Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hello there you’re watching Danske. And this is the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial. We’re going to learn seven different ways you can distort shapes in Adobe Illustrator, So you can see. I’ve got some examples on screen. I know there’s six. You know, seven would throw off the alignment and everything, so I went with six, but there are seven different options and you can find them all up here under effect and distort and transform so these are the seven distort effects. We’re going to be looking at, and by the end of this video, you’ll understand each of these different effects and how you can use them to distort your own shapes, so here’s a nice selection of some of the effects that we can create and we’ll just delete those, and we’ve got a heart. So if you’re thinking oh. I wish you would show us how to draw the heart. Instead, that’s much more interesting. Don’t worry, there’s a link down in the description and hopefully on the screen that will take you to a video if you’d like to learn how to draw a heart instead, but definitely come back up because this one’s worth watching. Okay, so we have a heart to start with, and this can be any shape. I’ve just chosen a heart for this tutorial, and we can select this go to effect down to distort and transform and we’ll start at the top three distort. Now what this will do is it will bring up a dialog box and it will have your shape with four corner points as well and effectively this is exactly what it says it allows you to distort free-of-charge not. I’m think I’m kidding. It allows you to distort your shape just freely, so you can just kind of pull these around and you can see. It really does skew that perspective, or you can reset it and start again. So if I go and distort this like so and click. OK, you can see. I’ve got that distort effect now. It actually remembers the original heart position. This is just an effect that we’re applying so as with all of the effects that we’re going to add in this video. If you select your shape and go to the appearance panel either on the right or up here, you’ll see that it adds the effect as an item in this list and you can turn that off or on or you can drag it to the trash if you’d like to get rid of it or click it and then go back and edit it now because this is just an effect. We’re not actually editing the physical part of the shape. So if you press command or control. Y it’ll take you into outline mode and you can see here that the heart is very much still exactly the same, but it just has that effect applied over it, so with any of the effects that we apply today. If you would like to have the part of your shape, actually match the physical appearance, just make sure it’s selected and that you’re happy go to object and down to expand appearance and you can see there now. The path actually matches the appearance of the shape cool, so that’s free distort. Let’s move on to the next one, so effect, distort and transform, pucker and bloat now effectively what pucker and bloat does bloat is where it will quite literally bloat your shape. It will push it outwards from the center and pocket is the opposite, so it will suck it in towards the center so we can pick the preview boxes, so that’s really handy to see that change in real time and we can move this to the right now. You can see that even at 25 percent, we get some really bizarre shapes. It kind of looks like the shape of a Pokemon or something and you can do this really subtly, and you can go to the absolute extreme and create some really kind of crazy patterns, depending on what you’re going for. And, of course, this effect will look considerably different, depending on the shape that you’re working with so pucker goes in towards the center. So there you go if you’re looking to create some kind of really cool emblem, Looks a bit bit kind of Witcher. Yeah, I like it, or you can go again to the complete extreme and and distort it as far as you like, but you know, depending on what you’re going for at pucker and bloat. Now, The next one we’re going to look at. Is Ruffin now! This is my one of my personal favorites. I think because it’s just super cool, so if we pick at preview box and you can select relative or absolute, if you change the appearance, I’m not technically sure of the difference between the two, but as with anything in illustrator, if you can tick a preview box and you don’t know what the opportunist. If Ecli’s just play around, you know, mess around with some options and physically see how that affects your design in real time, so we can increase this, so this will adjust the size and you can adjust the detail as well. So if we bring the detail up, you can see, there’s a lot more kind of spikes around the edge. It’s a lot rougher and we could bring that down, but you can also smooth out the corners now. This is quite subtle, so you might need to zoom in to see the smooth effect, but you can have sharp corners or you can have slightly smooth corners, but the reason. I like this one So much is that you can use this to create. Create, create to critten. Were the create to create some really subtle effects. So if I just click OK on this, you can see there. I’ve turned something that is a very clean heart shape and just giving it a kind of little bit more of a kind of handcrafted, feel bit rough around the edges, quite literally, so for someone like me who has a very clean style. If I’m going for something a bit more kind of handcrafted a bit rougher, This effect allows me to take my design and then apply this to it, and as I say with all the effects that we’re doing, these are listed under here, so I’ve still got that free distort. I’m actually going to delete now, but you can see here. Roughing is also listed. So we can switch that on off. Go back and edit it, so we’ve got lots and lots of flexibility there. So that’s roughen, which is awesome. Next we’ve got transform now. This is pretty cool as well. You can pick the preview box and you can adjust the scale so there. This is kind of like one dialog box that you can control multiple things in and you can just be scale both horizontally and vertically, so you can do it with sliders all from here, you can move it as well up and down and you can even rotate it, so all those transform things that you would get within Illustrator or Photoshop all within this one box, which is good and we’ve got some other options down here, so you can reflect it along the X or the Y axes or you can have it just set to random, and you can transform objects a lots of other options here as I say, I’ve not played around with these too much. This isn’t a feature. I use all the time, but I’m just clicking these boxes and I’ve got preview ticked, so I can see what effect it’s having on my shape. You can adjust the registration here. So whether it’s kind of anchored to the center, the top right the bottom right, and you can actually add copies as well, so if we have five, maybe ten, and we can adjust the positioning. It’s created all of these different copies on top of our shape, so you can see there’s lots of different options there for kind of messing around and creating shapes, but depending on your specific shape and what you’re going to use this for, you might get something slightly different, but that is the transform effect. Okay, we’re going to go on to tweak now, so well tick that preview box and this is similar to roughen so again you can adjust relative or absolute, and it will adjust the appearance accordingly, and you can adjust the vertical and horizontal amount, so this does something slightly different, but it is kind of creating that kind of rougher edge as well and you’ve got these other options down here and remember as I say if you don’t know what they mean. Specifically, then just click around and see how it changes the appearance of your shapes, for example, modify anchor points. It will kind of keep those anchor points in position. If you don’t have it checked and it will bend the shape around them. But if you select anchor points that tick there what it will do is it will actually modify the position of the anchor points to kind of suit the effect that it’s being created, so that is tweaked. Next we’ve got twist. This is another one. I really, really like because you can take the preview box and you can type in or use the arrow to adjust the angle and it will quite literally twist it around a point, so you can go to the absolute extreme. If you want and you can create something, you know, it doesn’t even look like a heart anymore. It is just totally random, and you can do that. Both to the right or clockwise and counter-clockwise direction, so we can go into negative as well. Then you can see it goes the other way, so that is twist and the last one is zigzag, so let’s take that preview box again relative or absolute, and you can adjust side. I think relative seems to be a little bit more kind of emphasized absolute, a bit more subtle and you can adjust the size. You can go for something totally over-the-top. If you want or you can have something really subtle like that. With smooth corners or sharper corners, zigzag is actually very similar to roughen as well. But what you can really do is add lots and lots of ridges, and you can create something like this. So whether it is slightly different is roughen is very much. It will rush in the shape and make it just kind of a less perfect, less smooth. The zigzag effect can actually be used to create. But you know, literally a zig zag around the edge of your shape. So you can create things like spikes and the effect itself is applied a bit more consistently, whereas Roughen is quite literally just roughening around the edges of your shape, so you can see a lot of different effects and then once you’ve once you’re happy with that again, we just need to kind of take that path and make sure it matches the physical appearance of our shape and we can do that by selecting it going to object expand appearance and you can see there in outline mode. Remember that command or control? Y the past now matches the shape and the only downside to this is that it’s no longer listed under the appearance panel. And you can’t edit the effect any further, So my advice would be if you’re going to expand it. Just keep a copy of this editable. In case you do want to tweak that effect later on and there we go, Those are seven different, distort effects that you can apply to shapes in Adobe Illustrator as a wave guide piece. If we leave any questions or comments down below like this video, if you enjoyed it, take care and I’ll see you next time [Music]!