Transcripts
1. Whimsical Textured Drawings in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Create Whimsical Designs with DIY Brushes 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 looking at creating whimsical style drawings that look hand-drawn, but which are created digitally. To do that, we're going to need to create the kind of objects that look as if they could be hand-drawn but in actual fact are not. You're going to be learning a lot about brushes in Illustrator today, scatter brushes as well as pattern brushes and art brushes. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up or say yes to recommending it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. Do that either along with your class project or in the community area. I see all of those and respond to all of your comments and your questions. I also look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started on creating whimsical texture drawings that look as if they're hand-drawn, but they're 100 percent digital.
2. Pt 1 - Haven't I Seen this Before?: Right now, if you follow me on Skillshare, you may be thinking I've already seen a class that's like this. Well, you've probably seen two of them. This was the first one. It's a Photoshop for lunch class on whimsical textures for drawings, and then I did one on turning sketches and brushes into whimsical patterns. What we're going to do here is we're working in Illustrator. We're going to create the same effect that we did in the Photoshop for lunch class here, and use some of the similar shapes that we used in this class here. The difference is that we're going to be doing this in Illustrator, and some of these techniques are easier to create in Illustrator. In fact, we can create one technique that we couldn't in Photoshop. It was really quite difficult. It would have been to have created it in Photoshop, but we're going to be able to do that in Illustrator very easily, and some of these other effects that we're going to create as well. Yes, you've probably seen it before, and this is where you've seen it, and what we're going to do is reproduce the same effect, but this time looking at the tools that Illustrator provides for us to use.
3. Pt 2 - What we are going to make: Now if you haven't previously seen my Photoshop for Lunch classes on this effect, let's have a look at where it's come from. I've created a Pinterest board here of this texture art images. This is a style that's very on trend right now, and it's very popular. There are a number of artists who are using this effect, and the idea is to create illustrations that look like they've been hand-drawn. There are elements in here that look hand-drawn. There's a really good chance that a lot of these are produced digitally, because it is easy to create hand-drawn effects in both Illustrator, and obviously in Photoshop. That's what we're going to be doing today. We are going to be looking at these little dashed lines, the line in the fox's tail here, the things we're seeing on this rabbit here, maybe things that we're seeing on the bear. We're going to see how we can reproduce these effects within Illustrator. Now there's also an effect here that we're going to look at that we couldn't do easily in Photoshop. I'm just going to go into this image here. It's these little squiggle cheeks here. One of these objects headed in, I think the bear did too. The bear has that around his cheeks, and a little bit down the side of his face. These are created with brushes. That's an effect that is not possible in Photoshop very easily, but we're going to have a look at that also in Illustrator. What we're looking at producing in this class is this texture effect, and we're going to do it in brushes. Then we're going to apply this to some whimsical texture drawings ourselves. I'm going to give you the link to this Pinterest board. I'm building it up, so I'm adding things to it all the time, so it should be a good resource for you when you're looking for this texture inspiration.
4. Pt 3 - Make the first brush: We're going to start our illustration process obviously in Illustrator. I'm creating a simple square document, 700 pixels by 700 pixels in size, RGB color mode. I'm just going to click "Okay". We're going to start by creating a vertical dashed line and for this, we need a tool to make it with. You can use any tool that you like in Illustrator. So you could use the pen tool for this. You could also use the blob brush tool. This is awesome time to get out the blob brush tool, and the pencil tool would be good too. Much you're going to use the pencil tool this time. I'm going to open up the pencil tool options by double-clicking on it and I want it to be a little bit more on the accurate side than the smooth side. In earlier versions of Illustrator, you might have two sliders here. What you're looking for is a little bit closer to accuracy and a little bit further away from smooth. But you can experiment with those settings to see what's going to work for you. As far as the other options are concerned doesn't really matter because we're just going to make a single path. What I'm going to do is draw something that looks like it could be a mark that I would make in my sketchbook with a pen. I'm going to zoom in because I want to join this up and I look like I've got one to many anchor points here. I'm just going to remove this one and I'm going to select my path and I just want to join it. So I'll choose Object, Path, Join." At this point, if your shape is a little bit too bumpy, you can go to the smooth tool and you can use the smooth tool having drawn your shape with any tool at all. It's not just working with the pencil tool lines, these are just vector paths. They could have been created with the pen tool. I'm just going to draw over this to try and smooth this bump out a little bit. You can also select your shape and choose Object, Path, Simplify. Using the simplify options, you can adjust the curve precision to get a simpler object. You can see this one is just created with two points. So we're simplifying it from 14 points down to two or three or a few more. But you can decide visually here how much smoothing you want of the shape that you've created. I'm going to leave mine as it is, but I just wanted to show you these options that you have. I want my shape to be black-filled and have no strokes. I'm just going to make it filled with black and no stroke. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command 0" so I can get an idea as to how big my shape is. I think I'm going to rotate it a little bit so it's a little bit more upright. It's a little bit big for a brush so I'm going to hold the Shift key as I size it down to a small shape. We're going to start out by making this a scatter brush because what I wanted to do is to be able to paint it in lines. I'm going to select the shape, I'm going to the brushes panel which you can get to by choosing Window and then Brushes. I'm going to click the flyout menu. I'm going to choose, New Brush. We're going to create a scatter brush. We could create this as either a scatter or a pattern brush because that would allow us to paint lines of brushstrokes. But the scatter brush is going to allow us to vary the strike. We're going to get this hand-drawn look from the simple shape using the scatter brush. So I'll click "Okay". At this stage, all I'm going to do is click "Okay" again. Now I'm going to go and get a pen tool or I could use a pencil tool, but what I want is just a line here. I'm going to select my line and apply my scatter brush to it. Now, I don't want it to have a fill so I'm going to turn the fill off so that we're just seeing the brushstrokes. Now let's go back to our brushes panel, and let's double-click on the Scatter brush because I want to change its settings. But when I have an instance of the brush in use on the screen, I can see the changes live. So it's going to be much easier for me to understand what's actually happening in this dialogue. We wouldn't see that otherwise. I'm going to set all of these to random, which does absolutely nothing except enable the second set of sliders. Size randomness allows me to vary the size of this. So I could, for example, set this to about 80 percent or 85. You can see that this is starting to vary in size. This is probably about 100 percent, this is about 85 percent. So I could increase this a little bit, even I could make it, no that's 160, that's too much. Let's just make it 110. This is the variation in size now. I can vary spacing. So I could take it from say, 70 percent spacing all the way through to maybe 110 of its current spacing. That's going to vary the spacing between each of these pen marks. Scatter is going to vary it up and down from the central line of path that it's on. We won't want a lot of scatter. But I could probably do minus 10 percent and positive 10 percent. You can see now there's offset from each other, and rotation is going to rotate them. Again, we don't want a whole heap of rotation, we want it to look as if we could have drawn these lines. We're just not being really careful about making our lines all the same because this is a hand-drawn look. The only thing that here right now that probably vary is the spacing. Just thinking that I'll probably take this down to 60 percent and may be 105. It's just a personal aesthetic so you can just decide what you want your line to look like. Now the colorization method is the other thing we're going to change and we're going to set it to tints. If we set it to tints, that's going to allow us to recolor this brush so we can make it white or yellow or pink or purple, whatever you want. I'm going to click "Okay". Now we're asked if we want to apply those changes to the stroke we already have. Well, I guess we can do that. We're not going to use the stroke for anything except for a visual guide as to how our brush is looking. That's the first of our brushes. In the next video, we're going to come back and create some other brushes and I'm going to show you a really fast way of getting through that scatter brush dialogue a little bit faster than the way we went through it this time.
5. Pt 4 - Make an overlapping brush: I'm going to keep working in the same document because what I want to do is build up a whole series of brushes that I could use for my whimsical drawings. Now I'm going to save them as a set of brushes that I can just come back to anytime. Right now I'm just going to delete what I've got here because I don't need it because my brush is already saved. The next brush I want to create is a zigzag stitch brush. If you were stitching zigzag, it would be up and down, up and down. So we're going to create a brush for that. Last time, I used the Pencil Tool in here. This time, let's use the Blob Brush Tool. So I'm going to click on the Blob Brush Tool. Double-click on it to just set its settings. Again, we want to it to be set in the Accurate area further away from Smooth because we would want to be able to get some bumpy edges with it. So I'm just going to click "Okay". Now with the Blob Brush, I'm going to draw the zigzag that I want. I want it to look a bit like that. It might be a bit heavier at the end, so I can just fill that in and maybe a bit thinner in the strokes. What I'm thinking of is if I were using a sewing machine to make this stitch, I know that the ends are going to be a little bit heavier because that's where it goes into the fabric and it will be a bit thinner in-between. So I'm looking at something that might be appropriate to use. You can just continue to work on your stitch until you have something that you like. The same principle applies with this brush in that you can smooth it out later on using the same tools that we used previously. Let's just go and grab hold of this now. To start I want to say what my Blob Brush does. It's because of the settings that I have on the Blob Brush. It's not using Keep Selected so it's not merging as I go along. But it doesn't really matter. I just know that I don't have that setting on so every one of those little strokes is now a stroke in my document. It's just going to be a nightmare of bits and pieces. What I'm going to do is I'm going to unify them. I'm going to put them all together into a single pass. I'm going to select everything with the Selection Tool. I'm going to the Pathfinder. If you don't see that choose Window and then Pathfinder and I'm going to click "Unite". In other words, create a single path from all those little ones. I'm really, really careful about keeping my layers palette clean and tidy. I've been seeing a few pieces of work that had been sent to me because there have been problems with things not working and a lot of the time it can be traced to a really really messy set of objects. So just be aware of that and keeping your layers palette really really clean and tidy can really help you in the work that you're doing. Of course we could use Object Pass Simplify, we could use the Smooth Tool. To use the Smooth Tool you need to select your shape and then target the Smooth Tool then you can come in here and just smooth out the bumps. Let's just call this our stitch. I'm going to re-size this. I want it to be quite a bit smaller. I'm using the Shift Key to re-size so its not losing its proportions. I'm going to open up the Brushes Palette and if I just select this and choose New Brush and choose Scatter Brush, click "Okay", you can see that all these Scatter Brush settings are exactly what they were when we created it earlier with this dash and we're going to have to do all of those settings all over again except that there's a simpler way. So I'm just going to cancel out of here. So we're not actually creating this brush. What I'm going to do is go to the Brushes Pallet here, I'm going to grab this Scatter Brush that we made earlier and I'm going to drop it onto this new icon here. What that does is it duplicates that. Now I've got two scatter brushes that are identical. I'm going to select my shape. I'm going to hold the Alt Key on the PC that would be the Option Key on the Mac,and I'm going to drag and drop this on top of the second brush here and let go. What that does, the Alt option drag drop replaces this shape here with the shape we've just selected. But because it was a copy of the brush that had all those settings in place, when I open the Scatter Brush options dialog, everything's already set up for me. It's probably not a 100 percent right but you know what I didn't have to do was go down and select random random random and set these up to even have something to look at. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now I'm going to brush it. Actually this time I'm going to use the Paintbrush Tool but let me just select away from this shape first so I don't paintbrush it. So let's go the Paintbrush Tool, lets go and select Scatter Brush and let's draw a row of these to get some idea as to how it's working. Well, it's not too bad. It's not perfect but it's not too bad. Double-click on the Scatter Brush. Now I can start making changes. If this were a stitch done on a machine, these stitches would all be joining up together so the spacing is out. This spacing is not appropriate. So I need to wind back on spacing here a little bit. Let's try 90 percent and see how it looks. Well, not quite yet. Probably 80. Maybe even 85 we could go up to. That's looking pretty good. All of these are touching. I'm thinking that the rotation is probably a little bit high so I'm going to bring this down to minus five to plus five. I'm probably also going to do the same for scatter minus five to plus five just to drop the scattering value down a little bit. The sizing doesn't look too bad at all. I think I'm just going to leave that. Here is my new zigzag. All the other settings I can just leave in place but you can see that this way of creating a scatter brush when you've already created one with most of the settings that are going to work for you is much quicker than doing it from scratch. I'm just going to click "Okay". I Will apply the changes to the strokes. Now we have a stroke that has this scatter brush on it and we can also create this scatter brush. So we've got two brushes that we can use. Let's just trash all of that because we don't need it. In the next video, we're going to come back and create another scatter brush but we're going to take the scatter part of it and make it into a pattern brush. So we're going to use a brush to make a brush. That's up in the next video.
6. Pt 5 - Scatter to Pattern Brush: This next brush that we're going to make is going to be a knitting stitch brush. Now in the interests of using every possible tool in this video, I'm going to do it with the pen tool this time. But if you like the pencil tool, make everything with the pencil tool, if you like the blob brush tool, make everything with the blob brush tool. It really doesn't matter. All you're looking for is uneven, perfect is not what we're looking for here. So what I'm going to do is just click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. It's got this smooth things happening to it. I'm going to draw out a heart shape in a way which is really what a knitting stitch looks like. Having created that, we can go and use all the same tools as we've been using, and what I want to do here is just move this side over, but I want it to be a bit larger. I'm using the direct selection tool to select either the anchor points I want to move and then just move them into position. This one I want to be a little less pointy than rounded. So I'll click on it and click up here to convert it to a smooth anchor point. You can go ahead and just perfect the shape that you want. Again, not rocket science and again, you really do want it to be uneven and not even. I'm going to select over the entire shape, and I do want to make this a little bit straighter. Doesn't seem to be perfectly straight to me. Now if you want to test it selected again and choose object transform, reset bounding box, and that will reset the bounding box around the shape. I also want it to be black filled and have no stroke but also taken off the stroke and I've got black fill on it. Let's size it because it's way too big for a brush. There's our shape. We've got all the scatter options that we can borrow. So let's go and get this brush here, and let's drag it onto the new icon. We've got a duplicate of it. Let's take our shape. Holding Alt on the pace, say that would be option on the Mac and drag and drop it right on top of this. So we replace the shape, click Okay, and this need to draw a line with it. So let's go and deselect what we had selected. Let's get the brush tool. Click on our new brush, draw a line with it. Not very happy with that, that's fine. Didn't expect to be, double-click on the scatter brush so we can now make changes to it. Anything stitch is like a separate stitch. So each of these stitches would sit side-by-side, not overlapping. The spacing here is not working for us. Just going to try it at a 100 percent and see what it looks like. That's actually not too bad. Let's set this to maybe a 110 and say, actually I think the smaller end, it could come down to maybe 95, maybe even 90. But you can just play around with this until you get the spacing that you want. Again, I think the sizing here is too different. So I'm going to make it from 85 to a 100 percent because knitting stitches just tend to be a little bit more, even, maybe even 95 and 85, and that may also affect the spacing a little bit. You may want to bring this spacing down a bit, maybe 5 percent on each of those. Everything else looks pretty good, so I'm pretty happy with that. I'm just going to click Okay. Now I have my knitting stitch. I'm just going to select that and delete it. Don't want that one either. I'm going to select the brush tool. I'm going to select my scatter brush. What I'm going to do now is lay down a column of stitches. I'm just going to click once. I'm not drawing, I'm clicking. Every single one of these stitches is different to the one before because it's a scatter brush. If you don't like the brushstrokes that you're doing, press control Z to undo them and go back and do them again. You want to get the spacing and the variation that is lending this to be a nice column of stitches. This looks pretty good. I'm just concerned that they're a little bit off center and probably as knitting stitches that would look better if they were centered a bit. I'm going to select over all of the shapes and I'm just going to center them with horizontal align center, and that's giving me still uneven stitches, but they're in a better column. Now, each of these is a path with a brush on them, and if I go and try and make another brush from them, things are just going to get to be a nightmare really quickly. What I'm going to do is expand this. I'm selecting over all of these shapes. I'm going to choose object, Expand Appearance. Now, what happens when you do that is you get two shapes for every little stitch, you get the V shape of the stitch and you get a no fill, no stroke bounding box around it. Again, in the interest of keeping this layers palette really clean and tidy, we're going to select everything and we're going to choose object ungroup until we get just shapes. So you can see now we've got a V-shaped path and behind it is an no fill, no stroke rectangle, V-shaped path, no fill, no stroke rectangle. What we want is to get rid of these no fill, no stroke rectangles because they're not doing anything for us. I'm going to select one of them and then I'm going to choose, Select Same fill and Stroke, and that's going to select every second one of these paths, which is H of these no fill, no stroke rectangles, they are all selected. I'm just going to press the backspace key, the delete key on the Mac, and they're all gone. Now I have just the seven V-shaped parts. Now I'm going to select over them and I can group them. I know that this sounds like a lot of work, but you're going to have a lot less trouble with your designs if you keep this stuff really neat and tidy, and that means expanding where it makes sense to getting rid of excess shapes like those no fill, no stroke rectangles, and then grouping everything back up into just a single group instead of seven different groups. Now with this selected, we're going to make a pattern brush from it. So I'm going to click the drop-down list here, new brush, pattern, brush, click Okay. I'm going to open this panel here and deselect show auto-generated corner tiles. I don't want corner tiles at all. If you're working with an earlier version of illustrator, that's like Hallelujah for you because you don't get corner tiles, then you don't need them. You're not any far behind where we are because you're not going to get them and we don't want them. At this stage, you can leave everything set here. You'd probably will just want to set your colorization method to tints and click Okay. Now let's go and see how this thing draws. So I'm going to click away from it. I'm going to click on my paintbrush tool and make sure that my pattern brush is selected, and I'm just going to draw a straight line. My straight line is a bit wiggly at the end, which is why this brush is going a bit wonky at the ends. It's also the colors off because I'm actually not using pure black. Let's try it on just a regular line. So I'm going to hold the shift key as I drag out a line just using the line tool with its selected, I'm just going to click on my Brush, and that's given me a nicer and easier to achieve effect. Now if you liked this effect and this is a really nice little knitting pattern, but you want to add some wiggle to it. Let's select over this line here and let's go to the wrinkle tool. It shares a toolbar position with the width tool, but it's the wrinkle tool we want. I'm going to click on the wrinkle tool and I'm going to go back and double-click on it because we need to set its settings. By default, it's going to be set to horizontal zero and vertical a 100 percent. That's fine because we only want to wrinkle in a vertical direction. I'm using a small amount of complexity and I've adjusted the intensity to 20 percent. That means that it's not going to wrinkle very fast, and I've got width and a height of a 100. Click Okay. What you do with the wrinkled tool is with the line selected, you're just going to click a little bit, and obviously that wrinkle amount was just way too much. So if it's too much, you can just come in and reduce it. So I'm going to take it down to five percent and I'm just going to sit just near that line a little bit and just wrinkle it very, very slightly. So not going right over the top of the line, but I'm going a little bit underneath it. I'm just trying to be really careful about the ends of the line because they're wrinkling really fast and not in a very nice way. So just be aware of that if the first time you wrinkle it, you don't get what you want. Just press Control Z to undo it. So there's another brush this time we've created it as a single scatter brush. We do have that scatter brush still here, but we can also, have painted in a knitting look as if it were a knitted pace of fabric using the patent brush. All of these stitches have this hand-drawn looked to them because they're uneven.
7. Pt 6 - Applying the brushes: Before we actually go to do a whimsical drawing, we need to do a few things. Firstly, we need to know how to save these brushes cause we don't want to lose them. So first thing I'm going to go and do is to make sure I don't have anything selected, I'm going to click on these brushes in turn and drag and drop them onto the trash can. Any brush that I can get on the trash can, I'm going to send to the trash can, except, of course, my brush. Any of these that I can take with me, I will too, but you can see that not all of them can be dragged into the trash. So I just need to click on them and see which ones can be trashed. You're going to be left with two brushes that just get shipped with Illustrator as well as your own set of brushes. We're going to click the Flyout menu here, we're going to choose Save Brush Library and you'll get to where Illustrator expects you to save your brushes and I'm going to call this whimsical texture and click "Save". Now, the reason I need to save those brushes is this. So let's just go and choose File, New and create a new document. We haven't looked at the Brushes panel, none of our brushes are there, those brushes are not accessible to any new document in Illustrator and worse than that, if we said, "Oh, well, we've created all these brushes, let's trash that document". Well then, we can kiss goodbye to those brushes cause we would never see them again. So firstly, you need to save them, and then secondly, you need to know how to get to them. You're going to do that by clicking the drop down-arrow here, Open Brush Library, it's a User Defined brush, that's your brush, and we're going to come down here and here, whimsical texture brushes, I'm going to click to get hold of them. Now, what I'm going to do is click on each brush in turn and as I click on them in this whimsical texture dialogue, they're added to the Brushes panel for this document. They're not actually used because I don't have a shape or anything to use them with, but they are just added into the document, and I can just close this down now. So these are going to be saved with this document available to it and via this menu, Open Brush Library, User Defined, whimsical texture, they're going to be available to any other document at any other time. Now the other thing we needed to know is a couple of tricks for actually applying these brushes. While we've already seen that we can click on the Paintbrush tool and for our knitting stitch, we can just apply single stitches or we can paint stitches, and that goes the same for our zigzag. But also, if we wanted just a single zigzag, we could go and create them manually. Ditto for this dashed one, so this is our little pin line, so we can create them manually by clicking, and because the scatter brush settings are there, each one of these is going to appear different to the other but we can also apply them to a line. Likewise, these brushes can be applied to shapes. So I'm going to create an ellipse here, well, actually let's make it a circle. With the circle selected, I'm going to the Brush tool and let's click on our Scatter Brush here and let's apply it to our circle, here it's applied, here this one's applied. So they can be used on a shape, but you might have noticed that the shapes that are surrounding this circle are all going in one particular direction, they're all facing the way that they were when they're made. Now there may be a time when you want the brush shapes to rotate around the circle, so in this case, what we're going to do is with the circle selected, we're going to click here on Options for Selected Object because we don't want to change the way the brush is working most of the time but we'd like to change it for this particular instance. I'm going to click here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the rotation relative to, and I'm going to set it to path rather than page. So the shape is going to rotate around as it goes around the circle. We do have a slight problem here in that we've got an overlap. The easiest way to deal with that is to click in here on the Spacing and I'm going to start pressing the down arrow key to adjust the spacing by a percentage or two. I'm going to do that until the objects are evenly spaced around my circle, well, as evenly as they can be for the fact that this is in actual fact as whimsical pattern, so everything's uneven anyway. Now that's going to go the same thing for all of these, so you can click on one of these brush strokes and go and do the same thing. It's going to rotate differently and then you would just adjust the spacing so it fits. But of course, any time that you do this and then click away from the shape when you go to try the brush again, it's going to default to how it was before, so you'll have to come back in and make those changes. The other thing I want to look at is this pattern brush that we created. So I'm just going to draw a line because this pattern brush we've already determined works a whole lot better on a straight line. I'm going to click on the line and then click on the pattern brush. Now, in this instance, what I want to do is to give it a little bit of a bend, so get a choice over and above using the Wrinkle tool. What I'm going to do now is just expand these objects, I'm going to do Object, Expand Appearance. Let's see what we've got in the last palette because this is always really important. Well, we've got groups, and groups, and groups, and groups. So what I'm going to do is choose Object, Ungroup, and continue to do that until in the Layers palette I have nothing but just shapes, and so you see here that I've got shapes and no groups, nothing is in a group, I also don't have any of those no field, no stroke rectangles, everything is one of these V shapes. Having done that, I'm going to group them, so with them all selected, I'm just going to click "Group" so that they're all just inside one group, that counts as neat in my book. Next, we're going to choose Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Mesh. I'm going to select the default options which are a four-by-four mesh and I'll click "Okay". Now, this is a warp mesh and if you're used to using warps in Photoshop, this works the same way, except that we have to go to the Direct Selection Tool to be able to select any of these nodes or these little anchor points in the intersection of these lines, and what we can do is just bend them. We won't want to bend them too much, but we can bend them a little bit and that's going to give a knitting pattern just a little bit of a bend. When we're finished with that, what we'll do is we'll find that we have an Envelope here, so the entire object is now called an Envelope. If you need to do things with it, you can select it, choose Object, Envelope Distort, and you can see here that you can edit the contents. So there's an option here to release it if you don't want it any longer but also to edit the content, so that would mean that we could come inside here and, for example, change the color of our stitch. Let's just make it a different color. But you will need to be able to get into the Envelope options to get to edit the shapes because otherwise, they're just not accessible. When I'm done, I'll choose Object, Envelope Distort, and I'll go back to editing the envelope rather than the objects in it. So they are a few things to be aware of in terms of using these brushes and now we're ready to go ahead and to actually use them in a project.
8. Pt 7 - Make a character: Now we're ready to put the pieces together and actually make an illustration. We're going to make the letter A, and I've already opened a new document. This is just the same 700 by 700 pixel document we'd been working with. I've gone ahead and added my brushes just using the flyout menu as we saw earlier. Now, you can create your letter A using any of the tools we've used so far, the blob brush, the pen tool, or the pencil tool. I'm going to make mine with the pen tool. But as I said, it doesn't really matter what tool you use. You want a letter A that is a little bit whimsical, so it wants to be not perfect. All I'm doing here is clicking and dragging. If you make sure that you click and drag in the same movement you'll get these nice rounded edges. Again, that's a nice whimsical shape. What we've got here is this shape and at the moment it has a stroke and no fill. I can apply a fill to it by just clicking on the "Fill" here. Now I need to take out the bit that's in the middle that's a hole in the letter A. That's why I chose this character so that we could do that. I'm going back to the pen tool, but again, you could change tools even at this point if you wanted to use the blob brush tool to make the center or the pencil tool you could. I'm just using the pen tool. I'm just going to again click and drag to create these nice rounded corners. Again, I'm looking for something a little whimsical, a little bit off bit. I'm tending to go in a different direction. These are closer together, these are further apart, just subtly different. In our last pallet, we should expect to see a shape for the outside of the letter A, the big bit, and a shape for the inside the letter A. What we need to do is to cut this shape out. We're going to select over both shapes. Because we made the inside one last, it's at the front, there's a stacking order here. The one at the top is the one that's notionally at the front. I'm going to the Pathfinder tool. You can get to that by choosing "Window" and then "Pathfinder". There's an icon here that is Minus Front. In other words, take the front shape away from the back shape, and make a shape that is a compound path here that has a hole in it. Just to make things a little bit easier, let's go to the Panel Options and let's make these a little bit larger so you can see them. There is my letter A and we're going to apply some interesting effects to it. It would behoove me at this stage if I want any part of the letter A to be white, to probably put something in the background here. I'm going to the Rectangle tool, click once. I'm going to lock these together so I can get a shape that is irregular shape. Type in 700, which is the size of my artboard and click "Okay". Let's go to the Alignment Panel which is here. Again Window Align, if you don't find it here. I'm going to click the drop-down, Show Options, Align to Artboard. Because I want to center this on the artboard. With it selected, I'm going to click "Horizontal Align Center", "Vertical Align Center". I'm going to fill it with a color that I want to use. I'm going to use a turquoise blue here. Don't want to have a stroke, so I'm going to turn the stroke off. Here is my filled rectangle. Here's my letter A. I'm just going to drag it below and I'm going to lock it because I don't want it to move as I'm working. At this point, I can go ahead and turn off the stroke on my letter A. I'm going to target my letter A. I'm going to turn off the stroke so it's just a filled shape. The stroke is not something I want to at this stage. Now next up I want to bring something in that is the shape of the foot of the letter A. Let's try the pencil tool this time. I'm going to draw a shape over the bottom of the letter A. Because this is going to be a shape that is going to be filled with something in a minute. Let's just go for now and fill it with a color. You can see that we have this pink, blobby shape, and the letter A. The only thing that I was concerned about drawing in any way correctly was this bit over here. I needed to make this shape bigger than the foot of the letter A, because what we're going to do is use the letter a to cut it off. I'm going to go to the letter A here, and I'm just going to drag and drop it on the new icon here. Now, interestingly enough, it looks like it hasn't actually worked but it has. This's going to turn off this letter A. You can see that this is a letter A, and this one is too. It's just Illustrator is not showing me the outline of that letter. What I've got here, are two letters A and the shape that I want to cut out. I'm going to take this one and I'm going to click on this one holding the Shift key. I've got both these selected, the pink shape and underneath it, one copy of the letter A. That's really important because if you don't make a duplicate of the letter A, you're just about to lose it because we're going to sacrifice one to cut this piece away. Again, back to the Pathfinder tab. This time what we want is the intersection between these two shapes. We got a pink shape that's this big. We've got the letter A that's this big. The piece that we want is where these two pieces intersect. This is the Intersect option. We're just going to click on it. That gives us a piece, that is the shape of the foot of the letter A. But you can see that in the process we lost one of those copies, so you just have to be really careful about that. This is a way of getting some color into your letter. The color is not really what I want here. I'm just going to make it a slightly lighter color at this stage. Now that we've got our letter A created and we've got an element that we can actually go ahead and do something with. In the next video, we're going to have a look at the adding some brushstrokes and do that special technique that I told you that was so much easier to do in Illustrator than it is in Photoshop.
9. Pt 8 - Decorate the character: Now, one of the techniques that we could not use in the Photoshop version of this class, which we are able to use in Illustrator a lot easier, is the ability to fuzzy up the edges here. I'm going to fuzzy up this edge and I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool and select over this edge here. I want to see what I've got in the way of anchor points. I'm going to Select over this area. Now, I'm going to "Lock" the letter A because I don't want the letter A bit, but I want the side out of this pink purple shape. I'm going to choose "Edit" "Copy" "Edit" "Paste." What I've got here is a duplicate of the bottom part of this letter. Now, I may not need all of it, so I'm just going to "Move" it out of the way a minute while I have a look at it. I'm just going to "Select" it to see where my anchor points are. Well, I could Add Another Anchor Point in temporarily just about here and then let's take away this one. Now, there's a way to get to the delete anchor point, to when you've got the add anchor point tool selected and that's just to press the "Minus Key." If you press the "Plus key'" it goes back to add anchor points. Those two toggle between each other. Let's just take that away. Now, I've got this bend here. It's a filled shape so I'm going to flip it over so it's a stroke shaped but not a filled shape. I'm going to my Brushes palette. Now, I have a Brush here that I could use for a slight feathered edge. Or I could go and get a brush that will give me a heavier feathered edge. I'm just going to show you this one because it's the approach that you may want to take. You're going to the flyout menu, Open Brush Library, and you're going to Artistic and "Artistic_ChalkCharcoalPpencil." There's this topmost brush that I like, but you could take this one, they're quite a few Brushes here that you could use. This one's got a really interesting feathered edge to it. I've just selected it, it's jumped into the Brushes palette and because this line was selected, you can say it's being applied to the line. This is a way of getting these brushy shapes onto a bent object. In Photoshop, it's really difficult to do, in Illustrator it's super easy. But right now it's a little bit big so let's go to the Appearance panel because I've got the shape selected. In the appearance panel, I can open up the "Stroke" here and I can decrease the "Weight." I can take it down to 0.25 or 0.5 or 0.75. I think I'm going to leave it at "0.5" here so we can actually see it since this is what we came here to do. Once I've done that, I'm going back to the selection tool and I'm just going to bring this shape back in and put it where it belongs right over the leg of the letter A. But this time you can see that we've got this brushy outline. It's going to depend on the Brush that you use exactly what the outline effect is going to look like. Now, in addition to just creating it as it is, you could also go a little bit darker. I'm going to the same "Pink," but I'm going to make the Brush outline a little bit darker. So it shows not only over the edge of the shape, but also over the actual foot of the letter A. In a similar way, you can use brushes with circle shapes. I'm just going to the "Pencil Tool." Let's just draw over here a small circle. Now, I've got my Pencil Tool set so that it joins up. If it's within "15 pixels" of the end, see where it says "close paths when ends are within 15 pixels". That means that provided I get the pencil tool pretty close to the end, it's automatically going to join up. I've got this circular shape here. Let's bring it over and let's put it onto our letter A. I'm going to fill it with a color so it has a color fill but no stroke right now, but let's go and get a different color. Let's go into a purple color here. But let's make it a "Pale Purple". Now, I can go to the stroke and I can apply a brush-stroke to it. I'm going to use this same brush stroke. Now again, that's going to be very thick and heavy because it's a one pixel line. But I can just drop down here to, for example, a 0.25 or 0.5 pixel line. When I click away, you can say I'm getting this texture outside my shape. There are a number of things you could do with this at this stage. One of them is obviously to go back to a much lighter color, so it's more obvious. You could also just make no fill. You could just have a stroke here that is a round circle. That's another way to perhaps put pink cheeks on a character, on a whimsical character. Of course, you can also change the brush. As I said, there was another brush that at [inaudible] with illustrate is going to be in your Brushes panel, this "Charcoal-Feather" brush, it would be another option that you could use. You probably want to increase the size of it because it is quite a thin brush, but that's going to give you that effect. Again, you can fill it with Color. There are a number of approaches you can take not just with this shape. Let's just fill it with a lighter color. I just want to show you one thing about this. Let's "Zoom" in here. If I grab the Appearance panel which has done a disappearing act on me, and select this shape. Right now you will say that the brush stroke is over the top of the fill and that's fine. That might be the way you want it. But if you wanted this brush stroke to appear outside the fill, all you do is select the shape, go to the Appearance panel and drag the "Stroke" underneath the fill, so you reversing them. In this instance, you're using the fill shape, the fill area as a mask to mask out the brush underneath. Now, that's not going to work obviously if you have no fill. If you set this to "No Fill" at all, you're just going to be able to see through it because the brush stroke still there. It's just that you can mask it out with a Color. Let's go and get a pale color to use as a mask. Provided the fill is on top of the stroke, that's the effect that you're going to get. 'Drag' the fill underneath the stroke, and then the brush is going to be on top of the shape. Just a different way of approaching that brush shape effect.
10. Pt 9 - Paint inside: Now it's time for us to go ahead and use some of the brushes that we created for this piece of artwork. What I want to do is to put some of those little lines, those little vertical line scatter brushes inside this foot of the letter A. Now, there are a number of ways of doing it, but perhaps the simplest and most sophisticated way of doing it is using a tool that's built into Illustrator. What I'm going to do is select this path here. Over here are three icons, and the one on the far right is called Draw Inside. With a shape selected, you can click on this icon. What that does is it creates a clipping mask. Anything we do now is going to be applied to inside this shape. What I'm going to do is just go and get my brush. I'm going to click on my Paintbrush tool and I want to paint in a gray. I'm going to double-click here, and I'm using this Hue option here. That means that all my grays are down the side here. You can also choose saturation, brightness, R, G, and B, and your color pickers going to change every time you do that just to a different look. I like the hue one. This puts my colors here and my tints and shades over here. What I'm going to do is get a darkish gray. You can tell it's pure gray because the R, G, and B values are all exactly the same. I'll click "Okay." I don't want it to have a fill, so I'm going to turn the Fill off. But you can say that because I haven't got the actual foot of the letter A selected, all I'm doing is setting things up to be able to use the Brush tool to paint my brushstrokes. I'm going to the Brush and I'm going to click here on the Scatter Brush. I'm just going to test it with the first line. I think the shapes are a little bit big, so I'm going to undo that and go back and just make this about 0.5 pixels. That's much better. Now you can say that I'm drawing from way outside the leg of the letter A. I'm starting way outside, I'm finishing way over the edge, and the clipping mask that we've created with this Draw Inside tool is clipping my painting, so that only affects the selected pink area. It's really nice little tool to use. When you're done, you can just click here on the Draw Normal option, and that goes back to normal. You will see in the Layers palette that you have a clipping path. The clipping path is this pink shape, and inside it are always brush shapes. Now they can be treated like any other shape in Illustrator, so you can turn them on or off. You can also select them and perhaps change the color of them. I'm selecting each of these, clicking on one Shift, click on the other. I've got them selected, double-click on the color here, maybe make them a little bit darker. Click "Okay", and they are darker, and all I need to do is to just go and click away and that change has been made. It's just wise to keep an eye out on what's happening here, and this is something that you would leave in the last. However, I've been really careful about trying to make things neat and tidy. Well, this clipping grope is what's called neat and tidy. This is all nicely bundled up this entire effect is all taken care of here.
11. Pt 10 - Clip Brushes to a shape: Next up, let's use one of other brushes. I'm going to select a color. I'm going to select the yellowy orange here. I'm going to select the brush to use. I'm going to select the brush tool. I'm going to click on my "Zigzag brush." This is going to paint pretty much like this. I think it's a little bit big still, so I'm going to knock it down a little bit smaller. I'm just pressing Control Z once I've finished just to undo it. I'm going to add some loops of this brush here. I'm just going to draw in some loops. Now I want the brush to follow around the loops, but we already know that we can fix that up later. If I need to, I can just press Control Z to undo a row of brushes if I don't like what I've done. Right now I'm going deliberately outside the shape because we're going to use a clipping mask in a minute to go inside. Now that I've got this selection done, I'm going to select all of those paths. Now I've got my letter A here locked down. That means I can just grab the rest of these shapes here by just dragging over them with the selection tool. Now, all of those I want the brush to follow the path, so I'm going to click on option of selected object. I'm going to make the rotation relative to the path, and let's just see the change here and click "Okay." If I wanted my lines to appear just as they are, that's fine. But if I want them to appear within the letter A, I need to do something. Well, first of all, I'm going to move this one over a little bit, and then I'm going to go and make a duplicate of my letter A. Here's my letter A is going to drag and drop it on the new icon. It's possible to create a duplicate even when a layer is locked, but of course to do anything with it, we're going to have to unlock the second version. I'm going to drag this up so it's on top of everything. Now I am going to select the letter A here and all these orange brush strokes. I've got just the letter A and just the brushstrokes selected. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to choose make clipping mask. What that does is it turns the top shape, the letter A into a clipping mask for these brushes so we see the brushes where they fall inside the letter A, but not outside it. Now this is just another way of getting the effect that we had down here. It's two ways of doing it, choose which ever way makes best sense to you.
12. Pt 11 - Add the Pattern Brush: If we want to use our knitting pattern brush, this is how we're going to use it. It's really important with this one because of the distortion in the brush that we start with a straight line. So I'm going to go to the straight line tool and I'm going to select a color to work with. I'm thinking a dark purplish blue will be interesting here. So it is my stroke color. I've got my line tool selected so I'm going to add a line across here, and it's going to be a straight line. So I'm going to hold the Shift key as I draw it. Now because it's a straight line, I can apply a brush to it by just clicking on the pattern brush here, and that's applied to this line. Now it's too big, so I can go over here and I can scale it now. Our scaling options for pattern brushes are more sophisticated than for example, these scatter brushes because we've got an option here for scaling it. So I can scale it quite small if I want to. So I can get this real effect of a knitting pattern. I'm going to do that and click "Okay". Now I can move my knitting pattern into position. I can also rotate this line because it is a straight line. When I rotate it, the pattern brush is running across the line. So it's nice and neat. But of course, if I wanted to, I could go and apply a wrinkle tool to the line. I just want to be careful that I don't demolish the stroke here. Let's just make sure the wrinkle tool is working well, it's right up at 50 percent intensity. So that's what's being so heavy handed, I'm just going to make it five percent intensity and see if we can get a little bit of distortion, but not too much. You may want to just experiment with that. Just get the wrinkle tool near the shape, but not too much and just tap at once. Now depending on what we want to do here, we can either clip it or I'm thinking I'm actually going to make my line a bit shorter. So I'm going to go here and pick up my line and I'm going to bring it in a little bit along itself. I've got a few extra anchor points because I ran the wrinkle tool on it. So I don't want to go too far so I start running into those anchor points, but I do want this to shorten up just a little bit. What I'm going to do is put a filled rectangle behind it. So I'm just going to drag out a rectangle and I'm going to fill it with a color. I'm going to go for a pale cream here. I don't want it to have a stroke. I'm just going to position this behind the knitting. Now it's on top of the knitting piece right now all I need to do is to drag it below that path and then just shrink it to size. Before I finish, I think I'll just take a few more of these dots and put them around my shape.
13. Pt 12 - Wrap up and project: The finishing touch that I want to do with this project is I want to put a polka dot brush on the back of this illustration. We don't have one yet, and it's going to show a few techniques that we haven't done before. First of all, I'm going to Pencil tool. I'm just drawing a smallish circle. Now, I want this to have a dark stripe, probably just a really dark gray stroke. Well, maybe not that dark. I want it to have a white fill, and white's up in this very top corner, 255, 255, 255 is white. I want to increase my stroke a little bit and I just want to decrease the size of this element, which is going to be my scatter brush. While I'm here, I think just a little bit lighter on the gray. Now I've got the element I want to use for my brush. I'm going to open the Brushes panel and choose "New Brush", "Scatter Brush", "Okay". Now, whatever I set for the scattering here, the important thing to do right here is to leave this colorization method to none, because that's going to mean that this is going to paint at this color. It's going to ignore anything I have selected for stroke and fill and it's always going to paint as gray and white. I'm just going to go and select this random settings a little bit. It's going to adjust them. Spacing, I'm going to increase quite considerably. Scatter, again a little bit. This is scatter in one direction and scatter in the other direction. Rotation, yes, I'm going to add a little bit because this is not a perfect circle. If it were a perfect circle there would be no point in changing the rotation angle because it would just be rotated around itself. I'll click "Okay", I'm going to get rid of my shape. Let's just test our brush. I want the spacing to be quite a bit larger and I want the scattered to be a bit more intense. All I'm going to do is across my background or what is going to be my background is I'm just going to run a few lines with the scatter brush. This is a nice way of getting some cool polka dot effects. I'm going to select all of these paths. I've got all of my dot paths selected. I'm going to group them with "Object", "Group" so that they're all in one area because they're going to be the image background. I'm just going to take them all the way down and place them above the background. Let's just click away for a minute. You can see that they're now forming a background. But they're way too intense for me. I'm going to select the group and I'm going to the Appearance panel, "Window" and "Appearance". Now, this group has an appearance that belongs to it, so what we can do is click "Opacity" and we can drop down the opacity. We can blend the shapes in to the layer below. The entire group is being blended in. You've also got blending modes, and these are very much the blending modes that you're used to having in Photoshop. If you have a brush that has some light and dark areas, you can blend them. Screen is giving us an interesting effect. Some of these other blend modes may also give you an interesting effect. I'm just going to leave it at normal, but I am going to dial down the opacity so the brushstrokes are a little bit see through so they're not quite as intense on the image. I'm just going to click away here and close this panel down. Let's just click away from illustration to see what we've got. Your project for this class is going to be to go ahead and make yourself some scatter brushes and have a go at the knitting brush where you making a scatter brush into a pattern brush. Create a letter or a character or a letter, A or B or C or a dress. One of my students in the Photoshop class did a little dress which was really cute and decorate it using the brushes that you've made and the effects that you've learned here. Have a go at taking a piece off a shape just by selecting it using the direct selection tool so that you can select a part of a shape and then just run a texture brush around the edge of that. When you finish with your whimsical character, post an image of it in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've enjoyed an exploration into whimsical hand-drawn looks, this time created in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this class and when you're prompted to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond 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.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
