag it down. We're going to find the color that I want to select. Then I'm just going to tap on that dot to change the color here. I have my brush selected. Now, I want to go back to my layer studio, and I want to make sure that I have a separate layer because again, I want that flexibility of being able to use different blend modes and opacities. I have the image layer that's attached to this selected. I'll hit plus, pixel layer, and now I'm just going to brush into the top here, and it's really strong right now. But I'll just go ahead and drop the blend mode down to soft light and I might just drop the opacity down slightly. I don't want it to be overwhelming. I just want it to be, just a subtle color change to the top. I'm not going to add any brushwork to the tail. I'm just going to be adding some additional detail using the pen tool in a little bit. Let me just see if there's anything else I want to add. The last few things I want to add with brushes is some shadowing to the tail here to break it up a little bit just to give it some more dimension and then add some shadowing to the beak. Let's start with the beak. I have two pieces here, and let me go ahead and close these. I have the top and the bottom, and again, I made sure to label them and I also put them in the order that they are on the bird. The top one, I'm going to add a little bit of highlight and a little bit of shadow. I'll add some shadowing here just to give that kind of curved fill to the beak and a little highlight at the top. So I'm going to need two layers. The reason I need two is because I'm going to use two different blend modes because with highlights, the standard blend mode is either Add or Screen, and with shadow, the standard blend mode is Multiply. So I need that flexibility in being able to change them. Go ahead and tap on the top part of the beak here. I'm going to pick my color. I'm just going to grab that same off white. This time I want to go to the sprays and splatters brushes that are built into Designer. I want to select the top airbrush. I'll make my brush a little smaller. Now because I have the layer selected, it should automatically clip a pixel layer to it so I can just brush in there. Now I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode of that again, too. Let's try Screen first. I'm just going to drop the opacity a little bit. Now I want to go ahead and add the shadowing here. Then I'm going to add a separate shadow layer to the bottom of the beak. So let me go ahead and grab just a dark brown, almost black. I have the same airbrush. I want to add another pixel layer to this top part of the beak, so that I have again have that flexibility and so I'm going to run it right about there. It's going to break that up there. I'll change that to multiply and drop the opacity. Finally, I'll add a bit of a shadow to the bottom here. So I've selected the bottom layer and it's going to automatically clip the pixel layer to it. I'll just run my airbrushing, doing it a little bit more on the bottom here. I'll change that to Multiply and drop the opacity. That's what we're going to do with the beak. Let's go ahead and add some shadowing to the tail as well. Let's go back here and locate the tail. I want to add my shadowing to the bottom of the tail because I want it sitting on there. It's not going to do anything if I add it to the top. I'm going to go ahead and select the image file that's attached to it and add a pixel layer. I'm just going to keep the same color and the same exact brush that I just use because I'm just looking to add a subtle drop shadow below this. I have a, actually that brush is too small let's go ahead and bring that up. Now bring it up to a medium-size brush, and I'm going to keep my brush back here. Because again, I'm just looking to add a very subtle drop shadow to there, as well as right there. I'll go ahead and change that to Multiply and drop the opacity. It's just getting a little bit of dimension to the tail. We're going to finish up our little guy here. In the next video I'm going to be focusing on somebody's harsh lines that are a dead giveaway that you're using vectors and we're going to break those up using a texture brush. Then we'll finish off the chickadee by adding some of the line art to the wings and the tail using the pen tool. I'll see you there.
9. Adding Texture to Chickadee (Part Two): One final thing I want to do with brushes is to break up some of this white, sharp line here as well as the black. It's a dead giveaway that you're using vectors. I want to use the fuzzy feathers brush that's in the pack that I provided just to add a feathery effect here as well as to the black and the outside of the bird. I'm going to go ahead to my brush pack and I'm going to select the free feathers and brush and eraser. I've selected a pure white. This is where we want something not necessarily clipped to another layer but sitting on top of it. This is why I was saying you want to make sure that you put your layers in a particular order so that you can very easily see where you need to place it. I want this clipped inside of this base, but I don't want it clipped inside of these three pieces, I want it sitting on top. I'm going to go ahead and select the cap layer, and I'll add a pixel layer to that. Now I'm going to take my fuzzy feathers brush, and I'm just going to start running it inside. It's staying within the lines here, but it's also laying on top of all of these layers, and it's letting me break up that really harsh white line. Just managed to change the color, let's bring that back to white and make sure we're on the right layer. Just going to bring it around here. Because I had it clipped in, it's not ending up out there. I'm going to bring it around the eye as well. Again, I'm just trying to break up some harsh lines here, and then finally I'll bring it down here as well, and break these two up. Again, this layer is sitting on all three of these arts, right on top of it, so it's not going to clip inside. I can easily break up all of these. Let's go ahead and add some outside detail with this brush here and here. This time I actually need it to be above the base. I don't want it clipped inside of it, I want it to be outside. I'm going to select the entire base and go ahead and add a separate pixel layer, and now that pixel layer is sitting above it. I can run the brush right here just above the beak. Again, I'm just trying to break up that really harsh line. I think I'm going to pull it down here and do it as well. Now I want to go ahead and break up the black part too. I'm going to do the exact same thing, but I'm not going to clip it all inside. I'm actually going to just add another pixel layer right above this one. The reason I'm adding a second-pixel layer, technically, you could do it all on one, but I'm going to be clipping some texture to the black and I don't want it to impact the white one. I've created a separate layer that I'll go ahead and add black. I have the same brush selected. I'm going to make it just a slight bit bigger, and just run it along the outside here. Now you can see it's adding a really harsh black line around the edge. That's where adding texture to it, it's going to take care of that. We'll do that in a moment. I just want to make sure I have it filled in here. Makes sure that you don't accidentally change the color of your brush. I just selected that by accident. Let me go ahead and just hit this here. I want to get rid of that black line. This is a layer like any other, and it's a pixel layer so I can attach texture to it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to attach the pixel, the original base layer that I used here. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate it. Let me go ahead and locate one of those. I'll find that here under the cap, select it and hit duplicate, and I'm going to drag it up and clip it to that black pixel layer I just put on there. Now I just need to move it around until it's at a spot where it looks natural. I wanted to follow the same direction as the other. I want to do the same thing down here. But I think I may make this a little bit smaller. You can see it's blending in that black line a little bit. Go ahead and duplicate that same one. I'm going to drag it down here and put it in a different direction. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. I want it to follow the same direction as that texture. Now one final thing you could do is run on top of that same one. You don't have to do a separate pixel layer. Let's just grab that spotted brush and an off-white. Let's find that off-white color, and just run it over the top here, it's a little too big. Let's bring it down a little bit. It blends it in a little bit more. Now you no longer see that really harsh black line. I like how that's looking. I like the rest of the texture. The final thing I want to do is add some line art using the pen tool. Let's go ahead and do that next. Let's start by adding some other line art to the tail. I'm going to use the align mode for those under the "Pen Tool". Let's go ahead and switch that. Again, this is going to give me self-terminating straight lines in whatever direction I add them in. Go ahead and zoom in here. If I start just by tapping out of a line here, I'm going to get a very boring straight line. I actually want to set pressure settings. I'll go to my stock studio here and you'll see there's a little line. Now, this mark here is going to manipulate the node on the end, and this one here is going to change the node on this end. I can add nodes in between that are going to allow me to add different pressure settings to my line just by tapping to add a node and dragging it where I want. I'm going to drag my two ends pretty low so that they're nice and pointed. Let's bring the stroke width down a little bit. Now one final thing that you want to do is whenever you're using strokes, make sure you go into the advanced and confirm that scale with object is on. If I don't do that, then anytime I scale this bird up and down, the stroke is going to stay where it is. When I make it smaller, the stroke is going to stay large and it's going to look rather funny. As long as scale with object is on, it's going to scale however you scale the rest of this group. I have that first piece in place. Let's go ahead and deselect. I don't know if I like this gray. I'm going to ahead and select it. I'm going to move it over and maybe make it a little bit. I have a brownish-gray and I'm going to select that and make it a little bit lighter just by dragging up on the light value here. I will be blending this in, so I'm not going to worry about it being too harsh. I'm going to keep the same stroke value. I'm going to go back into my pen tool and it's already set there. With the line mode, I'm just going to tap out lines in a few different links there. I like that one. Let's go ahead and do the other side. Again, I don't have to deselect each time because they're self-terminating lines. Let me go back in here. It's added curve layers for each of the lines I placed. I want this to be rather organized, so I'm going to go ahead and just tap on the first one and two-finger tap on the last and hit group, and that's going to allow me to move it around the way that I need to. It's also going to allow me to change the blend mode of the entire group as well as the opacity all at once. With the group selected, I'll go in, and the first thing I want to do is change the name. I'll just change it two lines on tail. I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light or overlay. I think overlay. It's giving me the nice brownish-gray color, and I'm going to leave the opacity the way it is. I like how that's looking. The next thing I want to do is add some curved line art to the wings to give it more of that layered feather feel. I'm going to go back to my "Pen Tool". I've turned my bird, it just makes it a little bit easier to work with and I'm going to keep that same stroke color. I'll just go ahead and tap that. I think my pressure settings should still be in there. They'll stay in there until you either reset it or you change it and turn this off. I just want to start tapping out. First, make sure that you change to the "Pen mode". Because again, I want curves and not straight lines. Let me go ahead and drag out. Again, I want all of my feathers to be in this direction. I need to tell designer that I'm going to put my finger down as a modifier to get a cusp. Drag down, tap, finger down, drag down, and I'm just going to keep doing that all the way across. I'm going to vary the length of it. Because of course, the feathers would not be perfect either. Let's go ahead and do one more row here. Just tap, tap, drag, finger down. Sometimes it's a little wonky to start over again. Drag down. You always need to make sure that your finger is down so you can drag your handle. If it messes up, just start over again. Remember, you can always go into edit mode and change it. I'm going to add a few more of these layers and then one layer of long ones. I'm going to speed it up now. I'll see you on the other side. We have the base layer of texture on some of the larger parts of the bird. We've broken up some of the sections here using texture brushes, as well as added some texture to the wings and the tail. Then we finished it off with some line art on the wings and tail. I'm actually going to call this little guy done. I'm liking how he looks. Now I want to move on to the cardinal. I have my flat cardinal base here all set to go. We're going to go ahead and do this as a time-lapse in the next video. I'll see you there.
10. Adding Texture to the Cardinal (Time-lapse): I have my cardinal turned on here and as I mentioned, I want to do this as a time-lapse because the process is exactly the same. I'm going to start with the base layer. I'm going to build up with some additional brushes and then I'm going to finish it off with some line art. It's just a matter of mixing it up a little bit. Every texture works differently for each bird, so just play around with it. But I'm going to go ahead and start in this and I will see you on the other side. I have added my texture to my cardinal here. Again, I started with a base layer of texture, I actually use a very obvious wood green and so I think it's an MDF Slice that I laid as my first layer of texture to the body. Then I went ahead and added again some green to the wing as well as the tail. I did actually add a second layer of the tail just like I did here. I felt like it was a little too flat and I wanted some dimension. I went ahead and created two new hexagons that I added together and then dragged below the body so that I have this almost like a bushy tail. I went ahead and added some texture to the black mask here. I added some brush texture. If you've ever looked at a male cardinal it tends to have a gray mottling on the wing as well as on the body. I went ahead and played into that and kept my liner, the gray color as well. Now one thing I didn't do that I'm going to do really quickly right now is add some shading and stuff to the beak. I did add texture this time. I didn't do that on the chickadee because frankly it's such a small beak, you wouldn't really see it. But I did want to do it here because the beak is so strong and obvious. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add a pixel layer to the top part, and I'll start with the highlights. Again I want to go ahead and grab the airbrush, and I'll just pick an off-white color. I tend to use that a lot for highlights. You can also sample the yellow color and just drag it up to get a really light yellow. But I tend to work with the off-white instead. First make sure you have your brush selected. I'm going to drop the size a little bit and then just run it along the top here. I'll change the blend mode of that to, let's try green to add this time. I want to add a separate texture layer here so that I can do some shadow. This time I am going to sample the darker yellow here. It's actually coming up a little bit orange. I'm going to drop it really low because I don't want to use black, it's a little too much. I actually want to use a brownish orange color. Let's see how that works. I'll just bring it up there a little bit. I'm going to change that to multiply and drop the opacity. The reason I'm changing the blend mode, by the way, is because that's going to allow the texture to come through. It's not just sitting on top of it so multiply works really well with that. I'm going to keep that same color and I'm going to add a pixel layer to the bottom. I'm just going to run it along the bottom here. Let's go ahead and change that blend mode to multiply and then drop the opacity. I like how this guy is looking. I don't tend to add any texture to the eyes of my birds. You could play around with that and see what you like. The closest I come to doing that is like here where I use the fuzzy brush. I could probably do it here on the cardinal if I grabbed that red color and then add a layer above the body itself and just drag it around here. But because I just don't feel like it works that well, it doesn't really do much there. Actually I think I forgot to change the brush, that's probably why. Let's go ahead and change to that fuzzy feathers brush first. It's not doing much for me, so I don't tend to do that on the Cardinal. I like doing it here again because it breaks it up and gets rid of that vectory look, but here I don't really think that's an issue. You could try doing it maybe with the black. Let's just try one more time here with the fuzzy feathers brush and you could break up the black mask. I went outside the line a little bit. Let's go ahead and bring that up. I actually want to clip this inside. I put it on top, but let's go ahead and clip it in. Now it's on the inside and I just need to take that same texture, duplicate it. I'm going to actually duplicate both of those. The brush as well as the original texture layer. I'm going to drag it up and clip it to that fuzzy layer. Now I've automatically just broken up that really black line there and I don't have that really harsh edge to the black mask. Now I'm going to call him done. I am making the texture here. The only thing we're going to need to do, of course, is to add some feet and legs in there and we'll do that when we actually add them to the scene. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and start creating a home for our cardinal. We're going to build up a bird house and we're going to add some texture to it right in that video. I'll see you there.
11. Building the Birdhouse: Now that our birds are done, we need to give them a nice place to call home. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a bird house for your cardinal by using a combination of shapes from the rectangle tool, texture image files, as well as some additional embellishments from the assets pack that I provided with the class. Let's get started. I'm going to build the base of my bird house first. Now the cool thing about creating these bird houses is that unlike with the birds where you were trying to use two or three particular characteristics to make them recognizable, you don't have to worry about that here. As long as you have the hole for the bird to go into the house and a roof and things like that, people will know it's a bird house, but you get to have fun with it. Instead of using one reference image, consider using several and finding characteristics from each one to create a composite design that you are the ultimate architect of. I'm going to go ahead into my Stock Studio and I'm going to type in bird house. I have an idea of what I want my house to look like and the shape. But I just want to get a few more ideas here. I know that I wanted to have a really light teal blue tone to it because I have a red cardinal and I want it to be a nice complimentary tones, so it'll be something along the lines of something like this, but a lot lighter. I like that it has a nice amount of patina on it, so I'll be using matte as well. I'm a big one on playing with a rust textures and different texture brushes to add patina and different tones. I'm actually going to delete this one, I just found another one I like better. It's going to be something more like this and let's see. I know that I want my shape to be a little bit different. I want it to be a trapezoid with a triangular roof on the top, so something like this. I'm also going to add a second story to mine. The roof on the second story is going to have more surface area so I can add a shingled effect to it. Let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to go ahead and delete these. I have them in mind as to what I want to create. I'm going to build my shape first using shapes from the rectangle tool, so let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to start with a teal blue color because I know that my end result is going to be wood textured and I want it to be a nice light teal. I'm going to start with something medium because when I add texture to it and play around with blend mode, it's going to lighten it up a little bit. I'll go ahead and grab my trapezoid tool. Again, I'm not going to be creating a perfect box here for the bottom part. I'll just go ahead and drag out a trapezoid and I want to flip that. The easiest way to do that is to go to the transform studio and I'm just going to do a vertical flip. Before I convert this to a curve, I'm going to drag these two little red dots out because the bottom is a little too narrow. If you have your snapping on, it's going to tell you when you've dragged both out to the same distance. Now I'm going to ahead and convert this to a curve because I want to add that triangle to the top, and I need to use nodes to do that. I'll go ahead and tap To Curves. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller so I have some room to work with. Now I'm going to add a triangle to the top, similar to how I added the crest to the cardinal. I'm going to tap and add a node to this, and it's a sharp node. I can just drag up and it's going to give me that triangle on the top. I think I'm going to make this a little wider now so it's more hexagonal, and I'm going to make it a little smaller. Again, I need space to not only add a base to this, but I'm going to add a second story. Let's go ahead and add a roof to this before we add the second story. I'm going to select my rectangle tool and I think I went to use something like a rusty brown tone. I'll pick this one here. I'm going to drag out a rectangle. Now I want to lay it here on the side. I'm going to hold my finger down and rotate it and that'll snap it at 15-degree intervals and I'll move it into place, make it a little bit longer. I want to add something to the other side too. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that. Go back to my transform studio and I'll just do a horizontal flip this time. Now, if I hold my finger down while I have the move [inaudible] , it'll keep it in line. I have these two shapes, I want to create one triangular piece out of them. There's not a Shape Builder tool in Designer like you have in Illustrator, but you do have Boolean operations to work with. I'm going to show you how you can easily create one piece out of this. I have two separate layers, I'm going to select both of them. I'm going to go up to my Edit menu and tap Divide, and now that's going to give me five separate pieces. So it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I just need to select these two overhangs here and I can just delete them. Now I can select my three pieces again, go back up here and hit Add, and now I have one piece. Even though you don't have the ease of the Shape Builder, you do have ways of creating brand new shapes using a combination of Boolean operations in the geometry section. I like this roof, but I want to make it a little, I guess, more fun and funky. Go ahead and drag that down, maybe a little bit. I like how that's looking. I need a platform for my bird to sit on. So I'm also thinking when I put the cardinal on the platform, this roof might be a little too low, so I might make my hexagon here a little longer. I'm going make sure about center is off and I just want to drag the bottom down. I'm going to drag these corners back up so they're under the roof. Need to give myself a little space to work. I'll go ahead and make this smaller. I'll grab my rectangle tool again and I'm going to make the perch for the bird in the same color because I'm ultimately going to be adding the same texture to it later. If you have snapping on, if you want to know when it's hit the end of either of these shapes, it'll let you know with that green line. You don't have to be perfect. When you're working with vectors, you have a lot of tools to tell you exactly when something snapped. But if you don't want it to look to vectory, you can also play around, have things kind of off-kilter. Personally, while I like to fancy myself a woodworker, I am not exactly the most skilled one all the time, and I tend to drill first then measure. So I end up with some really interesting shapes and I would probably do that creating a bird house. Why not do that with your illustration too? Again, just have fun with it. I'm going to go ahead and add my second story now. So I want to add it in that same color. I'll select my Rectangle tool and grab that teal blue color, and I'm not going to do a trapezoid this time, I'm going to do a regular rectangle. I want to drag it down below all my other shapes so that it's set back a little bit, and I'll just go ahead and center that. I want my roof to be a little different on this one. I actually want more surface area. I'm going to do a shingle effect on the top, so I'll go ahead and select my trapezoid and I am going to pick that same color. Let's drag out a trapezoid. Not too deep because I need room for the little hole. But I'll just go ahead and move this up and I'm starting to run out of space here. I think I'm going to select all my shapes and just reduce the size a little bit so I have room to work. I have my roof, I have my roof from the bottom here and my perch, I need something for it to sit on. Again, I'll go ahead and grab my Rectangle tool and I think I'm going to select something like just a light brown. I'll select that brown and just drag up. Or actually I like this sandy color I already have over here, and I'm just going to drag out a rectangle. So that's my base. I'll be adding some wood texture to that. Now, the bird needs to be able to get into the house. So I'm going to add some holes next and I'll use the Ellipse tool for that. I don't like to use black when I'm creating these because it's a little too harsh. I'm going to use a charcoal gray. I'll go ahead and tap that gray and I'm going to drag the light value down. Again, it's not going to be black, but it's also going to be dark. I'll just create a hole, I want it to be a perfect circle. So I'm going to hold my finger down while I do it and I'll move it in place there. It's a little flat and boring, I want to give it a little dimension. I'm going to go ahead and add a stroke to it. Specifically, I'm going to start with the same color as the house and then I'm going to go ahead and drag down on the white value. You can see that it's giving me a little bit of dimension there. I also can play around with the pressure settings here. I'm actually going to reset that so that we have a fresh start. Let's go ahead and select that again. If it's flat like that, then it's even all the way around and I actually want it to be a little dimensional. I'm going to go ahead and tap and add a node in the middle and then drag my two node on the side down, and it's just going to give it almost like a shadowing effect here. Just back up and see how that looks. I think I want to make it a little smaller, manage it. If you double tap on a layer, it's going to zoom in and I tend to do that a lot, and just make it a little bit smaller. I'll hold my finger down so it keeps the dimensions, and I'll two-finger tap and drag this up. I don't need to start fresh to create the hole on the top, I'm just going to duplicate it. Now I just need my windows next. I will go ahead and use that same gray color, but I'm going to turn the stroke off for that. I'll select my rectangle tool this time. I want to make an arched window. I'm going to start with one window. I'm going to create the window and then I'm going to duplicate it to the other side. Let's drag out my rectangle. The quickest way to make an arch out of a rectangle is to use the corner tool, but that is a Node tool, and right now this is a shape. The first thing I need to do is tap To Curves. Then I can go to my Corner tool here, which is up by my Node tool. Again, if you ever can't find a particular icon, just tap and hold the question mark. Now I want to select these top two nodes. When I drag across them, you can see them turn blue and I'm going to drag my radius up on my Corner tool until I can't go any further, and now I have a nice arched window. Going to select my Move tool and just make it a lot smaller. I think I want to add some kind of cross bars here in this color. I'll go back to my rectangle tool and select that same teal color. I'm just going to drag my Eyedropper tool and tap to change my fill to that color. When you drag across, make sure the rectangle tool is selected and drag out a rectangle and just put it in place. I don't need to redo that, I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate it and rotate it. If you turn on about center, it's going to drag in from both sides evenly. Now I'm going to want to add texture to this that matches the texture of the house because ultimately the effect that I want is going to be as if I took one piece of wood and just cut out the hole and the windows and this is leftover wood from where I cut it out. Right now I have these two rectangle shapes that make that up and I want one curve. I've selected them, I'll go to my Edit menu and I'm going to do an Add. That's going to make it a lot easier to add texture all in the same direction. I'm going to group my windows together so I can easily duplicate it, I just selected the gray shape and then that curve. Now I can two-finger tap and drag to add my second window. I think I drag that over a little too far. There we go. If you have snapping on, you'll get those markers to tell you where to stop. Now that we have all of our shapes in place, we're ready to start adding some texture. We're going to go ahead and do that in the next video, and I'll see you there.
12. Adding Texture to the Birdhouse: Okay, Now that I have my windows in place, the holes and all of the other elements. I'm going to leave this as is as far as the shapes and I'm creating. And I'm going to start adding my texture. So I'm going to start with my bigger pieces. With the exception of this one right here, I actually want to add the same texture that I'm going to be adding to this bigger piece here as well. So add it to these four pieces. First, I'll go to my texture menu. I'm sorry, my stock studio. And I'm going to type in I'm going to type in wood. And I know that I want something kind of knotty and not planks because they get in the way of the windows and stuff. I want a solid piece. Just go through here. I don't want anything too smooth though, because I want it to have some character as well. So I think I'm going to try this one right here. I like that there's some late in it too. And it also kinda plays into that orange at the top. So if placed it and I'm going to go ahead and drag it down and drag to, I'm going to start with maybe repeat here. So I'm going to drag it right about there. You can make it smaller if you want. And right now it's of course, just sitting on top. But I'm going to leave it as is because I want to place all of my pieces first because I want this one, this one and the two windows to match as far as blend mode as well as opacity. So I'll go ahead and just duplicate. I'm going to go ahead and clip it and move it down or I'm sorry, move it up. I'm going to move it to a different spot so it doesn't look so Match he now the windows, I actually do want to match this particular texture. So I'm going to select the one I have there. I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm going to go ahead and just drag it up. Clip it. So that if I zoom in here, you can see that there's a continuation of that line because I didn't move the location of the wood. I just went ahead and clicked a duplicate copy of it to that. So I'm going to do the same thing with this one. I'll go ahead and duplicate it. And I'll just go ahead and clip it. Again. It continues the line so it gives it the impression that I had one big piece of wood that I cut holes out of. Now let's go ahead and change the blend mode on all of them at the same time. So I'll go ahead and select all four. I'm selecting all four of my texture images. I'm going to go up to my layer options and I'm going to change this to something like ink. Let's see, hardly anything with hardly. I chose this because hardly allows some of the color to come through. It really allows the texture to come through. And you can see some of that tryna patina there. I really like how that ends up looking. So I'm going to call that good. And I just want to check and make sure I don't have anything that's two matching between these two, but I think I'm good there. Now let's go ahead and add some wood grain to the base here. While we have that up, I want something that's more, I want a different texture and I'm actually, I think I'm going to use a point because I can go ahead and I actually like this one a lot. I'm gonna go ahead and rotate it and I'm just going to use one of the planks to cover the base there. So I'll just go ahead and drag this down. All right. I think I might make it a little smaller, but I want to make it wide enough that I don't see that line. So I'm not actually looking to use the planks. I just want the texture between the spaces there. And I'll go ahead and change the blend mode to something like average probably. But does he know? I think I'm her it was softly. I want to find the right spot though. Maybe overlay soft light. All right. I'm liking that one. Now we have our our pieces here for the roofs as well as the perch. Let's go ahead and add that. I'm going to add different types of texture for the top, as opposed to the two bottom pieces. I want to add a rusty metal texture to the bottom pieces. So I'm just going to type in rust. And there's a particular one that I want. I want something that's pretty solid because I don't want to if I pick something like a chain link fence or something, you're going, it's going to be very difficult to make that look great. I actually want this particular one. And I'll just drag it down. You little bit smaller. And I will clip it to that roof curve and just move it where I want it. There's a particular spot that I like. You can also rotate it if you want. And let's see. All right. I like how it's a little different. In spots. Oop, there we go. That's what I wanted. I like this brown here. And then the rest, we're going to be adding some additional colors to it. But I like how that's looking for right now. Let's go ahead and just play with the blend mode on that. And Let's see. I think I'm gonna go with average. It looks like a doled it. But again, I'm going to be adding some texture using some of the texture brushes they provided. And we're going to be adding color to it. So I just want that little bit of nastiness. I'll go ahead and just duplicate that same image file and drag it to my rectangle for my perch here and enjoyment of find a nice spot on it like that right there. So the blend mode is already changed. I don't need to worry about that. Now that I have that in place, I'm not loving how light that is. I don't want to stand out so much, so I'm going to drag the color. I'm sorry, I mean, your dream late value of that down and maybe play with the blend mode. So the reason that I like working in so many layers is because it does give me the flexibility to do this. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was just adding everything directly. I'd have to start again. But the wonderful thing again about working with vectors is I have this flexibility. And let's see. I'm sort of rethinking this particular texture, but actually I like hard way there. Let's just move this over. All right. I like that. So now let's go ahead and add something to our roof here. I'm actually going to add a shingle effect to this. So I'll go to my stroke studio and I'm going to type in shingle. And I want something that's shot straight on. I don't want it to be curved like this, even though the actual roof is pitched, it doesn't end up looking rate when you use that, I find it works better if I just use something that's shot straight on. I'm going to try this one here and this is actually would as opposed to a metal. But I'm okay with that. I want that. I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller and I will go ahead and clip it to that roof layer and actually move it around. I don't want any funny spots. So you can kinda see where this is sort of cut off and it doesn't look great. I'm just gonna go ahead and widen that, so I get rid of that. And now I want to change the blend mode. I think I'm going to go with soft light on this one. Let's try overlay to know about with overlay. I like that it drives or it plays into that orange that I have down here. All right. I like how this is looking thus far. I feel like this is a little too narrow down here and might want to play with the size of this bottom piece as well as the perch. So I have about center on, so I'm just gonna go ahead and drag. And all right. That's good. I think these aren't exactly lined up and I think I'm okay with that because I like that it gives it a little bit of a wonky anus. So right now this is not exactly lined up with that one and I'm not going to change it because I think I like how that's working out. So one final thing I want to do texturize is add a little bit of subtle texture to my Windows and my holes here because he just will wait flat disks sitting on top of there. So go back into my stock studio and I'm going to type in texture. And like I mentioned with the chickadee, it's difficult to add texture to something really, really light, are really, really dark. So you have to be really careful which ones you pick. I think I'm going to pick this one because there's a nice amount of lightened dark value in it, but let me just see what the actual texture is. All right. I like that. I'm not going, I'm not looking for any real texture like I have up here. I just want something subtle that just sort of gives the impression of something is inside. And move it around. And I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode on this to something like glow. And then just drop the opacity. All right? Now that I'm looking at this stroke here, because we change the coloring here. I don't like how that's working out. So I think what I'm going to do is change the stroke color on the whole. And I'm going to pick something like this sort of brownish orange color in here and see how that looks. Let's go ahead and try that. I like that better. I feel like it looks more like you're in the natural part of the wood that's not painted. So I'm gonna go ahead and use that same color here. I'll just change the stroke. All right, I wanna go ahead and clip these same textures into my windows as well as the other hole. So I'll go ahead and duplicate that. Drag it out. And I just want to drag it to a different spot again so it doesn't match too much. It's very subtle, but it adds a little something more than just a flat disc. Again, duplicate, and I'm going to clip it to the Windows. Oops. Move it around. And then I'll just duplicate that one more time and clip it to this one. All right. Let's back up a little bit. All right, I like how that's looking. We've added our texture image files and we have all of our shapes in place, but it still doesn't have the dimension that we want it to have. I actually need to add a little bit of shadowing here and there to really give it more dimension. So let's go ahead and do that next. I'm going to use air brushes in the pixel persona to add some shadowing to the house here. And I particularly want to select some of the colors in the house itself. I don't want to use black because in reality, if a shadow is hitting a building with color, the shadow is going to have some of the color from the building. It's not going to be pure black, so I want it to look a lot more realistic. So the first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and select an airbrush. I found this in the sprays and spatters that's built into designer and I like airbrush, a one in particular. I'm going to start with some shadowing here. And what I'm going to do is use my eyedropper tool and just select one of the darker blue tones here. I'll go ahead and tap to change my color and I want to drag it down a lot further than that. So I went to dark to it's not going to be black, but it is going to be a lot darker. And I'm going to bring myself down to like a nice medium brush. Now I want to select this rectangle. And if I select it before I start using the brush, it's going to automatically add the pixel layer. And that's what my assistant is telling me here. And I'm just going to go ahead and start adding some shadowing here and keeping my pencil above. So I'm not adding too much. But I do want to bring the shadows down on the sides here because this roof extends beyond the building itself. So you'd actually have some shadowing on the sides, but not too much. I'll go ahead and change the blend mode of this to multiply and drop the opacity. Let's go ahead and do the same thing with this building down here. So I want to go back to my layer option or my layer studio and select that curve. And I'll just go ahead and start adding some shadowing here. So I'm just running my pencil along that a lot more because of the way the shape of this Rufus. Alright, and I'm bringing the shadowing and more on one side than the other. Again, this is a pitched roof that comes down beyond it. So I'm just gonna go ahead and hit the sides a little bit. And then one final thing I want to do is add a little bit here. So I'm gonna kinda come up in a V formation right about there and there. So I'm just sort of giving the impression of depth. Alright, any change my blend mode on this one next, and I'll go ahead and drop my opacity. Let's go ahead and add some to our post down here. So I need to come up with a different color and we'll use the same brush though. I'll select the rectangle. And I want to select maybe you some of that brown there. And just drag down. So again, it's not black, but it's not too light either. And I'll just start hitting the sides. And this is going to be a lot more shaded because this is a lot longer. But I'm actually shading more on one side than the other. And I'll just hit it a little bit there. Backup a little bit. And I'm going to change the blend mode on that to multiply. Alright, I like the shadowing, but I think I'm going to add some more impact to my other pieces here because now they're looking a little bit flat. I'm not going to add any shadows or highlights to it, but I do want to add a little bit of patina here in there. So we're going to do that with some of the texture brushes. We'll do that next. All right, I'm going to go to my greedy textures, pixel brushes that I provide it with the class. And the first thing I wanted to do is I wanted to add a little bit of a kind of a teal patina to these two pieces here because they're metal. So I wanted to be like it's almost been in the elements for awhile. I'm going to go ahead and grab this teal color here. And I want to pick this spotted brush because this particular Rust has a lot of spots in it. So I wanted to play into that. And I'll add a pixel layer to my rectangle here and just sort of get it in spots there and bring it down into the rest here. So I'm just sort of just kinda kissing it in spots, just giving it a little bit of a again, a patina as if it's been out there for awhile and the rain will too much back it up. And I'm not going to change the blend mode on this because I actually like how that looks. All right, Let's go ahead and do the same thing with the roof next. So I'll go ahead and add a pixel layer. And I just want to hit it in certain spots. And I'm just adding a little bit more life to my roof here. If you keep the pencil outside, the brushes Carnot sort of expand into the shapes so you won't get too much. All right? I like how that's looking. I think I'm going to call that done. Now. I want to add a little weathering to this. So I'm going to go back into my gritty texture brushes and I think I'm going to pick the woody crosshatch brush here. And I'm going to select a really light color because we're going to pull the luminosity out of that to give it that weathered book. So I'll just pick an off-white color or something. And I'll add a pixel layer to my roof. And I think I'll just bring up the brush a little bit. Angina kinda hit it in spots here. Now. It doesn't look like anything right now, but I'm gonna go ahead and change the blend mode. And you'll start to see if I pull the saturation out of it. So when I change it to saturation, it's going to give it a nice weathered look as if the paint is coming out of the wood here in there. Let's go ahead and add a little more there. And it just adds a little something to it. And went a little too far there. All right, let's back up and see how this looks now that all of our textures and shapes are in place, I just want to back out and see if there's any final changes or additions that I want to make. And I think there are a few minor changes and one embellishment that I want to do. But first thing is this stroke around the hole is very vector looking. It's not, there's no texture to it at all. And it's just sort of sticking out like a sore thumb. So I just want to go ahead and change that to be able to add some texture to it. But right now there, these are both strokes, which means I can't add to texture directly to it. I need to convert them. So I'll go to my layer studio and I'm going to select both circles. Go to my edit menu and tap Expand Stroke. What that's going to do is break both of those strokes away from the original ellipse and it's going to turn that into fills. Now I can go ahead and I can add some texture directly to these two curves layer. So I'll go to my pixel persona and I'm going to grab one of my textured brushes. I think I'll go ahead with the glassy streaks brush. And I want to pick sort of a darker color that's a little darker than this one. And I'll go ahead and just select the curve and just hit it with a little bit of texture. I'm not going overboard with it. I just want to add a little bit of texture just to break up solid line. And I'll go ahead and change the blend mode to something like overlay. So it's a very subtle change, but it's enough that it's not standing out as much. So let me go ahead and do this with the other one as well. Okay. So I'm liking matte. Now there's one final edition that I actually went to meet, and that's using the assets pack to add some botanical elements to the wood as if I had painted it on and it was weathered in. So I'm going to stick to the leaf formations up here, and I'm going to add them to these two pieces here. So I'm gonna pull this one in first. And it's obviously stark white. And it's a little big, but I'm not going to worry about fitting it in. I actually like to clip it into place and a relatively large size. I'm just going to drag this down and clip it in to my piece here. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller and maybe rotate it. And I'll change the blend mode to overlay and drop the opacity. So it's cut off by the windows and things. And I'm not worried about that because again, I just want it to look like I had painted or stained it and embellish the way before I cut it. And it's just sort of a, an ingrained piece of that wood now it's sort of blended in. When add a little something down here. I'll use this smaller one and make it a lot smaller. Just sort of work it into the side here. It's just getting a hint to leave. And what this is ultimately going to do is because we're going to be adding some botanicals to our background. It's going to compliment those as well. So I'll go ahead and just drag this down and clip it again to that curve. Change the blend mode to overlay, and just drop the opacity. So that's allowing the colorful tones to come through. But still give me a nice image there. All right, let me just do something up here next. And I think I will use, I'm going to use the same leaf because it's sort of broken up nicely, but I want to flip it. So I'll go into my transform studio and I'm just going to do a horizontal flip there. And I'm just going to drag it up and sort of size it up a little bit. Again, I'm not worried about the whole cutting off any of the leaves. It's still going to have a nice hint of leaves there. And I'll drag it all the way down to my bottom rectangle. I'll make it a little bit smaller. And go ahead and change that to overlay again. You could play around with the blend modes I just find when I'm using a wood grain texture like this, especially one with color. Overlay works best. And I'll just rotate it tour I want it. The reason I'm clipping and n is even though I'm changing the blend mode, I don't want there to be any issue with anything hanging off, so I make sure that I do that just so if I add anything behind this, you're not going to see a ghost image of that on top of it. So one final change that I am seeing while I'm here, I feel like these, like this here are kinda too flat. And I want to give it a little sort of a burn effect around the edges as if I had lasered these into the wood. So I'm going to go back and select my Windows. I'll just select the first one, specifically the arch itself. I'll go into my FX Studio and I'm going to turn on Outer Glow. Now I need the contextual menu, so I'll tap outer glow, and I'm going to select a color from inside, the actual texture year one of these tan colors. Let's try that again. So something like right about there. So I've got the color and I'm gonna change my blend mode to color burn and increase the size of that so you can see what's happening. Now if I drank up the radius, you can see that it's kinda breaking up that line a little bit around it and it's adding sort of a burn effect. I can play with the intensity and make it a little bit higher. You can play with the opacity. You can also change the color. Now I'll do this thing, this same thing to the final window. I'm going to select a different color as if it's coming from a different spot. So something right about there. Change the blend mode to color burn and bring the opacity up. Okay? All right, so let's back out. This one is a little too light, so I just want to bring up the opacity on that a little bit. All right. Okay, so we have created a bird house using a combination of shapes from the rectangle tool, as well as texture image files, texture brushes to both add and subtract areas of our design. And then we used some additional design elements in the FX Studio, as well as some additional brushes to add just a subtle texture to knock back elements that are a little too harsh. And then of course, we added some of the floral embellishments using the assets and blending them into the wood. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to create a tree for your chickadee using a combination of the pencil tool, texture image files, and some pixel brushes to add some shadows and highlights. I'm also going to show you how to create a leafy brush to add some scattered leaves to the top of the illustration. So those two videos are next, and I'll see you there.
13. Illustrating a Tree: Now that we have a space for our cardinal, let's go ahead and create a setting for our chickadee next. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a tree like this one using a combination of the pencil tool, texture, image files, and some shadows and highlights that we create using pixel brushes. I'm also going to show you how to create the scattered leaf pixel brush using a grouping of shapes that we create on the vector side. Let's get started. I'm going to start by creating the trunk of my tree first. I want to select my Pencil Tool. I like this medium brown color but I need it to be on the fill side, so I'll just go ahead and swipe that across. I'll make sure that Use Fill is on down here in the contextual menu, and just draw out my trunk shape. It's going to be a cross-section coming in here from the right side. Now, this is created with the pencil tool so the shape doesn't automatically close. I want to make sure that it's closed in case I need to make any edits to it. We're also going to be adding texture to it, so we're going to want to make sure it's closed before we do that. I'll just go to my Node Tool, and I'm just going to tap "Close", and it will automatically bridge the gap between the beginning and the node there. I'm going to leave the trunk alone for right now. Again, we'll be adding texture in a bit. But let's go ahead and create some branches first. I'm going to use my pencil tool again to create the branches but I want it to be on stroke this time. So I'll go ahead and select the Pencil Tool, go back up to my Color Studio, and I'm going to swipe to get that back to the stroke settings. I also want to go into my Stroke Studio and just make sure that my pressure settings are flat like this. If they're not, just tap in the middle and you'll get reset pressure and bring it back to flat. We're going to be creating our branches with strokes and use pressure settings to get a head start on the shape of the branches. Then we're going to be converting those to fill so we can add texture to it, and that's going to give us additional options to make further aesthetic changes to the branch. But I always like to start with a stroke because it's the easiest way to get a branch shape first. I'm going to keep this up to about 150. If you can't move it up here, which you're not going to be able to go over 100 points up in the Stroke Studio, just go to the contextual menu at the bottom of the pencil tool and you can go ahead and change that there. I'm going to create one large main branch, and then we'll have offshoots off of that. I'll start with my main branch. Now, obviously, this looks nothing like a branch. It's flat and boring and there's no angular spots to it. That's where the pressure settings are going to come in. If I drag this side down, it's going to decrease the pressure there and it's going to give a nice point to it. I'm going to keep that about there. If I were to move this up and down, this node over here, it's going to change this side. But I don't want to do that. I actually want to keep that relatively wide. We're actually going to be making it even wider once we turn this into a fill. Now I'm going to start adding some additional pressure settings between these two nodes. So I'll go ahead and just tap, and I'm going to make a nice flowing shape between the two. Make sure you don't do anything too harsh because you'll get weird shapes like that. It's a good start from the main branch, let's go ahead and create some offshoots. I'm going to bring my width down slightly. I'll create a second branch with my pencil tool coming out about here. Now, I'm going to avoid putting any branches right about here because I know that I want to put my chickadee there. So I'm going to stick to below the main branch, and maybe back here a little bit. Go ahead and just add a few more branches here. You can change the pressure settings on each one to make it vary a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and just adjust some of these just to get a little bit of a difference going. Now, you can see there's this little knob hanging out here. It's the node in the back here because this is all the way up here. If I just drag this down, that'll disappear. Since it's going to be behind it anyway, I'm not going to worry about how thick this one is. I just want to get rid of that little bump out there. Let me go ahead and go back into this one and just see if I want to make any changes to the pressure settings. They look really smooth right now, but I'm going to show you how to add some additional aesthetic bumps and lumps to the branches once we convert this to a fill. Let's go ahead and just make some further adjustments. This is bumping out again since I just made that a little more narrow, so I'm just going to go ahead and pull that down. Now I think I'll do one final branch right about here, and maybe make it a little bit thicker. Now that I'm looking at this, this one is probably a little too thick, so I'm just going to bring it down a little bit. I need to go back into my pencil tool. It automatically brought me back to 100 points there, so I'm just going to bring it a little higher here. Now I have this larger one bumping out from under here. Let me go ahead and fix that. Again, I'm just going to go to my Stroke Studio and just bring down the node so it disappears. I like how this is looking. There's going to be some additional changes, but let's go ahead and call it done as far as the stroke settings go. There's a few housekeeping things I want to do first before I convert it to a fill and move on to creating the additional aesthetic changes. If you go to your Layer Studio, you'll see that the trunk is on the bottom, we created that first, and we have all of these curves layers above it. I actually want the main branch to be above all of the smaller ones. We're going to be adding some shadowing to give it more depth and dimension. It's going to be easier to do that. It's going to show better if your smaller pieces are behind your larger ones. I also want to make sure this smaller one is behind this piece. So I'll go ahead and drag that down. Then I'm going to go ahead and take all four of these. I'm going to group them so they stay together, and I'm going to drag them beneath the trunk layer. I'm going to do that because I'll be adding some shadowing here as well and again, it's going to help drive home the idea that it's coming out of the tree and not just part of the tree if it's behind. Now, this would be a really good time to label your layers. We're going to be adding multiple copies of texture to these, and it's a good idea to label your layers so that you know what you're adding it to. I'm going to go ahead and do that now, and then I'll come right back. I've gone ahead and labeled all of my layers, and I just named mine basically the size and where they're at in relation to this main branch. The next thing I want to do is I want to prepare them for texture. You can't add texture to a stroke; you can only add it to a fill. While this one here was created with fill, the branches are all currently a single-line stroke. I'm going to select all four of them. I'm going to go up to my Edit menu here and I'm going to tap "Expand Stroke", and that's going to create fills out of all of them. It's also going to give us additional nodes to work with to make further aesthetic changes. Again, I just get a head start with my stroke and then I make further edits once I convert it. But it's really important that you do that step of converting or you're not going to be able to add texture to these. Let's go ahead and make some further aesthetic changes to our branches just to make them look a little less smooth and more branch-like. The first thing I'm going to do is go to my main branch here. I'm going to tap it to select it. I'm going to tap on this node and drag it up. It's curved in in a V shape. I'm going to do the same thing with these two, I'm going to select them and just bring them down like this.
14. Creating a Leaf Brush : There are a couple of things that I want to note about creating a brush on the pixel side using a selection of shapes that you create. The first thing is, you need to have designer 1.9 or higher. As of this recording, it's a relatively new feature. If you haven't already upgraded, make sure that you did that, it is a free upgrade. That way, you can follow along with this. The other things that I want to mention is, this is going to ultimately be a pixel brush. Even though we're going to be creating our shapes on the vector side, we're going to be creating the shapes, rasterizing them, and then creating the pixel brush on that side. If it's a brush that you plan to use in the future, make sure that you're creating it in a document that's of a higher resolution. We're also going to be adding texture to this, but we're not going to be able to access the Stock studio when we do that. If you don't already have a texture image file either on your iPad or in a Cloud file that you can access, go ahead to either Unsplash, Pixabay or Pexels website and look for a piece of texture to use and just save it either again to your iPad or to a Cloud file that you can access from within Designer. Then finally, the brush that we create is going to be whatever color shapes you create. If I create a series of green leaves by final brush, is going to be green. You're not going to be able to use the Color studio here to change the view before you use it. Now, I am going to show you how you can put a color overlay over it once you've used the brush. I'll show you that at the end. But again, the actual brush itself is going to be whatever color your raster group is. Now that we have all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and get started on creating the actual brush. I'm going to go ahead and turn my tree off here so there's some room to work. Now, I'm going to use the pencil tool again to create my leaves. There's two ways that I create leaves using the pencil tool. If you'd like to create your leaf using the pen tool or the shape tools, you can certainly do that. Whatever shape you create is the shape that's going to be used in the brush, so it's totally up to you. Now, I'm looking for more of a hint of leaves like this one. I'm not going for any major detail here where you can see the branches and things like that. I really just wanted a canopy of leaves at the top to fill out my illustration. I'm just going to create the leaves themselves. The first way that you can do that with the pencil tool is to have it set on your stroke settings. I'm going to go ahead and find a nice green color here. I'll go into my Pressure settings in my Stock Studio and I want to reset this. Right now, of course, if I draw out a shape, it's pretty boring, really flat, just like it was with the branch, but if I go ahead and add a note here in the middle of my Pressure settings and then drag these two down, you get a leaf shape. I could change the width of it, I could draw it curved. I can use my node tool to make further manipulations, but it's a nice quick way of making a leaf shape with one stroke. Now, for the purposes of what we're doing, you don't have to convert it, but if you were to create leaves like this under other circumstances and want to add texture, again, remember you're going to need to convert it first to a fill, but this is how I typically create the leaves on my plants and things like that. The other way that you can do it is to use a fill instead of a stroke. Again, I'll select my pencil tool and I'm going to go ahead and flip this over to the fill side and make sure that Use Fill is on. Then I'm just going to go ahead and draw out a leaf shape. I'm basically just freehand drawing some leaves. Now, for the purposes of this scatter brush, you're going to want to create leaves, of course, that are similar to one another because it's on the same tree, but create various sizes and create them in different directions. We're ultimately going to be creating a scatter brush and creating your grouping in different directions is going to help drive that home. I think I'm actually going to use the first process where I use the pencil tool on stroke. I'll go ahead back to the stroke side. I'm going to zoom out here a little bit and make this a lot smaller, and I'm just going to go ahead and start dragging out some leaf shapes, various lengths, and a curve some of them. I'm not bunching them up too closely because I want some scatter to them, so I need to have some space between them, but I also don't want too much space between them because if you have large breaks in the actual nozzle, the group that creates the brush, you're going to see it once you lay down the brush on your canvas. Let me go ahead and just create a few more here. Now, right now it's all one color, I'm actually going to change that in a minute. You can also go to your Move Tool and you could just select one of them and two-finger tap and drag and duplicate it, rotate it so you don't have to keep creating them. You can also go ahead and drag across and select a bunch, maybe make it a little smaller. Make sure it's rotated so it looks different. It's up to you how you'd like to create it. I'm going to go ahead and select all of these and just make the group a little bit smaller, so I have some room to work. Now, one thing I did not do and you can see it when I go ahead and reduce this is I did not turn on my setting here to scale with object. Make sure that if you're using strokes, you always have Scale with Object on, so that now if I go down, it's going to scale with that selection. I'm just going to go ahead and grab a few more pieces here and just rotate them around. I don't need too big of a bunch. I'm just randomly grabbing and I'm rotating as I go. You can also, of course grab a single one if you just want to fill in some space. I think this is good. I'm going to call the actual shaped on, but now it's all one color and I actually want some variation. With my Move tool selected, I'm going to turn on Add to selection. I'm just going to tap and select a random selection of shapes and I'm trying not to select some next to each other. If you do, it's not a big deal. I'm going to go up to my colors. You up here and I'm going to pick a nice medium green to change these two. Again, I need those to be a stroke, so I'll take my fill off of there and maybe make us a little bit later. I'll deselect. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing and select a few more. I'm going to pick a much lighter color here. I want a nice, dark value, medium value, and then a really light value. It's going to give more depth to your leaves once you put them on the tree. I'm not going to worry about little things like bump-outs like this here because you're not going to see it in the final result. But again, you can create your shapes however you'd like. If you want to create really nicely shaped leaves, that's totally up to you. I'm looking for more of a scattery look here. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drag across and select all of these again. We need to rasterize this and if you go to your layer studio, you're going to see that you have multiple layers making up all of these curved shapes. If you needed to rasterize each one of these without grouping them like this, you'd have to go into each layer and then combine them. The quickest way to rasterize this entire group is to actually group it. Now that I've done this, I can just go in and rasterize it. It's going to not only rasterize it, but it's automatically going to keep them as one group. Before you do that though, I recommend making a duplicate of it. If you need to go back in and make any changes to the vector shapes you created, once you rasterize it, you're not going to be able to do that. I always have a little backup just in case and I just turned it off so it's not in the way. I'm just going to go ahead back to my layers studio with that second group selected and I'm going to go to this little dropdown. It looks like a stack of papers and tap "Rasterize". Now that's created one, large pixel group out of all of those leaves. Now, we're going to go ahead and create the actual pixel brush out of this shape. All right, let's go to the pixel persona and I want to make sure I have that group selected. It's going to deselect it when you switch over, but just go ahead and hit the Move tool again. I'm going to go to my brush studio. Now, I have a category of brushes setup called my brushes, and I just created it by going to the Burger Menu at the top and hitting "Add category". You can also rename it this way. If you want to set up your own set of brushes, you can certainly do that or you can put it in an existing folder. I'm actually going to go ahead and put mine in the texture brush folder that I provided with the class. I'll go back up to my Burger Menu with that selected and I'm going to tap new brush from selection. It's going to give you this screen right here. Now, there's three tabs to the brush studio for designer. There's the general tab and this is going to impact the individual nozzle that makes up the brush, so that's the group that we just created. The second tab, dynamics is going to impact the brush as a whole, so not just the individual nozzle, but how the overall brush behaves. Then the third tab is where we're going to add some texture. Let's start with general. The only thing I'm going to change on this side is the spacing. I'm going to drag it up because I don't want this to be a stamp brush, but I also don't want it to be bunched up like this. I'm going to drag it out so that my individual groups are just about touching one another. I'm not worrying if anything's overlapping because in reality leaves overlap one another. I'm going to call that one done. Now, I'm going to go to the Dynamics page and this is where we're going to impact the entire brush so this entire thing here. The first thing I want to change is my rotation. I'll go down here and I'm going to change the dropdown to random and drag my rotation all the way up to 100 percent. What this is going to do is as I'm drawing out my pixel brush, it's going to constantly rotate the individual nozzle that makes up the brush as a whole in different directions so it really drives home that scattered effect and it just gives it more of a realistic look. The other thing I'm going to do is go down to Scatter Y and change it to random, and I'm just going to bump this up a little bit. That's going to scatter it on the y-axis just slightly again, just helping with that whole scatter effect. Then I'm also going to change the size so that each nozzle when it's laid down is changed in size slightly depending on the pressure of my pencil. I'll go ahead and just drag this up just a little bit. I'm only going to bring it to about 20 percent and I'm going to call it done. You can play around with other things. You could try the luminosity. That's going to change the luminosity values of each of the nozzles that make up the overall brush. You could do some hue changes so that it changes the color of the brush as you're drawing out. Certainly, go ahead and play around with this. These are the three that I'm going to change for this brush though. We're going to add some texture to the brush, but I want to test the brush first. I'm going to go ahead and hit, "Okay". I want to test my brush before I put the texture on it just so I can make sure it's accumulating where I want it to and it's scattering where I want it. I'm going to turn off this group layer and I'm going to add a new blank, pixel layer because again, remember designer automatically adds pixels to an existing pixel layer. I'll go ahead and select my paintbrush tool and make sure that brush is selected, and I'm just going to draw out some leaves just to make sure it's laying down the way I want it. I like how it's accumulating in some spots and scattering in others. I'm going to call the actual shaped on it, I like how it looks. I'll go ahead and delete that. Now, if you wanted to make edits, you could do that. We're going to go back in and add texture, and it's actually in the same spot. We'll go to the brush studio, I'm going to tap and hold on the brush and hit "Edit" and it will bring you back to that original screen. At this point, if you wanted to make some additional changes to the dynamics, you could do that. But we're going to go ahead and add some texture. I'll go to the last screen here and you can see this is the brush nozzle, that grouping of leaves that we made, making up the brush itself, and I'm going to tap on set texture. I have this texture that I created for another class, I'm just going to go ahead and put in here. Now, my brush disappeared at the top because of the white and dark values that are in this texture. I'm going to invert it and you'll see it shows back up again because it flipped. What was white is black and vice versa. I'm also going to go ahead and change the mode to nozzle. You can switch back and forth between the final and nozzle on yours to see which you like better and I know it's probably very difficult to see the texture on mine. Unfortunately, I can't make this larger, but go ahead and just play with the settings on yours. You can also change the scale of your texture here. I like to keep mine between 50 and 60, I find that that avoids any patterning and I'm going to go ahead and click "Okay". Now I'll go back into my [inaudible] paintbrush, select paintbrush, and I'm going to draw out some shapes. It's a little too big, let's go ahead and bring that down. It's a subtle change but if I zoom in, you can see that it's added the texture, and it gives it a watercolory refill. Now, I'm ready to add this to my tree. Let me go ahead and bring my tree back, and I'll make my brush a little bit smaller. I just want to add some leaves to the top here. Again, I'm just trying to fill out the canopy on the top and frame out the bird once I put him in there. You can also stamp some here and there if you have some spots you want to fill in. I like that, but I think my branch it's actually a little too high now. I'm going to grab my move tool and grab that branch. I'm going to hold my finger down, so it keeps it straight, I'm just going to drag it down. That's going to give me a little more room for my bird here but I like how the leaves are looking. Again, it's the green of the shapes that we created, but what if I wanted to add a different color to my leaves? This is a pixel layer like any other, so you can add effects to it if you want. I'm going to go ahead and select that. Go into my FX Studio and I want you to turn on "Color overlay". Now, it automatically adds black to it and I don't want that. I'll go ahead and tap to get to Contextual menu and I'm just going to change the color to something like yellow. Now, it's a really flat yellow just laying on top of it. But you can play with the blend modes to change it and get some of that variation back. If you put it on something like soft light or overlay, you can get a fall-like effect instead of the green, springy leaves. Now, this is a non-destructive edit, which means I can change it at any time. I can go back in, I can change the color. I can also turn it off. It's a nice way of changing color without having to start fresh. We've gone ahead and created a tree as well as a scattered leaf brush in this video. In the next one, we're going to add some additional details to both our birdhouse as well as this illustration by adding some natural background elements to our illustration. I'll see you there.
15. Adding Natural Elements to the Cardinal: Now that our house is done, I've gone ahead and pulled the cardinal in just to use him as a place holder. I want to add some elements to the background and maybe a little bit to the foreground to help fill things in and complete the illustration. I'm also going to show you in this video how to give this little guy some legs so that we can finalize the entire illustration. Let's go ahead and get started. I want to show you my process for how I add background elements, but ultimately it's subjective and it's completely up to your particular style. You might be more of a minimalist or more of a maximalist than I am and want to add more or less, it's totally up to you. In my mind, the way I approached mine is that these two elements here are my main stars, they are my main focus. I don't want to overwhelm them with anything. But this, as it is, is pretty stark. I do want to add a little bit and that's how I'm going to approach it. The first thing I'm going to do is I actually want to move these two over to the right a little bit. I want to just give it a different composition. I tend to start in the middle and then just shift things. This is going to give me a little more room on my left to add things like some flowers and stuff like that. That can be a little more sparse over here to keep the focus on them. The next thing I'm going to do is I want to add some background elements. I'm going to go ahead and turn this off for right now. I want to go to my designer persona and I'm going to grab one of my favorite brushes to add clouds. That is the textured acrylic 2 brush. I have this off white color and this is the color I tend to use for my background skies. I've tried using blue skies before and just I never liked the feel of them, so this is my personal preference. If you want to go ahead and change the color of your sky, go ahead and do that. I'm going to go ahead and pick something like this peach tone. Grab my vector brush tool and make a relatively large brush. I'm just going to put some little swooshes in here. It's obviously very harsh right now, I want that to be blended in. The first thing I'm going to do is group these because then I can actually change the blend mode all at once. I'll go ahead and shift the layer options and I'm going to change that to something like soft light or maybe average actually. I think I'm going to use that. I'll just drop the opacity. This is just breaking up the background with some textural clouds. The great thing is, the reason I use the vector brush is I have the ability to move them independently of one another. I can also decrease the size of them if I want. I'm going to bring that backup though. I can get rid of them if I don't like a particular one, but I like how that looks. I'm going to go ahead and let that go. I want to drag that below the house layer because when I turn him back on, I want those behind him. Now I am actually going to turn both elements back on now that I've put those clouds in place. I'm going to hold off on putting a sun in until I put my flowers and plants in because I may or may not put one in. I'm not really sure yet. It might be a little too much of an overwhelmed if I do that. Next, let's go ahead and use our assets to add some plant and flower life to the composition. I'm going to focus most of my attention with the botanicals over on the left here and I'll add a few over here. Now, I do want to add them both behind and in front of the house because I'm trying to give the impression of depth and that's going to help do that. If all of your flowers are behind the house, it's going to look rather flat. I'm going to start over on this side and I want to use some of the botanicals I used in this house here. I'm going to start with this wheat looking one. I am going to put him all the way in the back and he's going to be relatively dark. I'm not sure why that plant became a he, but I'm just going to call him a he. I am going to turn it to this dark teal color. It might be hard to see it on the video, but it's actually a dark blue and not black. I'll just move him all the way below the house but above the clouds. Now, I'm not going to worry about any of it being cut-off because in reality, as a photographer, if I were shooting this, he'd be my focus, not this. It lens the realism of it if your plants are peeking off the edges. Now, it's really dark right now, but I'm going to leave it as is. I'm going to be adding some texture to it to lighten it up. But he's good for right now. It's a nice contrast between the house and the plant. I add something right about there. I think I'll do that with maybe this one here. I'll make it a little bit smaller. I'm also trying not to cover up some of my favorite spots on the house there. This one I am going to move to the back as well. Once again, I'm not worrying about it peeking off the side. I'm just going to go ahead and change the color to something different than that, maybe a little bit lighter. Maybe actually something yellowish. I'm going to do that. Again, I will be adding textures, so it's going to change the color a little bit, but I just wanted a nice contrast between the two of them. I'm going to put some flowers down here, but let me go ahead and complete some of the plant elements first. I want to pull in some of this grass like thing in the front here. Again, I'm trying not to cover up some of my favorite spots on the house there like that little patina that I added there. I'll make this one a green color. Again, I don't want to add too much because the focus isn't the plants, the focus are these two things. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that and flip it and just pull this one to the back and maybe pull it down below the house. I want one more little element right there. I'll use this guy here, but make him a lot smaller. I'll flip it with my transform studio. I'm not going to worry about this plant being in front of the bird a little bit. Because again, that's going to help with the depth there. I'm just going to move it over. His feet are going to be about here. I don't want to cover up too much of his tail, but let's go ahead and give this a color. Maybe that pale yellow. Now that I have the plants in place, let's go ahead and add in some flowers. I'm going to focus them over here on the left side. I'm going to select this one here. I want to pick a color that's complimentary to the red but not the same. I think I'll pick something in the peach family. I'm going to create one flower, add texture to it and then duplicate that flower and just make minor adjustments to it. It makes it a lot easier than having to add texture to multiple flowers. I want to give this guy a little center here. These two assets are actually fills with strokes that are made to look like stamens. I'll go ahead and change the fill color to brown and I think we'll change that to black and just move it to the center of the flower. Again, I'll go ahead and add additional ones, wants the textures on. But now I have all of the elements in place that I want to, but they're all obviously a little too solid. I want to add some texture to them, so I'm going to go ahead and do that next. I'm going to go to my Stock Studio and type in texture. I just want to find some nice gritty textures. We have a really small surface area that we're working with. I'm looking for things that have some really unexpected movement in it. Because when you clip it to this smaller piece, it's really going to help add some nice depth to the element. I'm going to go ahead and change that to soft light. I'm using textures and blend modes that I know work well with these. I would just go ahead and play around with the colors that you're using and the blend modes and see what's working best with your particular item that you have in place. I'm going to leave the opacity the way it is on that, I like that it's got some dark and light in it. I'll go ahead and focus on this one next. I'm going to try and use different textures as I go. I like to use unexpected textures because it may be, for example, concrete, but once you put it on the plant, you really can't see that's the case, but it adds some nice texture. I'm going to try this one here on this back plant. I'll go ahead and clip it. Change the blend mode to probably softly. In this case I am going to drop the opacity a little bit. I'm going to be using some pixel brushes and adding some additional texture and color to these. I don't want to overwhelm it with too much texture. It was also looking a little too much concrete there. I'm going to go ahead and add texture to the rest of my elements here, and I'm going to speed it up. I'll see you on the other side. I have the base layer of texture on all of my plant and the flower. Now I want to add a little additional texture using pixel brushes. I'm also going to bring some little pops of color in here, in there. I'll go to my pixel persona and I'm going to find my texture pack here. Let's choose this spotted brush to start and start on this guy here. I want to use a contrasting tone here. Let's see. I'll go in and I want to add a pixel layer to my plant here. I'm just going to just tap it in certain spots. Again, I'm just adding some additional texture here and there. It isn't any plant you would see in nature, but I actually like having a fun with stuff like that. I'll go ahead and do that with this one here. Again, I'm going to add a pixel layer. I'll grab a different brush this time and a contrasting color, maybe a blue. Let's see what that looks like. Make it a little smaller. No, I'm not liking the blue. This is what I meant by its subjective, I just like to try different colors and different brushes and just see what I like best, but you may find yourself changing in here and there. I think that brush itself is not working for me, let's try a different one. I like that, a little bit bigger. I'm just trying to break up some of that yellow a little bit. I might try and change the Blend mode and see what happens. See only thing about working with the iPad, is there's only so much room to see things here. Let's go ahead. I'll probably end up going back to normal. I'm going to do that and just drop the opacity a little bit. I'm just trying to break up the leaf shape a little bit and I want to add a little something to this one here. I'm not going to worry about the rest of them. I think I will use this one, I'm going to use the Rocky Shimmer. Let's go ahead and add a pixel layer there. This is a nice yellow, I think I'm going to add some of this tone here and I'm just going to lightly hate these guys. I don't want to add too much because I actually really like the texture on that one. I'm going to call that done. Now, the last thing I want to do is, I want to add multiple duplicates of my flower here. I'm going to group it together. The first thing I want to do is make this guy a little bit bigger and move him right about there. I'll go ahead and two-finger tap and drag. I'm going to make him a little smaller and maybe push it down like that, so it almost looks like it's flattened. Rotate it a little. I'm not going to worry about it being slightly off the Canvas because again, just like with the plants, I am not focusing on these if I were taking an image of them or painting them or something, I'm focusing on him. I just want these to be filler on the side here, so let me go ahead and make another copy. The other thing I'm going to do is change the tone of some of these. We move him up here, I think. Again, just push it back and change the direction. I think I want to move him over though. Maybe make this one a little bit bigger. I feel like I'm covering up my favorite spots on my birdhouse, but sometimes you can't worry too much about that. I can actually just move the birdhouse over a little bit. I'm not going to worry about the roof being off slightly. I feel like this peach is blending in a little too much. I'm going to leave him where it's at, but I want to grab the curve on that one and just drop it down just to give it a little bit of a difference between the two. I'm going to do the same thing with this one, but maybe not as much. Just so that there's some variation between the three flowers, or maybe I'll bring it down a lot more. I'm not liking that either. Let's leave him there. I could rotate him too. Just play around. If you don't like how something's looking, again you can always just move it around. You can change it, pick a different flower. I'm going to move him off a little bit. Now one final thing I want to do is right now these flowers look like they're floating somewhere, so I just want to add the hint of some stems behind it. I'm going to use this one here, and I'm going to add just a dark green to it. I'm not even going to add texture to it. I'm just going to drop it behind the flowers and make it a lot smaller, so that it's looking like it's filling in stems and these aren't just floating flowers. I am going to call this done. Again, I want him to be the focus. I think I may make him a little bit bigger, and I'm not going to add any more plants. I think we're good to go there. The house is where I want it to be. I just want him to be a little bit more in focus. I have decided not to add a sun here, but if you wanted to add a sun, you can just use your Ellipse Tool and place the sun anywhere you want it to be. I'll typically add a texture to it. Sometimes I'll also add a textured stroke to it using the vector brushes, but I just feel like if I added that to here, it would be a bit too much. At the very most, what I would probably do is add one really big one in the background that I really blend in using a Blend Mode and Opacity settings. But again, I really think it would just take away the focus from him and that's where I want it to be. The final step that I'm going to do here with this illustration is give this guy some legs and feet, so we'll go ahead and do that next. I'm going to use the Pen Tool to add some legs and feet to our bird here. I think I'm going to pick a relatively dark color to contrast or play into the dark of the mask here, but I'm not going to pick black. It's actually a very dark brown. I'll go ahead and select the "Pen Tool" and I want to add this. I'm going to add it on the top to start. I'm going to change my pressure settings on my stroke, I'm just going to play with them. Make sure you don't have something selected, I just went ahead and change that. Go ahead and reset that, and now I'll go ahead and do it. I'm just adding just to give myself some texture to the leg, so it's not just a flat straight line. I also want to drop the size a lot and I'll go ahead and just tap out a leg, now that's still too wide, so I'll bring it down and it's actually a little too dark. Let's try just another brown color. I'm going to step back. I like the width and I like the texture. I don't want to get too much into the weeds with changing the texture or the pressure settings here because it will just take a focus away. I'll go ahead and deselect that and I want to now add a foot and I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, but I'll go ahead and tap it out to start. All I do to add his foot is just go ahead and tap and drag and I just give a little bit of a curve. I make it a little bit thinner than the leg itself, and then I'm going to go ahead and tap a little toe here. For me that's it. I have done some illustrations where I've gotten really detailed as far as, I have a claw wrapping around something. In one of the upcoming sessions where I'm going to show you other birds, I'll show you how to do that. But since he's on a flat surface, I don't want to do that here. Now one thing I do want to make sure is he's behind that plant. I'll go to my layers here. I'm going to go ahead and group this leg together and I'm going to drag it down, so it's actually on the platform, and I'm going to keep it in front of the bird for right now. I'm just going to duplicate the group and that's going to be the second leg, so I'll two-finger tap and drag. I'm not going to worry about the toes because you can't see it behind there anyway. But what I do want to add to this is a cover here. If you look at a bird, they have what almost looks like pants, you're not going to just see this harsh line here where there's just a stick coming out of the body. I want to give it a little cap here, but I actually want it to have the same texture as the body. I'm going to go above the legs and grab the Rectangle Tool. I also want to select the red that I used for the cardinal. Make sure you don't have anything selected or you'll accidentally change that. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle with the red fill. It's a little too harsh, I want to round it up here a little bit. Again, I can use my Corner Tool for that, but I need to convert this to a curve, so I have nodes. Now I can go to my Corner Tool and just drag across to select those two and just drag up slightly on the end there. It's a little round at the top, I'm not going to worry about this because it's actually going to be blended into the body. Now I'm going to two-finger tap and drag across to add this little pants thing to this guy. Obviously, that's just sitting on top and it doesn't look great. I want to blend it in with the body and when I do that, it's actually going to add the existing texture. I'll go into my Layer Studio, I want to select both of those new curves. I'm going to go into the bird, and I want to find the curve for the body. This is where it's really important to label your layers because you don't want to accidentally choose this one, you want to choose this one. Now I'll go up to my Edit menu and do an "Add". It's going to look really weird because it moved everything up to the top. But I'll just go ahead and take that whole thing and I'm going to drag it down beneath the wing, and now it's back to where it should be. Now of course, the legs are just sitting on top and that's not what we want, but we'll just go ahead and grab both of those and drag them beneath the body. Now we have some nice legs and feet and the little pants-like things that are attached to the body. Let me just back up and take a look at this and see if there's anything I want to change. Since I'm not adding a sun, I might change the size of the roof here, and just make it a little wider, maybe a touch taller. I am going to call that done. In this video, we added some botanical elements using some existing assets that we had and tried to find a nice balance between filling things in and not overwhelming our two main subjects. We added some atmospheric elements in the background to break up that sky. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and do the same thing for our chickadee in the tree settings, so I'll see you there.
16. Finishing up the Chickadee Illustration (Time-lapse): Just like with the carnelian, I want to go ahead and complete the chickadees setting. Now, I'm actually going to do the flowers and other botanicals as a time-lapse because the process that I used for the cardinal is exactly the same. But what I did want to show you in this video is in looking at the overall composition, if I were to have my little chickadee here up in the branch, they're really tiny in real life. For me to be somewhat realistic about it, I'd have to make him pretty small and you're going to lose him in all of the other elements. What I've decided to do is actually add two chickadees to my illustration. I'm going to have one in the foreground here and then one in the background to sit on the branch. Now, I don't have to start over again to create the chickadee. I can actually just take this guy and duplicate him. But obviously, the problem we have here is that it looks exactly like the other one and even though all chickadees are pretty similar to one another, there are going to be some subtle differences here and there. In the same illustration, I do want to make sure that it doesn't look like I just two-finger tapped and dragged out a duplicate. Because we have these all set as separate layers, we can very easily make adjustments. I'm going to show you first how to do that, and then I'll go ahead and fill in the rest of the illustration as a time-lapse. I think I want this little guy to have his tail up like this. But this one, I am going to adjust some of the elements to just give him some different positioning. The first thing I want to do is change his tail. I'm just going to go ahead and rotate it. It's down and is pulled right about there and I think I'm also going to adjust his body a little bit so it's not as big as the other ones. I'll just move that in a little bit, which means I also need to move in my other elements. Before I do that, I want to select all of the pieces that make up that chickadee. Let's see. We have the white there, and now I can go ahead and do that. Just making him slightly smaller and maybe a little less ball-like. I'll go ahead and move his eye and beak in. I'm not making major changes, but even some small, subtle changes are going to make it look different. Go ahead and move his eye in, I just want to make sure that everything is in place where it's supposed to be now. The beak [inaudible] whole too far down. I'll just back out. Now, obviously, we're missing his legs here and I'll probably end up adjusting the legs. I added the legs the same way that I added the cardinal, I just did it off-camera. I'll end up adjusting it because while his feet might be one way here, this little guy might be sitting on something else. The great thing about how you do it with multiple pen strokes is that you can easily adjust them. I think one final thing I want to do is just change the color of his tummy a little bit and maybe make the texture a little bit less prominent. Oops, that's the wrong one. Again, it's just minor changes and I'm also going to flip him the other direction. I'll just go into my transform studio and do a horizontal flip. He also needs to be a little bigger, but I'm not going to change the size yet until I put the other elements in place, and then I'll decide how big I want him to be. Again, I'm going to go ahead and fill in the rest of this with the elements, but I'm going to go ahead and time-lapse it. I'm going to speed it up at this point and I will see you on the other side. Here is the final illustration. I added a sun using the ellipse and a vector brush as my stroke just to break up the edge a little bit. I also went ahead and I added an effect to it in the FX Studio, specifically outer glow. I just sampled a color from inside and changed the intensity and the radius of it just to break up that edge a little bit, because I didn't want the sun to be the standout here, I wanted everything else. Now one thing you probably noticed as I was going through is I changed my colors, shapes, locations, sizes, and everything multiple times. The time-lapse probably could have been even longer, but I decided to stop at some point because sometimes you just need to adjust as you go and always know what I want my focus to be. If I feel like certain things are crowding it, especially when you're doing something like this with a lot of elements, don't be afraid to make changes. Nothing is set in stone, especially when you're working with vectors and that's one of the beautiful things about them is that they are flexible and adjustable. You can go in and make changes to the colors. You could change the textures on them and even the location. I actually ended up pulling these elements here back some and made them a little smaller. I made this one a little bit bigger but pulled it back as well because I felt like they were crowding my chickadee here. Now one final change I think I might make is I am not really loving the leaves at the top here because my elements at the bottom are so soft as far as their tones. I feel like this is too harsh. In addition to a color overlay, you can also go into your adjustments studio. Now, these are technically photographic adjustments, but they work on here as well and one thing that I might use is just, let's try a curves here. I'm just going to bring them up. I'm going to bring this middle thing up and it's just brightening it. Just giving it a nice, brighter green tone. Because again, since I don't have the flexibility of being able to change the tone with my color studio, I can do it in other ways like using the color overlay and the effects. Or I can use a number of different ones in here, whether it's the hue and saturation or the curves, or even the brightness and contrast. I like how much later that is, I'm going to go ahead and leave that alone now. One final thing that I might do is I didn't break up the sky like I did with the cardinal, but I felt like it almost might be a little bit too much. I might consider adding a overall texture layer just to unify everything together. But I think for now I'm going to leave this alone. All right, so now we have given both our cardinal and our chickadee a home. In the next video, we're going to talk all about the class project where you get to show me and everyone else your beautiful work. I will see you there.
17. The Class Project: The project for this class will be to create your own bird and bird house illustration in designer using the process that you learned in the class. My challenge to you is to have fun. Remember, if you include two or three characteristics that make a bird what it is, people will recognize what you're creating, but it gives you the flexibility to play around with other aspects such as the textures, the line art, and other things. Whether it's the bird, bird house, or even the background elements, have fun. Play around with textures, and colors, and even some shapes, but most of all enjoy the process of creating. Now I would love to see what you create, and it's always helpful for prospective students to see what they learn when they take the class. I hope you'll consider sharing your project to the Class Project section on Skillshare. The easiest way to do that is to screenshot your work. I'm going to show you a really quick way to do that using your Apple pencil on your iPad. Just wait from one bottom corner to the opposite top corner. You can crop in and then hit 'Done". It will allow you to see either to the photos or files, and you're all set to upload it to Skillshare. Again, I hope you'll consider sharing your project, and I can't wait to see what you create.
18. Wrapping Things Up...: Well, we've reached the end of the class. Thank you so much for trusting me with your time and allowing me to teach you some of my methods using Designer. What you've learned here is going to help you create just about any textured vector object using the app. I hope you enjoy exploring new subjects and applying what you've learned. Remember, this is the first in a series of bird classes. I'll be adding shorter classes focusing on one new bird and one new setting, so be sure to be on the lookout. I'll also be adding classes in a number of other drawing apps as well. If you haven't already, click the "Follow" button on my Skillshare profile, and you'll always be notified whenever I add a new class. Finally, if you share your work on social media, please feel free to tag me at the handle on the screen, as I'd love to see and share your work. Also, if you love texture as much as I do, consider joining my Facebook group dedicated to all things texture for digital artists, where you can ask questions, share your work, as well as tips and tricks in all digital apps, not just Designer, in a friendly, supportive environment. Thank you again for taking the class, and happy creating.
Tracey Capone, Illustrator, Photographer & Designer
