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okay so when you're in Illustrator
usually by default in your, uh, when you create objects, so I'm just gonna choose my
shapes
and we'll make a bunch different random color shape things, so I have a blue
circle
maybe red polygon, Iooks good
let's get a dark green square, so different shapes
the normal way that may interact with one another is
if ones on top of it completely clears it out so that the pixels that are on
top of this one cover-up
pixels that are behind it and of course if we want to change the
the stacking order of it you can adjust the arrangement of it
by object and arrange you can bring it backwards or or forwards from there
but what I want to do is I want to be able to blend
colors from one object into any object that's below it
and to do that I need to change the transparency
or the blending mode of the objects that I'm working on and if you look on
the board up
here I'll use these terms kind of
interchangeably sometimes I'll say transparency sometimes I'll say
blending mode and essentially it's the same thing
I'll show you in the pallet which one so if I say change the blending mode
or change your transparency mode, usually one of these is what I'm talking about.
so I'll jump back to the screen the pallet that that you're gonna need open
is your transparency pallet, it's one of those default ones on the right-hand side
so I'll drag it off so we can
see it from here. whenever you select an object
you'll notice you get a little preview of it in your transparency so
if I clicked on this one, you get a preview that, preview of whichever one that you have
selected, even if you select multiple objects
you can affect multiple ones at the same time. by default
the mode that you're working in, and you can see it's called the blending mode is
normal
and it just means it's normally going to cover up the pixels that you click on it
you get these kinda groupings of different other types and styles
and it will come into play once we start using Photoshop as well so this is
something that goes across different
uh, different software but if you change the
blending mode, let's say I chose multiply
all of a sudden the color of this one is being quote multiplied its being added
to
the color that's below it and its gonna give you different results based on the
colors
and I wrote them on the board, in general multiply
will make your colors darker so it's gonna multiply two different colors
together
whereas screen will make them lighter
it'll screen out certain colors. overlay affects
midtones and hue will affect just the
color or the value of what you are working with. it's easier said than done
I just wanna make you aware of it so notice that multiply and darken
they generally do the same thing, if I chose
screen you can see it gets a little bit lighter. if I chose
overlay and like I said it's going to affect the midtones
you can see it gets darker here but it doesn't affect this one
on top. hue
will or color changes it to that to be that particular color
but it keeps the same value of what it is and whereas multiply changes
it out
over the entire thing, so that's fun, but what can you do with it
well it really shows up well when you have a picture of something more than
just an
object itself so if I wanted to colorize
this picture I've gotten this selected, I can place it over his image
and you can see now it'll colorize in the shape of whatever shape that I have
that particular image right now it's set to multiply but if I chose a screen
you can see now I'm picking up the
the highlights of it, its only affecting the darker shadows
or if I chose overlay now I'm getting
dark darks and the nice highlights and all the midtones
are becoming red. is this making sense now? and this works for pretty much
any type of color that you may happen to choose and you're gonna get sometimes
different results
sometimes it's difficult to tell what result you get until you actually choose
the the color that you want so changing the transparency changes the, oh
that's kinda cool that's different, you see it kinda gives the
inverse of it, it gives and it changes how the
pixels or how the colors interact with one another
when you change your blending mode, so let's set it back to normal
or to be normal working from there.
another thing to know about the transparency pallet, is the opacity
of an object that you're working with. sometimes you just want to keep the same color but you
want to make it opaque you wanna see through it
and so by adjusting the opacity of it by clicking this number
and dragging down you can make it
fifty percent forty percent however opaque you want to be all the way down
to
zero percent. all cool?
did I blow everybody away on that one? very very simple but
especially in Photoshop once we start working in layers and not just
objects
changing your transparency and changing your blending mode is a very powerful way of
creating something
thats completely different, a very digital way
making something, you can't do that with a brush
not easily at least. so for today's project
what you're going to do is you're gonna download those
those textures that we have in this case the cotton candy texture
and the speckles texture and when you place them in here
we're gonna change the blending mode and that'll give you this kind of textured
type look to your to your document that you're creating
so let's see, we'll create file in New
and we're just gonna make this on a regular letter size sheet of paper
I'm gonna make its landscape orientation
and we'll say okay all I wanna do is go down
one at time, point by point and just show you exactly what we're gonna do to
make this all try not to skip over anything and read each of the
instructions very very carefully
because if you skip over something chances are you skipped over something that
you definitely need to know so I downloaded the two textures, I've created
my new
uh, new artboard. let's create the sky
in the background we're gonna work from the background to the foreground
so I'll use my Rectangle Tool and I need it to be a specific size, seven inches by
three inches tall, so in this case, you can click once
7 by 3 we'll say okay
I wanna fill it in with a linear gradient going from light blue to a
medium blue
and so remember if you want to have your gradient opened up
we need to have the gradient pallet, I'll just drag it off from here
you going to be using this a lot click here to turn on a gradient
and let's see, so a light blue to a medium blue
so let's change this one into a light blue
to a medium blue. there, let's make this one even lighter
double-click remember if you want to change a color that's not in your
predefined ones, you can click here
and this'll allow you to move the sliders to get something a little bit lighter
that'll work, that looks prettier
and we'll change the direction of it to ninety degrees, so lighter to darker
and we also need to turn off the stroke so I'm gonna select my stroke
click that now all I have is just my sky created
create a new ground. it's pretty just as simple too, so seven inches wide by 2
inches
two and a half inches tall
and we're gonna fill them with just a solid color a light tan
make sure you had your fill color on top before you select your
color that you want
alright so I've got my ground plane set up
got my horizon and I've got my sky going from there
next thing we can do is create the Sun so sun is using the star tool
1-click we want the radius to be, I want it to be.
five-inches, radius to be half an inch
so very wide but very small and the number of points is
gonna be 35
so you look something like this: and we'll give it a radial gradient from
going from orange to white
places over here turn on my gradient
in this case we'll go from orange
to white, of course we need to make this radial
alright and stroke none
so we're gonna place this over, uh, let's see
yeah place a perfect circle over the center
this one's going to be a white to
yellow circle, so perfect circle, what can I hold down to go from the center point
outward? option? what can I hold down to get that perfect circle?
so, I'm holding shift and option to get a perfect circle
from the center point outward
and it's simply a matter of changing it up in this case going from white to yellow
and let's see, of course I need to make a little bit smaller maybe I wanna see the
edges
from there
now it's gonna be okay if it goes of the edges
your papers, we're gonna clean that up at the end if you look at the one that I
created
notice that you can't see anything on the side well that's because all I did
was make some white boxes and I placed them over the edge before I printed
it's kind of a quick and dirty way of cleaning up
the edges that work force of yours looks like this totally fine at the end
we're gonna clean it up so going back to this one
once I've created that I've got to be able to send this backwards
so shift command and the
open bracket yeah left bracket will send it
to the back know the forward bracket will
bring it forward. let's move it down just a little bit
all the way to the horizon, cool
why would I place the Sun right here? can anybody tell me
what composition technique I'm using? rule of thirds very good
it says it's one of those things you see in a lot of different compositions
to place something to divide it up into sections of three
put it right there on that third of the line and it
in general it usually works out pretty well, pretty much better. so creating the
clouds
with this one, we're gonna use the pencil tool and i'm gonna go ahead to set my linear
gradient to go from a light blue
to white so, I already got my white set up
change it to a light blue. we'll make it
regular linear so now when I draw something off
I'm gonna draw kinda cartoonish
clouds, uh oh.
I drew it off but it didn't fill it in that's probably because I had
fill turned off remember you can double-click the pencil, ah there we go.
we wanna fill it in with anything that we created, so let's try that again.
turn it on, now when I draw the cloud
there we go, filled in that time
of course I can move that point over
good i'm gonna create about three or so different clouds different sizes
there's 1, 2
and three, that wouldn't pick up anything I had
and to give me a variety of them I can move them around
and place them one on top of each other so if I have this one I can make a copy
of it
change up the size of it and I don't have to necessarily redraw
a dozen different clouds
I can just use the same ones and re copy it and place them on top of each other
usually clouds get smaller the the further down
the horizon they are so you may want to make some of them really small
and lower down some of 'em that are closer to you a lot taller
you can even flip em around as well
be careful to not select more than one thing
one kinda fun thing you can do is
put some of the clouds behind the sun rays so it looks like the sun is
even going behind the clouds, it gives your
composition a little bit more depth. I'll leave that up to y'all how you want it
but I use my pencil tool create two or three different clouds and be able to
copy them
and move them around and change them up for what you use and from there
so here's the next thing, we're gonna place a texture
into your into your composition and this is gonna add that
speckled type of, um, type of look to what you're working on
so to place an image first of all I know I've downloaded it
to my desktop. yours may be in the Downloads folder if you download yours
but you can go to File and place
just like in InDesign
you find where it is in our case we want speckles and we'll place it on top this
time we're just gonna resize it to fill the upper portion of it
not the entire thing
so, up here, then we're gonna change the transparency mode, the blending mode
to screen so under transparency instead of
normal, we're gonna change it to screen, it's only gonna affect the lighter pixels
it's gonna look in general like this, so instead of having a
solid color now I've got something that has a little bit more texture to it
looks a little bit better
if you think it's too light for instance I kind of think it's a little bit light
down here
I'll also change the opacity of it so
I don't have that on your instructions but if you want to change the opacity
of it, that's OK too
that kind of lightens it up so you can see more of the colors
so changing both the screen and the opacity as well allows you to do
to get that. now let's actually draw off the
the mountains and the canyon wall. I'll zoom in so you can see this
as with the other ones you can use your pencil tool
we'll change our fill color to a
eh, let's see, a light orange it says.
no, excuse me, a dark brown, move it over one, and to create the mountains in general all I'm doing is
giving myself a mountain range, I'm gonna let it dip down
as it gets towards here, then come back up on this side, and then
come back around from there
that's what I'm looking for dark brown dips down towards there
I do need to move it, so I can move this up a little bit to cover-up
my horizon from there. then we'll start creating, it's supposed to be like a canyon
so you got two different walls on each side in this case we'll use the
light orange for the top and all I'm gonna do is draw off
this side and then also this side
for my canyon, following along the horizon
then I'm gonna go in and out, kinda like you're snaking it towards this way
so I got one
side of it created same way on this side start on this one
then go in and out, create it on that side
for the walls of it, we're going to use a slightly darker
darker color in my case, it'll be kind of a dark brown
and let's see
here. gonna go around and sorta follow
the edges of it
back around to the starting point
so with this one I need to send it backwards
so I'm gonna select it, send backwards
we'll do it twice since there's two of em below it, arrange, send backwards
so now I've got a canyon wall that's below that one
same thing for the other side
select it, send it to backwards now I've started to
create it on that side coming together, cool, the last thing I want you to do is just add
some shadow shapes
to it and those are these little extra areas that are kinda
jutting out give it kind of a cartoonish type shadow effect
and to do that, let's see maybe I need to make my canyon walls a little bit lighter
so instead of this middle brown, it'll be
lighter so my shadows will show up those
dark brown
all I'm doing is overlapping the different shapes
now instead of selecting each one trying to send it back
I'm gonna hold down shift and select all of them and just do
shift command bracket keys, oops shift command
bracket key, a ha, that one needs to be below
those and send everything to the back until they're in
proper order. all good? have I lost everybody? next thing
is creating the river you can use this using the pen tool
and you'll notice, the river is made up
of three different colors of blues so you got kind of a darker blue or a
medium blue
you got a lighter blue and almost a white type blue
on top of it, so with this one
we'll choose a medium blue and just as the canyon gets smaller towards the
horizon in larger we want to draw the river going that way as well
all I'm doing is clicking and dragging
and letting it curve and kinda follow the edge
of your canyon all the way back go
back to there and so when I come back
i'm following the edge of it as well remember you can hold down your spacebar
to move a point around if you need to and letting it get
wider as it comes closer to me so now it's going off into perspective. close it
off
do the same thing for lighter on the inside, so I'm gonna choose a lighter
color. it doesn't have to be perfect
this is your river; your
landscape. if you see a happy tree in it
keep that happy tree in it and then add some highlights
I just used white and these are real fun
because all I'm doing is is kinda clicking and dragging
I'm not really thinking about it I'm just kinda
clicking and dragging it's creating those almost
stylized cartoonish type trickles you can do yours little bit better
if you don't want to use the pencil tool use the pencil
draw it off really quickly and you get the same type effect
maybe even easier for you to use
but this is giving you practice
with your hand-eye coordination and also using the tools
okay
sort of coming together from there. the last thing is to
to create the bushes on each side and the bushes
these are going to be kind of a bluish green we're going to use
a paintbrush that has a rough edge to it so my fill
color set it to blue green and also
my stroke color, it's gonna be blue green as well so both of them need to be the
same
I'm gonna double click this to make sure yeah
fill new brush stroke is also turned on and let's see I do need a brush
I'm gonna choose this one. I'm gonna draw one of them
there we go.
it'll give it kind of that rough edge I can change up
width of it if necessary make it a little bit bigger. as with the clouds
if you make a copy of these you can change up the size, but in general
the further back they go you want them to be a lot smaller
you can change up their rotation draw two or three different ones
but you wouldn't want one to be in the back to be like super huge
because in general going in perspective you want them to be
receding off into the background
alright
last thing and this is something I've kinda gotten into a habit of doing
if you want your composition to have kind of a unified
look in other words if you want to look like it's not just a bunch of
random different things but the the colors are the same and
the composition is the same you can easily do this by adding something that has the
same color or the same texture to it
whenever I do a digital illustration this is a technique that I like to
use so right now when I see this I see there something you know there's
dark blues and light blues, there's a really dark area, a really light area
to unify it I'm gonna place
this cotton candy picture which kinda has one unified color and one unified texture
into this one, so
file and place. where is it,
cotton candy, as with the other one, we're just gonna
place it on top of everything you can scale it resize it as necessary, and we're gonna change
the transparency mode to
overlay now when I do that
it kind of makes everything a shade of orange
you know it tints the blues towards orange, it tints
the darker areas, lightens them up towards orange and it has this really cool
texture to
what to everything that's on there as with the other one you can
adjust the opacity
as you can see the difference from one side to the other side
just adds a little bit to there and you can add different textures to it
for your compositions essentially this is what you're creating you're using all
the tools to make
one particular picture and you can add more details to it
if you wanna at highlights to the mountains or a little different things to
what's in the desert that's totally up to you to print this off
like I said we're gonna clean it up by choosing
the rectangle and just make some white rectangles
along each edge. it covers up everything
to make that one right wide enough, once it's all covered up
this is what I'm looking for you can go and print this to the color printer
sign your name to it and turn it in for today
any questions before I let y'all go
alright