From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating diffused shading - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Creating diffused shading

“

- [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. Vector artwork most often is created using hard edge shapes. Think of logos and brand marks. That's what I'm talking about, but with the use of blend modes and raster effects a more authentic approach can be achieved. This movie is based off of the question I received from a viewer who saw an illustration I had done and asked how I created the soft shading effect in Illustrator. So let's take a look at how this can be done using functionality within Adobe Illustrator. So with all of my projects, it starts off with a sketch. So I'm going to select this. I'm going to adjust the opacity and I'm going to lock a layer in. And as you've see me do many times before I build and focus on form and shape at this point, not so much color. I have a general idea of color in mind but I'm really trying to improve the overall forms of the shapes I'm creating. And I don't let my sketch restrict me, meaning if I think something's going to work better in another way then I go that way. If you look at the hairline you can see it's way off from the way I drew it because I just think this is going to work better. So it's always good to improve and art director yourself as you go along. Now at this stage, once I have all my base vectors done I determine what my tonal family is going to be. What colors am I going to use on this? So I can easily select shapes, use the ink dropper and start coloring in shapes. I'll just select and try different colors until I find the colors and the specific views I want to use in my overall composition. Ultimately, when I'm done doing this process I end up with all my flat art is showing here. I have some gradients figured out already but for the most part, it's just flat colors to kind of balance the tone of everything. And I think this is looking good from this point all go in and all start creating the more detailed elements in an illustration. So if I look at this you can see I've gone in and added additional gradients. I've really gone in on areas like let's say this eye and compare it to the previous. So here's flat and here's detailed and all this is we're not using any kind of effects here. It's just simple shapes like this one. And I have multiply blend mode set and 70%. And I'll go to areas like the shadowing under the eye on the top of her cheek. And this is set for 35%. So using blend modes and using opacity is going to help you to create that nice rich illusion that kind of brings life to an illustration like this. Now it's from this point that I want to start adding even more detail. And the detail I want to add is I have some shading in this. If you look at this little shape in the ear, this is hard edge. I don't want to shade her face that way because I think it's going to be a little too stark. I want it to be softer. I want it to be more gentle if you will. And that's what I want to show you now. So at this point, all of this, if I command A, everything's on one layer, this is going to make it really hard to focusing on one area of detail, because you'd have to figure out how to sandwich it and dive into the sub layers which in my opinion are the scary basement of illustrator. I don't do that. Once I get to this point I start separating in this case, an illustration into distinct layers to make detailing easier. So that starts with the background which is going to make up the base of her face and her hair. Then I'll go ahead and keep her eyes, lips and nose on one layer. And then we're going to put her hair and the band above her hair on its own layer. This is how I do it. So all the layers in between I'm going to create will be the detailing and it'll be kind of sandwich in position. So I don't have to try to figure out where that should go. It just makes it easier. You can lock layers so you don't move anything and just focus on this layer. So we're going to turn this layer on and you can see we'll go and zoom in. So you can see this better. All I've done is I've created the same hard edge shapes for behind the eye and around the perimeter of her face and the top of her forehead. And these are the shapes I'm going to create into the shading effect I want to do. So these are going to lose their outline, and we're going to fill this with this color. If I de-select, it doesn't look like it's going to work great for a color. But one thing is I'm using what I call a shader color on the face. Let's go ahead and unlock the face so I can select the face element here. I'm using this base color. Now this base color is made 1755656. I like working in CMYK mode. And so what I do with the shading color in case of here, I'll select this we'll go back to color is I knocked the intensity of that color for each of these color breaks, but I bump up the black and this is what I call a shading color. And I'm going to show you why I do that is because it's related to the base but it's specifically created for shading so I can select these and I can go to blend mode on transparency and change it to multiply. It's already starting to look good but the value's way too high. We made the knock down the value in, in this case I think we're going to go to 40 and that looks really good. Let's de-select it looks good, but the color that is looks good, the hard edge, isn't what I want. So I'm going to take these two and I'm going to go up to effect. I'm going to pull down to blur, Gaussian blur. We'll open this up and we're going to try, let's see, 20. That looks good. Maybe we'll stick with what we had 10. Let's see that. Oh, that's looks good. So let's click okay. And de-select, look how nice and natural that looks. It's still a hard edge shape, you can see by the highlight there but it's a Photoshop effect. It's diffusing that edge and making it blend in with the base color. And this is how we're going to formulate all of our shading. Let's go to these other shapes here. So these shapes are shading behind the eyes up here. We'll go and lock the base layer, so we don't accidentally select it. So this area in the eyes here, we're going to go ahead and go to the appearance panel. And I already have a Gaussian blur on this but I turned it off. We're going to turn it on. And then we'll de-select and you can see how nice that looks. We'll do the same thing for this shape and we'll turn that on. And this is a good way to manage details. You can just go back to your appearance panel. If you want to adjust the Gaussian, click on it and adjust it in this case, all of these are set different and you'll want to figure out what visually looks best. So this looks like kind of a strange shape on her forehead but watch what happens when I go to it and I turn on the Gaussian blur it makes a really elegant looking highlight as if the light which is coming from above is hitting her forehead and leaving that nice little glow of light there. Now all of these elements here we're going to select all the elements on this layer and on this layer, get those again like that. We're going to turn on this layer above and this is a mask of just the face. So we'll select that. And all we're going to do is we're going to mask it. Now I have masking setup. I can just hit the F1 key and it'll mask everything because I have keyboard shortcuts set up. But if you don't just go to object, clipping mask and make notice I have F1 this why keyboard shortcuts are great and we'll mask it. So it masks all those elements into this mask layer now. So if I turn this off, this is what we had and it adds all this nice detail into it. That's all we're doing here. Now on top of this, I have a layer with free floaters is what I'm calling for lack of a better term and watch how it just comes to life from this to this. You can see, I have all these elements in here. And once again, if I select on this and I turn on the Gaussian blur, I've applied and I select this shape and they turn on that Gaussian blur, that's all I'm doing. It's multiple shapes, multiple colors and I'm just Gaussian blur it. So if you look down here, all this is is an oval made with the ellipse tool. But if you apply a Gaussian blur to it, it creates a nice area down there that looks far more authentic than keeping a shape with a hard edge. That's all I'm doing. I'm kind of painting with shapes and blending them with the blend mode of sorts. Let's go ahead and do another aspect of the detailing. And this is where I want to take these shapes here on her cheek. We can go ahead and lock these layers. So we don't select them. I'm going to take these and I'm going to fill them with the pink, get rid of the outline and on this I don't want it to be full value on this. So, I'll go to color and because I'm using global colors, it gives me the ability to turn it into a tint. So I'm going to do half value on these and you look at this and you go, well, that doesn't look very good. Well, once again, we're going to go to multiply and you're still probably thinking that doesn't look good. Well that's okay because that value is too much still. So we're going to knock it down to 60 and I like the hue but it's really not going to work well. So we're going to want to to go to effect, blur, Gaussian blur, and we're going to Gaussian blur this out quite a bit because we want it just to fade into everything. These aren't set numbers. So you have to figure out what looks good. Maybe you try seven to begin with and look at it. That's still a little too overt. I want it to blend more evenly. So we'll try 10. I think that looks good. Let's de-select and I think that looks really good. So it breeds some light. And if you ever change your mind, just select these shapes you can go into Gaussian blur, let's say you decide it looked better If it was, I don't know, let's do 15 and you can go, okay. And if you like that better than I would match both sides, obviously and you can edit it to 15. And actually I do think that blends better. So that looks good. If you think it's too overt in terms of the color it's adding to her cheeks. So that's how we added some nice blush to her cheeks. And the last thing I want to do is I'm going to go here and I'm going to turn on this layer. And what we're going to do here is it's too light under the edge of her hair because the light's coming from the top. So that would cast a shadow is what I'm thinking here. And so we're going to take this shape and I'm going to go back to my swatches. I'm going to select another shading color to create this shadowing. And then all I'm going to do is I'm going to go to multiply and we'll multiply it like that. And then I'm going to go ahead and go to Gaussian blur, once again and we'll go to effect blur, Gaussian blur and maybe it for a cast shadow, little more clarity, we'll go 12. And I think that looks good. And I've created this unique mass because you can see how you can see it on the hair. on top. We don't want that. We want the illusion to be, it's kind of bumping out from underneath the hair line at the top of her head. So with this mass selected it's sitting on top of the vector shape we Gaussian blurred. And just to show you how I have it set up I'm not going to go to option menu 'cause I can just select these like this and hit F1. And that's why I use keyboard shortcuts and it masks it. And that looks really good in context of this illustration. So, that's how I would work in these nice soft shadowing effects. And it pulls off a really nice authentic feel, and authentic look. So we're going to go ahead and finish this design. So I'll turn on this layer. Here's how all the final base art looks. I decided to add another element to this. So we're going to go ahead and give it a background. I just think it look good like that. And I don't want the value to be that much. So because this is global we'll go in here and just edit it to like 85%. I think that looks good. And once again, I don't want to hard edge. I want to add a Gaussian blur to this. So I'll go affects, I'll go blur, I'll go Gaussian blur. And, we'll blur this one quite a bit, 45. And I think that looks great. So it really falls to the background but it frames everything with the nice look and feel. So as I was working on this I'm going to need something else. And so I decided to add a few more elements. So I added the flower and I added a nice butterfly here but I also decided to add type around it. I think this would kind of wrap the illustration altogether. So this was a lot of fun to kind of adapt from my original illustration which I'll show you in a few seconds. But one thing that I kind of discovered that I had used this process about five years ago and it was for a book on illustrator that it was going to appear in. And I didn't run into the problem I'm going to show you because I never tried to scale it up larger, but let's say you design this and you wanted to create a poster with this. This is a smaller size image that fits on an eight and a half by 11. But let's say your poster is going to be 21 inches wide by 40 inches long or whatever. And you want to scale this up for that. Well, you're going to run into a problem because all raster effects, whether it's blur or any of the other effects that are available to you for Photoshop effects all of these listed here, they won't scale. What I mean by not scaling is just that we're going to turn on this layer. So here's our illustration and we want to size this down. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a clone of this. I just hit F3, Once again, keyboard shortcuts save so much time. I'm going to drag this over. So we have two copies of the same side. So I'm going to just scale this down. We'll do it less than half like this. And if we zoom into this, it doesn't look horrible because we built it at original size larger but there's no definition now because this size I'm going to have to zoom in here. We'll click on the cheek. And if we go to the appearance panel, it has 18 pixels. Technically, if it's scaled, that should be smaller. That should be nine pixels. If we scaled down, if we go back to the cheek over here and we check it's Gaussian blur it's 18 pixels. So it didn't scale. So what you end up with when you go smaller is everything just fuses together. It's somewhat acceptable to go smaller but it just won't hold up as nice. When you go smaller where the problem really is quite evident is if we take this one and we'll go ahead and clone it again I'm just going to slide the copy over and I'm going to scale it up. Let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit so we can do this easier. So I'm going to scale it up almost twice as big. And if we look at our shading, it's starting to break down you're not getting that same elegance, the smoothness because that raster affects, we applied to this shape, hasn't scaled up. It's still only 10 pixels. So I never knew this until I tried to take this design. And it was actually putting this movie together that scale I'm going, what am I doing wrong? And all these years I didn't realize that scaling is embedded with the resolution of the document you're working on. In this case my document is 300 DPI is the resolution and scaling will just stay at whatever size you build it. When you create your art at a 100%, a 100% this looks great. Well, that's a problem if you want to use it in other ways. So here's the workaround to do that. It's pretty simple. Just take your original art and design. So if this was my original art and design and I wanted to let's say, create a large poster or a large banner, or maybe shrink it down and make stickers from it, then what you want to do is you want to take your final art file and you just want to save it out from AI to a prepress ready PDF format, and then you can scale it. So it's kind of a hassle to do that but that is one way to work around. I hope they would resolve this 'cause it seems very unintuitive and you might just run into it. So I felt like I should point that out. Now my original illustration was this artwork and I use that whole kind of Gaussian blur to do all the shading. So all the shading in the plants, all the shading where areas overlap with the background and of course the face. And I took elements in the background that were kind of further back these plants here and I Gaussian blurred those as well. So it's a great technique to get that authentic shading, you just have to be aware of the limits. This methodology is one I use pretty much only in the context of illustration because there's scaling issues and you'll want to deliver prepress once again, PDF format to clients. If they want to scale and use artwork at different sizes other than the original size you built it at. If you have a question about anything related to design illustration, the creative process or maybe something more technical like this movie and want me to consider it for a future DVG Lab movie then send your question to questions@dvglab.com. Thank you for watching DVG Lab and as always remember, never stopped drawing.

Contents