Deke`s Advanced Illustrator Techniques

Deke’s
Advanced Illustrator
Techniques
or
How to Draw Better,
Stronger, Faster
(and More Efficiently)
in Adobe Illustrator CC
2015
Adobe MAX 2015 | L5207 | Deke McClelland
So here’s the thing: If you’ve signed up for this lab, you probably feel fairly at home
in Adobe Illustrator. Maybe you’ve been using the program for a long time and you
have tried-and-true systems for creating your artwork in a manner that feels predictable if not completely optimized and fresh.
notes
But, in part, I’m calling this course advanced in honor of the amazing advancements
that have been made to Illustrator in recent versions. In fact, if it’s been a while since
you’ve rethought how you accomplish things in the vector-defined world, there are
features in Illustrator CC 2015 that might have advanced right on past you.
Of course, if you’re fairly new to Illustrator, and you decided to sign up for this lab
because you’re confident you can adapt on-the-fly, you’re also in the right place. Here
are my Deke’s Illustrator Techniques that will help everyone start drawing better,
stronger, and faster in today’s most advanced vector wielding software.
Here’s what I’ll show you today:
•
Building custom paths quickly with the Join tool and Shape Builder.
•
Using the Pencil tool now that it does what you always thought it should.
•
Painting the way you always expected painting would feel, except you are
using something called the Blob brush.
•
Using the Curvature tool, which—although not confirmed—may be translating your thoughts.
•
Turning rough sketches into killer whales with the Round Corners feature.
•
Employing Illustrator’s mathematical mind to your artistic endeavors.
By the way, we’ve only got 90 minutes. And I’m notorious for having too much information. And there are some links and color images within which make me think
you might benefit from a full-fledged not so black-and-white PDF of this document.
You can download it, and all its supplemental interactive goodness, at my site for
your future, full-color further Illustrator education.
The full color, fully Illustrated
version of these notes will be
available for download at:
ht t p: // w w w. d e k e . c o m /
c ont e nt /not e s - de k e s -i llustrator-techniques-adobe-max-2015
If you’re not a member of deke.
com, you can sign up from
this page (don’t let “access
denied” scare you off!)
www.deke.com
Building Custom Paths Quickly with the Join and
Shape Builder Tools
notes
In real life, I can’t draw a perfect circle, but the robot that is Illustrator can. But wait,
let’s say you don’t want to draw a circle. In fact, you almost never want to draw a
circle. You want to draw any old thing you like.
Enter custom path outlines. That’s what Adobe calls every line and shape that you
create in Illustrator. Path outlines. Or if you want to be casual, just plain paths.
A straight line is a path. A circle is a path. And then you can combine them together
to make even more awesome paths. In this exercise, I’ll show you how to build any
path you might imagine quickly and easily using a new feature, the Join tool, and
an old work horse, the Shape Builder.
Exercise: Draw a white arrow with the new Join tool
First, let’s draw a white arrow (suspiciously reminiscent of the Direct Selection tool)
by simply using the Join tool to connect five independent straight lines.
1. Open Straight lines.ai from the 01 folder. Or just quickly sketch out your
own rough arrow with five line segments.
2. Grab the Join tool and draw over the corners of the arrow you want to
merge. Honestly, Adobe could call this the “Join and Throw Away the Leftovers, tool” but it would be too clumsy to fit in the tool tip. Use the Join tool
to not only connect each of the arrow’s corners into one path, but immediately
discard the parts of the path that extend beyond the point.
3. Fuse the area where the stem crosses into the arrow head. Select everything
but the stem and use the Join tool to draw over and connect that center bit
where the stem comes in.
4. Turn the stem into a thick 60 pt stroke. Select the path that represents the stem
of the arrow, give it a thick stroke, then change that stroke to path outlines (and,
then well, restore the stroke to match the rest of the arrow). Cut the bottom of
the arrowhead, and then you can use the Join tool to once again attach your
arrow stem to its head.
Check out White arrow.ai in the 01-Custom Paths folder to see my version of the
finished path.
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Exercise: Add and subtract simple shapes to make more
complex drawings with the Shape Builder tool
notes
If you can imagine your desired complex path as a the interaction of simpler components, then you can turn ordinary stars, rectangles, circles, and lines, into magic
wands, snowmen, clovers, and whatever you can imagine.
1. Open A Bunch of Shapes.ai from the 01 folder. You can see that this document
is made up of a bunch of simple shapes that aspire to be more complex forms.
2. Combine the orange star and the skinny rectangle to make a magic wand. Se-
lect the components, grab Shape Builder tool, and drag across both shapes until
you see that grid pattern on both parts. Release and voila.
3. Combine different parts of the snowman by selecting and then dragging over
them with the shape builder. By selecting his body pieces, shoes, and carrot
nose separately, you can use the Shape Builder to only merge the parts you want.
4. Subtract the brown circle from the yellow one to make a crescent. Hold down
the Alt (Option key when you’re trying to subtract one shape from another.
5. Combine and subtract appropriately to make a letter A. Then duplicate and
recombine to give the A some depth.
6. Combine and subtract the collection of ovals to make a clover shape. Remem-
ber, you can hold down the Shift key to make a rectangular marquee of things
you want the Shape Builder to merge.
If you want to see my finished shapes, check out Some whimsical artwork.ai in the
01- folder.
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Using the Pencil Tool Which Now Does What You
Always Wished it Would Do
notes
Since the dawn of personal computing, humankind has been looking for a tool that
you can just draw with. You know, like when you draw with a 20-cent pencil on
a 1-cent piece of paper. Except you wanna do that with a complex, slightly more
expensive computer application instead.
This dream escaped us for about, oh, 27 years. ( But now, it’s a reality, and it’s called
the Pencil tool. It finally draws smooth “hand-drawn” curves with the relative ease
of an actual pencil. If you’ve been disappointed by the results you got with this tool
in the past, prepare to be relieved and delighted.
Exercise 1: Drawing a heart with a mouse
Sounds like a line from Alice in Wonderland, but it’s really reality.
1. Create a new document with some center guides. Create a new document, set
the Profile to Basic RGB, and set the Width to 1008 points and the Height to
672 points. To make some perfect center guides:
• Turn on the rulers.
• Hold down the Ctrl (Command) key, and drag out from that spot where the
two rulers meet in the upper left-hand corner to draw both a vertical and
horizontal guide at the same time. Drop it somewhere close to the center
but don’t worry about getting it exactly right.
• From the View menu, make sure Lock Guides is not checked. Then marquee
the intersection of the two guides with the black arrow tool to select them.
• Use the alignment controls in the Options bar to align the guides to the
artboard.
• Name the layer Guides, and lock the guides back up from the View menu.
Add a new layer, named Drawing, so you don’t mess up your guides.
2. Set the Pencil tool to the appropriate setting for drawing with a mouse. Click
on the Pencil tool then press Enter (Return) to bring up the Pencil Tool Options
dialog box. Since we’re going to start with some simple mouse-based drawing,
set the following options:
Tip: If you like, give this file
a nice descriptive name and
you can open it as a template whenever you need to
start with some prefab center guides.
Choose File > Save as Template, and save it where you
can. I already hid one in the
02-Pencil folder for you.
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3. Try using the Smooth tool and Path Eraser tools. Try the Smooth tool over lumpy
areas in your heart. Or erase them completely and redraw with the pencil tool.
notes
4. Add a stroke and fill. When you get your heart the way you like it, add a stroke
and fill from the options bar.
5. Add eyes, mouth, ruffles using the pencil tool. Alt-dragging with the pencil tool
gives you a line segment (instead of your wobbly hand drawing.) Shift-dragging
constrains your line to the nearest 45 degree angle.
Exercise 2: Drawing a sea creature with a tablet
I’ve supplied a couple of tracing templates for you to practice with the sea creature
of your choice when you have access to a tablet. You can grab Seahorse template.
ai or Turtle tracing.ai from the 02-Pencil folder, or from my website if you decide
to try it at home.
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Painting the Way You Always Expected Painting
to Feel, Although the Word “Blob” Didn’t Really
Cross Your Mind
notes
Right now, right this minute, it’s tough to be an Illustrator trainer. Why? Because
the subject of this technique is one of the best tools in the entire software. And it’s
officially called the Blob Brush.
And yet, the truth is: The Blob Brush is an amazing tool. As with the Pencil, the
Blob Brush has grown more capable in recent years, so that it produces exceedingly
smooth and yet remarkably accurate results. However, unlike the Pencil, the Blob
Brush paints closed path outlines instead of open ones.
Better still, if you don’t like what you see, you can whittle at those closed path outlines with the Eraser tool. A bit of blobbing, a bit of erasing—sounds ridiculous,
but trust me, this really is the painting experience you’ve been waiting for. Let’s
get blobbing.
Exercise: Paint a Blob Brush­–based boy
What could be more fun than a good old fashioned coloring book inspired project,
but where Illustrator helps you when you go outside the lines.
1. Open the Original sketch.ai in the 3-Painting folder. I’ve already loaded my
sketch as a tracing template.
2. Set the Blob brush to do your bidding. After you choose the Blob brush, press
Enter (Return) to change your settings based on your desires. Notably for drawing with a mouse, move the Fidelity slider one click to the left.
3. Start painting in the black outlines of his face, hair, and neck. Remember,
you’re adding to the selected area as long as you’re painting into contiguous areas.
4. Add the skin color, and send to back. Remember, you can “color outside the
black lines” to some extent because you’ll send that color to the back. Changing color creates a new path.
5. Keep an eye on the Path/Compound Path/Group designation in the Options
bar to look for mistakes. Use the Options bar information to find out if you’ve
inadvertently made a compound path or a group.
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6. Try the eraser tool. You can use the eraser tool to clean up your blobs. 7. Consider changing the keyboard shortcuts. B should stand for Blob, don’t
notes
you think? Remember you can reassign keyboard shortcuts by going to Edit >
Keyboard shortcuts. 8. Add a background then erase away parts you don’t want (eyeballs). Add a blue
sky, then erase that blue area out of his eyeballs with the Eraser tool. 9. Try only coloring the edges, then choose release compound path to fill in. For
faster coloring of large areas. 10. Use the Smooth tool on bumpy bits. Much like when you’re drawing with the
pencil, the Smooth tool can help sometimes with painting as well. 11. Adjust the shape and angle of the Blob Brush options dialog box to make click-
able clouds. Hit Enter (Return) with nothing selected to see the Blob Brush dialog box, where you can skew, squish, and spin your brush for custom painting.
My finished file, Blob boy.ai, is available in the course files.
www.deke.com
Using the Curvature tool, Which Can Translate
Your Thoughts into Illustrator’s Language
notes
Illustrator’s Pencil and painting tools­­­—especially with their new intuitive features—­­
are all very well and good. In fact, if you ask me, they’re very well and great. But from
Illustrator’s perspective, they amount to an attempt understand a foreign language.
Think of it this way: When you drag—particularly with a mouse—you draw a rough,
irregular line. In previous versions of Illustrator, the program tried to smooth that
line using an averaging algorithm. The result was a glumpy version of what you
originally drew, only it looked like wiggly garbagy junk.
Nowadays, both the Pencil and the Blob Brush are so smart, they try to predict your
intentions. Illustrator may interpret one gesture as a straight segment, the next as a
smooth arc. In fact, just about everything can be construed as a combination of lines
and variously scaled arcs. In other words, Illustrator is translating your gestures to
the points and segments that it thinks you are meaning to create.
If you’re serious about mastering Illustrator, you have to at least occasionally express yourself in the program’s native language. That is, by drawing a path outline
one anchor point at a time. See, each anchor point anchors the path outline to a
specific location. And then that anchor point pitches a straight or curving segment
to the next anchor point that you draw. In the past, the Pen tool was the primary
means of creating those instructions, but now there is a new Curvature tool that
really help you speak Illustrator’s language.
Exercise: Test out the Curvature tool
1. Open that good ol’ center guides template document. You know, the one I
forced you to make earlier.
2. Grab the new Curvature tool. It looks like a Pen tool cursor with a tilde com-
ing out of it.
3. Click to make a point. Click somewhere on the upper part of the vertical guide.
4. Click again. Click on the left side of the horizontal guide. Watch for the bend-
ing rubber band function.
5. Click again on the lower section of the vertical guide. Note how the Curva-
ture tool continues to bend the previous ones.
6. Close the path outline. Click on the original starting point.
7. Edit the curve by adding points. And watch how it edits the curve. Note how
everything changes every time you drag, add, or move a point.
8. Try drawing a spiral with the curvature tool in another section of your doc-
ument. In some ways it’s more intuitive than using the actual Spiral tool. Remember:
• You can use the Curvature tool to convert points from smooth to corner
and back again by double-clicking on the points.
• Alt-clicking (Option-clicking) creates corner points on-the-fly while you draw.
• Escape a path with the escape key, or get the dreaded lines across your
document.
• Remember the Curvature likes to pick up where it left off when you reactivate a path.
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Turning Rough Sketches into Killer Whales with
the Round Corners Feature
notes
Illustrator CC allows you to round the corners of a rectangle by dragging a tiny circle that’s known as the round corner widget. Yes, the round corner widget. That’s
its name. It’s that target shaped do-dad that sparks to life inside every angle in your
Illustrator document. It does, in fact, allow you to round off corners.
But rounding of a corner or four of a rectangle is not the half of it. It’s applicable to
anything that contains corner points, regardless of how you draw it. To Illustrator,
a corner point makes a corner, and a corner can be rounded.
So let’s say you lay down a bunch of corner points with the Pen tool. Just by clicking, nothing more. Switch to the White Arrow tool, and all the corner points light
up with round corner widgets. And then you can drag them to create smooth transitions on-the-fly. Turns out to be a pretty fun way to draw.
Exercise: Turn an angular sketch into an organically curved orca
We’ll start by colorizing a tracing template so we can ruthlessly click out the angles
of our orca without being too distracted by the sketch. Then we’ll use the round
corner controls to pull each of those lines into a smooth sea-faring shape.
1. Open Colorized template.ai. In order to let you get right to the fun, I already
sketched out a very angular orca based on a regularly rounded guy I drew on
paper and scanned. I colorized my the sketch so the smooth lines of the drawing don’t interfere with your ability to click out a rough shape. Here’s how you
do that, in case you want to play later with your own sketch.
• Double-click on the open area of the template layer in the Layers panel.
• Turn off the Template check box.
• Grab the rectangle tool and draw out a rectangle that covers the whole image.
• Set the color to a lightish color of your choosing.
• Set the blend mode to Screen.
• Turn the Template feature back on.
2. With the Pen tool, click (no dragging) out the angled outline. I already did this
part too, of course. But when you’re on your own, remember to click outside
the actual organic curves (to give yourself room to pull the corners in) when
you quick-click your drawing.
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3. Click a point, then curve it with its round corner. Remember it’s easier to start
with the small ones to give yourself room to make big changes to the big angles.
Occasionally, you’re going to want to go to maximum roundness. Occasionally,
this is going to mean dragging right off the artboard.
notes
4. Use traditional white arrow point manipulation techniques to smooth out any
rough edges. The Round Corner “drawing” method is fun, but it does create
some problems, including making concurrent cusp points on top of one another.
And don’t forget the Mash-your-fist-J keyboard shortcut to join and smooth at
the same time once you’ve deleted unwanted segments.
5. Fill in the colors as desired. You can use the Shape Builder and Outline modes
to get at all the tiny tricky bits.
My final file, Happy orca.ai, is available in the course files if you want to check it out.
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Drawing with Math: Deke’s Techniques for
Having Robot Overlords Create Artwork
notes
After all that direct drawing, I wanted to take a final moment to consider creation
via Illustrator’s more mathematical, less manual, processes. In many of the more
than 400 episodes of my weekly series, I’ve used dynamic effects, or duplication
and measuring, or layer styles, or some other math-centered way to make Illustrator arrange things to my liking.
These are some of the more mathematical manipulations that you—with the help
of Illustrator—can apply to ordinary unsuspecting, unassuming shapes, and arrive
at a dazzling display of intricate interplay.
Your collection of files for this lab includes all the sample files for these particular
Deke’s Techniques. I’ve also provided links to each of the videos that show you how
to create them. If time permits, we can choose one or two of these to go over in class.
Many of the videos that explain these techniques are free at deke.com, with links
to follow up exclusive videos that are accessible to members of lynda.com—or if
you concentrate and get it done in 10-days—available with your trial membership.
Of course, the links aren’t going to work on paper, but you can download the PDF
version of this document, which has the added bonus of revealing these lovely images in their full-color splendor.
Deke’s Techniques 138: Creating a Superhero Shield in Adobe
Illustrator
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-138-creating-a-superhero-shield-adobe-illustrator
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Deke’s Techniques 139: Turning Illustrator Path Outlines into
Photoshop Shape Layers
notes
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-139-turning-illustrator-path-outlines-photoshop-shape-layers
Deke’s Techniques 241: Drawing an Orthogonal Cube with the
Line Tool in Illustrator
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-241-drawing-orthogonal-cube-with-line-tool-illustrator
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Deke’s Techniques 382: Drawing a Vector Flower in Illustrator
notes
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-382-drawing-a-vector-flower-illustrator
Deke’s Techniques 384: Creating an Origami Flower in Illustrator
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-384-creating-origami-flower-illustrator
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Deke’s Techniques 436: Drawing an Orthogonal Box Tower
in Illustrator
notes
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-436-drawing-orthogonal-box-tower-illustrator
Deke’s Techniques 455: Islamic Design I, Flirting with
Geometric Genius
http://www.deke.com/content/dekes-techniques-455-islamic-design-i-flirting-with-geometric-genius
Check back at deke.com in the coming weeks for the final installments of this project.
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