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Hi, I'm Stacey. We're going to make some custom textures from scratch and make some things to use them on.
When I've used hotkeys for something, they'll appear in the lower left corner of the screen whenever possible. Let's get started!
First, choose what color you'd like to use. We'll use shift-f5 to open the "Fill" dialog to fill the background with our painting color.
Next, it's ctrl-shift-N for a new layer. Now it's time to pick a brush! You can use F5 to open the brush settings.
Any brush with a pattern or texture to it will do well here. I've chosen the grass brush because it can create a huge range of effects
with this technique. I've also enabled build-up in the brush settings. This lets you click and hold on a spot and have the amount of color
deposited there increase. In our final step of set-up, we'll double-click our new layer to open the layer style options.
Select Bevel and Emboss. The two top settings are the most important; Inner Bevel and Chisel Soft tend to give the best results for this.
Size and soften will vary based on your image size and what kind of brush you're using, so feel free to play around with them at any point.
Here, I'm just dragging the brush steadily across the canvas while using the same color as the background.
Now, here I am dragging back and forth over the same areas, and you can see it's building up to a smoother texture with pockmarks.
The flat areas are where I've hit the maximum amount of color.
Via magical powers of editing, my canvas is now filled in with a lovely pitted texture.
We'll go over a few more demonstrations of what this can do with variations in the technique. Create a new layer, then hold down Alt.
Then click and drag the effect from the first layer to the second to make a copy.
This time we're using a leaf scatter brush to make a soft texture that has nothing at all to do with leaves.
Mine is going to finish via editing magic again after the initial few strokes.
You don't have to use scatter brushes with this, by the way -- a textured stroke can do a lot of amazing things.
This one looks rather like a crumbling plaster wall with multiple layers of peeling paint to me,
but it could easily be used for quite a lot of things. One more time through. Make another new layer, and alt-drag the effect up to it.
We're going to grab the grass brush again to show another possible variation.
You can see that we're getting a somewhat furry or grainy texture. If this is what you're after, you'll want to be careful not to go over a spot
more than once. If you need to touch up, start a new layer with the same layer style.
Set your colors to black and white, then flip them so that white is your painting color.
Select the canvas, fill it with black, then reselect your painting layer.
You can see how this blends and builds in a rather different way from what we had earlier with with the matched colors.
You can also change some settings in the blend mode to get even more variety.
Adding a texture or contour to the bevel and emboss can have amazing effects.
Play around with it and see what happens. It's one of the best ways to learn!
Now we need something to use these textures on. To the Illustrator cave!
I've started with a simple ellipse with no stroke and a black fill. Select the rotate tool and hold down the alt key.
Click on the point you'd like to rotate around. A dialog box will pop up.
One of my favorite tricks here is making Illustrator do math on my behalf.
I want 12 copies in a full circle, so I'll put in 360 divided by 12 for the angle.
Then we hit copy, and hit ctrl-d several times until you've completed your circle. Now hit V to change to the selection tool,
then hold shift while clicking to select every other ellipse. Pick a color for them, and we've got one option for a shape.
Let's make some more! I'm going to select all of this and group it with ctrl-G then move it off to the side and hide it for now.
Next, we'll try the polygon tool. Drag a polygon out, but don't let go yet.
To change the number of sides, push up or down -- in our case, it's down 3 times to get a triangle.
Now it'll keep that shape until we change it again. Drag some more triangles, and employ some editing magic to move them around
and make a little haphazard tower out of them. Open the pathfinder panel and select "Merge" to make it a single path.
We're going to get a linear gradient fill for our tower and make it go from orange to yellow.
Tap G for the gradient tool and click and drag to get the gradient to head from bottom to top and adjust the placement if needed.
Then it's back to the rotate tool, alt-clicking on a rotation point. This time, let's have 18 copies.
Now it's time for ctrl-d again to make more spinning copies! Then V for the selection tool, and select all of the paths.
Click on opacity in the appearance panel, and set it to 60%. Change the blend mode to Color Burn, and you've got an angular sun.
Perfect for those sharp summer days.
Now it's a move, shrink, and hide and we'll get one more wondrous whirlwind.
I've magically created a petal here by making an elipse and changing the top and bottom vertices to corners.
Let's do 16 copies, and it seems like a good time to mention that I've picked out 16 colors for the palette I have open.
We'll do ctrl-D for our copies once again, and V for selecting.
You can leave it at 100% opacity and change the blending mode to color. Most importantly, just don't leave it on normal
because if you do the pathfinder operation we'll be doing in a moment won't work correctly.
Keep everything selected and click your first color. Shift click the top path to deselect it and switch to your next color.
Repeat this process until editing magic once again takes over and you've got a brilliant spectrum before you.
Select the original petal and the two on either side of it.
Now, to make things slightly easier on us later, open the select menu and click on Inverse.
Group those petals with ctrl-G and hide them for now.
Select the remaining petals and open the pathfinder menu. We want to divide. If we had left the blending on normal,
we'd only get pieces for some of the colors here. But since the stacks are blending together, we get one piece for each color in the stack.
We're going to take a minute and group them up by stacks first so we stay organized,
and hiding them as we go makes it easier to see which sections we haven't dealt with yet.
Now, the reason we're performing this bit of surgery is because we have a bit of a problem.
That final petal we created can't blend the same way without being underneath the red,
but we can't move it without just moving the problem down the line.
Now, to keep track of which petals are which, we'll number them with the same order of the colors we used.
Color number one will be petal number one, color number two will be petal two, and so forth.
That will help us refer to them later. It does take a bit of work to make sure that we have all of these groups made correctly,
but it does help immensely down the line and it's a very good habit to get in to.
I strongly suggest at the very least organizing your files in to well-coordinated groups and,
whenever possible, naming them in the layers panel.
Even if no one else is going to be looking at your files, it's a good practice to be in so that when
you look at them, say, in six months or a year you'll still remember how to find everything.
Again, I also recommend that you spend as much time as possible experimenting around with different settings.
Even in the few things I've managed to show you here, we've generated a good number of different effects.
I could easily have recorded another few hours just by making some very small changes in things that we used.
And, I've kept to using things that shipped with the program. You can find any number of resources to download more things.
Using those will give you a nearly endless variety.
Then we'll go through the stacks and make sure each one gets pieces in the correct order -- from bottom to top, they need to be 15, 16, 1, 2, 3.
This will create the illusion that each petal is on top of the one to the right of it. Editing magic fixes the rest of my groups,
and now we're almost set.
Drag our earlier group of invisible petals up to be just below the area with the rightmost set of petals
so that the blending is correct all the way around. Congratulations, you've made an impossible flower!
A quick jump here will give me a chance to show you a couple of ways you can make fast patterns in Illustrator too.
Here we're drawing a lot of lines with the line tool, which is about as simple as it gets.
Editing magic gives me a lot of lines, split up in to a few groups so I can work on small sections at a time.
As you can see, you can get a lot of different effects simply by changing the brush.
We're going to stick with a simple one so I can show you a few more things though.
Hide all but one of the groups. Next we're going to grab the wrinkle tool by clicking and holding until the menu comes out here.
These tools are some of the best-kept secrets of Illustrator.
I highly suggest that you take each one of them and play around with them for a while to find out what sort of things you can do if you haven't.
The default settings should work just fine here.
If you need to change them, just double-click on the tool once you've selected it and use the menu that comes up.
The groups we set up let us stroke along each line without others piling up in the way.
All I'm doing here is very slightly moving the cursor while I drag across each one.
Now, if you have the power of editing, the other groups will have become wrinkled while you worked on this one
and you can unhide everything now.
Otherwise you'll have to do them one at a time.
At this point, we can grab the warp tool to add a little more strangeness in to these lines.
Just click and drag to move things around the way you'd like.
And now, more editing magic.
I've used a similar texture to the one we just made with the lines on our flower by putting it in that file and setting it to an opacity of 10%
and a mode of Color Dodge. Some of the groups are set at lighter colors to get more contrast.
Let's turn that texture off and put a different one in! Go to the file menu and select Place.
I've saved several variations of the patterns we made in Photoshop, and I think this one looks good for now.
Move your image to where you'd like it, and change the opacity to 20% with a blending mode of overlay --
the choice of blending mode generally depends quite a lot on the texture and what ends up looking best.
If you want, you can copy the flower here by selecting it and hitting ctrl-C. Now, we're going to make a layer mask.
Ctrl-shift-V will paste the flower you may have copied, and you can fill it with white to let the texture through only over the flower.
Let's squeeze one more method in. I've set the flower-shaped layer mask on to the flower, and now we'll use Place to put a
texture in to the layer mask itself.
I'm picking a very dark pattern here, because we'll be inverting the layer mask and that means the darkest colors will show the most.
I like how this pattern in particular tends toward lines in the dots. The best patterns always tell a story;
this one is of something being dragged across this spot several times a day, wearing down the surface over time.
Thanks for watching!