Creating "Year of the Ox" - Illustrator Tutorial

(dramatic whooshing) - Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. It's that time of year to approach the Chinese calendar and create a design based on the animal for their New Year's. This year is the year of the ox. This is going to be a fun one so let's dive into it. Now, before I move to Illustrator and go over various build methods and how we approached it with vector creation, I want to walk you through reference because a lot of people tend to think if they don't feel proficient at drawing, they can't pull off certain styles. And I really don't think that's true. I think if you push yourself to be uncomfortable and that's weird way to phrase it, but it is true. Push yourself to just embrace the fact that you feel like you can't do something and do it anyway because you know what I think you can. And the more you do that, the easier it will become and you'll be able to pull it off too. Every artist uses reference, whether you're a Disney artist or myself for that matter. So here's an ox I found when researching what an ox looks like. And that's important because if you go to Google and you type in year of the ox and do an image search you're going to find all kinds of artwork out there that creative people have done, and most of them are using a bull, not technically an ox. And I even saw Facebook do it this year. I went to a certain page and an animation popped up, looked like fireworks and their ox just looked like a bull. So you want to make sure to use reference 'cause it'll help you avoid that problem. And on this one, I just cut out the head first because I don't want the body or need it. I want to create a motif that I picture in my mind and that is just the head of an ox. I want his horns to kind of encompass or hold if you will a graphic shape that uses the Kanji symbol for the year of the ox. So that's the idea I have in mind. And I'm trying to get some good reference that I can draw from because reference will help you with whatever type of style you're working on. The reference is realistic, but it'll give you cues as how to simplify things to achieve that aesthetic so when people look at it, they think ox that's why we're doing it. On this job I thought the nose was not perfectly symmetric, like a straight on view, so I took the best part of the nose, cloned it, centered it to where I wanted it to be. And I also did that with the ear, the right ear from my point of view, it looks better than the left ear. So I just copied that over. And I think this already looks better than the original reference. I took the paintbrush tool and just painted some white chiseled edge on the left side. I thought it was too fat. So I kind of chiseled that down like this and think this looks good. And when I'm doing this I just keep going until I think it feels right. And in this case, I thought it felt right but I don't like the right side. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make a selection. I have the selection here in the file right here. That's what the selection is. We're just going to Option + Click it to get the actual selection. I left it there. So in case you want to try some of this, you can. The PST is in the exercise file. With this selected, we're going to go up to edit and we're going to go Copy, Merge. That means everything visually showing it, just copied it. Now we're going to paste it, but don't deselect this selection because you can simply just go paste. So if we go Paste or Command + V, it's going to paste it directly in the position you have that selection. That's kind of a nice trick. If I didn't have that, it would just center it on the document. So this puts it in the right orientation. We're just going to, let's go and name it. We'll call it cloned head since we're kind of being a Frankenstein here and merging different parts to get a better visual image. So we're going to select that layer. And we're going to go up here to Edit. We'll go to Transform. And we're going to go to Flip Horizontal. Make sure that your settings in Photoshop have the alignment guides turned on because all we have to do now is just drag select this and it will know where the center is and we just stop. So that's how easy it is to get really good reference in this case of the ox head. The picture I had in my head was his horns kind of encompass or hold a nice graphic with the Kanji symbol for the year of the ox in it. That's my thinking for my design but I didn't really like these horns. I thought they looked too thin. And then as, as looking at other oxes, I saw one and it had these horns and I go, those look even better. So of course, I'm Frankensteining this onto this one. Now, ultimately my motif's going to be circular. So I wanted to be able to distort these horns. And one thing before I attempt to do this, you'll want to make sure that by default if you haven't changed the settings in Photoshop they changed the scale. So I have mine set to legacy scale because, well, frankly I just find it easier. If you don't, you're going to have to hold down the Option key or something like that. So if we go to preferences here, General, I have this turned on Use Legacy Free Transform. I prefer it that way. You might too, but actually I'd test it without that turned on and then turn it on. And I think you'll agree with me. It's a lot more intuitive. So with the layer new horns selected we're just going to go up here and we're going to go ahead and Transform, Scale and I'm just going to move this up like that. And then we'll do it sideways to kind of get that vibe. And that's probably close enough to what we need. I might move it down a little bit Maybe move that over. So all I'm doing is getting it close to that proportion. So when I have my graphic symbol in the horns that's going to nest it really nicely. Now I kind of did that really quick and dirty. Here's kind of a more time spent making it really dialed in where I went in and I use the warp tool to really finesse it. So that's all I'm doing here. Now, I thought I was done and I even printed this out and started drawing on top of it on Vellum just to figure out what the drawing was going to be like. And I wasn't liking it. So I went back and I looked at more reference and I found the perfect face. My problem was, this ox is looking at you now, but his head is like pointed towards the ground. So you don't see enough of his mouth. That's the part that's throwing me off. Once I looked at more images, I found a new face. That's looking directly, well, it wasn't perfect symmetry. You can see, I cloned it from left to right here. Once again, I'm making idealistic reference but once I put it in, I go, okay, this just works better. This looks better. And so this is what I'm going to use. We're going to move to Illustrator now and walk through the entire process. It's a lot of fun. So let's do that. So we're in Illustrator now, here's our ox reference right here. And the first thing I'm going to do is just start drawing. I have the reference. Now I need to just look at the drawing and let it guide me in terms of how do I simplify things? How do I bake it down so there's minimal detail but it still reads correctly as an ox? And so that's all about refined drawing. So I use Vellum made by Neenah Paper, by the way I've been using it for about 18 years now. It's just awesome because you can erase on it and it doesn't mar the surface. So this is the styling I'm thinking about but you can see it's not a perfect replication of the photograph. That's not the point. It's to help guide proportions. And then I'm taking an artist's prerogative to figure out where can I add some ornate treatment? So I'm using this kind of tiger tooth detail to create the illusion of shading on this and little cut-ins to reflect the horn and give it more characteristic than just one flat shape and trying to uniquely form the nose in the bottom part of the mouth. Once again, the bottom arch of this mouth if you really look at it, if you zoom in, it's kind of circular, but I took a little more artsy take on it. And I did the same thing on his nose just because it looked better. Now, I won't know exactly if that's going to look great when I build it, but those are the risks, that's part of creating. Just take those risks because don't just think, oh, I need to replicate this exactly. You don't. It's about just aiding you to keep moving forward and you can art direct as you go, if you build something just doesn't look right, that's okay. Try it again and just keep improving it. So we're going to turn on this layer and this is the layer we're going to build on. And I usually select my artwork and I tint it back about 15%, lock the layer. And the first step I usually do is the simple ones, meaning whatever can be built with simple shapes then I'll use simple shapes. So all of these areas here I think could benefit from the use of circular motifs. And so that's all I'm doing. So here on the horn, instead of click and adjusting Bezier curves, why do it that way? When I can select both of these and I can go minus front like this, I can take another shape here, find the center. This is on top of this kind of moon shape now. And I can trim it to get that. Or maybe it's part of the detail. That's going to be on his cheek. So I have these two shapes and combine his front to get that nice little wedge, this elliptical shape. That's kind of rotated a little bit and squashed, that will become his eye, these are simple circular shapes. All of these are created with the ellipse tool over here. Probably the one tool I use the most if I added up all the methods I use over any given year, it'll probably be that one. Here's this, this little indentation on the front part of his face, same method. To do that, a lot faster than trying to create with the pin tool. The pin tool is great when needed, but it's a lot faster, more precise if you can build in shape. So that's what I do here. Let's go and zoom in just a little more like this. And here's another one. This is using the pin tool to create elements like this where it's more freeform in shape but still, it's all about figuring out how exactly and where to place your anchor points. If you think of a clock, three o'clock, 12 o'clock and then wherever something comes to a point in your drawing, such as this element there'll be an anchor right here, comes to a point. If you think using the clockwork method, and if you don't know what that is, watch my flagship course. The course is called "Drawing Vector Graphics". That was the first course I ever did and watch the movie, "The Clockwork Method". And that's going to help you figure out and discern where to place your anchor points. But if you think like a clock and look at a shape and analyze it, it's going to help you form it. So I created most of these with the pin tool. Now, one thing that I've been doing for quite a few years just because it gives me a better aesthetic is I'll draw a shape like this. You don't have to build the curve into your path. You can draw it like this, knowing you can come back whether you use the widget tool for rounding or a plugin like I do, you can take this and I can pull it out to get those curves where those curves need to be like this. I can even do it on little elements down here like that. So that's one way you can approach that. And if that makes your process go faster than by all means, do it. I actually never used to do that. I used to build the curves on the path so you can teach an old dog new tricks. And whenever it makes sense, I use it as well. So then all the inner detail, these are all the other elements as shown here, when it comes to the horn there's different methods I use here. Now one thing, I don't want it to be this sharp at the top. So obviously I would want to round that off. So I'll just take this and I'll go ahead and probably something like right around there, their horns really don't come to a razor sharp point. They tend to be blunted if you will. So I'll do something like that. I'd probably make it a little less rounded but you get the idea. These, once again, these are just simple shapes that I created, it's sitting on top. Once I have these, I can use these to edit the horn shape itself. So if I select the horn and we go minus front then that's as easy as it is to do that. Now, once I've done that, I'll use rounding in another way. So if I zoom into this area, the cut-ins look nice. But what I'll ultimately do is I'll go into an area like this. I'll go to where this comes to this corner here, and I'll round all of these off as it does that. I just think it really makes for a more graceful handling of that detail. And then ultimately when it's all said and done, I'll go in on certain areas and just do fine rounding kind of like that. So I just wanted to point that out quickly. Now, once you get to the points since this is all a symmetric design, you'll get to a point where you have everything set up. I have all my artwork ready to go. This is the base shape, everything, other than these circles in this shape down here, and these don't need to be reflected, then I'm going to select everything else that does. And all clone it, Command + C, Command + F. I'll go to the reflect tool, find a central anchor point. Make sure you have smart guides turned on, Command + U, and then I'll just reflect it over. So that's how reflection in symmetry can really be leveraged to make the whole process a lot easier. We're going to go in and select these two. We'll go Unite, that'll fuse them all together. We'll do that on any shape that kind of goes from one side to the other here. So we'll go ahead and fuse those like this. So I think this is going to look great. We'll end up filling this also. But the next thing I want to focus on is a motif because we're going to take that motif and we're going to use it in our design. Now this type of element, this is going to be a little bit of a editorial here, but this was made using the star tool. So if I go to the star tool and I just pull it out, now you can see it's remembering my last settings. I think this has 44 points in it, but the way you add or reduce points is once you pull it out with my right hand, I'm using a mouse. You size it like this. But if you want to add more points you use the nudge keys up and down on your keyboard. And if you go up one, it adds one. You go down one, it deduces one. So that's how that works. And if you hold Command down and you move your mouse, you can get long points or short points, really subtle. If you're creating, let's say it's a burst on packaging. Then this is how you create that burst image. And then once you let go of command, you can size it. So that's all I did to create this kind of burst effect showing to the right here. Now this is a tool I wish they would improve because you're having to do a keyboard press and move. It's very non-precise. I think they could improve that feature but that's how I created this element right here. So all I want to do is I want to go ahead and create a simple motif that I can use on my design. So all I'm going to do now is we're going to go ahead, this is some other detail we're going to go ahead and select this. I'll bring it to the front, make sure it's on top. We'll fill it so you can see what I'm doing. Select the big pedal like this, minus front. And so we're getting that same aesthetic we have in our primary artwork as well. And then if I turn on this layer this will be the flora, so I'll have another element that will work in here and on this one right here, making sure it's on top once again, we'll go ahead and fill it like this. We'll select that petal. And we'll just minus front like this. Now, the reason why I add these circular shapes out here is because this is also a form of a pattern of sorts. We're creating a circular motif. We don't need to create each of the four coordinates independently. We can create one like this. And all we're going to do is clone these, Command + C, Command + F, select this circular shape. And if we go like this and rotate it, it keeps it in line and registered like that. Then we can select the shapes we had like this and we'll just go Command + C, Command + F. We basically cloned all those shapes, select the circle again and rotate it like this. And you get the full shape. Now, once we have this, we can go ahead and get rid of those shapes. All of these now we'll unite, oops, my bad. We don't need this circular moon like this. Once we have all these shapes, we can unite it. And this is where we'll color it with ultimately what the base color of the artwork's going to look like. So it might look complex, but if you think in shapes and you think about tools and what tools in this case the bursts, easily allow you to make those shapes. Then we can go back to our main artwork like this and then position, let's go and zoom in a little bit. So the base art is looking good. And then we can position that where we want it right on the forehead here. So that's looking pretty cool. Now, another thing I want to go over is I want to use a subtle border pattern or create a pattern brush that fits the genre. So it's a Chinese type of pattern, a classic Chinese type of pattern. So we're going to do this and this is it right here. It almost has a Greek feel to it, which is kind of interesting. I'm going to select this. I'm going to just make a copy of it. Command + C, Command + F. So we'll just drag it over. And this is a repeatable pattern. So both on the left and on the right, it just repeats. And that's the important thing. That's what you want to do. So we're going to delete that. I just wanted to point that out really quick. And all we're going to do now is we're going to go to brushes here and we're going to drag this in and drop it. And we're going to select pattern brush and we're going to go, Okay. It'll want to automatically build a corner. We don't need it for this since it's a circular shape, but I always turn that off. If I need it, I try to build it natively. I don't want an algorithm do it for me. So I'll go art pattern like that and I'll click, OK. Now I can select this shape and apply the pattern. And it creates that nice pattern and it applies it to that shape that's centered on our overall motif. Now, one thing I want to point out when you create a pattern like this, this is a live pattern. And if you want your art to not be live, because somebody could resize this, let's say your stroke right now is one. Somebody might change that, and it changes the size, which changes the tolerance which I wouldn't want on this. So you'll have to go to Object and Expand Appearance and you might even have to go ungroup and you can see that this is made up of four copies of that pattern. So to fuse them together, you need to go Unite, like this. And this looks pretty good. Now you can see on some of this content it adds all of these anchor points. And if you don't want those, it's going to be a really hard problem to smart remove them because that feature isn't on the desktop. It is ironically on the iPad. So I'm hoping they bring it to the desktop. But if you have a plugin, this is another reason I use plugins, I can go here to subscribe and click smart remove and it will smart remove them. So another reason to use second and third party plugins but I go in, I clean it up. So this is what my final mark looks like. Now, the Kanji character for the year of the ox I drop in the middle. This is looking really cool. So now I want to show you how I'm going to apply color and finalize this design. Now what goes really great, which I've used in two previous years of creating Chinese New Year graphics, And you can watch both of those in previous DVG labs. They're a lot of fun. One of them incorporates the iPad into it. We're going to colorize this. So we're going to pick a nice golden kind of background color. And if we put our ox graphic on top of this I think this looks really cool. Now let's say you want to change the background color. Now what I'm going to show you now is why I use global colors. So if you click into any color swatch, notice I have global checked, always use global colors because I don't have to select anything to change it. This is the color break as it is now but let's say I want the background to be more of a reddish color. So if I go ahead and plug in new numbers here, we'll put some black in it 'cause we want it a little darker like that. You can preview it. You can see what the background looks like. That looks great. But now this is almost like tone on tone but I don't want this to stay red. So what I'm going to do is select this and we're going to go ahead and color this, this nice kind of gold color, which I think looks absolutely cool. And so I'm going to select this and now we want to add a drop shadow to it. So we're going to go up here and we're going to select Effect, Style, Drop Shadow and you can see how it's applying which already looks pretty good but we'll go ahead and dial this in a little more. I don't want it to offset on the X coordinate. So I'm going to punch it in zero and then I want this to be a little more like this. We'll see what that looks like. Yeah. It's a little less harsh on the edge and then we'll click OK. I think that looks great. And what's really going to bring it together though, is I want a subtle pattern. And if you watch the previous DVG Lab to this you can see how you can easily create patterns or watch my Drawing Vector Graphics Pattern Course. But this is what a pattern would look like in the background, which I think is pretty cool. Now, if you think it's a little too overt, right now it's 20, so we could go in and we could knock out like half the value. Actually I do think that looks a little better. It kind of pushes it to the background more. So a lot of things you can do with this I hope you found this useful. Remember reference will help you with proportions, give you insight into how you shape and form things when you're drawing 'em. And it's not about realism. It's about deducing form in shape. So always make sure to do that. It's going to make the process less frustrating overall. Drawing is all about shapes. So think shapes as you draw and reference the real world images to help you solve this visual puzzle and communicate the idea you're trying to create. Don't get frustrated. It should be a creative struggle on some level and over time that will diminish, but it's never going to fully depart. So expect it and embrace it. And as always, thank you so much for watching DVG Lab. And until next time, never stop drawing.