Unflat: Make Vector Textures from Scratch in Adobe Illustrator CC

1. Trailer: Hi there, my name is Esther Nariyoshi. I am a surface pattern designer and illustrator. I love working with vector graphics. It's super dynamic and flexible and there's no such thing as pixelation in vector graphics. You can create your art into whatever size and would never lose the line quality even when the final export is 10 times larger. However, there is a problem with vector graphics. They can't appear to be really flat, that's what this class is about. We're going to take a deep dive into Adobe Illustrator to find out ways of creating native textures from scratch. But I want to warn you ahead of time, because this class is going to take some commitment. We're going to cover a lot of ground in one class. We will take some basic geometric food illustrations and take them to the next level by creating native texture brushes, playing with built-in effects and much, much more. You may or may not end up with some ice cream at the end and maybe memorizing 20 keyboard shortcuts along the way. This class is best for someone who has just some little bit of experience with Illustrator. If you're looking to up your illustrate or game, this is the class for you. 2. Class Resources: Before we hit the ground running, I would like to walk you through the class file I have created for you. This illustrator file is called following along. For those who don't want to spend too much time on creating shapes or selecting colors, this file will give you a jump start. You're welcome to grab it from the class resources area and use it to follow along with the class. If you would like to post a masterwork on social media, or make commercial work using the knowledge that you have learned from this class, feel free to make your own illustration. Either way, let's dig in. 3. Sausage: In this section, we're going to create the vector textures for the sausage. We're going to start out by creating some basic geometric shapes and then slowly add three additional layers to make the sausage look a lot more realistic. Because Illustrator is a vector-based program, which means that you can enlarge whatever you're backed to work three times bigger or even a 100 times bigger, it would not lose the quality. For example, if you are looking at a picture and you zoom in maybe like three times, and you will start to see the pixelation, but this won't happen with vector images. For example, if I zoom in, you can see the little texture is still very clear. So that's one of the biggest advantages of using vector graphics. So we're going to learn how to do that over here. But before we start drawing, I would like to walk you through how to set up a workspace. So currently I'm using the painting workspace over here. You can find it by clicking on the drop down menu on the upper right-hand corner and select painting. And your workspace should look exactly the same except the color palettes, because I have made some minor changes over here. But you're welcome to just use whatever default Illustrator gives you. We want to add one more thing over here, because we use it so often in our class, it makes sense to just stack it right here. That function is called image trace. You can find that by clicking window, down the menu in the middle image trace. You can just drag and hover over it. You see this blue highlight that shows you that you can stack the panel over here and you can release? So basically image trace turns a flat image into vector information. That's what we want in our class. You can go ahead and save this new workspace under a new name by clicking on your workspace over here and name it a new name. Or you can move on from here. The advantage of saving a new workspace is that even if you move onto a new document, Illustrator will still remember your arrangement. You can pull that out just by clicking on the workspace drop-down and select whatever workspace that you named after. So that's pretty handy. Also whenever you want to minimize one panel, you can just double-click. For example, I'm just going to click on the color and that will collapse, and then whatever that is underneath will expand. So that will allow you to see more colors. So you can also setup your workspace that way. Now we're ready to move onto sausage making. Let's start out by making a rectangle first. You can click on your keyboard M or click on the shape tool over here that shows Rectangle Tool. Instead of click-and-drag, I want you to click on your canvas just once without dragging. That will allow you to control the exact dimension of your rectangle. So we're going to go with 900 pixels by 250. If your document is set with a different measurement of units, you can still manually type 900 pixels. The program will translate that into whatever your default unit is. Then just click okay. Whenever you want to change your unit, you can just click command R. That will bring out the ruler and at the very top. When you right-click, you can change your units. So it's pretty simple. We're still using pixels here for my document. Then I want to create a perfect circle that has the same height as my rectangle over here. So I want to press L for ellipse tool and click on canvas one's instead of click and drag. I'm going to go with 250 by 250 because we want the same height. We want the beautiful alignment over here. Let me just separate these two. Now I want to rectangle to have rounded corners. You can do that by dragging this little circle at the corner. Just one of them, but will change all four until it's highlighted. That shows you that's the maximum it can do. This is a perfect half circle over here. Let me just give it a different color, so it looks more like a sausage. All right, so now we want to align these two shapes over here. There are a couple of ways of doing ads. Let me just zoom in for a second. So I have my smart guides turned on. You can do that by clicking on view and make sure there is a checkmark on your smart guides. Once we have that turned on, when you move white object, it gives you a pink indication of where your object is in relation to other objects around it. For example, when you move it kind of close to the center it was snap and show you the word center. In our case, we want to move it all the way to the right. See it aligns vertically and horizontally and also has the word intersect to show you it's perfect alignment. You can let go. This is pretty beautiful, let me just give it a darker color so you can see. I'm going to undo it to show you another way of doing that, which is using alignment tool in Illustrator. When you select both and then click on one of the objects, that will set this particular highlighted object as a key reference. So you want to come over to the very top and click on this icon that's called vertical align center. That will bring it to the same horizontal level. Then you want to click on this horizontal alignment right to bring it all the way right. So this is also a way to do perfect alignment. Now we want to create this little white dots. Basically, it's fat content of a sausage. So let's make a big circle first. You can do that by clicking on L and hold onto shift. That will give you a perfect circle. You will find that I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts that may take some getting used to. But over time, it's really worth the effort to memorize all of them because it will speed up your workflow exponentially. Small effort does pay off. We want to color this into black first because that will just make the texture or more pronounced. That makes it very easy to factorize it later. You can come over to the effect and select effect gallery over here. That will give you different kinds of effect. You will see that there are six different folders. We want to open the first one, which is called artistic and click on this [inaudible]. Basically, we want to play with different sliders until you see this salami type of thing shows up. You can click okay once you're happy with that. Currently this is still an appearance, which means that you can still change a lot of the attributes on the fly. For example, if you want to click and give it a different color you can. Maybe, I'll go with this. If you click on the appearance panel over here, scroll down, we'll see the boundary fact can still be highlighted it has the little under dashed line over here. Once you click on that, you can still add it, and change whatever slider information you want until you are happy. Now, we want to turn this thing into a flat image so that Illustrator can start factorizing it. You can come over to object, and expand appearance, which will set Illustrator ready for vactorising. The function we want to use for vactorising, is called the image trace, which we just stacked neatly right over here. Initially you will see everything's grayed out. This is discouraging, but don't worry, just click on the canvas once, and click back on the shape. It will all show up. I do not know why this is set up this way, but this works. First, you want to change the mold to black and white. Ignore white down the bottom under options, because you don't want Illustrator to think the white frame is also part of the shape. That will just save you some processing time. You can preview the result. Initially, you will see a giant black circle. That just shows us that we need to play with this threshold so that Illustrator can pick up more information than just one single color. This already looks really good. We want a predominantly white background, maybe with black dots on it. You can manually click up and down arrow on your keyboard, and then play with the paths. Seems like in this case, the higher the number is, the more rounded the shape appears to be. If that's your preference, go for it. You can also play with the noise level. Once you are happy with it, just expand the whole thing by clicking expand at the very top. That I will give you a beautifully traced vector shape. We don't want the whole thing. We only want part of it. We have some trimming to do. First, we want to duplicate this circle over here as a trimming guide. You can do that by command C, which is Copy and command F, which is Paste in front at the same place. Just drag it up like that. You see the placement is really good, I like it. You want to bring the circle all the way up by right-click, arrange and bring to front. You can also do that by pressing Command Shift, right bracket. There you go. That bring this to the front. Now, we'll basically like a cookie cutter, we'll cut through the texture. You want to do that by selecting both, and right-click and select make clipping mask. The keyboard shortcut for that is command 7, for making clipping masks. Right now even if you don't see all the information as you hover around, you still see the outlines. That's in the nature of the clipping masks. It manipulates how you see it visually, but not really necessarily trimming the whole thing. If you want the real trimming to happen, you still need to select this, and come over to pathfinder tool, where you can come to Window, and select pathfinder. The third option of the second line says merge. You want to click on that. That will really trim off the access. Maybe I'll give it a different color as well. I want to move it down here. We see that intersect appears as I move. That's pretty neat. Now, it gives my sausage some texture over here. Let's go back to our image to see what else we're missing. If you look at the image over here in this close up, we see this beautiful shadow. That'll be our next step. First, we want to create a rectangle that is longer than the sausage, but maybe about the same height. It doesn't have to be exact. Don't worry about the numbers at this point. We want to give it a gradient. You can click on the gradient tool over here. Click on the swatch. By default, that will give you horizontal gradient. We just need to tweak the angle to negative 90, so that we have darker color at the bottom instead of on the right border. This is a good starting point. Now, we want to add a bit of noise here. Make sure it's selected, and come over to effect gallery. You can select to grain, which is on the last folder under texture. You can play with the intensity and the contrast. I'm pretty happy with this. I have intensity as 79, and contrast as 64. If you have created your rectangle in different sizes, this number might not make sense to you, but basically just play with the slider and see what happens. If you're okay with how it looks. Just click OK. Again, this is the effect, and it's still live. You can click on the appearance, and tweak the numbers. You will see the grain is still highlightable over here. Once you're happy with it, you can just click object and expand appearance. That'll turn this thing into a flat image, which makes it ready for vactorizing. Now, you come over to image traits tool. You might need to click upside again, and back on the object. Turn on the ignore white and preview. This looks a little bit rough for me. You need to play with the threshold a little bit more together. Maybe with the noise. Now we reduce the size of the particles. I'm pretty happy with this. Depending on how fast your computer is, sometimes playing with this effect will take a few seconds for the preview to show up. Just be patient. The result is well worth it. This is really beautiful. I'm pretty happy with this. So I have my threshold maybe right about in the middle, and my "Paths" turn really high, and "Noise" really low. This is a nice effect that I'm happy with. So I'm just going to the very top to expand it, and before I go on to trim it, I would like to make it a compound shape. So currently a lot of these little dots are lying on top of each other. Now we'll create a lot of unnecessary anchor points information that will slow down my Illustrator. So I just want to go to "Pathfinder" and the very first option under "Shape Modes", it's called "Unite". That will combine a lot of the shapes together. That will save me some processing time. Now I want to create a giant cookie cutter that is the exact same size as the sausage. So I'm just going to select them both. Right now I have many layers under my sausage. I just don't want to miss anything. I want to select and then hold onto "Option" as I drag down. Maybe shift to make sure things are completely vertical. Let go, and I will use the lower sausage as my cookie cutter guide. First, I want to take off the texture because I don't need that information. I just need this shape over here. I want to combine this shape into one by coming over to "Pathfinder" and click on "Unite". Perfect. I'm going to color it through. So you know that this blue is my cookie cutter. Now I want to move my beautiful shadow above. Pay attention to the overlap. Maybe it's hard to see over here. So let me just give it a different color and change the blending mode. You can do that by clicking on the "Appearance". The first drop down menu gave you different options for blending mode. "Multiply" is the one that I often like to use. That just turns things ever so slightly darker. This is a good position and color to me. I want to bring this blue cookie cutter all the way to the top so I can cut the cookie dough. Remember the keyboard shortcut is "Command + Shift + Right bracket". But if you don't want to remember, just right-click and "Arrange", "Bring to Front". Now I want to select both the cookie dough and the cookie cutter. You can just drag and select and "Command + 7" to make clipping mask. That is beautiful. Then I want to merge it. Click on the "Pathfinder" and the third option on the second line to merge it. It might take a while for illustrator to do that, because this is a lot of anchor points information. Then you slowly move it up and hold on to "Shift" to keep it vertically aligned and let go. I'm going to zoom in at tiny bit. Adjust the position a little bit. I want to change the blending mode, because when I make the clipping mask, it lost the information of my blending mode. So I'm going to give it back to "Multiply". This is really beautiful but maybe a little too dark. So I can change the "Opacity". Okay, this is a pretty good blend. So let's go back to what we have over here to see what else we can add onto our lovely sausage. So we have this salami over here, and we have this shadow over here. We're missing these little beautiful highlights that's going on over here. So let's do that. First you want to create a long rectangle that almost looks like a stroke and then you come over to "Effect". "Effect Gallery" and under first folder, artistic folder, there is "Film Grain". It's just another more dynamic grain effect than the first grain that we have used. So play with this slider to see what effect you can get. It doesn't seems to make a huge difference because the line is so thin and I'm just going to click "OK" from here and "Expand Appearance". I want to start tracing right away. Make sure that "Ignore White" is turned on and "Preview" is turned on. So eventually I want to see this little almost like crumbs that is going on and just like the randomness of the effect. I'm pretty happy with this actually. Maybe play with the "Noise" level and corners. Just make sure [inaudible]. Let's go with this. So I'm going to click on "Expand" and that's the effect I want to have. It seems like I don't need all of the dots over here, but by default everything is grouped together. You want to un-group everybody by clicking "Command + Shift + G", and delete some of them. Just select them and change it to the highlight color and bring it to the highlight area over here. Actually, let's go back. I'm going to undo it a couple times. I want to group this thing together. Because once it's on the sausage, I want to change whatever attributes altogether as a group instead of change each one of them individually. So at the moment, I'm going to give it a lower "Opacity". That is under "Transparency" so that you can't appear more naturally on top of the sausage. That's about it. Now we want to rotate this thing 90 degree. You can select and group it by clicking "Command + G" and just start rotating by grabbing the corner. If you hold on to "Shift", that will default to 90 degree. Then make sure you save your files again. That's always helpful to remember. As far as the technique goes, I think we have learned everything we have over here in this image except this little torn edges that just looks so organic. I just can't leave you without teaching you how to do it. So let's do it. I'm going to start out with a rectangle and give it a more pleasant color than white over here. I'm going to zoom in so you can see better. Click on the rectangle and drag one of the corners to make sure it's rounded corners and then select it. Then you can come over to "Effect" and "Effect Gallery". It's one of the effect that is under "Sketch", it's called "Torn Edges". You can't really see super clearly over here because you need to turn the "Image Balance" all the way up to change the contrast and then you can change how smooth you want the edge to be. You actually want the contrast to be reasonably low so that you can basically have one black image with little jagged edge on the side. Click "OK" and "Expand Appearance" over here and then just "Ignore White" and then trace it. You can play with the threshold and the "Noise" level and then increase the "Paths". The "Paths" count. Then just "Expand". Sometimes if you want the result to be super dramatic, you can start out by creating a smaller rectangle and then start doing what I did before, and then eventually once the whole thing is vectorized, you just increase the size of the small rectangle that will make the effect more dramatic. But other than that, I think I've taught you everything I know in this image and I hope you are warmed up and let's move on to the next. 4. Carrots: Previously, we have walked through steps of how to make the shape of the sausage and three different textures on top of it. In this lesson, we're going to do something very similar. We're going to start out with making the shape of the carrot and then give it interesting textures as well. Let's get started. We want to start with a small and perfect circle. You can do that by clicking L and click on the canvas once. Let's go with 150 by 150. The reason why we want a smaller shape over here is because smaller shapes tend to make the visual effects more pronounced. Once you have it vectorized, you can always resize it to a larger size. I'm just going to click OK here and then change the fill color. What I did over here is to swap the stroke color with the fill color. You can do that by pressing Shift+ X. We can do that see. We'll just swap the swatches, the fill color and stroke color. That's nice to know. Then I'm going to give it a nice little orange. Make sure the fill is in front and color it with orange. If you look at the very top of your toolbar, there are two kinds of selections. One is called the selection tool. Basically, if you have things grouped together or single object, it will select the whole thing. But the direct selection tool, which is this white arrow, this allow you to select individual anchor points. That's what we need over here. Make sure it's selected or you can press A on your keyboard, like the middle of the circle, and then click on the anchor points at the very bottom to make sure that single one is selected and you can drag it down. To keep it straight, you can hold onto your shift key as your drag it. Before you click anywhere else, we want to turn this into a corner inside of a curve. Come over to the very top. It says convert selected anchor points to corner. That's what we need. Just click that and it will make your corner very pointy. I'd like to bring it back just a tiny bit. I can drag this little dot that appears at the corner and now we have the basic carrot shape. Let's give it some fun leaves. Over here, we will use simplified leaves. It's basically a bunch of lines. You want to use the Segment tool over here, or you can use the forward slash on your keyboard. There's no rule, just start click and drag. You don't really see anything here because I forgot to give it a stroke color. I can still do that by selecting the stroke color. Actually, you want to select the whole group first. This time we use the selection tool, the black arrow, and then you give it a color. Make sure the stroke is in front and now increase the size of the stroke weight, maybe 12. This is a good size and you can reposition and then bring it all the way back. Command Shift left bracket, where you can do right-click and arrange send to back. The difference between send to back and send backward is that send backward, will do it one layer at a time or bring it down one layer at a time. But if you do send to back, it will just send it all the way to the bottom layer. This is our basic shape. Let's start doing textures. The first thing we want to do is to textual rise the leaves. Right now we have some really, really smooth strokes that makes it look really flat. We want to give it a little bit of texture. Let's create a rectangle that's about the same size as our leaf over here. We want to switch the stroke and the fill. We want the fill to be certain color but no stroke value. Then click M to create rectangle. Then you can come over to you effect, effect gallery. On the fourth folder that is named sketch, select the tone edges and then you can start playing with the values to see how much details that you want. This seems good to me. I'm just going to click OK. Let me zoom in a tiny bit. That's our final effect. I'm going to make it flat by clicking object and expand appearance. I want to trace it over here. Image trace. You might have to click outside and click back in and turn the ignore white on and preview. [inaudible] the threshold, that's going to make the most difference. This is a good one. Maybe increase the paths count and then decrease the noise level. I'm pretty happy with this, and just going to click expand. I have done it a few times. Now we have four different variations. We don't want to duplicate it too many times. The tip will look exactly the same. That's distracting when you look at artwork, when things are unintentionally repeating. Now, I just want to replace it. I'm going to take away the smooth strokes and then replace it with the jagged ones. I'm clicking E to rotate and then bring it over here. When I click and tweak the angle individually, so click E or come over here for free transform tool. You can rotate it. Basically just grab the corners, E, and then rotate it. Now I want to select all four and bring it to the back, Command option left bracket. Let's see what else we're missing. Over here we see this beautiful texture that shows the wrinkles of a carrot, so that's what we're going to do next. First we want to select the body of the carrot and make a copy at the very top. We can do that by Command C and press Command F to paste in place. The top layer will eventually become our texture. Then we come over to effect, instead of Effect Gallery, this time we want to Pixelate, and the third option that is called Mezzotint. Click on the drop-down menu, you can play with different option just to see what it does. But for our purpose, we want medium strokes. Let's go with that. It doesn't look super like a carrot, that's because we need vectorizing. Let's turn this into a flat image first by expanding the appearance and then come over to Image Trace, turn on the Ignore White and preview. The black portion will be our final result, just play with the threshold and see what it does. It starts to look more like a carrot now, and then you can play with other sliders. I can sign off on this, so I'm just going to expand and then give it a different color like a darker orange. Well now we have a texture on top. Let's go back and see what else we're missing. If you look closer, this is basically a texturised gradient, let's see how we can achieve that. Let's start with rectangle, and then give it a gradient by coming over to Gradient panel and click on the Swatch. Again, we need to tweak the angle to make sure the bottom portion is dark and the top portion is white. Negative 90 is the degree that we want, and we want to give it a little bit of texture. Come over to Effect Gallery and Artistic, which is the first folder, and then Film Grain. This is a pretty dynamic grain type, we can play with different sliders. This will do, let's click Okay and expand this effect and turn it into an image, and then try to Image Trace. Maybe we want to zoom in a little bit before we do that, Image Trace and Ignore White and preview. This look a little bit too rough for me, I want the grain to be a little finer. Maybe I want to turn down the noise level, turn down the corners. I'm not really happy with it because we don't have a solid bottom over here. It just doesn't look as natural. Maybe I just need to increase the threshold and then decrease the noise level. It starts to look a lot better. That's going to recreate the gradient but this seems to be a lot better. I can sign off on this so I'm just going to click Expand. Because there are many anchor points, I want to make a compound shape. You can just click on Pathfinder and Unite. At this point is probably a good time to save, so Command S to save your file. There you go. Technically, I can just make it a little smaller and rotate it using free transform tool and just have it sit up here, maybe to give it a different color to make it look more realistic. But the problem is that if I want it to be a little bit longer, say it's not exactly two times but one time and a half, I'll just have to move it so precisely that the end connects well, and then maybe somehow using the Pathfinder to cut it half over here. I don't want to do all that work, so I'm just going to undo and show you a smarter way to get to that point. It may take a few extra steps than what you may expect, but I assure you it's well worth the effort. What's even better is that you can just create the brush once and use it many times, even in other documents. Basically we want to grab this shape and make a brush out of it. You come over to Object and Pattern and make. This can seem really overwhelming. We want to bring the height, maybe triple it, I'll put it a 100 so they're apart from each other. Really what we're looking at is how the edges connect, that's this area right here. Right now there is an obvious gap that we want to close, so we want to come to width to decrease the size of our repeating unit. You can use your down arrow. It will just bringing things back and zoom out to see. If it looks seamless to you, it looks pretty good for me. I'm just going to click Done. Once I do that, it will save this pattern to our Swatches panel. But before you do that, you'll want to remember the width and the height, maybe write it down on a Post-it Note. Our dimension is 126 by 100. Yours might look a little bit different. Now we want to create one rectangle that is the same height as the repeating unit 126 by a 100. Click on OK. This doesn't look exactly the way we want it, just because we need to move the stroke a little bit. Right-click Transform, and Move. The horizontal number is not really relevant for us. We only need it to move vertically just a tiny bit. But before we do that, we want to turn the Transform Objects off because we want the object to stay the same dimension. We just want to move what's inside. Let's start with maybe 40 pixels vertically. Great, this is exactly what we want. Just click OK. What your goal is to host one perfect repeating unit within your rectangle, because that's going to be the basis for our brush. I'm just going to come over to object and expand it. Click on OK. Instead of being a pattern, this is actually a clipping mask. Now we want to trim the axis of it. Click on it, and come over to pathfinder and merge. It may take a few seconds for your computer to process all that information. Let's zoom in. This is exactly what we want. We have a perfect repeating unit. Now we can make brush out of. Come over to brushes panel. If you don't have it over here, just come over to Window and click on Brushes, and it will bring out the same panel. Click on New Brush. The very bottom, we want Pattern Brush and click on OK. Again, because this brush looks so complicated with many paths, it may take your computer a few seconds to think through. Basically, you can leave everything as it is, except one, which is the colorization. We want to change it to Hue Shift. This will make color changes a lot easier. Once you have that, you can just click OK. Now you actually don't need this, you can delete this. As you can see on your Brushes panel, this new thing pops up. Let's see how we can use it. Over your carrot, let's make one straight line. You can use the line segment tool over here by clicking or just press the forward slash on your keyboard. Just click and drag. Simple enough. You don't see anything immediately. Make sure the stroke is in front. We just need to tell the stroke, that's the new brush that we want to use. We can move it around a little bit. The good thing about it is that this is perfect where you're repeating. Say that you want this line to be just ever so slightly shorter, so you can select the endpoints by hitting A and select that one anchor point, and bring it shorter, and the line will become shorter. You don't have to do some serious pixel wrangling to make it shorter. This automatic brush will just apply itself. That's pretty neat and you can change the blinding mode to maybe Multiply. Then bring down the opacity to make it look a little more natural. The colors works great. If you want your stroke to be the opposite direction, you can just double-click your brush, and it will bring out the pattern brush options. What you need is to flip across, check this check-mark over here and click OK. It will show you or will ask you if you want to apply it to the current brush, which is yes. I'm going to change this and see that the direction of the brush has changed. That's the little trick over here. Whenever you want to change color, you can use the Recolor tool. For example, I'm just going to select it all, and come over here to the color wheel. That will allow you to recolor work. Say that I want the top layer to be a lot more saturated, I can just increase that and you can preview it on the fly, which is pretty neat. Maybe this is a little too much. I'm happy with that. Seems one last thing we need to learn in this session is to give the carrot a little more beard. I don't know, maybe roots is the better word. Let's pull out the Blob Brush tool. The keyboard shortcut is Shift B. It's nested under the Brush tool. It's the second option under the Paintbrush tool. You will see this little dot right here, that shows you the diameter of your brush. You can change it on the fly by just clicking left or right bracket on your keyboard, and just start drawing. It's pretty neat. Once you're done, you can select it all, and sample the orange color by clicking I to bring out the Eyedropper tool. Then bring these three guys all the way to the back. I think now we have a pretty good-looking carrot. Anytime if you guys need some troubleshooting, or have any questions, please leave me a message over Skillshare or Instagram. I'd happy to take a look and help you along the way. 5. Bow Tie Pasta: All right. Congratulations guys, now you have graduated to making pastas. We're going to start with something really basic, which is triangle. You can come over to your polygon tool on the left, if you don't see it immediately, maybe you need to click on your ellipse or rectangle tool. Long click to bring out the fly out menu and select polygon tool, and just click and drag. Actually before you release the mouse, you want to click down or up arrow to change the number of sides and hold on to shift, so the triangle is sitting upright and let go. Then you want to rotate it 90 degrees, by clicking E for free transform tool and hold onto shift to constrain the angle. Now we want to bring a curve to the side line over here. We can do that by using curvature tool that is on the left over here, and then hover over until you see this little plus sign that will add one cube anchor point. So just bring it out, something like that, and let go. Right now this is the entire compound shape but I want to cut it into two. I can do that by using my scissors tool, keyboard shortcut is C, and just click on the top anchor point once and the bottom anchor point once. If you just use selection tool, you will see now I have two separate shapes. I'm just going to undo. What I really want is to create the zigzag along the line over here. I want to come over to effect, and distort and transform under that, at the very bottom, click on zigzag, then you want to turn on the preview so you can see how you're doing. First, change the size to absolute which gives you a finer control, then you can change your ridges per segment up and down, depending on how many curves you want on your pasta. Select smooth, it's curved line instead of completely pointy zigzags. Basically the size option will determine how deep the zigzag will be. This is a pretty good size, so I' m going to click "okay." Right now this is not exactly connecting. You see that it's missing the connecting points over here. Let me just expand this, I don't want this to be effect, I want this to be anchor points. I want to click object, and expand appearance. Now we need to match the sides. Make sure you're using the direct selection tool so you're able to grab one anchor points at a time. Just grab the very top one from the zigzag shape and bring it over until it says anchor and just let go, that shows you the two are overlapping. If you have problem bringing two points together, it's probably because you have the snapping turned on. You can come over to view and make sure all the snappings are off, and it's a lot easier to move things around. The snappings are very helpful when you are doing UI design because you need that level of precision, but if you're doing illustration, you don't really need that. Then you grab the bottom anchor point, then bring it over here. Now we actually have two shapes, even though it looks like we have one. Let me just click on one and move it away so you see, we have this triangle on the left and the zigzag on the right. We want to combine these two. You can select them both and use pathfinder and unite, but I' m going to show you another way of achieving the same effect which is called shape builder tool. Select the both shape and click shift M. That's the keyboard shortcut and icon sits somewhere over here that looks like this. Then you can Just draw across the shaded area will be combined together. Great. Now we have half a bow tie. Now we just need to copy and paste to make the other half. Let's do that by right-clicking and transform and reflect. Select vertical, and instead of, we want to click copy, so we will have one extra copy. Hold onto shift key as you drag horizontally. This is a pretty good intersection, so I'm just going to combine both. Select both and shift M, just draw across, and it will make one big shape. Great. This looks a little bit pointy over here, so I'm just going to round this corner a little bit. Make sure you have it selected and click your keyboard A. It will bring out this corner rounder, and it will just round out all the corners. All right, now we have a basic shape, let's zoom back out. This is a good point to save your document, so I'm going to do that. What else we're missing? We want to create this little highlight at the very edge. We already know how to make the jagged brush. Just a quick review, we want to click on M to make a long rectangle and then give it some texture. Effect, effect gallery, artistic and foam grain, though maybe a little bit rougher, let's see. Then we click on "Okay" and let's zoom in just a little bit and expand appearance, object, expand appearance and image trace. You should be very familiar with how things work by now, but I still like to call out the buttons that I'm clicking in case that you are following along. Just a little bit of refresher, ignore white and preview. You can play with threshold to see how rough or smooth you want your brush to be. Actually this looks a little bit too simplistic. I'm just going to restart by creating a thicker rectangle. I'm going to just create a thicker rectangle, so the texture can be drawn out a lot better. Come over to Effect and Effect Gallery, and select Film Grain. Maybe I want the intensity to be a little bit higher and make sure the grain is all the way up and click "Okay. " Expand appearance and Image Trace. Let's see how we're doing this round. Ignore white and preview to a little bit better. We have a lot more details this time. I want the middle to be solid and the edges to be rough. Let's do that. Maybe I want to increase the path's count all the way up and the corners. That doesn't really affect anything, maybe the noise to be up. I'm okay with this one. Expand at the very top and I will make this one compound shape to save processing power. Now, we're going to make this a brush. This will be our basic segment. You want to come over to object and pattern and make just to tweak the edges. Remember what we did last time is to triple the height first, so that they're not sitting so tightly on top of each other. Bring down the size of the width. This looks a lot more seamless. Now, our dimension is 375 by 100. Let's click "Done" and create a rectangle that is the same size. 375 by 100. Click on okay. We want to select this fill as the new pattern which was created over here. It's perfect. I'm going to delete the original one. The reason I don't want to use the original one to create a brush is because this one is not a perfect way of repeating. The one on the top is not repeating, but the one on the bottom is because we have tweaked it inside the pattern maker. I'm just going to delete this and then expand the appearance and then trim the access by merging. This is our perfect repeating unit. The left side connect perfectly with the right side. Now, we want to come over to brushes. Add New brush, pattern brush, and click on okay and change our method to Hue Shift and click on OK. That'll be our brush. Say that we have created one line segment and then we use the stroke. We apply the new brush as the stroke. Looks pretty handy. This looks a little bit big. All we need to do is to bring it down a little bit. Bring out as one point. Let's do 0.5, now it's half the size. Not too bad. As you see, we have highlights that doesn't cover the whole thing. We only highlights a few portion of our pasta. Let's do that. Right now we have one solid shape that has fill but not stroke. Now, we want to create a copy on top of this pasta. Command C for copy and command F for paste in place. Let's just give it a different color, so that we know this one is different. I'm actually going to turn the fill to none, because we only need the outline which is the stroke. I'm going to give it a very dark color, maybe a little bit thicker. You can see we have two layers now. The top one is just the outline and the bottom one is just the fill. We want to actually lock the bottom one, just click on anywhere in the middle and Command 2, to lock that one. We're not accidentally clicking on it. Now, we want to cut the outline to pieces, at least two, maybe five or six pieces.. Click on C for our scissors tool. It's pretty intuitive, so basically, we're just using digital scissors to cut it into maybe four or five pieces. Maybe a little more than that, but just click on it six or seven times. And then use your direct selection tool to take out the parts that you do not want. I'm just using the delete to do that. Sometimes need to use it a couple times. You go. Now, we're seeing some outline over here. Let's take this part out. Now, we want to select all of the outline and apply our new brush to it. All I did is select them all and click on the New Brush. It's a little bit thick so we can bring it down to maybe a quarter of a point. Look better. Maybe a little thicker. Let's do 0.4. Now we have our highlight and we can do the same thing for the middle portion over here. All we need to do is to create a curve. If you are confident drawing, just click on B for the brush tool and start drawing. My line is not very smooth, so I'm just going to click B again and double-click the Paintbrush Tool to bring out the paintbrush tool options. I want a little bit of help from Illustrator to smooth out my lines. Let's try again. Even though my line is pretty jagged, the final result will be pretty smooth because of the setting we just did.I'm going to give it a different color, which is probably this cream. Bring it down to a quarter, 0.25 and bring it to the middle, and reflect this across. I did right-click, transform, and then reflect. I want this reflection to be horizontal. I want to copy, instead of flipping the original one, I want a new one. Just bring it down, and now we have our highlight. We have our pasta. By the you can unlock your pasta, you can do that by clicking command option and two. We will unlock everything. I'm just going to re-color this, because this looks a little too orange for me. I'm just going to select the entire pasta and come over to the re-color art work tool, to see what I can do about it. This window is pretty large. First, I want to select the pasta color in the middle, and then bring down the saturation and move the hue. By the way I'm using HSB space. If you want to switch your space to RGB or something like that, you can click on this little hamburger and then change your color space. This is a much better color. I want my highlight to be a little more saturated, maybe more of a yellow hue than red. It just feels more appetizing. Then I want to bring my highlight to a lighter color, so it stands out. Click OK, much better. Looking at our reference image, it seems like we're missing an interesting half tone dotted background, that's what we're going to do next. There are a few ways of doing that. I'm going to show you where things are. First, we want to create the exact copy behind this pasta, so that we will use that area for our shadow; to do that, we can press command C for copy and command B for paste in the back. Now we have two exact same shapes sitting on top of each other, that makes it tricky to move it around, so we're going to lock the top layer. Click on the first pasta, and command 2, to lock it, then we can just move the second layer around freely, without thinking that we might accidentally move the first layer. We just give it a darker color so you can see better. Let's also zoom in. The first way of doing that is to come over to Effect and select pixelate and color half tone. You will be given a bunch of input. Basically you can adjust the CMYK angle. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. You have to play with the angle, to see the results and then come back and tweak it. You don't really have a live preview preset in this option. I'm just going to go with whatever is default over here, just to show the Effect you might have at the end. This one looks pretty, heavily digital. That's not exactly what I want. So I'm going to do, Undo. But if you like it, by any means, go for it. The one that I really like is Under Effect and sketch; in the middle, there is half tone pattern. What I really liked about it is that, you can change the size of the dots on the fly and you can preview it, so it's not really like dark box, that you don't know the result. You can click OK. We want to expand this into an image, and then trace it. Ignore white then preview. This is really interesting and very dynamic pattern. Anywhere between black background with very small dots to, if you turn it really really down; you will have white background levels and black dots on it. It's really dynamic and it gives you a lot of options. I'm going to go with something that is, somewhat different from the reference image, but I really like it now. I'm just going to expand and give it a different color. If you want to fine tune your color, I would really recommend using the recolor artwork tool. This will give you very fine control over the color. I'm going to turn down the saturation and make it really muted, maybe increase the darkness a little bit. You can make it a cool hue as well. That's nice. I'm just going to click OK. Remember the first pasta is still locked. To unlock it, you can press command option two. Since this pasta has many parts, you might want to group it. Just select them all, and click, command G to group it. Now we have learned how to make our super texturised pasta. 6. Ice Cream: So we're going to do dessert for this session. This is a good sign. In this entire creation process, we're going to make something new and we're also going to revisit some of the concepts we have learned so far. So this is more like a review session/cross training and by the end, you'll have ice cream. So this is awesome. Let's start from the very bottom and let's give it a color. To mimic the waffle cone texture, we want to create a pattern in this case. So we want to start out by creating a rectangle. Let's zoom in a little bit so you don't have to squint too hard. Then we want a copy on top command C, and command F, press E on your keyboard to free transform it. Hold onto Shift, so it will be 90 degree. We want this to be very precise, so that's why we're holding onto the Shift key. Select them both, and come over to object and pattern, you've guessed it. We're going to make a waffle pattern. So this is clear enough. I'm just going to go with this. Basically, what you're looking is the spacing, the ratio between the thickness of the line and the spacing, the size of the square. If you are not happy with it, you can just decrease the size, but make sure you're using the exact number for your width and your height because the repeating unit is a square in this particular case. This is a little denser and then we don't need to cross anymore. Now let's create a copy on top command C, command F. So the top portion will just be the waffle cone. This looks super giant and it's in wrong color, let's fix that. First, we want to change the scale by right-click, Transform and Scale to maybe 50 percent and we want to uncheck the Transform object. So the boundary will stay in place. Let's do the 40 percent and then we want to rotate it 45 degree. Make sure the transform objects is unchecked, so that it's not rotating the object, then we click on Okay. Now we can fix the color. You want to make sure this is not selected by clicking on the canvas once. Then double-click on your new pattern to fix the color to maybe a lighter cream. This is probably good enough and click Done. There you go. Okay, let's move on to the first ball over here. It's a happy blue, so let's tweak the color a little bit and give it more saturation. Okay, that's good enough and we want to create a copy on top of this to host all the texture, command C, command F, then maybe just give it a different color. So we can tell the texture apart from the background. Come over to in fact, and texture and gray. This seems a little bit too fine even if I change the contrast, the grain, it's still very fine. So I'm just going to select something different, enlarged or maybe just clumped. This is the good size, so I'm going to go with this. And I want to expand the object and then trace it and see what we can do with the threshold. Already looking good. Don't worry too much about color because you can change it later. Just focus on the shape, the size, the spacing. All right, I'm going to go with this and expand. You go back to the darker blue and be done with this, and let's move on to the next. So the next one has a little squiggly line. There are a few ways of doing that. So first one is just to use the brush tool and just squiggle. That's the easiest. Another way of doing that is to actually use the texture. So we want to start out by dragging just a straight line over here and maybe make it a bit thicker. Making it come over to in fact, stylize. Notice that there are two stylize. We want the first one that is under the illustrator effect, and then we want to select scribble, which is the very last option, and pull it aside and turn on preview. So basically, or randomness as if you're scribbling. So you can change the variation and then decide how much overlap you want it then change the stroke width and change the spacing from tight to loose. Basically, this adds a little bit of randomness that you don't have to draw maybe like a 100 times. You can just play with the knobs and see what you like. Once you're happy with it, you can just click okay. You can still resize it by grabbing one of the anchor points and just bring it down. You want to expand this. It's not just a fact, it will become a stroke. If you want to go further with that, you can apply one of the brushes that you have made before to make it texturized or you can just expand the stroke itself to turn it into a shape. You can do that by coming over to path and outline stroke. This will turn the stroke into a path shape. We can group them both by pressing command G and command shift left bracket to bring it down. All right, let's move on to this one. It's hard to notice what exactly has changed. Let's zoom in to see. What I did is to basically add a little roughness to the circle so it doesn't look like a perfect circle. Sometime you just want that as part of your texture. First, I want to give it a strawberry color. You can double-click and come over to. This is a pretty good one. Then commit to that and come over to effect and distort and transform. The third option says roughen. Immediately, you'll want to turn on the preview. This looks little too dramatic. You want to bring down the numbers in general, maybe two percent. Then change the points to smooth instead of corner. Bring down the number even more, and click okay. Let's just zoom in to see the difference. In general, this still looks like a circle and it doesn't look too out of place in comparison with the rest. But this misshape just gives it a little bit more fun to it. We want to expand the object. Let's come over to our chocolate swirl.First let's give it a chocolate color. You can select the gray on top and then select a chocolate color by sampling from our reference image. Now you want to just create some random rectangle. We want the rectangle to be very long. The reason we want to do that is because when the swirling effect kicks in the length, it's going to get significantly shorter. We want to start strong here. Select them all and come over to the swirl tool. If you don't see the icon over here, just click on the width tool, long press, and then select the twirl tool here. You can double-click to change the dimension. This doesn't make immediate sense. You have to play with the twirl rate and the detail and then simplify to see what's best. But I'm just going to go with my default and start just pressing and clicking. It seems like the twirling needs to be a little faster over here. I'm just going to undo and increase the twirl rate and increase the intensity and see what happens. This is a little too intense if you can see the result. Maybe we want somewhere in the middle. We want the size to be a little bit bigger. Maybe 200 by 200. There you go. A lot better. We'll undo, because the edge doesn't look very natural. I'm going to do it again with the same setting. Make sure I move around so the twirl will become natural. There we go. Have you witnessed maybe I want to increase the size just a tiny bit. This little nice circle can sit in the middle. Now I'm selecting the circle background to create a copy. Command C and F. I want to bring it all the way to the top. I want to select all the creamy color together with the circle to create a clipping mask. Command seven. That will give me the twirling effect. But right now it's still the clipping mask. I want to trim it by clicking merge. I want to bring this entire ball all the way down. Command shift, left bracket. All right, now we have our ice cream. 7. Beets: So if you're still watching, that means that you have done a lot of hard work. Let's change the pace a little bit in this session. We're going to create something really fun, but very quick as well. So right now we have our basic shape over here. Let me just zoom in a tiny bit. Remember when we were working on the carrots, we have created this little texture brush over here, right? You can hop over to your carrot and just copy this little brush and come back to your beets and paste it by command v. As you paste it to this new document, you also pasted the brush over here in your brush panel, which means that you don't have to go through the painful steps of creating your texture brush. You can just pick it up and use it. All you need to do is to select them all, all the leaves over here and apply the brush. Now you have your textured leaf right away. So now you don't need this, you can delete it. Let's see what we can do to create this little brushy looking texture. First we want to create the exact copy on top. So command c for copy and command s for pasting in front. And then you can come over to "Effect" and "Effect Gallery". Under the "Texture" folder, which is the very last, and select gray. We have played with this option before, but I haven't told you that you can choose different grain type. We're going to explore that over here. Come over to the "Grain" type, and click on the "Drop-down Menu" and select the "Vertical", which will give us really nice brushy looking texture. You can play with the intensity and then play with the contrast as well. Don't worry too much about the color because you can still change it. For example, I can give it different color fill. The beets can take different hues, and I can also change the opacity or blending mode to make the texture more pronounced or subtle. So yeah, that's all we need to know to create this nice little beet. 8. Fish: Let's move on to our next dish, which is fish. In this lesson, we're going to revisit some of the steps of making native texture brushes for our shadows and highlights. We're also going to learn how to refine the position of your brush so it's easier to apply. Then we're going to move on to some shape building to make our hard shadow on the fin here. Last but not least, we're going to add an x and shadow under the fish. Let's dig in. First I want to zoom back out to grab our basic fish and hold onto Option key to make a copy on the right. I want to rotate it 90 degree by using free transform tool. Let's zoom back in.The reason why I want the fish here is because I'm going to make some texture brushes and I want the scale to be relatively comparable. First, we're going to make a texture brush. The process itself is very similar to the curves that we have created a while back but this time we want a little bit of directional texture. I'm just going to hop over here to show you a close up view of what I mean. As you see over here, we have some very directional texture here. It's just very nice like a visual candy. I want to start up with the gradients. The size doesn't have to be super long. This is a pretty good start. I'm going to give it a gradient by clicking on the gradient swatch and change the angle to 90 degree. Then come over to Effect, make sure this is selected and come over to Effect and Effect Gallery. Under the fourth folder, which is called sketch, you will see this effect. It's called graphic pen. This will give me a directional 45 texture. I think that's very interesting. You can change and play with the slider over here to change the stroke length. I'm just going to go with this and click ''Okay''. I'm just zoom in a little bit so you can see better. It looks a little bit pixelated. It's because this is not a vector yet. Let's trace it. But before that, we want to expand the appearance and then image traits.We want to turn the threshold. But it's not showing any changes because I forgot to turn on the preview and ignore white. I want to bring down the noise level to very small. This will show me a lot more detail like this random geometric texture. We'll just play with the parts and corner count and expand. Then we can bring this into our pattern tool, Object, Pattern, Make. Again, what we're really looking at is the gap over here when two repeating units connect. This look a little bit dense. Just for the sake of my sanity, I'm going to increase the height over here. They're far apart from each other that I can pay attention to how the gap overlaps. Then I want to come over to width and use my up and down arrow on my keyboard to bring this texture in a little bit. As you can see, now we see a nice overlap that covers the gap that we had. You want to zoom back out quite a bit. What you're looking at is that you don't want to see any obvious repeating unit. I see a little dent over here. That's distracting. I'm just going to delete some anchor points by using direct selection tool and minus. Just take away these actual anchor points that we don't need, Great, now we have a smooth bottom line over here. I'm okay with how this one looks and then click ''Done''. Now we don't really need this anymore. I forgot to look at my dimension. I'm just going to double-click the last pattern, which is the one we just made to check on the dimension. It's 189 by 100. Let me just round it up a little bit so it's 190 by 100, then you click on ''Done''. I want to create a rectangle that is 190 by 100 and change the fill color to the pattern, which is automatically happening right now. It seems the stroke has been cut. We just want to move the pattern vertically inside this little square. If you remember it's Transform and Move. We want to turn off the transform object and turn on the preview. The horizontal number doesn't really matter. All we need is the vertical movement. As long as we have some clearance above and beneath the stroke, we're good to go. I'm just going to click ''Okay'' and then expand this pattern into a clipping mask. Then trim it and select it and then come over to merge. This is what we need. Right now, this pattern is maybe you cannot tell exactly. Let me just zoom in. This is a repeating pattern. If we hold onto option key and bring one right next to the other, it perfectly stacks. That's what I mean by repeating unit. If I'm going to use this to make a brush like our new pattern brush and you click on ''Okay''. Change the method to Q Shift. Even if you forget it the first round, whenever you want to make a change, you can always just double-click your brush. The last brush is what we just made. Let's do a test. I'm going to use my line segment tool and then apply the stroke to new brush that we just made. Maybe I need to make a curve so you can see it better. I'm going to use my paintbrush tool. I'm double-clicking my Paintbrush Tool to increase the smooth level because I know my line is going to be jagged. I'm just going to roughly draw across. Let's zoom in. We have a slight problem here. I was roughly drawing along the line of the fish, but our brush has been divided. The bottom line of our brush doesn't align within our stroke. This makes alignment a little bit more difficult, that you have to move it around to see if there're lines and there is a gap over here. We can fix that fairly easily. I'm going to show you how. Since we still have our repeating unit, we want to bring it all the way up and click on the transform that is at the very top right next to the alignment. What we need to know is the size of our repeating unit. It's roughly 190 by 56, you can round it up. That's what we need. Click on N to create a rectangle, 190 by 56. We want the height to double, but the good news is that you don't have to do math, Illustrator would do it for you. So you want to use the star and two to show Illustrator we want double this amount and click "OK." This will be the frame that we need. I'm going to color it very bright and bring it all the way back to show you what we have. This red, bright orange frame is roughly double the height of our repeating unit, but the exact same length. But before we make our brush, we want to make sure this is perfectly aligned. We want to select them both and click on the frame one more time to make sure we turn this into a key object or reference. Use the vertical aligned top, and then horizontal align center. Our brush repeating unit is sitting exactly at the upper half. Now we want to turn off the color to make sure we have no stroke, no fill. This is our frame and then we want to bring it to the very top by using Command Shift, right bracket. The no fill, no stroke frame will always have to stay at the very top. So that the Illustrator knows that's the position we want it to be. Then you can select them both and click "New Brush", Pattern Brush and then Method, Hue Shift, and click "OK." Let's go back to our fish. Let's draw another line that is roughly around the edge of the fish. Beautiful. As you see, reaching into a different color so you can see better. If you click on the brush, you will see the bottom of the texture is the same as the outline we have. That's pretty neat and you don't have to do some crazy you reposition later. That's pretty handy. Now let's zoom back out and see what else we need. I'm going to delete my repeating unit because we don't need it anymore. We will need to do a shadow and highlight around the body over here, but not the fin and the head. We need to do some shape making. What I need you to do is to use Direct Selection Tool, the white arrow, to click on the body and grab the darker gray, the head, and the tail. That's the three parts that we need for our next step. Then hold onto your option key to drag it all the way down. Maybe hold onto Shift to keep it straight. That's the portion we need. To be even more specific, we only need the lighter gray but because this is actually a bigger shape, let me just delete the darker gray portion. We actually need the darker gray to do the deduction. I hope you're not super confused. The next step we'll make it easier to understand. So start using direct selection, I want to select the second fish and Shift M for shape building tool and hold onto option. By default it will be plus, it will combine shapes together. But if you hold down to option, a cursor will change to minus. We'll take out parts that we don't need. So we have that out in this part out. It seems we might have a couple stray anchor points and just delete that as well. We will use this as a guide for our brush. I'm going to ungroup it so this is not connected to the top fish when I click on this. Now, we need to further reduce the unnecessary information. All we need is the bottom curve and the top curve. Let's use our scissors tool to cut our path. The bottom two anchor points and the top two anchor points. Now we want to delete the unnecessary portion, which is this part, as well as here. This looks a little weird because we have fill instead of stroke. Let me turn the fill off and turn on the stroke. We have distilled our fish into this two line, and now it's time to apply our brush. The very last one is the one that we have made with the new position. It does sit over here, but it's not the right direction, as you can see, I'm going to double-click and flip across. Make sure this is checked and click on "OK." We want to apply two strokes. Now we have our strokes back. Maybe we want to reduce the size a bit. This is a one point let's do 0.75, a lot better. Let's go ahead and re-color the fish as well. All right, now we have a basic fish over here. Let's move our texture backup. You want to hold onto your Shift key to keep it straight and pay attention to your a smart guides. Now let's give it a different color. Maybe I want to change the blending mode, to multiply over here, so it shows through. I will do some highlight over here. Maybe I will give it a different stroke width, so it doesn't look too boring. I'll use white and lower the transparency of it. Now we have our highlight and shadow. Let's move this solid part all the way to the top so that it's covering the leftover strokes. There we go. This is a good time to save, by the way. I'm going to do that. We now have a little bit of dimension for our fish. Now I want to give it a little bit of hard shadow, something like this over here. I'm just going to hold onto option key to make a duplicate and shift key. This is a fairly easy. I'm just going to use my pen tool to make a shape and make sure nothing is poking out. If I send this to the back, as you can see, this little red shape has covered the top portion of our triangle. Now we want to do some intersecting. Basically we want to select them both and use our shape builder tool, which is over here, to trim off this odd shape on the fly. I want to hold onto option so we're taking it off and not adding it on. There we go. We want to send this back, so the orange part will show. That's awesome. I'm going to change this to a darker blue by using the recolor tool. I'm just going to increase the darkness then click okay. I'll just take out this fin over here and replace it with the new one. There you go. You can go ahead and do the same thing for the other two fins. But I'm just going to leave it as it is over here. Now might be a good time to group everybody, so all of the different parts of the fish move all at once. I'm going to click command G. Our last step is to make an accent shadow, something like this. You might be tempted to just create the outline of the fish and enlarge it proportionally, but the problem is that in this effect, I have the exact same distance. Let me show you what will happen if you just simply resize it. Let's create an outline by selecting it all and option drag. I'm just going to make this one compound shape by using unite and give it a different color, so it's easy to see. Right now, let me just drag it from center and I'm holding onto option key as I resize. This will make the resize come from the center. I will hold on to shift key to keep the proportion. I want to send it to the bottom. As you can see, it's not exactly what we intended for. This is because this fish is not a square or a perfect circle. The height and width, it's so different and they grow at a different rate. Let me just undo. What we really want is to expand or offset the path over here to certain pixel amount, so we have the same distance off of the outline. You can do that easily by coming over to object and pass an offset path. Make sure you have the preview turned on so you know. Let me just change it to a different color so it's not red on red. Let me give maybe a bright yellow. We have object, path, and offset path. Turn on the preview. All sides of the edge grows evenly as we change the number. That's pretty neat. I'm just going to stay somewhere here and click on okay and delete the original one. There are some pretty serious gigant edge over here. Let's just take out some of the anchor points by pressing minus. You can also simplify this by coming over to object, path, and simplify. If you want to still be pretty close to the original shape, you want to turn the curve precision pretty high, and play with the angle threshold. See the original anchor point counts is 260 and a current one is only 91, so that's pretty neat. But it still didn't solve the problem that we have over here. Maybe we need to go in and take the anchor point manually by using minus, because eventually we're going to have an effect over it, so the gigant edge is not really a problem. But I still wanted to make it smooth as much as possible before we get any effect on top of that. Let's send it to the back. Let's see what effect we can have. Let's come over to effect, and effect gallery, and by default, it will show you whatever you have chosen before. I'm just clicking around over here. This is our old friend, half tone pattern. Not really a big fun right now for this one. Just go ahead and explore to see which fits your overall direction. I think I'm going to go with this. This is under the third folder. Distort is like glass. I'm just going to go with this and vectorize this from this point on. I like how unpredictable this pattern is, so I want to expand. If you want to lock the fish you can just press command 2, so you don't click it by accident. Ignore white and preview. It doesn't show anything, so let's increase the threshold. Awesome. I like this texture. I'm going to expand from here and give it a different color. Now, we have learned all the texture techniques that we have introduced over here in our fish dish. 9. Noodles: So we're going to end our series with something pretty lightweight. In this session, we're going to learn two simple things. One is to add green onions to our noodles by using pattern and the other one is to use external texture. So far we have been using Native Textures and Vectorize It for our work, but now we're going to borrow external textures. Sometimes the options are really limited within the program and you will need maybe a scan image of something else, or if you are looking for something really specific that Illustrator doesn't offer natively. So you want to bring in another third party texture. It's still a pretty easy process. Over here, I made this using my iPad. I used a sandy brush to draw around it to mimic the texture of the chili pepper and just dragged and drop it over here. I want to embed my picture within my file so that I can vectorize it. So first I want to come over to "Image Trace". Again, for some reason it doesn't show up. All the options are grayed out. So just click outside and click back in and "Ignore White" and "Preview." The warning where Adobe just tells me that this is a pretty big image, it may take a while, I just click "OK." Initially this is a pretty good read. So I'm just going to tweak it to see if I can improve upon that. Actually, I'm just going to go with it. This is a really good texture. I will expand. We have a lot of white space over here, so you really want to make sure that you are ignoring white so the frame doesn't get red. Now I want to color it to a bright spicy color. By default everybody is grouped, that's great. I'm just going to leave it where it is. We then want to make a green onion pattern that is over here. Of course you can draw it 20 times, but if the illustration is giant, you probably don't want to do it 200 times. So we're going make a pattern. First, we want to use our pen tool by pressing "P" on our keyboard. You can use rectangle tool, but I just feel like green onions are rarely just perfectly rectangle. So I'm just going to click randomly to create this misshaped rectangle. Maybe you just want to do 10 of those. It's pretty therapeutic to create these little guys in comparison to what we have learned so far. So this is a nice change of pace. I want to color them all green because they're green onions. Come over to Object, Pattern, and then Make. You want to zoom out to see the spacing. First thing I want to do is to increase the preview copies. So the maximum you can do is 9 by 9. It basically allows you to preview nine patterns by nine patterns. So that gives you a better idea of where things are. It seems like these two are too close. I'm just going to move it and you can view what's going on the fly. Depending on how your initial spacing was planned out, you may want to use a different tile type. What I mean by, "tile type" is that when you click the drop-down menu, there are different selections. You can do brick by row or column, or hex by column or row. Sometimes this will create a pretty nice effect. I'm actually happy with the grid, the initial one. So I'm just going to click "Done" and this will save my pattern to the swatch, which is what I want. I don't really need these initial ones, so I'm going to delete them. Right now this is a clipping mask. I'm going to click "Command+C" to copy the noodle and "Command+V" to paste it. I'm going to color my noodle red so you can see better, because cream doesn't have a great contrast with white. So it's harder to read for you. I then want to bring my peppers over my noodle. We can feel the heat of it. Maybe I want to bring this layer all the way to the front to give it more visual impact. I then want to create a rectangle, roughly the size of the noodle, for my green onions over here. It looks like the green onions are a little bit too big. So I'm just going to change the scale a bit. Right-click on my pattern, Transform and Scale. I don't want to change the size of my rectangles. So I will turn off the Transform Object. I will turn the scale to maybe 80 percent. It doesn't seem to be too different. This is more like it. Maybe 70, let's go with that. As you can see, because this is a rectangle, some of the onions get cut off. We don't really want that. So let's expand it into a clipping mask and trim it. So we're dealing with individual shapes. There you go. These are grouped together. So we want to ungroup it first, "Command+Shift+G," so that when we click on individual onion slices, we're not clicking the entire shape. We can take them out individually. I want these to be out and maybe this one so it doesn't look like things were square before or things were rectangle before. It looks more organic. If you're super fancy, you can rearrange the layer so that some green onions appear in front and some appear in the back. This will give you a more sense of depth. This is great. That's basically it. Guys, you did it. This is a super long class, but I have a problem cutting it short because I want you to learn every single little technique that I'm enjoying so much to add textures to your work. I hope that you really enjoyed the class. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, I would love to help you. 10. Thank you!: If you're still watching this video, maybe there are two of you, I think we need to be friends. My handle over Instagram is @esther. nariyoshi. Please reach out to me if you have any suggestions for future classes or if you have any questions for me. Otherwise, enjoy your textures.