From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating color detail

(cog turning) - [Narrator] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. I'm a big believer in pursuing creativity outside the context of your day to day client projects. I say that because the best way to develop and grow new creative skills is by practicing them on your own for no other reason than to be creative and have fun. Some people ask me when I say this, "How do you figure out what to do or what to create?" Well, a good place to start is your own passions. What do you like to do, what do you find interesting? Maybe you like wildlife, that might be a good place to start. So, I'm going to showcase a personal project that I eventually turned into a promotional piece of artwork as well and this is all based off of my own passions, so let me walk you through what I created. So, the genesis for this idea, the idea that formulated in my mind, kind of came about in a different way than usual, meaning my daughter wanted to go see the movie It, based off of Stephen King's book, we did, in the movie there's this freaky head, that comes into a scene and it sprouts spider legs and you can see I drew a happy little head with spider legs down here, but I was kind of already thinking about that, that was kind of a freaky scene and then, the next day I was looking at kabuki masks, I love kabuki masks, there's actually a previous DVG lab where I feature kabuki art, so I had that in mind and then I saw a photograph of a crab and then my mind made a connection between all three and I thought of a pun, instead of kabuki, krabuki and I go, oh, I like that idea and I just doodled a krabuki here, what I thought a krabuki would look like. It has a little bit of samurai, a little bit of the kabuki mask aesthetic in it and it has a crab, so that's all my thinking is here, that's all you need to be inspired to create and of course, I look at reference, I look at a crab, it's a symmetric creature, so we're going to draw elements and cues from that as we create what we want to create here, a krabuki, obviously kabuki masks to get the flair and aesthetic of those. Their kind of curved fangs and horns, the ornaments on it are going to give us a cue there, the koi fish, I love koi fish. But it's the scales I was looking at here and of course, the samurai. A nice image from a museum gallery, showing a real samurai and even though we're not creating in a realistic style, all of these things are going to inform us on how to shape, how to draw and how to compose these different elements together to create what we want. In this case, a krabuki. So it all started with rough drawing, it's going to be symmetric, so I just draw a line and start drawing on one side and if I don't like something, erase it, redraw, until I get something that feels right. It's literally a feeling and if it feels right, I know I'm going in the right direction. I might not have everything worked out, but I try to work it out in a rough form and that's what I've done here. I'll scan this in, print it out and then I'll draw it more precisely, using a mechanical pencil and some velum as shown here. This is to work out exactly what shapes am I going to create, in vector form and how thick and thin are the outlines around them, I'm not using strokes, I'm going to build all of this with just shapes and fills, but this is going to be the roadmap that guides my vector building, so when I scan this in and place it in Illustrator, you can see I've done that here, I'll place it, turn it to 20 percent opacity, lock the layer and it simply becomes a roadmap to start building upon. So if I zoom into this first section I started building, the only free form building here with the pen tool, is this brow area. But it's easy to discern, anywhere it comes to a point, all these areas, this point, this point, that's where you place anchor points. You don't have to have any anchor points in between those areas, because you can pull out the bezier curve and control those curves using those. The only two that are a little harder to discern, is where to place your anchor points to get this curve. But if you use the clockwork method, which I cover in my flagship course, Drawing Vector Graphics, this is a nine o'clock position, this is a six o'clock position. So it really does benefit to work out your design in a drawn fashion, so that when you move to vector, there's no guesswork in building. You can improve and change stuff as you go along to make it look better, it's not that strict, that you can't deviate from your drawing, because I did here, I had originally drawn it like this, but it frankly, looked better fatter, up here at the end, so that's fine. I originally drew my eye shaped like more oval, but I actually want that a circle, so I used simple elliptical shape building tools in Illustrator to create that, I don't need to create it with my pen tool. So a lot of components go into building vector art and the better you are at figuring out what's going to help you go faster and get a precise look and feel, the better. In this case, I use a combination of shape building and freeform building as I compose my illustration. As I go along, it may look kind of like a mess, but that's okay. I don't worry about it looking like a mess, I know that eventually I'll go in and select a lot of different shapes, like all these exterior outline shapes, like here, will all be fused together along with this shape for the tongue and that'll end up making the outline as shown in my drawing. But at this point, I'm not doing that because I'm going to use some of these shapes, such as this one again to help form the gill detail on this edge. But a lot of different building I'll do, like these little wedge shapes, what are these? Well, these are simply shapes that I'm going to select, bring to front and take the horn and I'm going to minus front from the horn to get the little notches, so I'll build those separately, I don't try to build this shape and build these notches in as I do it, it's just easier to build the base shape, then build the notches afterwards, as shown in this one. You know, unite these together, make sure they a compound, make sure they're on top and by the way, I'm using keyboard shortcuts when I say that. Once I unite them to make it a compound, you would have to go Object, Compound and Make. But notice, I don't ever go to the menu, I just hit F7. And that turns into Compound. I never have to go to the menu to arrange to bring to front. I have a keyboard character shortcut for this one as well, F5. So all I've done is I selected and united, hit F7, hit F5, it brought it to the front, select both of these and then minus front to get that detail. You want more information, check out DVG Lab Movie on keyboard shortcuts, I highly recommend you use them, it makes the build process go much faster, you never have to go to the pull down menu, if you figure out the keyboard shortcuts, they're going to accelerate your build process that you use on a daily basis. So a really good pro trick to get in the habit of using. So if we go to the gills here, you can see, here's that shape where I might have created it initially for something else, but as you think about building, always keep it in mind what else are you going to build next, because you might use the shape you already built again to help make it easier to build another shape, in this case, I used this shape to define the inside, kind of curvature of the gill and all these shape interact with that edge to keep the continuity intact and it's going to work great. I also will use this at times like if I select this, make sure I bring it to front to also trim other shapes that I need to. You can see I have these notches again here, so I'll select these, unite them. Turn it into a compound, because when you unite, it turns into a group, make sure it's a compound. Bring to front, using the keyboard shortcut I showed you, F5 and then minus front, so you can see how fast that goes. Never had to touch the pull down menu, that's kind of the point of using keyboard shortcuts, it makes things go a lot faster. Also, if you can memorize all the keyboard shortcuts for the tools, you never have to go over to the toolbar. So, if I wanted to let's say use the eyedropper, I can just hit letter I and I have eyedropper. If I want to zoom, Z to zoom, you know, V to get the selection tool, that type of stuff. So, those speed up the build process as well, to get in the habit of memorizing those. Once you do it for a certain amount of time, it becomes muscle memory. I've been using these keyboard shortcuts now for over 15 years, I don't even think about it, it's just muscle memory, it just comes to me right away. Let's go up to these scales, because this is another simple little shape building. All of these, if I go to key line view, they're just elliptical shapes, so I'm just using these to figure out how I'm going to compose it, so I'll take these two shapes for example, unite them together and that'll allow me to edit this back scale here and I'll minus front. We'll take these two shapes. Again, unite them. I'll make a clone, 'cause we're going to need this twice, since we have two scales we have to edit and we'll minus front on this one. We'll take the clone and we'll minus front on this one. So what I've done there, is I've created, actually, on this one right here, it will become part of the parameter outline on the artwork. But if we go to key line view, you can see these are already cut into place and then this is a good example of where you'll reuse another shape, so I might go back to this layer and copy this one, go back to this layer, paste it and then this, I'll use, actually, I'll clone it, because I'll use it to edit this one, go to pathfinder, minus front, I'll use this one to edit this shape, like this and then obviously we would need to have this shape to edit the bottom part of that. So that's how you can use previous shapes you've created to continue to edit and make the build process easier. So if you're not sure you're going to need the shape again, don't just delete it, make a copy of it, put it on a layer, maybe name layer Temp, I do that at times and then it's almost like you can go to that, if you realize you need it and it will safe you a lot of time, so get in the habit of thinking that way, thinking in shapes, what shapes are going to help you to build other shapes, in this case, this is how all my final scale shapes came out, I'll use the same methodology to build all the other elements in this composition, such as the claw here or here's more of the claws with the legs down here. If you notice in my initial drawing, I had this drawn in and what I'm thinking there, is this is going to play the part of a shadowing, so I'm going to select this shape, select the interior part of the claw and I'm going to minus front, so when all this artwork's fused together and you're going to see that in a second, this will act almost as a shadow. I'll also build other elements like the horn here and of course the styling on the headdress for the samurai. When it's all said and done, I'll have all my reflected base shapes and they'll look like this. And once I have that, I can select the ones on the right, the central component, which is the headdress itself, I don't need to reflect, since that's in the center. I'll just take this and I'll clone it. Command + C, Command + F. Then I'm going to go to the reflect tool, find a central anchor point, make sure you have smart guides turned on, Command + U to toggle it on and off. We'll select a central anchor point, this one and we'll reflect it over. Now, we'll go in, select this and bring this to front and now we have all of our base shapes to go ahead and start fusing shapes together to create the fundamental base black and white artwork we need. So I'm going to select both sides here and un-group it, I'm going to select all the blue perimeter shapes on both left and right and I'm going to go ahead and unite those, so they unite all together. We're going to select this, un-group it, I'll select the background shape, which is the blue. Select the blue we already have, unite it again. Then I'm going to go ahead and cut this. Select all my outlines, paste behind and that's how quickly you can start building your base art. Now we'd have to do some of that same welding together of shapes down through the middle, so for example, on this scale and this scale, on each side, we'd have to do the same. But I would go into these areas and I like to pull stuff over from one side into the next, that way, when you fuse them together, Illustrator won't keep a line in the middle. Sometimes that is going to happen when you fuse stuff together using pass finder and so you have to pay attention to it. Not all the time, it's just an intermittent problem. Illustrator engineers told me one time, "That's because Illustrator's too precise!" and I'm like, "Yeah, no." So just be aware of it, you might run into it at times and if so, to avoid ever having that problem before you merge them, just pull one of them over, so it overlaps, obviously and then when you fuse it together, you're never going to run into that problem, so I just get in the habit of doing that. When it's all said and done, we have our black and white base artwork like this and it was at this point I'm looking at this thinking, I like it, but there's areas of the outer perimeter outline around the character, the continuity's looking off to me, so if you look at this area, the thickness around this area and then you compare it to like around the top of the head, around the edge of the scales, there's an inconsistency with line weight, so I want to address that. So what I'm going to do is I've started playing with it here and this is where the nitty gritty of vector building comes in, so all the magenta lines is my original base artwork you saw previously, but I've taken elements of it, in this case it's blue and I've added an outline to it and this outline is three points and that's to create a thicker, overall outline for the perimeter art. So if you look at this shape here, this shape right here is seven point three nine two points tall, I like to work in points and if I select this and bring it down here and snap it and let's go ahead and bring that to front, you can see it matches that weight on the outside of the perimeter line, so I need to make sure everything in my art is matching this tolerance. So knowing that is seven point three nine two and to get there we need to add a three point line, I need to expand this horn three points. So I go in here and I go Path and I go Offset Path and I go three and I go Okay and you can see that, let's go ahead and change this to like blue and if I go up here, you can see now it's the correct thickness from the interior of that horn, to the outside of the shape, so that's all I'm doing here, I'm just improving the continuity of the art, if we go up here and I pull this down, you can see it now matches the corrections, so I was a little off in a lot of areas, some areas I was more off, such as this part of the top of the horn, I had a greater amount of distance I need to create to match the tolerance. On the other ones, not so much. So it was kind of inconsistent and that's the hardest part to do when you build this way, so this is the easiest way I've found to deal with it is to just address it after the fact, because it's a relatively easy fix, it just takes a little time to do that, so if we turn this layer off, I turn this on and I'm going to turn this layer above it on, you can see everywhere where the blue is showing is where I bumped up the weight. So when it's all said and done, I've gone ahead and created the new thickness and if we look at this, let's get it kind of big here on screen. If we look at this, we'll turn on our original base art and if I toggle between these, so our fixed weight continuity on the outside and before. So this is before, this is after, look at the improvement. Just helps so much to pay attention to those kind of details. Now another thing I'll point out is notice on some of the detailing, let's zoom in here, it's most noticeable on the face part. So if I turn this off, do you notice any changes happening other than that outline? All the subtle rounding on the inside, like on this eye where it goes into this gap, well that would get darker there, so this is where you can use the rounding tool in Illustrator, I prefer using a plugin that you can do the same thing, I'll go in and I'll just round off detail like that, so as it kind of goes back into that area that would naturally be darker, it's kind of eating away at the white and it helps to give that illusion of creating a shadow there, so this is with everything sharp, if you look down on these shapes and then when I turn this on, you can see how it improves by adding subtle rounds to everything, so an important little detail and track. Once I get to this point, I print it out and I just work out the shading. I haven't even started thinking about, well, I've thought about color, I haven't applied it yet. But this is the shading I do that's going to guide me later. So let's go ahead and focus on color here, 'cause this is where the process obviously gets fun. So you can see a lot of my colors being worked out here and we're going to select some of these areas with eyedropper and we're just going to start coloring. Like this. Some of these base colors here. Like that. By the way, this color pallette of mine, I kind of borrowed it from another design. It was actually another kind of crab design, but it was more geometric, so it's okay to borrow from yourself, I do that quite a bit, if I find a color pallette that I really like, I'll use it again in another piece of art that will be different. In this case, it's a different type of art, but it's a crab, that's the one thing that's a little the same, so the horns aren't perfect white, those are going to be this kind of horn color, if you will. So this is how I work it out. Here we'll add subtle shading like this. So this is just working out all the flat color here. We might go into here and color that that way too and eventually that'll probably be white, so I'll color that one as well, so this is all our flat color. But you saw how I drew out the shading initially and I do that because I'm going to scan it back in and I align it, so if we go here and I zoom in on this, you can see how I aligned it here and that works great and then I use it to build my vector shapes like that, so that's that. Here's another one where I scanned it in as a separate scan and it's aligning up here and I also build my base shapes based off of that aligning. Now what I want to go through now, is distinctly coloring not specific the flat colors, we have the flat colors all worked out. I'm more concerned about how to build the shading colors. So if I turn on these shapes that we created for the shading on this horn and I select the crab shape here and I clone it, Command + C, Command + F and I select the shape we created for the shading and I intersect it to get those shapes trim the way they should be, notice it's going to turn into groups, so we'll turn that into a compound and now we're going to colorize these, so let me turn on this, because this is our base color, right here, but I have a color on top of it, right here and I'm going to show you how I usually handle creating a shading color and this shading color, if I open a color, you can see this is the break, if we go to CMYK, we want to cut this value in half, so we'll go to about 40, I don't know, 42, this one, we'll go maybe 42 as well, I think that'll work. 42 and then we had no black in it, so we're going to add black and if you were painting traditionally, this is how you do it. You would add less red color, less yellow color and add a little black to it, to get this muted value of the base color. Well that doesn't look good for shading, but watch what happens when we select it and we go, multiply, that looks pretty good, but still a little too dark, so let's change the value from 100 to 65 and I think that looks really good. So now that we have that, we can select the shape we trimmed for the shading and apply the shading color. So this is usually how I handle this type of shading and I mix those colors that way to pull it of. Now there's another part and that is here's the highlights. So let's go ahead and select the crab. Command + C, Command + F to clone the copy. Select the highlight, intersect it. Make sure it's compound. Now you might think, well, this is easy, 'cause all we have to do is go swatches and we can color it white and that's not bad, but what I found on a red color especially, is if we color it the base color and then we go to Color, making sure it's a global color, we'll allow us to have a tint, that's what T stands for here. We can bring this down and we might set the tint on this to 70. I think this looks pretty good, maybe a little whiter, so we could go down to like 55 and I think this looks like more authentic than having a stark white. So that's how I'd handle that type of coloring and detail. Let's do just a couple more and we'll wrap this whole project up. So at the horn down here, I'm going to turn on the horn shading. We're going to select the horns here, make a clone of it, Command + C, Command + F. Select the shapes for the horn detailing, intersect them, this is going to be a group. So we'll turn that into a compound and all we're going to do now is we're going to go to a shading color for the horns, we'll fill that, get rid of the outline, like that, I think that's going to work fine and we're going to go ahead and multiply this. Just so it makes it a littler darker, like that. And I think the value at 100 percent's fine, so we're not going to adjust the value on that. And then another small detailing on the horn, will be the little highlight here and this is easy, we'll just get rid of the outline, fill it with white and then one last part, is since it's coming out from the head or the face that is of this krabuki character, we're going to select the horns, make a clone of those shapes again, select this little sliver. It's almost if you look at it, it's almost like a little moon shape. Select the horns we cloned. Then we're going to intersect it, we can actually sample the shading we have here and then let's go ahead and go to, okay, it's on multiply, so that'll work good. And we're going to leave that 100 percent, I think I'm going to go back and change the value on this one. Yeah, I like that. So that's how I'd shade that thing. Now that last part, what's going to breathe life into this illustration is going to be just the simple detailing on the eyes itself, but before we do that, let's turn off what we just did and I'm going to turn on all the shading, boom, look at that, that looks nice, but now watch how it comes to life with a lot of the highlights, all these highlights come in, that's looking good and I've gone into those shadow areas and I added deep shadows, the same principle, just one step darker. Look at how much that brings life into this overall illustration and now we're going to focus on just the eye itself and so let's zoom in on that a lot, so you can see that pretty clearly, I'm going to turn this on to kind of guide us, we're going to zoom in even more and so the first one we're going to do, we're going to select this cast shadow that's from the eyelid onto the top of the eye and this is going to color like this and you can see it's multiplied at 100 percent value. Then the second one will be these shadows on the edges here. These shadows on the left and the right edges, these will be a little more diminished, but still create that nice rounded form we have going there. We'll select this area, this will be a nice shadow, based off the inside color of the eye, like this. This will be part of that cast shadow and it'll be a muted value of what we just applied and that'll overlap that color, that's looking really good. And then we're going to do what's a reflective highlight here, on the pupil of the eye, if you will and that'll just be this white and it's set to 20 percent, if you look at the transparency pallette and then we're going to do a couple more. Down here, this is just going to be a tint of the inner part of the eye and the very last one, it'll be the hot spot, it's just a solid reflective white, but how cool does that look? That just totally brought life to it. So flat, with detailing. Really brings life to it. So let's go ahead and zoom out and you can see how everything composes together with the shadows, with the highlights, with the deep shadows, just to really kind of breathe life to this overall design. Now, as I was working on this, I got to this point and I go, I kind of like the outline, but I don't know, something was bugging me about it and that's when I thought about the outline color and right now it's this kind of purple, purplish color, you know and it's okay, but maybe blue would look good, so I tried blue and eh, not really, maybe it's just a different hue of purple, eh, it's okay, but I don't know, green, I was going, yeah, that's not going to work and then when I tried a dark muted red, boom, I was just like, that's it, that's awesome, that's what I like. So I'm always trying to experiment at each phase of the project and with this one, after I was done with it, I said, "This is going to work great for stickers, "but I want to do a tee shirt, "I don't want to do a multi colored tee shirt, "I just want to simplify it." The nice thing about this style, is it simplifies really, really great. So I simplified it into one color design and I almost like this better than the full color. It's just really, really cool. So this is a tee shirt, it's actually on Cotton Bureau if you want to check it out, but it's going to work really well in a simplified format, here's the tee shirt version of it. I did a whole course on coloring and detailing, called Drawing Vector Graphics, Color and Detail, so I encourage you to watch that to extend your knowledge regarding this topic, but that said, what I showed you in this movie, I didn't cover in my course, because it's something I recently discovered on my own, trying to simplify my workflow and now I use it all the time. So I encourage you to experiment and see if you can find it useful for your own creative process and discover your own insights into how to improve how you work. Thank you, as always for watching DVG Lab, please leave reviews, I really appreciate it and as always remember to never stop drawing.

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