From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating an artsy globe - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating an artsy globe

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(whooshing effect) - [Instructor] Welcome to drawing vector graphics laboratory. Growing up, I loved art. I loved to draw, and I was influenced by the art others created. Museums worldwide have historically documented how art has influenced and facilitated thriving cultures. Just think of living without music, movies, drawings, photography, illustration, design, paintings, video games, theater, restaurants, books, podcasts, et cetera. I've been thinking a lot about this ever since I came across this wise quote shown onscreen, and it inspired this movie. So let's get artsy with our vectors, and create a design worthy of this topic. So this definitely inspired me, and it set me forward in starting to think about this, and it inspired initially this doodle that I sketched out after reading that. The earth without art is just eh, and that's kind of what it comes down to for me, when it comes to art. If you remove art from culture, it's a sure way to kill culture. Every culture needs art. Art brings so much to life in general, it makes life worth living, so this was the initial sketch, but it's not really how I wanted to handle this, or approach it. It's a funny cartoon of sorts, but that's about it, and I think we can take it a little more in a sophisticated direction. So let me show you my rough lettering, I started doing some hand lettering with a pen, and I just start whipping these out. I draw a lot of different words out, until I get the word looking the way I want, and then I'll take one part, and I'll even fuse different directions that I drew out until I have one that's going to work, and the one at the right is working really well, so that's the one I'm going to move forward with, is this one. Now, this is like the bones of the final form and shape, because I wanted it to have more thick and thin, so I'll use this just to guide my proportions, and then I'll draw out more thick and thin versions, and this is what ultimately, I'm going to scan into Photoshop, and then I'll just fill it in, so what I end up with is a TIFF image like this. And that's all we're going to do, is we're going to go ahead and open, let's see. We're going to open image trace, like this, and we're going to click on ignore white. We don't want any of the background to show up in this. We want it to be transparent, and I'm just going to do this setting, if you've watched me use image trace before, I use the exact same settings on everything, because I want it to translate what I've already figured out in the drawing stage, and just convert it into a digital format, into a vector format. So I'm going to hit trace, and then once that's done, I can hit expand, and you can see everything we have here. But, one thing I'll show you, we'll go ahead and hide image trace. We'll use it again, but I'll just hide it right now. I'm going to expand this, select this type, and notice we have about 9,093 anchor points. That's quite a bit, we can clean it up a bit, so what we're going to do is we're going to go to object, path, to simplify. We're going to open it up, and let's see. We'll do like one percent, and I think that looks good. So we've lost over half of the anchor points, so that'll just optimize our art a little bit. So that looks good. Now, what I do from this point is, I'll start composing the type. I kind of figured it out a little bit, as I drew it out by hand, but it's not perfect. So once it's in vector form, I can finesse it, and if I turn this layer on, you can see how I've art directed myself. This looks fairly close, but some of the words are angled a little different, they're sized a little bit different, especially if you look at "is just" is probably the least important part, so I diminished the size on that. I adjusted the word "eh" just so there wasn't so much space between the e and the h, I kind of pulled them together a little bit, and I also minimized the word "the", and composed it and nest it inside the top of that word a little bit, and I think that's going to look better as I lock it up with our artwork later. So the next stage is where I want to create a globe, but I want it to be an artsy globe. I want it to be very organic and freeform and very expressive in its style. So I just start doing that by taking a pen, and just doing scribbled drawings. And these are really quick, I'm not thinking a whole lot, other than the fact that I want it to be a globe. I'm just drawing, and I try not to stop the movement of the pen as I'm drawing. This helps to create something that is very loose and almost like a gesture drawing. And you can see on these, I'm trying to do the continents, but I don't know if that's going to work, and the more I look at it, I like the outer shape, but the continents, not so much, so I decide to handle it in a more traditional sense with latitude lines and longitude lines, and I start drawing those out as well. And these are all good directions, but the one I really like is the one in the bottom middle here, that's the one I'm going to move forward with, and once again, we've scanned it in, and we have a TIFF here, so we're going to go back and open up image trace, one more time. We can diminish that window, and we're going to click on ignore white, we don't want any whites in it, and once again, exact same settings, to get the tightest trace as possible. We'll click trace, and then we can click expand, to get access to our final art. At this point, we're done with image trace, so we'll close that. And if we look at how many anchor points we have, we have about 4,473 anchor points, that's not too bad, but I think we can optimize it just a little. So we'll go to simplify again, and instead of 99, we'll do 98, and we'll bring it down to only 1,252. It doesn't affect the quality or the aesthetic of our art, that looks fine, and I think this is going to work really good now. So we have the base artwork for a globe, and the next thing I want to do is I want to show you how to create some really hand-drawn assets that will turn into vector form, but it's going to enable us to get a nice artistic look when it's all said and done. And this is where going back to analog at times really does help to achieve something that is hard to mimic at times in a digital format. Either if you're in Photoshop, or you're in Illustrator specifically. But I just took a black colored pencil, scribbled these out, and we're going to turn a few of these into assets we use into our design, and the first assets we're going to create are a scatter brush. And so you can see two of them up here, and I've already gone ahead, scanned them in, and I've already auto-traced them, or image traced them, so that it's vector artwork. So we're going to open up the brushes palette here, and I'm going to drag this over like this, we can close this, bring this over here, and on this one, I'm going to show you how to create a scatter brush. So we're going to select this, and bring it over here, and drop it on this. It's already defaulting to scatter brush, that's fine, we'll click OK, and then we're going to do some settings in here. We're going to call this beta brush, and then some of the settings here. Now, you might ask me after you watch this, well, how did you determine those settings? Literally, I just played with it. I just initially plugged in some numbers, then clicked out, tried it, didn't work, went back, and it's all exploratory. And every time I've ever seen anybody talk about the settings on scatter brushes, it's the exact same thing. "Well, I'm not really sure what it does, "I just keep messing with it until it looks good." Well, that's literally what I did. So, there is no specific step by step, you're going to have to play with it, but I'm going to show you the settings I did, and you could go from there, and then adjust it as you see fit. Now, out of the four settings on the scatter brush, we're going to make all of them random, except the scatter itself, and that's going to make sense as I show you how to use it, but we'll keep this at 100 percent, this one's going to go to 139, and on the second one, we'll plug in 25 here, we'll match 25 back here, and then on the bottom one for rotation, we'll rotate, and this is going to help it give it randomness, 55, and then we're going to plug in 120 here, and then on rotation relative to, we want to do path. Now, normally if you're creating an art brush for example, you would select tint here, and that's what we want to do here, 'cause we want to be able to color it whatever color the stroke is that gets applied to it, it'll become that color. So you put it on tint, and that's everything we need to do, and we can click OK. So we have that done. This other brush here was just to show you that I made one, that's already in our brushes file, so I don't need to recreate that. And at this point, we can just get rid of these brushes, and I'm going to go ahead and just kind of minimize this, and scoot it over here. Now, we're going to go back to layers, and I'm going to show you how I start using these brushes to create with. So if I turn on this layer, like this, here is our global artwork. And on the layer below it, for the brush work, we're going to select a few things. We're going to select our beta brush, and then, we're going to use a tonal family of colors we're going to determine to create with, and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to select this color here, which is this color, so we'll go ahead and select that, but it has to be the path, we don't need a fill, we'll get rid of that. So we have the color selected, we have the brush selected, all we need now is the tool selected, and the tool we're going to use is the paintbrush tool, like this. And also, we want to go into transparency, and I want to go ahead and select multiply here. So we have a blend mode of multiply, we have a color loaded, which is this turquoise blue, we have the path selected and the tool. All we have to do now is if I go over here, I'll just show you how the scatter brush works if you just drag along like this, it'll just apply that brush to a path. But we're not going to do that, we're not doing shading. We're going to do spot kind of scatter brushing, and all that requires is we'll click once, and it'll randomly put a brush there. We'll go ahead and click another time over here, and we're just going to visually lay them down like this, until we get a composition looking good, and if you don't like that one, or any one, just Command + Z, Command + Z, just redo it, until you get it looking the way you want, like that looks pretty good. Once we have that one, we can switch the color, and it will retain all the same components of our settings, it's just going to change the color, so we'll go ahead and let's see on this one, I think I'm going to do a yellow, like this. And once again, when you use this, and you try this with the exercise file, you're going to get a different look, a different result, because this is completely random. You won't be able to replicate exactly where I place these because when you click, it's just going to randomize it and place it wherever it goes. So that's the benefit of this, is the more you use it, you'll get used to how it works, but it is going to change as you're using it. The next thing we're going to do, we're going to use the other brush, so we're going to click on that. All the same settings will remain intact, but we're going to change the color again, and this brush is a little bigger, so we'll go ahead and start placing it, and once again, you can see how it interacts with stuff, the other colors underneath, I don't like that one, let's try another one, there, that looks okay, and maybe, nope, nope, nope. (laughing) That's okay. And that's okay, let's go ahead and switch up the color one more time, and we've used the purple, the turquoise. We don't have any of the orange, so let's put some of the orange in this, and we'll put one up here. And I try to pay attention to where I'm placing colors, so I don't get any one color too far anywhere. This, and that looks pretty good. Maybe one down here, I think that's going to work nice. So that's how I'll use those scatter brushes. Now, some of the other images that I created with the colored pencil is I created some scribble textures. So if I turn those on here, you can see what those look like, and on the scribble texture, we're also going to take this, or specifically, let's take this one here, and we'll colorize it, ooh, not that one, we want to fill it like this. And on this one, we're just going to drag it over, and just place it anywhere here, and on this one, I'm not sure what color to make this one. Maybe this stays orange? Let's see, we'll just drag it over. Ah, maybe red would look, no, I think, well, it doesn't matter, you can color it whatever you want. I think I'll keep it orange. And then, on the layer above it, the globe itself, I don't want this black, we're going to turn this white, so it kind of interacts with this. But we want to define the edge a little bit, so if I go to appearance panel, notice I have an outer glow, and this has the darker color of teal to create a nice shadow, or a halo effect around it, a glow effect around it, and this helps offset it. And I think that looks really good. Now, from this point, we can turn off our tonal values there, and we're going to start playing with some textures, so I have a texture here, and we're just going to go ahead and bring that over and align it with our design like this. And we're going to colorize this, so it kind of goes with the design. The globe is white, so I think this will look good being white, it'll kind of make it look like a nice splattering of sorts. We can lock that layer. And then, on this one, we're going to go ahead and this is a speckle texture. Once again, we'll go ahead and align it with our design, and this one, we're going to just color the aqua color itself, but we're going to multiply it, so it interacts with the colors underneath it a little bit, and that just gives it more of that organic flair and feel, and we have another speckle over here, and we're going to go ahead and align that one too with our design, and on this one, we're going to color it the yellow color. And then, once again, we're going to multiply it, so it interacts with the colors underneath it. And I think that looks pretty good. So that's how we can create an artistic globe. Now, when you play with this, it's going to look different for you, because of the scatter brush being completely random, but I think what we've achieved here is a nice artistic looking globe. Now, when I originally created it, and you're going to see a change, because, once again, the brushes are random, I'm going to click on this layer, and you can see how this one's a little bigger than the one we just built, but you can see how the brushes applied a little differently, but that's okay. You still get a really nice look and feel, artistic feel, that is, on the artwork itself. Now, we can take our type, lock it up with our globe, maybe it's a horizontal format like this, which looks fine, this would look good on a postcard, for example, but what I think's going to work really well, because our motif, or centric motif for the globe itself is a circular shape, I think that's going to work best. And when I laid this out with the type, I just think this came out really cool, and it's my favorite composition with this artwork, so that's really cool. So that's the nice thing about working and experimenting, is you never know what you're going to discover. When I first started this, I'm thinking, eh, I'm not sure if I'm going to like it. And then it was all said and done, I kind of surprised myself, I did like it. So here is, once again, the final artistic globe. I enjoyed creating this type of content. I do so not just because it's fun, which it is. I do it because I want others to discover the same joy that comes from creating your own artwork and design. Each of us has the creative potential to influence our culture, and I hope this helps you towards that effort. Thank you for watching DVG lab, and until next time, never stop drawing.

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