Vector Illustration: Design a Magical Scene with Shape, Colour, & Shading | Jeremy Mura | Skillshare
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Vector Illustration: Design a Magical Scene with Shape, Colour, & Shading

teacher avatar Jeremy Mura, Brand and Web Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      0:45

    • 2.

      Researching ideas

      3:46

    • 3.

      Sketching

      2:15

    • 4.

      Layers & guides

      2:48

    • 5.

      Using the Pen Tool

      4:06

    • 6.

      Shape building

      9:32

    • 7.

      Adding colour

      2:55

    • 8.

      Shading & adding detail

      6:28

    • 9.

      Finishing touches

      5:01

    • 10.

      Post your project

      0:25

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About This Class

Learn how to create a magical illustration from sketch to final design.
I take you through the process of creating your own custom illustration.

We will go through finding ideas, sketching, shape building, shading and texturing.

Key lessons include:  

  • Adobe Illustrator Tips and tricks
  • Techniques to make your illustration stand out
  • Using shape, colour and texture
  • Concept to finished artwork

All you need is adobe illustrator cs5, cs6 or CC (Free Trial), a pencil, paper and your imagination.

By the end of this class, you’ll have some inspiration and the techniques to make your own cool illustration!

Students of all levels are welcome to experiment and submit projects. A working knowledge of Illustrator will be helpful.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Jeremy Mura

Brand and Web Designer

Top Teacher

About Jeremy

Jeremy Mura is an award-winning (LogoLounge Book 12) logo designer, Youtuber and creator from Sydney, Australia.

He has been in the design industry for 10 years working for both small and big brands worldwide. He has worked for brand names such as Disneyland Paris, Adobe Live, Macquarie Business School, American Express and Telstra.

He has over 6M Views on Youtube with over 650 videos uploaded, has taught over 80k Students on Skillshare and has grown a following of 100k on Instagram.

Jeremy has been featured on Adobe Live, LogoLounge Book 12, Skillshare, Conference, Creative Market.

You can follow him on Youtube, Instagram or get free resources on Jeremymura.com

See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Jeremy and I'm a Designer and Illustrator from Sydney, Australia. I'm 20 years old, I've been designing for around three years now. Today I want to be going through how to create a vector illustration in a illustrator CC. We're going to be using color, shape, composition, and lining to create a design that's really fun and that really pops and stands out. I'm going to be showing you how I get some inspiration and how to do your sketches and then take that and input it into illustrator and build your shapes and lays and render all that into a final art work. It'll be a great class for people who are beginners or maybe just want to learn a new skill or a new technique. I'm going to to be sharing with you some tips and tricks that I use every day in my designs and that I use in illustrator. They'll make your whole design prices a lot more efficient and a lot more fun. Let's get right to it and I hope you guys enjoy the class. 2. Researching ideas: Awesome, thanks for enrolling in the class. I hope you enjoy it, and it'll be a little fun. What I do for research and to get some ideas is I go into Pinterest. You can use Google if you want. I use some other blogs and some of the sites which I'll show you as well. So that's what I usually do before I do a design just to get an idea, start collecting thoughts and just things that I can use in my composition or my design. We're in Pinterest, I recommend using it, it's really good. Now I'm just going to go typing "fantasy illustrations." I got inspired by the old King Arthur Disney movie. I was looking at the shelf the other day and I saw our old videos, tapes that we had and I thought I want to do a magical illustration around that. So maybe it will have a sword in the rock and maybe it might be in a forest or a cave or in a castle. It could be anything really. You just have to open your mind and just really start looking for things that might stand out to you. So maybe you might want to have some trees in there. You want to have animals. Is it going to be more lonely in a weird atmosphere, or is it going to be more magical or simple? It all just depends on what you want. The best thing is to go through typing different words and elements and just look around for things that you like. Maybe you like the lighting of a picture or you like the look of something. I think this is pretty cool. Maybe there's a plenty in the back and what we can do just press Save and I would keep saving it. I created a pin board that is called "Skillshare Class," and now I'm just saving images. You can save it from anywhere as long as you got the Pinterest extension as you see here in the top right corner, I've got the Pinterest extension also, if I go on any other website, I can just pin images as well as doing on here. So I'm just scrolling through. Maybe you can't find something, you just look up other things like maybe magic cave. Just play around with words and see what you find. This process should be quick, not to be too serious about it just try and get some images that inspires you and to get some ideas. So that's Pinterest. I'm going to go on ArtStation now I got here in the tab. This is a [inaudible]. It's a lot of concept artists and designers on here as well and usually I get some inspiration. I don't copy into the designs, but I just look at the composition, try and get some ideas from other people. So I just typed here "magic forest" and as you go down, you can see it's a lot of concepts, art, digital illustrations, some really cool ideas. A lot of magical fungus and trees and just looking through. Oh, that's pretty cool sword actually. This is pretty nice is all. I can just click that because I have the Pinterest, I can just right-click on the image and go pin it, and then I can just go pin to Skillshare Class. So it's really easy, guys, really simple. Pretty much that's how you gain inspiration. It's good to look in books as well and go out for a walk, go to the places where you get vintage stuff and just go through that and try and find things not only on the incident. So I built this pin, here's my final pin board that I've created. Some [inaudible] I've got all the new ones in there. So here's a final pin board and as you can see, it's got what I got inspired by, just a variety of different things that I think I wanted to put in my design. So I got this old rocks, some landscapes, things have lighting and just things that really stuck out to me. So this how you find inspiration and now in the next class, I just want to show you how to translate that into a sketch and start using these ideas and thoughts and put it into your own composition. 3. Sketching: So we finally finished our Pinterest board and our Mood board, got a bit of atmosphere, got some ideas and inspiration. So what we do now, we're going to jump into sketches. Don't always jump into Illustrator first. Always make sure you sketch first, sketch your ideas. It makes it, "I wrote an alarm process" quicker and more efficient. What I do, I usually run out some words. You can do a mind map if you want. I'll start writing out some words. I'm going to have cool colors, is it going to be in a forest? Is it going to be more fantasy? Is it going to be like trees, Fungus? Is it there going to be creatures? As I said, it's going to be more of Arthur, King Arthur thing for me. I might have this sword in the rock, which I was thinking about. Here at the Koch me directly, but this is the fun part about sketching and just writing it out. Your ideas can flow and you can create whatever you want. It makes it really easier later on. I think I'll just sketch out some words. I'll just write down e-trays, maybe one has some creatures, some light rays coming down. Is it going to be night time? I'm thinking maybe in the afternoon, like at noon. I just write them out. Now what I do usually is I just start sketching out some boxes. You can use a ruler if you want but you just make it rough, it doesn't need to be perfect. Because you just need to work with the outputs. These are just called thumbnailing. We're just doing a small vision. Let's sort out these boxes, and now I'm going start just sketching some ideas: swords in the rock, maybe there's light coming down. This is really rough, you just get an overall idea of the composition you want to lay it out. I can have a background. What's going to be on the foreground is it on mid-ground. Is it going to be different lights? What's the direction of the light going? Because let me do our shading is going to have an effect. Is it going to be like trees? Maybe you want to have silhouette type of look, trees in the background or something like that. This is the OS questions and just iterate as you go and adapt in just whatever you feel like doing just do it. 4. Layers & guides: I've done my sketch refined a little bit, and it took a photo from my phone, put it on Facebook, and then it was downloaded it to my desktop and then I uploaded it into Illustrator. I just went File and Place, and located the file and then downloaded from there. Or you can just drag and drop it in, it will work the same way. So what we've got here, we've got our image. I've just scaled it up a bit so it can fit our board. What we're going to do now is we're going to create some guides. We're going to press "Control R" to get the rulers up, and so I'm going to drag from the edges as you can see where the rulers are. We're going to use these guides just to know where the center is and just to make it more symmetrical when we're building our shapes and makes it be easier. So what I'm going to do is press "Control O" and semicolon. That's going to unlock these guides, so you can see if I select it goes dark blue. I want to select both of them and then what we're going to do, hold "Shift" to set above them. I'm going to go up the top here and go Horizontal Align Center and then Vertical Align Center. So now these are both aligned to the our board, as you can see the our board the black line, they're both aligned. Now what we're going to do is just lock those so we can't select them. We've got our image as you can see. What we're going to do now is we're going to put this on a template layer. So what we do, we have our Layers panel, we're going to double-click the layout. We're going to name it Sketch. Make sure you always name your lines properly because it can get messy sometimes and you can lose all your objects and you don't know where everything is, so make sure you name it properly and it will help you later on when you're putting illustration. We can change the color if we want, so leave that blue. What we're going to do is we're going to click this Template box. So click that and then dim the image maybe to 60 percent, press "OK". So now it creates a template layer and actually locks the layout, so you can't go over it or whatever. So it's just locked and you can untangle that and it just makes it overall easier to deal with. So what we're going to do now is we're going to stop building out our layers. So I'm just going to create a new layer by clicking the "New Document" over there. Now I'm just going to start naming these. So you've got to have full ground. I'm just going to name this Sword, Background, for the trees, and then I'm going to add a few more, Shading. You can add others if you want, but that's what we need for now. You can just click and drag as well. Make sure they're in the right spots. Yeah, that's how it's going to work and I'm just going to unlock these layers that I'm only using and I'm going to start with the top one, the Foreground. So after doing these layers, we're going to go into the next video now. 5. Using the Pen Tool: We just finished creating our guides and our layers. Now we're going to jump into the pen tool and stop building out some values. We're going to build the foreground now. What we're going to do is going to press, Paint for the pen tool, make sure you're on the right layer. Then close that box. We've got the pencil up, you can see your mouse changes. What we're going to do now is select a bright color and you can see I've got magenta selected. If your color is on the field, you want to press Shift X and that you can see on the left hand is just switching it. We're going to make it on the stroke and makes your fill is empty. If you don't want to fill, you just press this little box here or you can press forward slash. I'm going to jump right into it. Create some anchor points. What I'm doing is just clicking and dragging. The pencils are really fun, I can use it for a lot of things. You'll see a lot of design is like cutting out objects and putting it on custom background or something like that.That's called deep edging as what people use the pen tool for. But I use it for illustrations. It's really easy. It makes your hand more free. I'm just using a mouse but sometimes I use my way come tablet. Makes it this more faster all the process. I'm just going through and clicking and dragging. You can see how it creates these busier curves and the smooth lines. That's what it's called, busier curves. We've got these handles here. Maybe I want to get rid of these handle. What I do is just click on the Angle point and it gets rid of it as you can see, just like that. Then we'll just go to a straight line instead of a curve. I'm going to go down like that. You'll also notice if you hold Shift is going to keep that line in proportion just like that. You can see it's creating a smooth curve. We're going to do that. You can also do a 90 degrees, 45 degrees. It's really cool. We're going to go hold shift if you want similar lines. Another trick as well if you just want to move one arm handle from one side, you can hold Alt or Option if you're on a Mac. We can just click and drag and move these handled like that if you want to get a different angle, which is pretty handy. I'm just going through buildings illustration one-by-one. The mushroom is the grass. The outline of our foregrounds. Foreground is great because adds depth and dimension to illustration. It creates a sense of atmosphere. That's why I always try and add a bit of foreground and a background. Just makes the illustration gives it more detail. I'm just going through here, clicking, dragging. Maybe scan if you make a mistake or if there's wrong points in the wrong spot, you can always go back and edit it. Sometimes if you click off and use back on it, you can express P again and then just click on the last angle point you on and it will continue on that path that you're one, as you can see. The pen tools are really handy. You could use shapes if you want but because it's just a silhouette and this foregrounds a bit more detail with outlines from our sketch. It's easier to use the pencil. But I'll show you how to use shapes. We're going to build a sword out through shapes really easily. It can be a lot files that all depends on what type of work you're doing. When I first thought I didn't know how to let crate illustration at the top of thing. It just comes with practice. The Pen tool, I was pretty bad with the pen tool when I first started, but after college and that type of thing you just learned in the tutorials and that type of thing. It really helped me a lot. Then you just become really super fast with it and it just helps you out. I'm just going to close this path off and create a shape. So just holding shift, make sure the lines straight and click on the in path and now it's one path. Press shift X. Now with this field I'm going to change it to a gray or black. Just like that, just so I know it's a foreground and the shapes there. Always work in grace at scale first, we're going to do coloring later on in another video. But this is what I do and now I'm just going to lock that layer. In the next video we're going to start building our main illustration and adding some detail. 6. Shape building: Start building out every illustration like the sword in the magic. We're going to use shapes. I'm going to show you some shortcuts and that type of thing. So it's good that we have our guides up that we created before, I'm going to press "M" for the marking tool and I'll also drag this out, hold "Alt" and that's going to try and keep it in proportion. We're going to drag hold shift. If you hold Shift, it's going to make it straight when we drag it. I'm going to create a triangle using the shape tool. You can go the left tip, you can see that we've got all of our shapes. Just right-click to get them up and we'll click on the stop. Click and drag this out. If you want to get more sides to it, you just press up and down like that, and we can create a staff you want. So you let go and it will create that, but I just want a triangle, so I'm just going to press up and down and go to a triangle and I'm going to hold shift to keep it straight. I'm just going to rotate this, make sure it send it to the line. You can see a small gurge the purple line that's just showing us that it's connecting, aligning to that grid, which is really handy. We're going to drag it in and sweet, so it's fully connected, so illustrate or symmetrical. We're going to be too fat so we're going to make it thinner. I'm just building out this sword using the rectangle tool. I'll show you a cool trick to align things as well. I've got my rectangle just like that. You select these two rectangles and you select the one that you want it to align to. So you're going to select this one and press the button on the top, which is aligned horizontal. You could also do it in the line panel and do it that way as well. Now, this is probably centered within that rectangle, which is super cool. I'm just booting it simply with shapes. You could use the pen tool as well, but this is a lot better way. It's good to view things, if everything is shapes because your mind, but just in a mathematical way. So this is really cool. I'm going to make a anchor point on this box. I'm going to press "P", and then bent to it and click on the path here. So it should make an anchor point and just hold Shift dragging that up so it's horizontal, just to make that pointy bit, that will be one, and I'm going to also drag this. Actually we're going to leave that, and we get a rectangle. Hold Shift and Alt to keep the proportions and we'll drag it out so we get like that diamond shape. So I'm just dragging along the guides. This is why you should always set up guides, it's good. I might make it a bit smaller. It's good to always go back and edit it. If you don't like things, you can always just go back and fix it up. See that's looking awesome. So we've got our sword now, and I'm just going to copy this to the side just in case you want to edit this later, if you don't like the sword, and we're going to do is select these and I'm going to press "Unite". We're going to go to our pathfinder tool, open it and you can see we got unite or minus front and we've got all these tools, but we're just going to press "Unite", just like that. What I do is I usually put those shortcuts on F3 and F2 in that type of thing to make my process quicker. I just press it and it's really good. Just go into Settings and each is change it. I'm going to edit these side, because you can see how our sword is a bit rounded. I'm just going to create a circle, just like that. Well, we can do now is you can also reflect the circle as well being. Let's make sure that your object selected, press "O". We're going to select the center of that line, press "Alt" option, and then we get these reflect box come up. We can go vertical or horizontal, but we always move it horizontally but I wanted to go across from that Web we selected. Press "Copy". So now it's copy and it's directly across, so it's symmetrical, which is super handy and then I'm going to make another box and you can make these rounded and I'm doing the same thing. Press "O", reflect it, so now we got it and it looks like that and then I'm going to unite it again. There we're going to unite it and then cool. We've got this all up, let's see. Now, we can place this in there just like that, awesome. Now, I'm going to lock this lock an object select and press is control tool, or command tool, if you're on a Mac, and now I'm going to need a pen tool to create this rock. I should have changed the color. You can see what we're doing. Again, just rewritten the pen tool. If you want to make some more detail do some more points. Let's make a more rough edged. Obviously, the more time you spend with this, you can get more detail. Don't be afraid to experiment as well, nothing's perfect the first time around. I can always press "Control Z" to undo something. So you've got our rock there, sweet. Changing the color to gray. Yeah, that's looking good. How can we create these little spell thing? Because it's an enchanted sword, the ground's enchanted by some magic witch or whoever did it. What we're going to do, we're going to create a circle. We're going to actually stick around here, hold Shift and Alt, creating that circle, press "Control C", "Control F", and that creates a duplicate. So we're going to just hold shift and O and drive that in. So now we've got two circles. I'm just going to lock the rock as well, we hold shift, drag into the middle because we're going to use these guides. What we're going to do now, I'm just going to change the color of this. I'm going to create a circle now in-between these two lines. I'm still going to hold the center of that guide, use it as a guide. Doesn't have to be perfect, but there'll be centered and just move it up a little bit. What we're going to do now is we can rotate this circle. It's going to go all the way around. We're going to press "Alt" for the rotate tool or if you go on the left, you can see it just there and we want to find the center of the circle. Another quick way to find the center is pressing "Control Y" for outline mode and you can see these little cross here in the middle. It's a little cross. We're just going to select our mouse over that and press "Alt" plus the rotate tool still selected and you'll see our circle is going to move there and I'm going to press "Copy". Now, we've got the circle there. I'm going to press "Control Y", and you can see it's duplicated it and it's rotated that 20 degrees from where our anchor point is. Then what I'm going to do is press "Control D"and you can hold it down if you want, and it's going to copy it really quickly. Now, we've got all these circles just copied. So that's the fast way to do it, and now I'm going to grab the star shape and M, I'm going to get six sides, 5-6, yes, hold Shift key proportions. So I'll change the color, then we're just going to center it. What we're going to do, you don't want this overlap. So we're going to have to cut that off. So the way we do that, we're going to select these inner circle. We want to press "Control C" "Control F" again to place it in front of the circle and we're going to press "Control Shift" open square bracket. So this will bring it to the front of the upmost layout on the top of everything. What we're going to do now is we want to select that and we're going to select the star and what we're going to do now I'm going to press "Shift M" for the shape builder tool and you can see this little plus. It sees it registers all of these as shapes. So what I can do now if you hold Alt and click, it's going to minus these outer shapes that I didn't want just like that, really handy. Now, I can get rid of the circle and you can see our stars are all in-between there or what's left of the star. Then I can get rid of that circle, delete that and you can see I've got the shape in the middle and we're just going to select it all press "Control G" to group it and what I'm going to do, I'm going to copy it just in case I'm going to edit that later. Select that and what we're going to do, is hold "Alt" go to the top of the bounding box. I'm going to drag this in just like that. So it's going to create that perspective. It's going to skew it, and I'm going to control shift back, square bracket and it's going to put it below the rock and I'm going to make it bigger just like that. So it looks like it's in the middle of that spell or whatever it is. Just like that. Pretty cool. So that's the main part of the illustration and in the next one, I'm going to start adding color, some gradients and just make it pop. 7. Adding colour: So once you've finished doing illustration, you've done your background and done all the elements, you get onto colors now. A good way to get colors is to copy paste some colors from the Internet. What sites I usually go to is lolcolors.com, really cool guy made it, stays a candy check him out is a good designer. But I'm usually, they've got these cool color drops, and what I do I just screenshot it and chocolate in or copy, paste it into Illustrator, that's quickest way, or you can just put your mouse every double-click and get the hex code and then you can copy that into this watch panel. Other good side is Callaghan as well, you can click through categories or we can just go down and go abroad, abstract, cool color pallets, which is really nice and handy. So those are the two slides I usually use. What I did at college up these colors insert Press I, get the agile pod and then just click and then go to this one is found on the right hand corner, and then just press new swatch. Then that will add the Swatch. As you can see, Swatch will popup, press, okay, and we'll add it to the group. You can see you can create groups of folders using this button here, which is really handy. Another way we can create different color palettes as well is, if I select one of these colors here like the yellow and I go to color guide, and click I this drop-down menu, you can see we get all these different color rules. So we can create different types of color pallets, like complementary, monochromatic, triad, different shades. It's really handy and you can get a variety of different styles. So if you just want to add one of these elements, maybe I want some more like orangey, yellow, I can just click on analagous and go to this button. Click that, and then now we'll add it, add this to the Swatches panel. So I was very because Control C, shows you that, and I'm going to just delete these and we're going to start calling illustration. So I'm just going to double-click on this, on my sword, when you double-click will take you into oscillation mode and that will go, that wakeful groups, or groups of objects, or just any object or shape. You can double-click, will take you to this mode, and which allows you to work on that object by itself in that layout. I'm going to start coloring things using the colors. I'm just going for a normal color palette for a sword. I've got some Broadsea. Just trial and error, just playing around and see what fits. Make sure your tones are right, you don't want to have too much saturation in contrast, make sure it's the right levels and you have the right values meaning there's the right levels of dark tones and light tone. So your illustration doesn't look too muddy, and you really want to put the bright colors and the high contrast point on your focal point, which is my sword in the middle. That's my focal point, so I want to put all the bright colors in the contrast there. That's because it's where the focus is. I'm going to go through and color these illustrations and once you've done that, then we're going to go into the next beat and add shading. 8. Shading & adding detail: Cool, so we finished coloring our illustration, make sure you establish where your light source is coming from, so you can see I've got a light ray, so we know the light is coming from the left corner, so that means our shadow is going to be cast on the right-hand side. What we're going to do we're going to jump into our sword, I'm just going to double-click that, and you can see what I did is, I got a pencil and I clicked on the top anchor and I went all the way to the bottom of the sword and clicked that, so now we get this line, and we've created a shape, and what I've done is by shifting for the shape better tool, and then I've just clicked on the shapes, and then I got the eye dropper tool with "Eye" select them, and then just colored in those colors again, so now you can see we got this separate shape. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab those shapes we've just created, and then press "Ctrl C", "Ctrl F" to paste it in front, and you can see we've got those in front now. We're going to go to the transparency panel, and you can see we get all these blend modes, you can play around with these and figure out what's best. Usually I use multiply, color dodge, overlay, and soft light is pretty good, but the best thing to do is play around, you can get some really cool effects, so what I'm going to do, is change it to multiply, and you can see now the color, because it's on top of that other layout, because we've created extra objects, it creates this multiply effect, and it doubles like the darkness on top of it, so what I'm going to do, I usually put the percentage down the opacity to 40 percent, so I don't want that shadows too harsh, so you can see that now I've got some shadows, press "Escape" to get out of the isolation mode. Now you can see we've got some shadows on the sword, and it's starting to look really cool, so I'm going to add some shadow to the rock, so we've got our light ray here. I'm just going to make that a little bit bigger, just like that. I'm just going to lock that "Ctrl 2", I'm going to select the rock, and what I want to do is actually I want to get the pen tool out, so press "P" with pen tool, and I'm just going to drag a shape, like this it doesn't have to be perfect, just around the edge of the rock. Let's change the color, so that we can see, and what I'm going to do is take the rock and that shape that I just created with the pen tool, press "Shift M" for shade builder tool, and I'm just going to monice it out, and I'm going to change that shape to the same color as the rock, and make it show its on multiply, and I'm going to leave that on 30 percent actually. You can see now I've got this shadow on the rock, really cool, really simple, so it shows that the light is coming from the left, and it's making the rock give the illusion that it's a bit freely, so what I'm going to do now is select the sword and select the rock as well, hold "Alt", drag it to the side, and then I'm going to go to the power finder tool, and just unite those just like that. Then I'm going to make this smaller and just rotate it a little bit, and then I'm going to hold "Alt" and just squeeze it in just like that. What you can do as well, if you press "S" you'll go to the scale tool bar, if you just go down in the toolbox on the left, you have a shear tool, and you can shear it. It puts it into the same perspective, you can even hold "Shift" as well, or you can just drag it, and you can see what it's doing, it's shearing it and putting it on an angle. Sometimes it gets a bit weird, but just play around with it and try and get a nice effect. I'm just going to rotate this, place that behind, stretch it out, cause these shadows usually stretch out. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to change this dark color of the green, and then I'm going to change this to 20 percent. You can change the player on the bunny as well, but that looks like it's a shadow, so that will do the trick. You can see that the light is coming down, it looks like it's casting a shadow from the sword and the rock, so that's pretty cool. What I want to do now is, I'm going to add some shadows to the background as well, I'm just going to lock those layers and unlock the background, and what I'm going to do, I'm going to add some shadows to the floor, so what we're going to do is, we go to gradient panel on the right here, and we just double click on the little thing there, and you go to CMYK, and then I'm going to bump up the black. I want to move this slide along, just to get some shadows in the back, and you can see now this looks like a shadow. It's adding some depth into the background. I'm going to do the same thing for the very back as well, just this background. What we can do is, we're going to get the eye dropper tool, and then select that if I want, and use this slider, or you can just use that one, and what we can do is if you go to a swatch, you can just drag it or drag it from here. Drag it down into the gradient slot of section, and then now we've just created that thing, and what we can do is hold or just copy that across. I'm just going to change angle to 90 degrees and then double-click this. Then I'm going to add some black to that as well, and what you can do now you can click this button here on the left, and you can reverse it. Now you can see how it's just reversing the light, so maybe it's night time in the back, or if maybe you want some shadows coming from behind the bush, or I can have it like that. I like it like that, makes it look like the sun is coming down, so it's just adding some subtle gradients, adding that extra depth and detail, and it makes your illustration really stand out. I'm just going to change the color of this ray as well quickly, maybe I want it to be little bit yellow, then maybe I'll change the blend mode, so you can just scroll through it, you can see whatever works. Soft light or overlay is not bad, bump that up to about 60 percent. I'm just going to drag this out a bit, and what I usually do for these gradients, if you want it to fade out, you make the other one zero percent opacity, and that really makes it fade out, so it looks like it's natural lighting. You can do it for gradients and a lot of things. Best thing to do is always just play around, so I'm liking that. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to add some texture and just add some final touches. 9. Finishing touches : So what we're going to do is we're going to get this Brushes panel up. If you don't know how to get it up, go to Window and click Brushes. What I'm going to do I'll press L for the Ellipse tool. I'm just going to click and drag hold all and Shift as well. I'm just going to go create a circle. I want to select these and just drag into my Brushes panel. We want to create a scatter brush. I will press OK. Now, what I do for me, I usually set these to Random and I will also change the colorization to Tints. What I want to do, I want to press OK. Because I want to be able to preview my brush. I'm going to press B for the Brush tool and them I'm going just to drag it, strike real quick. Let's delete that circle. What I'm going to do to edit these, we go back to our brushes panel and double-click on the circle we just made. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to play with these settings, these parameters, and you can really get some cool effects. In this cell we create a scatter to see how we can start to get some cool particle effects. We're giving the illusion that I want the light right is shining and make it feel like there's dust in the air. Just to give it that extra detail, make it fill we know that it's a magical illustration. I'm just really playing with these. It doesn't have to be too perfect. I think that's okay. I'll just some press OK. You've got this box for about just press Apply to strokes. It applies it. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm just going to make sure these things are locked. Everything's locked. Press B for the brush tool. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to paint or just click and drag in inside this light ray. Now, we're getting some particles. You don't want to do too much. Well that's looking okay. Now, we can see we've got these cool little, actually circles, well it looks like dust particles. I'm going to select these and I'm going to go to the Transparency panel, and I'm going to just go through the blending modes again and just see what works. It's all a trial and error and just playing around, and you can come up with some really cool things. Soft Light is not too bad, or even Overlay. I think I'm just going to leave on screen though, I will change opacity to 80 percent. It's a bit less. Don't worry about this, let's leave it out you would see when you save it. Cool. Now we've got some particles, and now I'm going add some, a bit more glow in the middle of the sword. I'm just going to drag in an ellipse again, and I'm going to create a gradient. We've got a Gradient tool. I'm going to just use this yellow with white that we have. I'm going to put the opacity of one of the indicators to I'm going to change it to a radial. I'm just going to drag this slider in a bit more. I'm going to change the blend mode to Overlay. Then percentage to 60, we'll go with 60 percent. So you can see now it's got a bit of extra light in that area of. So if I drag this away, you can see it's a little bit flat. So when I put the C now it's go a little bit extra glow on the sword, which is pretty handy. We want to do one more thing now, we're going to add a bit of dust. So I just got this dust pack. You can get it from credit marker for free. I'm just going to click this, press Control C to copy. I'm going to go back to our illustration. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to, I'm just going to making a new layout, call it Texture, and I'm going to create a square, just like that. What we're going to do, is going to Transparency again. What we're going to do is go to, Make Mask. I've made a mask now and what I'm going to do is press Control V to paste that texture that we just copied, and you can see it pops up here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this out, make it to be bigger. It can overlap that board. This is just one technique I use, just to adds a bit more detail. As you can see, if I zoom in here, you can see we've got these little specks. So that just adds a bit of grain to it, instead of being pure, just flat vector. Then you can play around with these and invert the mask if you want. But I'm just going to go here and actually I'm going to go back here and I'm going to select the Texture, and just press. I want to change the color. Maybe we're going to put up that green. Then what I'm going to do, to hide the edges, you just press Control H, and I'm going to zoom in. Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to click on the square here, and I'm just going to change the blending modes and then see what looks good. If you want more light textures or if you want it to be most subtle, you can go maybe Overlay, or even Color Dodge is okay. Yeah color dodge looks all right. All right just a really subtle texture. So if you zoom in, you can see how we got the little specks. Yeah, that's how you add some finishing touches to your illustration and yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed the class, and hopefully we're going to see you in the next one. 10. Post your project: So yeah, that's it. Hope you guys enjoyed the class. Thanks for enrolling. I really appreciate it. Don't forget to post some projects in the project gallery and we'll get to it and give you guy feedback. If you guys need any help, just put your comments below in the discussion board and I help you out. I hope you guys learned a thing or two about Illustrator. Learned some new techniques about getting inspiration, getting ideas and creating effect the illustration. So hope to see you in the next class and have a good day.