Transcript:
Hello, everyone, this is. Chris, from spoon graphics back with another video tutorial for Adobe Illustrator today. I’m going to take you through the process of creating a colorful embroidered patch, based on the kinds of designs associated with national parks. The artwork will incorporate a landscape scene at sunset, which helps keep the design simple with a silhouette graphic and a warm color palette. You can find some inspiration in my showcase of embroidered patch designs and spoon graphics, which reaches a range of cool little badges by various talented artists. Many of those examples have been physically made in thread, but stick around till the end of this tutorial to discover an easy way to make your digital design look real with stitching and embroidery effects. But first, if you want access to a library of resources, including the tool, were using to create this realistic embroidery effect, sign up to invite our elements and vital elements, saves you time effort and money with unlimited downloads of premium design and stop templates, including print templates, graphics, photos, fonts and now royalty free audio tracks to check them out today about hitting the link in the video description below. I hear tattooing is nice this time of year. So that’s the location. I’m gonna base my face design on open up illustrator and create a new document. I’m just using a typical a4 size document with pixel units, but to give yourself a nice, large work area. Go to view and hide out boards, pipes, designs come in all shapes and sizes, but I’m basing mine on a hexagon, Find the polygon tool under the shape tools and draw a shape while holding the shift key to keep it straight. You can use the cursor keys While dragging to alter the number of sides holding the spacebar also allows you to reposition the shape before releasing the mouse click and drag near the corner handle of the bounding box and hold shift to rotate the shape by 90 degrees stretch out the width while holding the Alt key, so both sides are scaled proportionally, but just the height by dragging just the top or bottom handle, choose the direct selection tool, then click and drag one of the corner widgets to round off the corners of the shape. I actually managed to find a color palette with the name Tatooine in Adobe Color, which perfectly suits this retro style design. It incorporates a dark brown that will work nicely for the silhouette in the foreground, then a nice group of warm colors to depict the sunset. You can’t import the palette into your library, but I find pasting a quick screenshot into illustrator is an easy way to make these shoes accessible. Find the pencil tool, then draw a wobbly line to represent a slightly hilly horizon, continue with the shape around the main text again and back to the starting point, activate the eyedropper tool and hold the shift key while clicking the darkest shoe from the palette. It’s a sampler is this shapes fill to trim away the excess switch to the selection tool and hold shift and click the hexagon to add it to the selection. Grab the shape builder tool and hold the Alt key and click the unwanted area to delete it. Activate the pencil tool again and quickly deselect everything by clicking on some empty space While holding the command key or ctrl key on Windows to toggle the selection tool, draw another slightly more mountainous shape across the design, looping it back to the stand, use the eyedropper tool to sample a purple color from the palette at the hexagons of the selection with the selection tool, then trim away the excess with the shape builder tool before deselecting everything again with a click on some empty space with the selection tool. This purple shape is overlapping, the brown shape so select it then right-click and choose, send backward. The next three warm colors can be drawn as horizontal rectangles to create a gradual change in color in the sky and to create a cool, retro striped look, draw a shape that overlaps the Purple Mountains and takes a roughly a third of the remaining empty space. Give this rectangle, the darkest red fill using the eyedropper and use the send backward command to place it underneath the previous shapes, delete the excess using the shape builder using the hexagon as part of the selection, so identify where it needs trimming to the next rectangle can be easily snapped into place. If you have smart guides enabled from under view menu. Follow the same process that I drop the color and trim the shape to size. Since this rectangle is buttered up exactly and doesn’t overlap, no altering of the stacking order is necessary when it comes to trimming the final shape, it can be difficult to select the hexagon when it can no longer be seen. A handy technique is to draw a selection to capture the outline and another shape and hold the shift key and click that unwanted shape to remove it from the selection. Choose the ellipse tool from the shape menu to draw one of tattooing two sons. We’ve run out of colors in the palette so double, click the fill Swatch and manually choose a light yellow hue hold shift while drawing the shape to keep it circular and overlap it with the purple mountains so it will appear to dip below the horizon. If we try to use the purple shape to trim the excess with the shape builder, it will punch out both shapes leaving on a wanted gap. An alternative technique is to make a duplicate of the purple shape under the. Edit, copy and edit paste in front menu commands, right, Click on the shape and choose. Arrange, bring to front, so it sits on top of the yellow circle shift and click the Sun so both shapes are selected then. Click the minus front button in the Pathfinder panel draw, tattooing second son using another ellipse, this time, with a paler yellow film, use the technique of drawing a small selection, then shift and clicking the unwanted shape to activate just the hexagon clear out its default. Fill color, then click the stroke setting and sample the same pale yellow color used in the second son holding shift while clicking well sample just a hue, whereas without the shift key, it would load the shapes of parents and that the color is a fill head over to the stroke panel and increase the weight to 5 points, then set the stroke alignment to outside open up the appearance panel. I tend to keep mine in the bottom left of my screen, but yours may be elsewhere in your interface. If not activated from under the View menu, click the small menu icon in the corner and choose add new stroke with the eyedropper tool still active sample, dark brown color drag this brown stroke underneath the paler stroke, so it’s not obscuring it, then increase the weight to 20 points to create a thicker outline. Click on some empty artboard space to deselect the hexagon, then click the brown shape to load its appearance with just a brown fill. Use the rectangle tool to draw a small square to represent one of tattooing iconic moisture farm buildings switch over to the direct selection tool and deselect everything in order to then select just the top two corner points using the shift key drag the corner widgets to fully round off this top edge, There are two more shapes and Rand off just one corner to create a recognizable silhouette. Grab the type tool to add some text to the design. I’m using a few fonts from the Titling Gothic family, which you can activate from Adobe Fonts using the link In the description scale this text element to size and give it the same pale yellow fill as the Sun shape to Center up the text accurately, right, click and choose create outlines. You can then add another shape to the selection by holding the shift key, then release shift and give the shape an extra click to make it the key object. Click the horizontal align. Center Button in the align panel setup, the word national park using the compressed version of titling gothic, the high tracking value of 400 Give this text the other yellow fill, create outlines and center it up within the design. A simple decorative shape can help fill out some empty space zoom in and draw a small circle with the selection tool active, hold the alt and shift keys and drag the shape to make a copy position this duplicate on the other side to center up these circles relative to the other objects, Select them both and create a group so they can be aligned as a pair add one of the other shapes to the selection. Click it again to make it the key object and align everything up, use the wide variant of titling gothic to add the wording outer rim and position it in the leftover space within the badge composition script. Arama is a called retro style font. From a door. We funds that can be used for the words, visit their go to objects transform and shear and configure the settings to vertical at five degrees to add a simple rise effect to this script. Give these text elements fills using colors from the palette and follow the procedures to Center them up a little detail. We can add to the sans-serif. Text elements is to subtly round off the corners, use the direct selection tool to adjust the corner widgets to around 1.5 pixels for the larger text and not 0.5 pixels for the smaller text elements. That’s the main design finished. Using these same techniques, you can create embroidered patches for any location or subjects by illustrating simple graphics with illustrator’s, basic shape tools next. I’ll show you how you can transform this flat vector design into a realistic looking embroidered patch in Photoshop, but first there’s a couple more steps in Illustrator required to clean up the artwork, draw a selection across everything, then go to object and expand appearance, Click the divide button in the Pathfinder panel, which splits all the shapes where they overlap each other. Right, click and choose ungroup to separate everything and click some empty space to deselect. Choose a shape, then go to select same and fill color. Click the Unite button in the Pathfinder panel to merge all these shapes into one pick another shape of a different color and repeat the process continue with shapes of each remaining color until all, the objects of a particular filled color are combined into one object, go to file and export as choose. Photoshop PSD is the format. Make sure the resolution is set to high and the right layers option is checked. Open this new. PSD file in Photoshop quickly add some additional space around the canvas with the crop tool to create a realistic embroidery effect. I’ll be using an aptly named Photoshop. Action called realistic embroidery as part of the inviter elements library, along with over 2 million of their assets, Or you can find it individually for $8 to both places You can download it down in the description area. I’ll leave the finer details to the instruction manual included with the product Buts quickly effect from a multicolor design. The action steps need to be applied to each color individually First. Lets tidy things up by renaming the layers. In my example, the orange and red stripes seem to have been combined into one layer, so a quick magic, one copy and paste job separated them onto different layers again. The first step of the action sets up the stitched outline for the shape then the inner area can be filled by repeatedly playing the second action step. Once the temporary shapes have been applied, click the render action to process it with a realistic embroidered. Look, make sure you rename the layer before applying the actions to the next color layer. Otherwise it will throw up an error because it tries to select the wrong layer. I added just one outline of stitching to the main brown color layer, so the inner portion is filled with the finer fabric texture. The action generates a blue thread color by default. This can be removed by bringing back the visibility of the original color layers and dragging the group to the top of the last Dyke. Change the blending mode to overlay double click each of the Smart Objects layers in turn to edit the effect settings, turn off the blue color adjustment layers While you’re in there, you can modify the other features too. I removed cloth displays for all shapes, except the brown layer turned off the drop shadow and removed the border on any layers with small text, save and close each of the PSB smart object files to return to the main document. Finally, you can adjust the stacking order of the layers to arrange them into the appropriate order. Once all the layers have been configured. The artwork looks like a realistic embroidered patch, complete with the fine texturing of thread and stitching using Adobe Illustrator for the main design meant we can easily use the basic shape tools to construct a simple illustration in a scalable vector format. Then this fantastic! Photoshop action quickly processes the digital artwork to make it look like a real patch. So if you enjoyed this tutorial learn two new tips and tricks, please give the video a thumbs up to help recommend it to others, subscribe to my channel to stick around for more of my content and head over to my spoon graphics website to buy yourself my free design resources bundle as always. Thank you very much for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.