Warp Shapes & Text in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Warping Shapes and Text in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class; warp shapes and text in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're warping text and shapes in Illustrator. We'll start by downloading a photo of an apple. We'll turn it into a vector and then we'll shape it into a sort of square shape using the Envelope Distort tool in Illustrator. Then we'll go ahead and warp some text and distort it using a mesh. We'll also reshape some text to a hand-drawn shape. Along the way, you'll learn the handy technique for filling text with a custom gradient and for using the blob brush. Now, as you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I enjoy all of your class projects. Now let's get started on warping shapes and text in Illustrator. 2. Warp Shapes & Text - Part 1: We're going to start our warped text and shape project here at a site called morguefile.com. At morguefile, you can search for and download photos. The issue with morguefile is that you have to do something with them. You can't just publish them as they are. Since we plan to do something with this apple that we're going to download, then this is a perfect site for us. I'm just going to click on this apple, and I'm going to give you the link to do so. Then you can just click to download the image, and you'll download it to your downloads folder. Now, I've already done that. So let's just close down my browser, and then let's go to Illustrator and create a new file. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm going to create a document. This one is 960 pixels by 560. It's in landscape mode, so that's perfect for me. I'll just click "OK". Now what I want to do is to place that apple illustration in my document. I'll choose File, and then Place, and I'm going to navigate to my downloads folder. Here's the apple. I'm just going to click on it and click "Place". Inside Illustrator, I can just drag a place for this image to be put inside the document. Now, whenever you do that with an image Illustrator, assumes that you probably want to trace this, which is exactly what we want to do. We can go up here to the Image Trace options, and I'll just click to have Illustrator trace this bitmap image and create it into a vector object. The resulting trace isn't particularly good, but we can solve that by opening up the image trace panel here. If you don't see it, choose Window and then Image Trace. The first thing to do with this panel is to turn preview off. It's probably the only panel in Illustrator that has preview turned on by default, and it's probably the one that you least want preview to be turned on for. So just turn it off so that you can make these changes to the dialogue without Illustrator retracing the image every single change you make. Now, if you don't see the advanced options here, just click on "Advanced". We want to trace this in color, so I'm going to select color from the mode's drop-down list. I'm also selecting a limited color palette. We don't want too many colors. I have it set to 30, but you could set it to anything between 20-30. In the Advanced panel, we can choose how this image is trace. Because we're just here to learn about warping, we don't want a very high fidelity trace. We're going to drag paths to low and corners to less. Then we're going to drag noise all the way up to about 100. That's going to give us a rough trace enough for our purposes. Now we're ready, we can click "Preview" on, and Illustrator will go ahead and trace the image using these settings. This is the trace result. It's a far better result than we had previously. I'm just going to click to close this dialogue. Now, I want to expand this, so I'm going to click "Expand". That expands the trace into the pieces of vector shapes that got to make this image. Next, I want to ungroup this. I'm going to select it, and choose Object, Ungroup. That just ungroup the shapes. Now I can start to get rid of the bits that I don't want. I don't want to any of the gray background, all I want is the apple itself. I can just make a general selection over the areas around the image that I don't want. But I'm going to be a little bit careful, to make sure that I don't destroy the bottom of the apple. Because chances are, that the shadow under the apple is also part of the apple. If you try to take out the shadow, you're going to destroy part of the apple. Well, I'm going to show you a solution for that. This stripe pieces here, but we're going to ignore those for the moment. Let's just go and clean up the bottom of the apple. To do that, we're going to zoom in. Now, your next best friend tool-wise right now is going to be the eraser tool. I'm just going to click on the "Eraser Tool". Here, I can just start shading off the bits of this vector shapes that I don't want leaving the bits that I do, because this darker green is actually part of the apple. As soon as I break the connection between a shape and the apple itself, now I can come in with the selection tool, and just select on that shape and remove it. Sometimes the eraser tool is a good way to clean up. Just strive at some pieces that you don't want from a scan. Of course, you can get these bigger pieces as well. We can just drag around and just grab any of these stripe bigger pieces that we're seeing here that might also be attached to the image, or you can just select them with the selection tool and get rid of those. We still got bits and pieces here, and I'm not going to worry too much about them right now. Because what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go to what's called outline view. I'm going to choose View and then Outline. Now we can see where all the stripe pixels are, just makes life a little bit easier. With the selection tool, we can select over the stripe pixels and start to get rid of them. We can also use the eraser tool at this point. If you can see this little dots, which is the outlines of these little leftovers shapes, then you can just go and erase them. This is a quick and easy way, just to clean up traces in Illustrator. In just a couple minutes, we've got a really good trace of this object. Let's go back to normal view. I'm just going to choose Preview on CPU. Now we have our traced apple, and we're ready to go ahead and to warp it. I want to warp this into a square shape. 3. Warp Shapes & Text - Part 2: To warp our apple shape into a square shape, we're going to need a square object. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, I have a Fill Set and No Stroke and I'm going to hold shift as I drag out a square so that I can make my apple a square shape. Now, the square shape was drawn after the apple, which means it's on top in the last stack. This is pretty important. I'm just going to open up the last stack and you can see that the square objective is at the top and the apple bits and pieces are underneath. Well, I'm going to group the apple together just so that it's not going to separate into a million little pieces. I'll select over it and choose Object and then Group. It's still underneath the rectangle though and you can see that in the last pallet. I'm going to select over both these shapes and I'm going to use a tool called Envelope Distort, we'll choose Object and then Envelope Distort, and we're going to select the make with top object because that's going to make the apple a squared shape. Well, at least that's the theory. Let's click here, and all this aims to do is just to make the apple exactly the same shape as it was. Clearly right now, the rectangle or the square shape is not working. I'm just going to undo this. Sometimes Envelope Distort won't give you the results that you think it should give you. Let's go now and let's create a circle. I'm just going to drag out a circular shape. Again, my circular shape is in a path on top of my apple shape. Now let's select both these shapes and let's see what Envelope Distort does this time. Object, Envelope Distort, make with top object. We wanted the apple to be a square shape and forcing it into a circle actually had the desired result. If you sometimes think that Envelope Distort isn't working the way you want it to, try it with a different shape and see if you can work out what shape you can draw that's going to give you the desired result. Now I just want to rotate this around, so I'm just going to grab it, hold the Shift key and rotate it just 45 degrees because this is the way I want my apple to look. Now once you rotate a shape, you'll see that the handles no longer appear around the shape the way they did previously. If you want your handles to be in the right place, just choose Object, Transform, Reset Bounding Box, and just look at the handles now. The top one is pointing at the very top of the shape here, let's click "Reset Bounding Box" and see how we now have the handles where we might expect them to be for this particular shape. Before we leave off warping the apple and go ahead and look at the text, just be aware that this apple has control handles around it so if we click on the direct selection tool, there is a control handle over here, an anchor point, and so we can drag it out, and that would drag out this corner of the apple. We can actually shape it into perhaps even a little bit better square shape by just using these handles. Here I'm using the Envelope Distort to get started with my square apple, but I may want to come back here with the individual handles and just reshape it to get the perfect result. I'm pretty happy now with my square apple, let's go ahead and have a look at how we would walk the text around it. 4. Warp Shapes & Text - Part 3: Now, the typeface that I'm going to be using for the type effects is called big bottom typeface. It's a typeface that has a slightly bigger bottom than it does top. It's a cartoon typeface. I'm going to give you a link for downloading this font, but you can use any font that you like. I just suggest that you use something that is relatively thick so that you can get a nice warp effect. I'm going to type the word weird, and I'm going to do it in capital letters. I'm going to select my type and I'm going to select my typeface which I've already previously installed. Here, it is big bottom typeface and I'm going to enlarge it and place it over my apple. Now, one of the things I promised you in this video were showing you how to add a gradient fill to type because you can't do it using this option because by just selecting gradient fill, we've got a gradient fill here, but the type isn't filling with it. It's not something that you can do and illustrate it particularly easily. I'm going to start by grabbing the colors I want for my gradient. I'm going to open up my swatches panel, I'm going to get my eyedropper tool. I'm going to sample a couple of colors from the apple itself. I'm going to select this color here. I'm just going to drag and drop it into my swatches panel. I'm going to sample a few of these colors so that I can use them for my gradient. Selecting colors like this is going to make sure that the text gradient that I'm going to use is going to be color wise matching the apple. Now that I've got that, I can get color text, but I just can't get gradient filled text. We're going to go back and select the text with the selection tool. I'm going to open up the appearance panel and here, I'm going to add a new fill. I'm just going to click here for Add New Fill and the strange thing is, when you add a new fill, you get access to these gradient fills. Its just like a weird thing in Illustrator but you can't add a gradient fill to text just by clicking on gradient fill. But if you go through the appearance panel, then yes you can. I want to add a different gradient though. So I'm going to the gradient tool, here is the gradient here and you can get to it, of course by choosing Window and then gradient. Now, I want to select the colors, and I have the colors in my swatches panel. I'm going to do a light gradient to a darker gradient. Well, let's choose this color here. Now I've got my gradient. One of the things I'm going to do is actually add it to the swatches panel. Having gone to the trouble of creating the gradient, I'm also going to save it so I can reuse it later on. I'm going to just pop it in here, so my gradient is saved. Let's go back to the gradient dialogue because I actually want this to be a radial gradient. Then, let's go to the gradient tool over here and I'm just going to drag the gradient in from this end. So light on this side, through the matching where it is lighter on the apple as well. I've now got some gradient field text and you now know how to create gradient field text in Illustrator. Next up, we're going to look at some options for warping text and I'm going to show you all three of them and we're just going to work with them. The exercise here is just purely to show you what your options are. Let's select over the text and one of the options is this one, Make Envelope. It's a warp option and you can also get to it by choosing Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Warp. It's exactly the same tool. What you get here is a dialogue of warp options and these are the options that you can use. You can use arc, which will arc your text. I was actually using Arc Upper because that gave me effect that I've liked but there are lots of options here that you can play with. Just select anything and start working with it. When you do select it, you're going to get these options here. At the moment, we're working on horizontal and you can see that it's arcing this way but if we drag it this way, it's going to arc underneath. We could have placed that perhaps underneath the apple. You've also got a vertical option here which takes it in different directions vertically. But horizontal is presumably what we want here. You can also add some distortion, so you can add some horizontal distortion to your warp and also some vertical distortion. You can say that even using these built-in warp options, given that you've got so many of them and every one of them has these controls, you can get a fair bit of warped text variety just from this one dialog, so I'm just going to click "OK". That's one of your options for warping text and I'm going to use this as the basis for the second choice I'm going to make, but you could just do this with regular text as well. I'm going to choose Object, Envelope Distort, and if we hadn't already done this warp, we could choose what would be here, Make with Mesh. Well, we're going to choose Reset with Mesh because that just allows us to use the mesh tool on the already warped text. Now, when we do that, we get the option to maintain this envelope shape. In other words, what Illustrator is saying to us is okay, you want to make it with the envelope mesh, I know how to do that, but you already applied a warp to it. Do you want to do this mesh with the existing warp or do you want me to ignore the warp and just go ahead and do the mesh? Well, what we want to do is take this as the basis. So we want to maintain the envelope shape that we've got, but we want to add some additional mesh options. We're just going to use one row but you can see here that we've got three columns. Well, we're going to increase the number of columns just so we get a few more options, a few more handles here for bending the shape down. I'm just going to click "OK". Let's zoom in and let's go and get the direct selection tool because these are just anchor points. I'm going to just select over this anchor point and drag it down. When I do, the text comes with me and it has little handles just like any anchor point, so we can smooth it around. I can bend this text around the shape of my apple just by moving the anchor points and the text is warped to match. I'm just going to grab this one and drag it down and because it's not bending nicely around the apple, well it's got a handle on it and we know how to just manipulate those handles to smooth out the bend. If I want to turn I do, I'm actually going to bend this around the stalk in the apple because that's going to give me that look that I'm really getting a bent piece of text. Now, if you find that your apple is taking off on you, just open up the last panel and just lock your apple down. This envelope here is the apple, and if you lock it, you won't be able to select it, which will give you a bit more freedom to select either other anchor points because you won't get the apple in the way as you drag on them. When I'm done, I'll just press "Control" or "Command+0" to go back to seeing the image at full size. We have our envelope distorted text here, we did it in two ways. First of all, we used the text arch option and then we used the mesh option which allows us to distort the text by dragging on handles. Well, next up, we're going to see yet another way of distorting text. 5. Warp Shapes & Text - Part 4: For this next text effect, we're going to use a different type of warp. Right now, I'm just going to move these pieces little further up my document. Go to the layers palette and just lock these two elements down so they don't move. I'm going to go and get the Type tool, I'm going to type Science. I'm still in the same font, this big bottom typeface. I'm just going to move the text roughly into the position I want it to take up. Ultimately, I want to fill this text with the same gradient I used up here. But because envelope distort, it makes it a little bit difficult to see how you would even fill type with a solid color. I'm going to leave the gradient fill until later and show you how you can edit these envelope distort objects so that you can change their fill, because it's not immediately apparent how you would do so. I'm going to warp this text to a shape. I'm going to draw my shape using a blob brush so I'm just going to click on the blob brush. I'm going to set a stroke color. I'm going to make the stroke color something like a red for now. If you don't have the blob brush in your version of Illustrator, you can just make a shape. It doesn't matter what shape you make. It's just important that you see how to warp your text to a shape. Now if you double-click on the blob brush, if you've got that, I like to set the fidelity to smooth. That's going to smooth everything out nicely. I'll probably also select "Keep Selected" so that any additional brushstrokes I make will be added to my shape. Now I'm just going to drag to paint a shape that I want to distort my type into. Because I had the fidelity set to smooth, you'll see that when I draw on this shapes that Illustrator is trying to smooth out the bumps. That works pretty well. If you're not a 100 percent happy with how smooth your shape is, you can come in here and choose the "Smooth Tool" and double-click on it and you can see how you can set it to accurate or smooth. Well, you'll want to set it to the smooth end if you want to smooth things out. You can just drag over these anchor points to just smooth them. What Illustrator does is remove anchor points to give you a smoother shape. This shape is just a regular Illustrators shape so it has anchor points all around it. You can come in here and select on any of these anchor points, and adjust them as you would any other anchor point in Illustrator. So you get a lot of flexibility using the blob brush as a starting point for your shape, and then adjusting the shape if you want to, having made it with the blob brush. I'm just going to square off the end here. This is the shape that I want to shape my text too. Because I drew it second, this shape is on top of the tech shape. Now that's really important for the envelope distort tool, that the shape is on top of whatever it is that you want to reshape. Now I have my shape and my text, I'm going to select both of these and I'm going to use Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Top Object. That bends the ticks to the shape of the object. It just hasn't been particularly successful here, so let's go Edit, Undo. Let's go and have another look at our shape. It's usually one or two of these anchor points that are causing difficulty. I'm going to zoom in here and we're going to see if we can see what's causing it to turn upside down. Well, this is probably what's causing it to turn upside down, this anchor point here. I'm going to try it with the [inaudible] tool, to see if I can get it to behave a little better. But if that doesn't work, I can always go to the delete anchor point tool. I think I have two anchor points in close proximity and they're just not behaving nicely. Having got rid of what I think are probably the problem anchor points, I can add a new one back in and just adjust the shape using it. Let's go back out again and let's try that again. Again, selecting the Selection tool, dragging over the text and the shape, Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Top Object. This time that text is re-shaped correctly. Just be aware that if you draw on the shape yourself, if there's anything that's a bit funky in terms of the anchor points, you may need to come back and re-adjust the anchor points, and then distort it again. Now we've got our word science, which has been nicely distorted to match the shape that we created. This can be stretched out. It's just a warped shapes, so it's going to behave like a regular shape in Illustrator. But now what we want to do, is to add this really interesting gradient to it. Well, if we have a look in the last palette here, you'll say that we've got envelope here in the Layers palette. But there's no indication that we can open it to get inside our text. It's got this funny gray fill color, which is not represented by the actual fill color of the text. So there's no direct relationship between what we're seeing here and what we're seeing here. If we open up the appearance panel, we just get envelope and contents. But no matter what we click on in here, we can't get access to anything that looks like a black fill that we could change. The answer is not in the appearance panel. The answer is in selecting the text and choosing Object, Envelope Distort, and then Edit Contents. This gives us access to the type inside the envelope. Again, we know that we can't fill this type with a gradient because we're not allowed to do that in Illustrator, so let's open the appearance panel and let's click on the contents of this envelope, and let's add a new fill. Now we can add a gradient fill because of the gradient option available here. Let's go and get our gradient. Now with the gradient fill applied, let's go to the gradient panel and make it a radial gradient. Once it's a radial gradient, we can go back to the appearance panel, make sure we have this fill selected, and go and get the gradient tool itself, which now allows us to drag over the kind of gradient that we want for this shape. Now that we've done this, we can close down the appearance panel. But what Illustrators not going to tell you is that you're still in this edit envelope walk mode, and you need to get out of it. So you need to re-select this shape and then you need to go to Object, Envelope Distort, Edit Envelope, and that takes you back to editing the envelope rather than the contents. Let's go back, and you can say now that the handles appear around our shape. The envelope distort tool has a few little weird things about it so you just want to be aware of those when you're using it. 6. Warp Shapes & Text - Part 5: Before we finish off with this warp text effect, there's one other thing I just want to show you because it might help you understand how you're going to get interesting effects with it. I'm going to just open a new document and I'm just going to the ''Pen Tool'' and I'm going to drag and draw a heart. I'm going to click and drag upwards in this direction. Come across here, click and drag downwards. I'm going to the bottom of the heart where I'm just going to click once. I'm going to come up to this side, it's going to be a little bit of a lopsided heart. I'm going to click and drag here. I'm going to come back to the finishing point and click. Now, one of the issues is going to be this point in a minute, but let's just see what the problem is and let's solve it. Firstly, I'm going to fill the heart with a color, but I'm not going to have any stroke at all. I'm just going to go and obviously pick some pink color. This is going to be a good color for it. Now, I'm going to test it first of all with my type. I'm going to type the word love, and I'm going to do it in all capitals. I'm going to again select this "Big Bottom" font. Let's type in big, in here it is "Big Bottom Typeface". I've got my text and right now it's on top of the shape because it was drawn seconds. In the last panel you can see I've got text on top of the path here for the heart shape. Well, we need to reverse those. In the last panel, we can do it by just dragging the text below the shapes. That's one easy way of doing it. Let's select over both of this, it doesn't matter that my text is really tiny and my shape is really big. The text is going to be dragged out and made bigger to fill the shape. Right Right we're only on a test process. Let's do "Object", "Envelope Distort", "Make with Top Object". You can see here that this one's got the same Buckle Under Effect as we had with the type that we did on the previous one. Let's just undo that. The Buckle Under Effect is caused by this point here, not having two handles. All we need to do is to click on this "Two handles" option here, to make a round edge and then just reshape our heart. To break these two handles, I'm going to hold "Alt" or "Option" as I drag on this end because that just lets me reshape this end without reshaping the other one. Let's just go and get this handle. I think it needs just a little bit more work. I want a distorted heart, but it's important that this middle area here has two handles on it, or else the text when it appears inside the heart is going to buckle. Now that we've done that, I'm confident that this is going to work this time. Before I go and make my text the shape of my heart, I'm going to tuck a second version of this heart away. I'm going to drag it onto the "New Layer" icon. I'm going to move it to the very bottom out of the way, and I'm going to turn its visibility off, so we can't see that second heart. Now, let's go and get the two pieces that we want to work with. The text, and Shift-click on this larger heart shape. You can see here in the layers panel that these two shapes or these two objects are selected. "Object", "Envelope Distort", "Make with Top Object". Now, we have our wonderful text that's in the shape of a heart, but look what we've given ourselves by keeping a duplicate of the heart. Well, we've allowed ourselves the opportunity of adding a colored fill behind the text without having to redraw something that was a hand-drawn shape in the first place. Now, one of the things that you might want to do at this point is to actually make this second heart, the one behind, a little bit bigger so that the word love appears inside it. Well, you're about to encounter a problem in Illustrator. I'm going to select this shape and I'm going to drag out what's on this handle holding "Shift" and "Alt" as I do so. You'll see that this doesn't give us an exact copy of this shape. You can say that this anchor point here is really close to the shape underneath the warped shape, and yet the shape is a lot further away on this side. We're not getting a really true expansion of this shape. I'm just going to undo this. Let's go and let's look at this shape alone. I'm going to turn the text off. I'm going to look at this path and I'm going to add a stroke to it, and it's going to be blue for now. I'm going to make it quite a bit bigger. I'm going to make sure that it is not on the inside of the shape. Aligning the strike to the center is a good option here. Now, we have a stroke that is building a little bit of extra space on the edge of our heart. I'm going to take this shape and I'm going to expand it with "Object Expand". I want to expand, fill, and stroke, so I'll click "Okay". Now, I have a stroke which is a pace, and the heart, which is a pace. In the group here you can say that there's a blue bit, and a pink bit. Well, we're going to take the blue bit and the pink bit, and we're going to join them using the Pathfinder. I'm going to "Pathfinder", I'm going to click on "Unite". This gives me a blue heart. Well, it's really easy to recolor it back to the pink color that we wanted. Now, let's go back to the "Layers panel". Let's turn on our text. By adding that extra amount of shape around our heart using a stroke, we've now got a perfect extra amount of pink around our text. We wouldn't have had that perfect re-shape if we'd done it by just dragging on the handles of the shape. Now, again, this text is inside the Envelope. If we want to re-color the text, we need to select it. We need to go to "Object", "Envelope Distort", "Edit Contents". Here is our type, and it's this tiny little thing in here. Well, we can recolor it to, for example, a dark red. Once we've done that, we're going to choose "Object", "Envelope Distort", "Edit Envelope", and so we get back to this envelope shape, this distorted text object. There you have some options for creating warped text and shapes in Illustrator. Your project for this class will be to create something that is warped. You can go ahead and download the apple and do the weird science project with the square apple. Or you can make the heart with love in it, or you can do whatever you like. I just encourage you to experiment with the Envelope Distort tools to warp type and to also warp shapes in Illustrator. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I hope that you've learned lots about warping texts and shapes in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.