Transcript:
[MUSIC] Okey-dokey. It’s the start of a new week time for another tutorial. Hey, guys, you’re watching Dan Ski. This is the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial. I’m going to show you the tools that you need to know to create some colorful floral patterns all in Adobe Illustrator, So without further ado, we’re going to jump to the screen now, and I’m gonna show you how to create this okey-dokey so we’re now in Illustrator. You can see I have a new document. The art board is 1920 by 1080 and we’re gonna start by going over to our tool bar, grabbing the ellipse tool. If you don’t see it, just left-click and hold here. Sometimes it’s the rectangle tool, just grab that ellipse tool and left-click hold shift holding shift, keeps it perfectly circular, and then we’ll go to the bottom of the toolbar and just set the fill color to none, so we have a black stroke almond outline. Next, what we’re going to do is try and pop this in the center, there we go. We have our smart guides that nicely line everything up. In fact, this next bit, you definitely gonna want to turn on your smart guides. It will make life a lot easier. Trust me, so go up to view down to smart guides. Just make sure they are checked and what we’re gonna do is go to edit copy edit and paste in place and then hold down shift and scale from the corner holding shift. Make sure it doesn’t skew out of shape like that. We definitely don’t want that. And with those smart guides, it should snap. You, see there. It snaps when you reach that halfway point and I can just move this up again, holding a shift to keep it in line and you can see it snaps to the halfway point as well and I can go to edit copy edit paste in place again and again, hold shift and drag to the right, and if everything is snapped perfectly. You should see something like this and there we go so now. I can select both of these circles by holding on shift and clicking. I’ve got a lot of shift holding today and we’ll go to edit copy edit paste in place, just hover over the corner and again again, Hold shift and rotate shift is very useful. I hope my Shift key doesn’t break on the keyboard that would be disastrous, so hold shift. Let go and you should have created. Hopefully something that looks like this. If you haven’t then sorry, maybe try it. Try again, so we’re gonna drag over everything here to select it and then go over here. Look for the shape builder tool. It’s this icon here. I’ll click on the shape builder tool. Now what this tool allows you to do is combine shapes together or remove parts from shapes. So we’re going to do that now so you can see. I can hover over individual segments. They all become highlighted, And if I click and drag, it will combine them together. However, we don’t want to do that. We want to actually remove some segments, so let’s just undo that one. Now, if we hold down alt or option on the keyboard, you’ll see that plus sign changes to a minus and what we can do now is drag, still keeping that alt or option Key held down, dragged through everything that we want to remove and you can see it selected. And when I let go of my mouse, it’s gonna leave me with these four petals in the middle now for some reason when using the shape builder tool, sometimes it it like duplicate shapes on top of each other, and that can get really complicated further down the line, so what? I like to do just to kind of check that there’s nothing like that going on. You can see if I drag this out. No, the shape underneath it in a shape underneath it. That’s gonna cause problems. Trust me, so what I like to do is just select each of the top shapes. We’re gonna hold down shift, so they’re all selected all four of them. We’ll get to edit and cut. Now, what cut does is it will copy it to the clipboard and then remove it as well. So we’ve now got those four petals on our clipboard and you can see here. We’ve got this underneath like. I don’t know why the shape builder tool does this sometimes, but for me, it’s just easier to avoid any complication like that, so we can select all of this hit delete or backspace on the keyboard. Remember, we’ve got that on our clipboard. So if we go to edit and paste in place, it now pastes only those four, and we don’t have any kind of duplicates behind you or anything, and we can go to the bottom of the toolbar. Just swap the fill in the stroke. And there we go. We have four petals with a black. Fill, okay. Next we’re gonna go over to, uh, swatche’s panel. I’ve got mine, doctor over here on the right. If you don’t see it, just go to window down to swatches and you can position that wherever you like, and we’re going to pick two colors. Now it doesn’t actually matter what the colors are because we’re going to change them so. I’m just gonna double. Click on this pink. The important thing is that we do. Check the global box. So this just is gonna make it so much easier to edit these colors later in the tutorial. I’ll show you what I mean. Just trust me for now. Check Global Click. Okay, We’ll pick another one. Check global click. OK, and I’m just gonna drag these swatches to pop them. Next to each other, there we go, so we’ve got a pink and an orange global Swatch so now. I’m gonna select these four petals I’ve created and again go to edit down to copy edit and paste and I’m gonna hold down shift as I rotate until it snaps there, We go like so, and if I drag over everything what I’m going to do then is grab the gradient tool. Well, you can drag over everything you can drag over everything and start adding gradients and it will it will try and add the gradient to all of them, So I just try this at the gradient. You can see you can do it to all of them at once. I’m gonna do it one at a time. It’s just a little bit easier and it probably uses a little bit less processing power on the computer. So I’m just gonna select one of these petals. It doesn’t matter which one and then grab the gradient tool from the tool bar on the left, and I’ve got my gradient panel over here. Now if you are an older version of Illustrator like CS6, then just got two window at the top down to gradient, and there you go, you will have your gradient panel here, in fact. I think I’ll probably just leave minor for now. So with this one petal selected, I’m just gonna click on the gradient slider, and it adds that default black to white gradient. And you can add an angle here, so you could go 45 degrees. If you wanted, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll leave it there for now and next. I’m going to drag over everything. And it’s selected, grab the eyedropper tool from the tool bar on the left and this is going to sample the gradient. I’m about to click on and apply it to everything else that is selected, So if I click the gradient here with the eyedropper tool, you can see that it gets propagated to every other shape, Exactly the same gradient as well. Now you can go in here and you could start. Maybe changing individual gradients. If you wanted to kind of manipulate the lighting on different shapes, But I’m gonna leave it as is for now. I think it looks alright and what we’re gonna do is actually click back on this one here. In fact, we can select all of them now because they’ve all got the same gradient. So if we change the gradient up here, you can see it changes for all of them once and I’m gonna double. Click on the Black Swatch on the gradient slider and pick one of those global swatches and I’ll double click on the other end so in this case is white and then add the other global Swatch. And there we go. It looks quite terrible, but it doesn’t matter because we’ve created those global swatches. We can change this later on. So if we drag over everything now, this is the trick at the moment we have eight different shapes, all overlapping with a gradient, but they don’t really blend into each other, very well, so if we go over here to a pass TI and click on this, you get the transparency panel pop up again. If you’re on an older version of Illustrator, just go to window down to transparency, and you’ll see the same panel pop up over here. The important thing is to go where it says normal now. If you click on this, it will bring up a list of blending modes. If you use Photoshop, these will look very familiar. We’re gonna check multiply now. You can use different blending modes. I definitely encourage you to experiment with different blending modes, different colors, but for me multipliers the one that’s giving me the best effects so far, so what we’re going to do is click on this and you can see, it blends a lot of those colors through into one another, and then you get these kind of thinner, smaller petals on the inside. They just become a little bit more accentuated, Which looks quite nice. Now something else you can also do is you can actually adjust via pasta. If you like, and you could bring the opacity down, That’s one way to kind of accentuate them even more, but if you bring the opacity down too far, then the whole designer overall can look a little bit washed out, So I like to keep that up, but what I’m gonna do now is close that down. Whip, open my swatches panel. I’m gonna double click on the pink one, so we’ll start with this well. Just check that preview box. So any changes we make will be updated in real time and now. This is the fun bit. I can start messing around with these sliders. So the reason that we have these global swatches with this checkbox here is so we don’t have to go in every time we change a color go, and then re add it to all of these different petals because that just take well that would take forever, whereas now we’re just changing the Swatch and it updates every instance throughout our document, so any global swatches we have within our pattern within our design. They just get updated as soon as the Swatch gets updated. So let’s go for something A little bit warmer. See where this goes? Maybe something a bit brighter there. We go well. Leave it at that for now, click. OK, then we’ll double. Click on the other one check preview. Maybe something a little bit a little bit more. Pinky, Pinky, ready? I’m just making this up as I go along and then I’ll jump back to the other one, so you can see as I’m adjusting these sliders In real time, I can see what colors are really working. And what isn’t so there we go? I’ll leave that as it is for now. I could always go back and change those swatches If I want to, but there we go, We have like a geometric. Floral pattern made up of gradients, which I think those quite nice and they blend together. Well, something else we can also do because we can drag over this. Now we’ve created it. Go to edit copy edit paste in place. We could manually rotate this bird. It’s it’s not the most accurate way to do it, So what I like to do is well. Just zoom in here. And with this copy selected, what we’re going to do is go over to the transform panel you can see. I’ve got rotation here, so I’m going to click in this box and then I’m going to use the up or down arrow keys. Now every time I press this, It’s going to move the shape one degree. I’ll rotate it one degree, rather, so there we go, so I can just rotate it, so I’m still doing it by eye, but I know that it’s at least snapping to the nearest degree. If you do it manually, you’re gonna get like 45 point, two five degrees or something, so this is a slightly more accurate way of doing it. And there you go, We’ve got an even crazier creative pattern now, which looks really really cool and we could even go one step further. Grab the ellipse tool. We’ll just drag holding shift and from the swatches panel select white as the fill color, and it’s going to make it quite hard to pop this in the middle. I think that is the middle. If you’re not sure, we’ll pop that shape over there drag over all of these different petals, go to object and group. And then if we drag over the white circle shape and the pattern that we’ve created, go to window down to a line. This brings up the align panel and we can easily just align these centrally to one another with those options. Just so we know it’s definitely in the middle, and then we can select the circle and hold down shift and this will scale it up, but if we hold down alt or option as well as shift, it will scale to or from the center so you can make this smaller or you can make it bigger. That looks quite nice. They could go even bigger. Still, there’s something a bit more like that, so it depends entirely on what you’re going for, but once you’ve got a circle in the middle that you’re happy with, you could either give it a color or we could just like, knock it out completely, so if we dragged over everything again, we’re going to go back to the shape builder tool and remember we held down alter option on the keyboard and we click, and if we just drag through everything with the shape builder tool, so everything is covered, there we go. It knocks it straight out the middle. So if I were to go and throw another color behind there, we can just check, lets. Try a different color, so you can see the blend mode of multiply blends onto that color, but we can see that the color from the middle is well is completely knocked out. Oh, there we go, That’s how to create a fun vector floral pattern, All in Adobe Illustrator, so guys. We really hope you enjoyed this tutorial, but if you’ve got any questions or comments, you know what to do. Drop those down below as always like this video. If you enjoyed it, take care and. I’ll see you next time [Music]!