From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

929 Making a face of triangles in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

929 Making a face of triangles in Illustrator

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our illustrations such as it is, and we're going to fill out the basic shapes in order to create this artwork here. And even though it might look extremely rudimentary, these are all the shapes we need in order to create this final illustration. All right, so in case it's not obvious, I'm working inside Adobe Illustrator, and I'm going to start things out by grabbing the white arrow tool, which, even though Illustrator calls it the direct selection tool, has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow. Now, I'll go ahead and click on this segment down here to select this right side of the chin independently of the rest of the shape, and then I'll go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can press control C or command C on the Mac, and then I'll return to the edit menu and choose paste in front or you can press control F or command F on the Mac. And that, as many of you know, is a quick way to duplicate a selection. All right, now I want to nudge another copy of this path down into the right. And so I'll start by pressing shift, alt, right arrow, that shift option, right arrow on the Mac. And the reason that we're pressing the shift key is to move the selection 10 times the standard keyboard increment, which is one point, so I've moved to 10 points. And by virtue of the fact that you also press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, you made a duplicate of that line as well. Now, just press shift, right arrow, and then press shift, down arrow twice in a row in order to achieve this effect here. All right, now I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll shift, click on this line right here. And so you should have lines in both locations as we're seeing right here, in which case, don't move them like I did, just leave them where they are. And you want to join them together by going up to the Object menu, choosing Path, and then choosing join, or you have a keyboard shortcut of control J or command J on the Mac, which I will be using in the future. And so go ahead and choose that command once. Notice that fuses the bottom edges of my case, but the top edges are not fused together, which is why I'll press control J or command J again, in order to convert those two open paths into a single closed one. All right, now I want to draw a long line down the right side of the face, and I'll be doing that using the line segment tool, which is available here inside the line tool, fly out menu. And so what you want to do is drag along this edge like so. And notice that I'm seeing in the heads up display there that I have a distance value of whatever, I don't really care at this point, and an angle of 239 degrees. Well, that's not really accurate, it's 240 degrees, and I'll demonstrate that by undoing the creation of that line and clicking up here at the top, right anchor point. And that's going to bring up the line segment tool options dialog box complete with the accurate angle of 240 degrees. I want the length to be 520 points, at which point I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to create this big, long line right here. All right, now, if I switch to the final version of the illustration, you'll notice that I'm trying to achieve the effect as if the shapes are kind of pulling apart from each other. So I want this line to move down a little bit. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to my artwork in progress, and also switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the V key. Then you want to press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box. I am looking for a distance value of 10 points, incidentally, but I want the angle to be the same angle that I used for the line itself. So I'll change it to 240 degrees and press the tab key. And if your preview checkbox is on, you'll see that I'm moving the line down ever so slightly, at which point I'll click OK. All right, now I want to nudge this guy down 30 points and over to the right, 30 points as well. And I also want to duplicate it right at the beginning. So I'll press shift, alt, right arrow in order to make a copy of it and nudge that copy 10 points to the right. And now press shift, right arrow twice more in a row. And then I'll press shift down arrow one, two, three times in order to create this line right here. Now you want to shift, click on the original one, which should still remain, and you want to join them together by pressing control J or command J on the Mac twice in a row in order to achieve this effect here. And now, assuming the fill is active here inside the swatches panel, I'll just go ahead and click on the shade of blue in order to fill that guy with the same shade of blue that I've assigned to these two triangles right here. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch to the final version of the illustration once again. So I can show you that I have kind of a couple of different treatments for the eyes. This eye is made of a kind of shape inside of a triangle, and then there's a little ambiguity as to what the eye is over here on the right hand side. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to this document, and I'll press the A key to select my white arrow tool, and I'll click on the edge of this triangle right here, so the left edge of this. What you might say is an upside-down triangle. Now you want to create a copy of it by pressing control C, command C on the Mac, followed by control F or command F on the Mac. And he may have seen that little message that red shape expanded. It didn't really expand the shape, by the way, not at all. If I were to switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the V key and click on that shape, you can see up here in the control panel, or in the properties panel if you prefer, the word polygon, which tells you then it's still a live shape. All right, anyway, I'm going to click off that guy and select this line right here. And I want to nudge it 40 points down by pressing shift down arrow one, two, three, four times in a row. And now I'm going to create another copy of this guy, but this time using a dialog box, so I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box right here. I'll set the horizontal value to negative 140, which is going to move that line 140 points to the left, and then I'll tap to the vertical value and set it to zero in order to achieve this effect. Which is wrong, I'm moving it too far, I want to move it back 20 points, and so I'm going to click on that horizontal value and press shift, up arrow a couple of times in a row to move that line to this location here. All right, now, I don't really want to move the line, I want to copy it, so I'll click on the copy button, and now I'll shift, click on this guy so that they're both selected and I'll bring into front by right clicking any old place inside the document window, choosing a range, and then choosing bring to front, which has a keyboard shortcut of control, shift, right bracket, that's command, shift, right bracket on a Mac. And then I'll bring these guys forward like so, and now I'll join them together by pressing control J or command J on the Mac twice in a row. All right, I'll go ahead and fill this guy with blue once again, and now grab this blue triangle right here, and I'll drag it by its bottom right anchor point until it snaps into alignment like so, and then it'll press the alt the option key on the Mac and release to create a duplicate. All right, now, I'll just go ahead and shift, click on that previous shape so that they're both selected. Now we want to find the intersection of the two, and I think the easiest way to do that is to go to the window menu and choose the Pathfinder command, and then just go ahead and click on this third icon right there, intersect, in order to find the intersection of those two shapes. And now, I'll just go ahead and hide the Pathfinder panel. All right, now you want to switch back to the white arrow tool by pressing the A key and then click on this bottom segment in this blue triangle. And incidentally, you need to click on the segment. If you click in the center of the shape like so, then you're going to select the entire thing, and then you're going to have to click off of it and try again. So you want to click just right there in that segment, make sure that all three of the anchor points are hollow and then duplicate that segment by pressing control C, control F, that's command C, command F on the Mac. All right, now we want to create a duplicate of it 20 points down and to the right. And so you want to press shift, alt, down arrow. That shift, option, down arrow on the Mac in order to move it and make a copy of the original, and now press shift down arrow once again, without the altar option key this time, and then press shift right arrow twice in a row like so. Then press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and shift, click right there in order to select both of those new lines and join them together by pressing control J or command J on the Mac twice in a row. All right, now we want to create just a little edge up here. And notice in the final version of the artwork, I just want you to see it's this tiny edge right there. That's all we want. But because it's a little different from some of these other shapes, it's going to take a little more work, not much, but here's how it works. You want to press the A key once again to switch to the white arrow tool because we want to select a partial path outline and then click on this edge right here, which is the right edge of this big upside-down triangle. And then I'll press control C, control F in order to make a copy of it. And now we want to duplicate a copy just as we did with this guy. And so I'll press shift, alt, right arrow, that shift, option, right arrow in the Mac, followed by shift, right arrow by itself, and then press shift, down arrow twice like so. All right, now you want to press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and shift, click on that first line that you just copied, that one right there, and then join them together again by pressing control J or command J on the Mac twice in a row. And now here's the trickiest part, although it's still pretty easy, make sure your smart guides are turned on, by the way, by going to the view menu and checking smart guides right here. Mine already has a check Mark in front of it, so I'm fine, so I'll just go ahead and press the escape key. And now you want to press the A key to switch back to that white arrow tool, click on this anchor point right there, and then just kind of carefully drag it up like so, and it should just kind of snap along its previous edge. See how that's happening. And then you want to move it into this location right there and release. And now go ahead and grab this guy and do the same thing. Just drag it up to its own edge until it snaps into place like so. And you've got this tiny little edge, at which point, you can click off that path outline to de-select it. And that is how you complete all the shapes required to create the triangle face, which, even though it looks supremely primitive, is going to result in this final piece of artwork.

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