Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, it's Jeremy here, and I'm a Designer and Illustrator from Sydney. Today in this class, I will be showing you how to create some vector mockups. We are going to work our way through a T-shirt mockup, and I'm going to show you a few other examples on how to create some cool mockups, whether its for print or web, and that type of thing. Mockups are really awesome, especially when you're showing or presenting your design work, logos, illustrations, and more branding with your client, and helps you visualize your project before shaping it in the real world. Mockups are a great tool that helps them to see the project in a professional way, and it helps them shut your work in context and allows you to show it in a way that is going to be portrayed in a real life situation. That's why it's good to have mockups. It's really going to help you become more professional and help you design process. The good thing about it is it's always on Illustrator, so it's a lot quicker and a lot more efficient than jumping into Photoshop and doing all that stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed the class, don't forget to enroll, and let's get stuck into it.
2. Reference Images : So before we start building up our vector mockups, what we're going to do is find good reference images. You can see I just went to the Nike store and I found these cool running shoe. You can see how it's a nice photography, it's got a clean background and will be easily able to outline the shape of the shoe really easily and quickly. It's also got other pictures that you can use as well, top view, side view, and other views that we can use to trace over. We're not copying the image, we're just using it as a reference and then we can build our own vector shoe and design over it. So you can go to other sites like Urban Outfitters, Asos, or clothing stores that you shop at and you can find some good images and use that for anything like t-shirts, hats, whatever. I'll just copy and paste. You can right-click and use your copy and paste, or I usually screenshot it and then I'll just copy it in. You could see there are some more examples here. This is just Urban Outfitters one. You can find some cool hats, beanies or anything like that. Another good way to do is go to Pinterest as well. You can just find anything pretty much. I just typed in t-shirts and you get all these t-shirts that you can use. The way can do it, you can just go in, pick one and then just right-click, copy, go to Illustrator, and then just paste it in, just like that. So now we get some cool reference images that we can use. You can see I'm just using some basic ones. We're not going to copy the image, but what we're going to do, we're going to outline and use strokes and shapes to build it up. That's how we're going to create our vector mockups.
3. Creating T-Shirt Mockup: Once you've found some awesome mockups to use and reference images, we can start building out our designs. I've got the shirt here, I'm just going to select it. Then you can press "Control" or "Command 2", and that's going to lock the image there. You can see now it's locked and we can't select it, which is pretty awesome. What I'm going to do now, I have some color palettes. Usually when I do these types of mockups, you want to make sure that it's flat. You can see how these creases in the shirt or whatever you're using, you can add shadows if you want or highlights to make it realistic, but others prefer to keep it flat, so it doesn't distract the client or distract them in the presentation when you are showing the logo or design on the t-shirt, or mockup, whatever you're using. I'm just going to press "P" for the Pen tool, and I'm, just going to select the color. I'm going to select yellow for now just so you guys can see it. I'm just going to bound the stroke right there. I'm just going to go in aside, going over the top of the outline of the shirt. You can start clicking and you can see when you click and drag it, you can make it a bit more curvy, you don't want to make it too straight because a shirt is real material. It's not always straight, it's not like metal. You want to make it a bit more organic. You can see I'm just holding "Shift" and dragging that out to get that curve there. You can also move these handles by holding "Optional". You can see it's a handle, and I can move this around to get a different curve if I want. Which is pretty awesome. I'm just going to go through here and go around the whole shirt. The process applies to all the other mockups you use, if you're doing a hat or a watch or anything really, or shoes. Doesn't have to be perfect, but you're going to try and get the outline as good as possible, because if they're going to be presenting it, then you want it to look as professional as it should be. I'm just going through here, just like that. Now you can see we have our main outline of the t-shirt, which is pretty cool. You can always go back in here and edit those strokes or points. If you press "A" for the "Direct Selection" tool, you can just select the anchors and you can actually just drag these points in, and you can edit the way you want it, in case it's looking too wonky. You can always go in and fix it like that. Now, what we're going to do, we're going to add some more of the creases, because you can see how a shirt has creases or stitching, even for the collar as well, which is really useful. We can press "P" for the "Pen" tool again. I can click on the line then I'm just going to hold "Shift", drag this out to get a rounded, circular line, and then click again, and you can see we've got a nice shape there. We'll do the same for the bottom bit of the stitching of the collar. Just going to have it like that. Sweet. We've got our collar, we got our shirt, and what we'd like to do is we'll add a bit of creases, makes it a bit more realistic. I'm just going to go through here. It doesn't really complete the same, but we're going to just leave it like that. I'll do the other side as well, just to get a nice little crease in there. Sweet. We've got that crease, I just want to make it a bit less, just like that. What we can do now as well, we can actually change the width of this crease. First of all, I'd like to make the corners round, you can see how it's squared off. I'd like to make it round, so I'm going to select all the stroke and we're going to go to "Window" and click "Stroke". You can see you've got this window pop up. We've got our stroke options, and what we can do now, we can actually round off these lines or paths so we can make it a bit more organic. I'd like to round it off, what I do is click "Round Cap" and "Round Join", and you can see how all the pointy bits are rounded off now, which is pretty awesome. You can also make a dashed line as well. If you want to make the stitching, look more like a stitch, we can go, "Dashed Line" here. What I usually do, I round it off and add a bit of a gap. I've added a dash of five and a gap of 10, which I was playing around with before. You can see we get this nice stitching effect, which is pretty handy, and then we can bump down the stroke to make it look like it's part of the shirt, which is pretty awesome. But I'm just going to leave it like a normal line for now. Actually, I'm going to drop that, make it a bit more thinner, just like that. What we're going to do now, we've rounded off our lines and we can actually change the width, or we can actually taper these off. If I select this line, you can see how it's not connected to the main outline for now, I can select it. If you press "Shift W", it's going to get this "Width" tool up. If I go, "Shift W", you can see on the left-hand side it's this looking thing icon, and I can actually click on the anchor point on the path, and I can click and drag and it's going to make it really fat, or it's going to make it really thin. You can actually taper it off all the way. It looks like it's just like a crease there. Or you can just have it a little bit rounded, which I'd like to do to give it a bit more depth, make it a bit more realistic. I'll do the same for this side as well, which is pretty awesome. You can see that the stitch is tapering off a little bit into the shirt. That's pretty awesome, we've got our shirt. I'm just going to hold "Alt" and "Shift". Always make a copy, just duplicate it so you don't lose what you've worked on. Then you can just go in here to edit the paths if it's looking wonky. It doesn't have to be perfect, it can be the way you want to design it. We've got our path, and what I usually do, I'm going to change the outline now to a darker color and then just bump up the stroke. I like having my strokes thick, it looks nicer. We've got our t-shirt marquee. What we usually do now, I can actually select these, I'm going to just copy it one more time, and what I'm going to do, I'm going to select it all, and go to "Object", and I'm going go expand appearance. It's going to expand all these strokes. You can see how it's expanded, but we're going to do it again, so go "Control E", expand, and then just press "Okay". You can see now, all these paths are actually just shapes now. What I can do is, we can go to the pathfinder tool. You go to Window and then you can go to pathfinder. What we're going to do, we're just going to click "Unite". I'm just going to zoom in so you can see. Now, it's united as one shape. Now you can see it's all just one shape, there's no stokes, but we've kept our edited version here so we can go back and always edit it. This is now expanded version. What we're going to do is I'm going to press "Control C", "Control F", and that just made a copy on top of it. I'm just going to select a different color, and I'm just going press "Shift M" for the shape builder tool and I'm just going to select everything here. Now you can see it's turned everything into a shape and it's just the fill now, there's no stroke as you can see. We've got that, and now bring to the back, "Control Shift", left square bracket, and we've brought it to the back. Now we can select all this. Sometimes it's good to actually make a copy as well, "Control C", "Control F" of the back one again. Then we're going to lock that one, select all this, go "Shift M" for the shape builder tool, where you can see it looks like this on the left. Now we can actually select these shapes here. I'm just going to click, click on that and click in the middle here. Now we've got a shape p. Now, if we want to make these darker, we can actually just bump it like that, and make it like it's like a V-neck sort of thing. I'm actually going to leave that there. These are too dark, so I'm going to drop the opacity down to about 40 percent, maybe a be bit more. Okay, sweet, so now we've added a bit of shadow because it's inside the shirt. You can see that and it's a separate shape. We've got separate shape there, but we can delete that. But you can see we've got this separate shape and we got a copy of that and a copy of the back one as well, because you don't want to lose your shapes and stuff like that. We've got that, and what I usually do, I select it all, "Control G" or "Command G". We've just grouped it all now like this. We've got it all. Make sure that you unlock the bottom, fill, and just group it again. Now we've got a group like that. Then you can go ahead and just create a logo or whatever logo you're using, or if you're doing a branding project. So let's pretend this star is a logo and we can start laying it out in the middle of the shirt or whatever, how you want to do it. I'm just going to pick a font. You can see now we're starting to get a nice cool mockup that we can use in our presentations and use it in our work. Yeah. This is how we create our t-shirt. You can go ahead and build out a hat, a phone, a shoe, whatever it is, and start building up a collection of vector mockups.
4. Using Symbols Library: Once you've created your t-shirt mockup what we're going to do now is save it into our Symbol Palette so we can always draw from it and reuse it in any other project. You can see here I've got our t-shirt, what I'm going to do is just going to copy this down below just like that. You can see I build out my shoe in an iPhone and an action cap, just from these images are up here.You can see that they are all editable, they are just strokes and I'll play with the width tool for these. These are the dashed lines and the rest of these fills and strokes. You can see the outline is just shrunk stroke and I'll put everything behind it. Just pretty awesome. You can keep that all alive.You don't have to expand it like we did for the t-shirt. That's just showing you another way just to clean up the lines, if you want. You can leave it like this, just by [inaudible] it together and we can save that as a symbol. We got a t-shirt here. I'm just going to delete this stuff because we're not going to use that. I'm also just going to delete this copy that I had, just cleaning it up. We've got our back piece, we've got this little extra piece here as well. I'm just going to get rid of that. Now we just got a fill, a shadow and our stroke there. I'm going to group this together for now. What we're going to do,we are going to go the Window and go to Symbols. You can see how you get the symbols, there is default ones here and you can also load in some in as well, which I'll show you off about. Select all these, hold Shift and click the bin on the bottom right corner and that's just going to delete the symbols. What we can do now, after you've done your mockups, we can just use these and make a symbol out of it. I'm going to click it and just drag it into the box. Then you can name it whatever you want, T-shirt. Don't worry about these settings here because that's only for use when you're using in Adobe Flash, which you don't need to worry about. Press "Okay". I'm also doing the same for all the other ones as well. You can see how it's saving it and loading it into the Symbol panel. Now we've got our symbols, what we can do now, is actually we can edit them or use them, delete them whatever we want. What I could do,I can just click and drag it out. Now you can see it's a symbol. If I select it, you can see at the top here, it shows the symbol and it shows you what you can do with it. You can edit symbol or you can break the link. You need to press break the link when we want to use it, if I press Break Link. You can see now it's just the shape but beforehand it's got this little mark here, it shows the symbol and you can't really edit it.You can change the color but it won't be editable so just make sure you Break Link.We can also select it and go to edit symbol or we can double click on the shirt or the object, whatever it is. If I double click it, you can see we're in edit mode, you say get this bar and I can go in and actually change the color. Maybe I want a green shirt and if I press back or Escape, you can see now it's actually re-saved the shirt and its saved that symbol there. Now it's a green shirt, which is pretty awesome so it's really flexible. I'm just going to delete these for now. There we go and now we've got our Symbol Palette. I'm going to show you how to save these. Click this little dropdown menu. What we can do now, is go Save Symbol Library. This will allow us to save the library so we can just reuse it. I recommend try and save it in the right folder. You can see in your Adobe photos, you can save it in the Symbols and you can save it in there or you can just save it anywhere. Maybe I want to save it in one of these places so maybe I'm going to save it in this folder, Color Palette folder. You can see that effect of Mockup Designs, call it whatever, and just click Save. Now if I go back to that folder, just got my Color Palette folder. You can see here with the file Vector Mockup Designs. Now every time I open a new document, I'm just going to open a new one really quick. Now if we go to our Symbol Palette, I can just click on this, I can go open Symbol Palette, go other Library and then locate the folder or file where you put it. I put in here and if I double click this, it should load in my Symbol Palette just like that. Now I can just start using these,if I have a presentation and use as I want. I can even edit them in here as well and then I'll just Break Link, just like that. Then I can go in and start putting my logo in, creating some nice mockups.
5. Mockups In Action: Now that we have our vector mockups, we can use them as symbols. We can just load them into any project we have with the client and start to use them to create some nice mockups. You can see I'm just working on some old logos that I did about a year ago. You can see that it was one of my first logo concepts. You can see I just got some of the designs, and now I'm just checking on the t-shirt, and the phone, whatever mockup you create. Just applying the logo or branding work onto those mockups so the client can see it and how it's going to look like in the spacing and the layout of it, which really helps them to visualize the mockup positively so when it goes to the real world, they get an idea how it's going to look. That's why these mockups are really useful and helpful. They're going to increase your chances of people liking your design or concept. This is a good way just to apply the logos or branding, whatever you're doing, to one of the mock-ups. You can see here that I've got a phone. If you want to add shadows or something like that, I'll show you what I usually do. I'm just going to press M for the marquee tool. I'm just going to drag a box. Then what you do with this box, you go to your Gradient panel and you just click on the White and Black bar and you're going to get a gradient. What we're going to do is to just change the angle to 90. Then now I'm going to increase this black click on the little slider and decrease the black to about like 30 percent. We're just going to click on the white one and the capacity to zero. Just like that, and you can see how the gradient has changed. Now I'm just going to drag this little slider up a little bit close to the black. Just like that. Now you can see we've got a bit of a flow background going on. Then I'm going to drag it behind the phone. I'm just going to drag to something like that. I've just decreased the percentage a little bit more. Now it looks like the phone is sitting on an actual floor or panel or something like that. It gives a bit of depth and dimension to the mockup, so it looks like it's standing up on something. Then you can add more than one you can add a few on the left or right and put some different designs on it or whatever like that. But that's just how I add shadows to these kinds of mockups. You can always go ahead and add shading and other types of things, but as I said before, it's easier just to keep it flat like use grays or whatever so the logo can stand out on the mockup. That's how you create the mockups, guys. I hope you enjoyed the class and I look forward to seeing your projects.
Jeremy Mura, Brand and Web Designer
