Transcript:
My name is Nathaniel Dodson. And today we are gonna take a look at this. Look at that, we’re gonna be making some ribbons in Adobe Illustrator. We’re gonna make five different ribbons from this ribbon sketch sheet. You can download this ribbon sketch sheet using the link in the description below. Let’s just go ahead, jump into Illustrator and get this thing started. Okay, here We are in Adobe Illustrator, and like I said, you can download this sketch file. There’s a link in the description. We’re gonna create a new file here in Adobe Illustrator New Document. And I’m just gonna go with a little 2560 by 1440 You see that right there and I’m going RGB, although we’re not really messing with color today. So you don’t really need to worry too much about that. I’m gonna hop out to my finder. Here is that base sketch a JPEG? I’m gonna drag it in. I’m gonna zoom out a little bit. Hold down my shift key here while I’m gonna grab my regular black arrow selection tool. Hold down my shift key and just downsize the sketches. I wanted to be as big as possible, but small enough that they’re kind of fit in there on my on my artboard. Alright, so let’s begin here with sketch number one and I for. Oh, I remember which one it is now. It’s this guy right here. So this is just going to be a super easy to create ribbon, lets. Do it quickly, we’re gonna start with the rectangle tool and I’m gonna choose a color that I like. So you see, I get this color action going on down there, number one. I’m gonna select the stroke and hit the little slash button just to get rid of the stroke. I’m gonna select the fill again, and I don’t know. Let’s give this Maybe like a big pink pink. Fill something like that. Alright, we’re going to come as close to this as we can. Maybe not quite as angular. So I’m just gonna create a little band of color with my rectangle tool. Oh, you know what you see this? The ribbon background. That’s gonna cause us some trouble lets. Just delete that shape. Real quick, let’s take care of some housekeeping name. This layer sketch and we are going to lock that layer and we’re to come down here and create a new layer and this is gonna be our ribbons a layer. Alright, lets. Go ahead, grab our rectangle tool. Drag out a rectangle. It can be as big or small as you want. We’re gonna kind of some of these ribbons. We’re actually gonna almost trace. This one is so simple. We’re gonna do it by eye, so take a rectangle, go object transform shear and here in the shear panel. I am going to share it well. This is what you’re probably gonna see. Is something like this. We want to share it along the vertical axis, and we want the shear angle to be probably about 20 percent. You could go higher, but again you start getting kind of steep, so I think 20 20 degrees is probably good for us here today and I’m going to hit. Okay, and then I’m going to duplicate this. I probably could have copied it as well, but I’m just gonna go edit. I’m just gonna go edit copy and then edit paste in front and I’m gonna move it straight down. I’m holding down shift and then I’m gonna slide it so Im. Gonna you see that little Intersect line That’s appearing, right, That’s telling me that the top corner of my shape, all the way up over here is in a straight line with the bottom corner of my shape here. What that is and this is gonna be a really important thing. We’re gonna use a lot today with this ribbon creation. It’s these guys here. The smart guides you can just go view Smart guides. Turn them on, it’s really gonna help and while you’re in here, turn on, snap to point as well. We’re gonna be using that in a little bit too. Alright, so I’m gonna drag this down until I get my little intersecting line and then I’m gonna drag the straight over to the left. Something like that, man, you know, maybe? I’ll drag it up a little bit, and maybe back to the back to the left a little bit. Did I say a drag it to the left or dragging to the right, and then I adjust it back to the left. Whatever, alright, so that is, that’s that little shape there. Now we go ahead and create the ribbon parts of it so we can do this with another rectangle, but it may be easier if we just go ahead and well, let’s do it with the ribbon. Let’s do with the ribbon. What, let’s not overthink this. Let’s create another copy of our ribbon, and we can do this by holding down alt or option and just dragging out a copy. Now we want to undo the shearing, so let’s just reverse it. Let’s go object transform Shear, and instead of positive 20 degrees were gonna go negative 20 degrees and hit. OK, and there we have it. We’ve got our our shape and it looks pretty good, just like that. So what we need are the two tails. Let’s go with the tails of the ribbon first, so I’m gonna take this, and because I have smart Guides turned on. It’s just gonna click right into place there. I’m going to hold down alt or option and duplicate a copy of this down to the bottom, and then I’m going to just crunch these in a little bit, so I’ll crunch that one in like that, and then this one up here, maybe I won’t, uh, I won’t push it back quite as far now. You may be looking at it saying, okay, but there’s no end to the ribbon, which there isn’t, so let’s grab the rectangle tool again. Hold down, shift, drag out a square. Maybe about that big. It really doesn’t matter. It can be bigger or smaller, depending on your taste and then we’re gonna drag this over, and we’re gonna use this as our sort of cutter if you will, so I’m gonna hold down Alt or option and drag another copy of this diamond down to the bottom hard to see what we’re doing because everything is the same color We’re going to select our two top pieces here and lets. Change the color a little bit, just so you can see it and we’ll do the same here at the bottom. I’m going to change the color. Alright, so the two top pieces. I’m gonna select and this squares on top, so we can simply go to our Pathfinder and say, look – front, so use the front piece to cut the bottom piece and there we go, is it even no, but I kind of like that you can line up and make it perfect. If you want and you do that with smart guides, turn it on, see that little line. That’s just saying it’s aligned perfectly. I you know, do you can do it either way? I guess, but even if it’s a little bit off it still, it’s kind of cool because it sort of makes it feel a little organic, so I’m gonna just look for the center there. We go select both of these down here and chop that as well. All right, now we need to move the tails of the ribbon behind the front straps of the ribbon, so hold down shift and select both pieces of the ribbon. Go object, arrange, and we’re gonna say. Hey, look, send this to the back, so just gonna send them behind. And then the last thing we need to do is create the piece of ribbon that goes between both big pieces. We’re gonna do that with the pen tool and again. Smart guides is going to help us we hover over. We can place this point right on top of that other. Anchor Point. And we’re gonna take it right across like that and then down to this Anchor Point and then across to this Anchor Point and then up to that Anchor Point. And then we select this right. Click, and we send to this to the back as we’ll arrange, send to back boom, Alright? Now it’s just a matter of coloring, so we’re gonna select all of our shapes and we’re going to use the eyedropper tool and make sure they’re all the same color and the two front pieces. These two guys, they’re gonna be the lightest color, so everything behind. It’s gonna be just a little darker than that, So I’m gonna select all three of these other pieces, and they can all be the same color lets. Click our flyout menu and choose the hue saturation brightness and just say look instead of 100% brightness. Give me like 85 or something. Something like that. And then we select all these pieces. Commander control. G to group them together. Zoom out and we have our first our first ribbon now. I want to show you a cool trick, so a ribbon like this is really really versatile and what do? I mean, a ribbon like this, just a ribbon with straight edges. So you can take this. You can use it like this. You can drag out a copy. You could further shear. This transform shear and you could. You could say that you could say, give me 50 That’s only a little extreme, right, We’re gonna maybe go an additional 20 something like that. You can do a lot, you can stretch it in one direction up or down all sorts of things like that, but all so something you can do. That’s really cool is you can go affect warp and you’ve all these different warps. You can apply to it, so lets. Just go with an arc here. You can do something like this and you can choose the amount of. Bend you want to give to this? Give it a bunch of horizontal. Bend or vertical? Bend or both and you can really create a ribbon that looks like you took a ton of time to create it, but in reality, you just created this simple straight edge ribbon, and you got this fancy looking sort of extreme a ribbon. If you will alright, so that’s the first ribbon. And that’s a bunch of the the principles that we’re gonna cover. If that’s all you want it, you can leave the tutorial now, but I would recommend you stick around because well, frankly. Youtube likes watch time. So I want you to watch the video for a long time, but also. I think you’re really gonna enjoy we’re doing next. Alright, next we’re gonna tackle this a little rounded ribbon down here, and this is gonna be sort of another interesting. Take another interesting way to draw a ribbon. Let’s lock up ribbon number one and create a new layer and we’ll call this ribbon’s – or something like that. We are going to begin here with any lips tool, and I’m gonna draw with only strokes, and we’re gonna we’re gonna switch to fill right at the end just to make sure everything’s looking good, so let’s drag out a nice big ellipse, and we want to kind of follow the top of our sketch, so just just roughly follow the top of the sketch. That’s good and I’m gonna come over here to my stroke option in my properties panel and boost it up to like ten just to make this very easy to see. I’m gonna hold down alt or option and drag a copy of the straight down. I’m holding shift so straight down, just like that. And then what I’m gonna do is select both of these well. I’m gonna select, yeah. I’m gonna select both of these ellipses and I’m gonna hit this little – front -. It’s gonna leave me with this crescent shape. Alright, and then I’m gonna grab my ellipse tool again, and I’m going to drag out like a little circle here for the left edge, and then I’m gonna hold down Alt or option, and I’m gonna drag a copy of it right over for the right edge now. I want to use this as a cutting tool, so I first need to merge my two ellipses, so I’m gonna select both of these ellipses, not the crescent shape, just the two ellipses, and I’m gonna say here, just merge them up, and then I’m going to select both remaining shapes and I’m gonna choose this one here, which is just click to intersect and then we’re left with just the face of our ribbon. Easy enough, right, but the trick here is we want to create a perfectly symmetrical ribbons. So let’s cut this ribbon in half. I’m gonna take this ribbon and I am going to swap the stroke and the fill and then I’m going to take a rectangle tool and I’m gonna kind of try to find the middle of it right there. See, smartguide’s is helping me right, there clicks right to the middle. I can select both of these shapes now and just choose minus front. I know we’re flying through the so fast guys. I know, hang with me here. Let’s drag the ribbon up a little bit and lets. Create the little foot. Here that’s gonna stick out and then all wait to do is create the the side piece over here for one side, and then we just flip the artwork over and we have a full ribbon. This is pretty cool, so we’re gonna take the pen tool and again well. I’m gonna deselect and then I’m gonna use the pen. Tool and smart guides. Again is gonna help me drop an anchor point exactly on the original anchor point. And then we’re gonna come up, maybe? I’ll give it a little bit of a bend here on the back of this ribbon. Maybe I’ll make it. Bend the other way and then come right around and join that shape. Now, of course, we can’t tell what’s going on the shape. Looks like it’s the same color because it is lets. Come over here to our color panel. Select the color fill. Say, Yeah, you know what, yeah, lets. Make this actually orange or closer to red. Something like that, and I’m gonna. I’m gonna actually leave this at 85 percent brightness. I’m gonna select the face of the ribbon. Use my eyedropper tool. Select that same orange, but I’m gonna make it the hundred percent brightness. Orange, all right now! Obviously the problem is. We need the face of the ribbon to be in the front, so select the little tail piece, right, click, arrange and send it to the back there. We go and now all we have left to do is draw sort of the edge of the ribbon. So let’s just begin here. Sort of behind the ribbon. If you will draw a piece out like that, and let’s pull it. Pull it back this way and then we’re gonna just drop it down this way. I’m just Alt clicking if you if you’re not familiar with how to use the pen tool, there are a lot of tutorials out there on using the pen tool highly suggest you become very comfortable and very familiar with the pen tool. It’s so important to be able to use well in Illustrator. All right, select. This let’s make this a little bit darker, lets. Maybe take this down to 75 and this looks really bad because it’s on top of everything. So right, click and say arrange. Send it back now. I said this looks really bad, and it looks really bad because I did kind of a bad job in here too. So I’m gonna take this Im. Maybe gonna straighten these out just a little bit more. Move this one closer to the bottom. Something kind of like that might look a little bit better. We can’t also select this with the direct selection tool and just round to the corners as well just to give it a little bit of a softer. Look, if you like that kind of thing. I don’t know that I like it for this, but you could do that. All right, point is now we have this. That’s actually that’s a little bit big it’s. The tail shouldn’t really be dominating the the ribbon, and this is just a little bit. It’s a little large for the the ribbon. Here that we have so. I’m just going to move this adjust what I’m gonna adjust the anchor points to click and drag some anchor points and everything will be. Everything will be nice and good for us here very shortly. Something like that, it’ll zoom in. I’m still going to adjust to this. This is why, using the square like we did on the last ribbon. It’s so so useful because it’s so easy. I’m gonna just gonna specifically select that point and just round the middle of the ribbon out a little bit, just something like that. Alright, now that we have this that still kind of looked bad. Whatever alright, we’re gonna select all of these shapes and we are going to reflect them, but what we need to do First is go object group, just group them up and then we’re gonna go object transform reflect. Now, we’re gonna say yeah, reflect this along the vertical axis, hence flipping it side to side We’ve got preview turned on, and we don’t want to hit, okay. We want to hit copy because we want to save our original piece, right, and then we just need to join this, but we need to join it perfectly. It needs to be exact. This is where remember? I told you to turn on snap to point. This is where it’s really gonna help, so you make sure you select the piece of artwork and then you switch over to your white arrow tool and click any of the anchor points, so you take the anchor point and it’s going to click to any other anchor point that it comes in contact with right, so that’s great. I can select both of these shapes, and if I look here In my layer’s panel, they’re both groups. I don’t really want them to be groups. Now, so I’m gonna go object Ungroup and I want to select the face of the ribbon, both pieces of it and I can use my Pathfinder panel and join them here or unite them as the Pathfinder panel would say, And then I can select the whole kit and Kaboodle Commander Control G to group it together. And ladies and gentleman. We have our second ribbon. Maybe a little curved for my liking. I might just pinch it up a little bit. Pinch it down a little bit. Bring it something like that. I don’t know it can use a little tweaking. That is for sure, but we do have our second ribbon. Yeah, it could use a little work, but there you go. We’ve created two ribbons now. We’re going on to ribbon number three, so let’s have a little more fun with this one. We’re gonna go with this curved guy right here. This one right in here, Let’s lock up ribbon number two and we’ll create a new layer. Am I moving fast enough here? I feel like I’m moving way too fast, but alright, we’re going to do this an even different way than we’ve done. The other ones. We’re gonna straight, Use the pen tool, so we’re gonna create one side of the ribbon at a time, so I’m gonna just drag out a tangent handle. Click and just drag the top edge of the ribbon, right across and hit. Enter or return. Because that’s the path we want then. I’m gonna hit shift and the letter X to swap my fill with my stroke and set the stroke to ten points again. We just want it to be noticeable. Let’s make this ribbon. Let’s go green for this ribbon, right, let’s make it a little darker green, so we can see what’s going on a little less saturation there and the green green can be intense, and now we’re gonna take this top of the path, Hold down alt or option and the shift key and drag it straight down, so we’re gonna drag it right to there and we’re well on our way to creating the face of this ribbon. How do we complete the face of the ribbon? Well, of course, with the direct selection tool, drag a selection over both of the anchor points on the left side. See how they’re solid, blue filled over here. They’re not, so you’ve got those two selected and then hit command or control. J to join those two anchor points and do the same for the other side boom. We have the face of our ribbon. We can select this ribbon, Commander. I’m sorry, not Commander Control J shift X to swamp fill with stroke and we have the face of the ribbon. I’m gonna move this up a little bit because I want to see the little the little tails here in the bottom that we want to be drawing out. So something like that is good now. I’m going to take my pen tool. Let’s begin. Actually, let’s begin on the same side. We’ve been working on over here and again. We could right there on the anchor point. This is, you’re gonna see that smart guides is just it’s a lifesaver All the time and something like that. I mean, they’ll give it a little bump and boom, and we’re gonna select this piece. Go to the fill color and we’ll darken it up a little and say, like 75 on the brightness, and, of course, just so we can see what we’re doing as we’re doing it. Arrange, send to back boom. Got that very cool. Let’s go to the other side here and again. We’re going to begin right off that corner anchor point. I’m gonna pull a little tangent handle through and Ill. Go like that and this one. Maybe I’ll keep this one straight. And, of course, we’ll, right-click arrange. Send it to the back boom. Alright, we have the first two pieces of the ribbon completed. Now is you need to create the little tails? And I’m gonna create both of these separately. So let’s go through about a Bing. Got that hold on Ill. Hold down alt or option to click that go back. Create that point we’re gonna bring it over here to the point of the little wing that we drew perfectly run into there. Hold down, alter options, so we can pull a straight line back from that and sort of hide it behind that little tail We drew. We need to make this a little bit darker, so let’s go. Maybe 68% and it looks really bad because it’s on top of everything. So what’s the trick? Of course, Right-click arrange, send to back and there we go see. It tucks right in everything aligns perfectly, and everything aligns so perfectly because we have our smart guides turned on, so I can’t overemphasize that I mean, I could, but I would just be annoying at that point. All right, let’s begin with this. Anchor Point here. And I’m actually gonna loop this loop This ribbon back this way. I’m gonna ignore my sketch for a quick second there and let’s bring this back and just drag that right through like so and join it off. And then, of course, select, right, click and arrange and send it back and there we go. We have just created ribbon number three and look at that. It’s such a complex looking ribbon, but Oh, Commander, Control G to group it up by the way, such a complex looking ribbon. But you can see it doing it this way. I think it was kind of faster than using the ellipses and all the fancy schmancy, the Pathfinder nonsense that we did with this orange guy and I kind of think the ribbon looks better, so that’s. That’s that that’s how we do that now. We’re going to lock this layer up. I’m gonna name it ribbons three, and we’re gonna move on to the fourth type of ribbon. Am I giving you enough ribbons here to play with? And this is gonna be this little arrow ribbon down here, Just because it kind of looks cool. I thought, and I thought it’d be neat to do this. So we’re gonna go ahead. Also, start here on, Let me name the layer first, so I don’t forget ribbons for, and I let’s begin with the pen tool. We’re gonna create the top part of the arrow boom, and I’m gonna hit shift X to give me just a stroke and then I’m gonna create the arrow across the front and create the bottom part of the ribbon or the arrow. I should say, and then we’re going to create this really accentuated. I don’t know if I want it to be a curve. I think I want it to be a straight sort of cut in the back of the arrow. I think that’ll look kind of cool, right. You see that just a straight cut in the back of the arrow, very cool. I’m gonna select this. Let’s make this maybe, like a light blue or a blueish ribbon arrow. I don’t know what to call it. I guess I’ll just call it a ribbon arrow. There we go and now again with the pencil and this is pretty simple at this point. You’re just creating these shapes. You want to begin off the corner, right, so you’re looking for that? Anchor Point. Maybe I’ll zoom in a little bit. You’re looking for that Anchor Point, and you’re saying I want to come off the Anchor Point. I want to create this front shape. I’m gonna add a little bit of a curve. I’m holding on alter option by the way to pull out that tangent handle. I want to create that little curve on the front loop back around boom. I’ve got it! I’m gonna darken this by maybe 5% Let’s go 85% and I’m gonna just drop it behind by the way the hotkey to dropped behind. I should have told you this before. Look before arrange, send backward is just command or control in the left square bracket. So that’ll really make it fast. If you want to just quickly like, oh, we’ll bring it forward. Drop it backward. Let’s see what it looks like either way, and then we go ahead and do the same thing, so we just start here off the front corner. This time anchor. We make a little curve in the front loop and then we’re going to take this. This one almost is gonna have a curve going the opposite direction, and voila, we select this. We go from 85% to 80% and then command or control in the left bracket. Maybe a couple times and get it in place behind everything where it should be again. Go off that front! Anchor curve, This guy right around, Give it a little give it a little swoop there on the front, and we’re gonna come around, Hold down alt or option when you attach if you’re gonna attach and pull like I’m doing. And then we’re gonna go from 80% brightness to 75% brightness, and, of course, Commander control on the left bracket a few times to get it all the way behind everything and finally coming down the homestretch. The last one we go anchor point and we bring this out to a nice points down here. Hold down alt or option. We’re gonna pull this back the other way. Something kind of like that big shark tooth. Voila, select that we go from 70% to. I might actually go 10% on this one just to really accentuate it as the darkest part, and we’re just going to knock that down. Make sure it goes behind everything, and I think one thing I will do just to make this a little more interesting select. This bottom piece hit the letter. A which is going to give you our white arrow and then just literally don’t click and drag the little circle but select in additional time. You see how it’s it’s highlighted or as the other little circles or not. That means you’re just going to round to that one corner, so lets. Try pulling on that and just rounding off the bottom corner. Maybe something like that, right, That’s kind of neat, and maybe we could do the same for our arrow where we just round off the nose just ever so slightly, you know, three four or five pixels, something like, so select the shape command or ctrl. G to group it together and let’s move this out with our growing collection of ribbons. Let’s make it a little bit bigger and again Because Smartguide’s has allowed us to just get such precision. You can scale these up as big as you want, and they’re still just gonna line up perfectly. There’s no fear of oh no. I’m about to be exposed, Everything’s gonna fall apart. Let’s lock up this layer and create another layer and finally, ladies and gentlemen, the most difficult ribbon of the day ribbons number five. We are gonna go ahead and create this guy right down here. So this is gonna be fun. We’re gonna break it down into some simple steps. We’re gonna go with the face first and then. I’m gonna show you how to jockey multiple, twisting ribbons like this. It’s really less difficult than it probably looks, so lets. Do what we’ve done before. Create the ribbon, you know what? I’m going to double. Click on my layer and make this a color that you and I can both see. Let’s go with, Maybe Violet, and I’m going to pull through this way and then settle down up here. Just create the face of the ribbon again. It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent exact to my sketch. It just kind of has to be an approximation. Enter a return shift, then the letter X to swap fill and stroke and let’s set our stroke to ten points again just so we can see it very easily and hold down alt or option drag a copy of our stroke down to the bottom. We’re gonna use our direct selection. Arrow, select two anchors on the end command, or Ctrl J to join, select the two anchors on the other end command or Ctrl J to join and shift X to swap the stroke to the fill and here. We already did one. That’s pink. Maybe we should go yellow lets. Do it so a little yellow ribbon. This will be kind of cool. Let’s go yellow will begin at ninety percent brightness for our face and 75 percent in the saturation Department because yellow can be intense. Alright, so here’s where the fun begins. We are going to take the pen tool and we’re gonna jump off of our front Anchor point. We’re gonna pull straight up. I’m holding down shift, so I’m pulling my tangent handle straight up. And then what like the target at which I’m aiming to land is the apex of the back side of the curve, so you can see the ribbon kind of loops around like this, and then it cuts back to the left, so I’m looking right out here at the point, and I’m gonna hold down shift and drag straight up as well, even if this means I’m not exactly following my sketch because I just know this is gonna work, right, and then I’m gonna hold down alt or option and just click that anchor point to pull that tangent handle back in, and I’m gonna click and create the backside of this piece of the ribbon. Just like that, and we’re gonna change the brightness down to. Let’s go 85 and again. We’ll just drop that behind and there we go. We have the first piece of the backside of the ribbon. Now we’re gonna grab the pen tool again and we’re going to bounce off of our anchor point here, so we’re gonna click anchor. Hold down shift to drag a big tangent, handle up and again. I’m gonna go to the apex of where the ribbon twists back to the other direction. Hold down, shift boom. Got that alter option. Click the little path to or the little anchor point to suck that handle back in, and then we’ll create just a back side of this piece of the ribbon, just like so there we have it and I’m going to knock this down. Another 5% to 80 and we’re gonna drop this behind everything -. All right, so you can see we’re creating our ribbon. We’re creating the ribbon now. I’m going to go ahead with the pen tool. I’m gonna deselect that, and we’re gonna begin over here. So right off that anchor point. Let’s make sure we’re on the anchor point first and foremost There’s a lot going on there. Hold down, shift! Click to go up and at this point, you could take it all the way to the end. If you want so we’ll, just take this right to the end. Hold down alt or option, and I’m gonna actually go. Pull a tangent handle back this way and we are going to do something like. I don’t know, just like that, Maybe loop right around and complete this end of our ribbon again. We will go down to 75% in the brightness department and command and the left bracket key a few times until our ribbon is behind everything so you can see here if I shut off the sketch. We’ve just created that portion of the ribbon. Now, part of what looks funky about this well. There are a few things. This little path down here should probably cut across more like this and therefore should be coming out more like that right, so you can do all this kind of stuff to just tweak and adjust, and that’s totally fine. We’re gonna take this and have this kind of suck. It’s way through that way. Things like that, but also part of what’s looking kind of the end. The end piece looks a little bit too big if I’m being totally honest, but I think we’re gonna. I think we’re gonna just live with it. I say that, but I’m gonna, and I’m gonna end up messing around with it. You guys know me too well. I’m gonna end up messing with it and maybe pull this this anchor. This tangent handle. I’m sorry off the anchor point. I accidentally right-click there. Ignore that something like that. Mammy asked. It looks a little wonky, but something. Yeah, let’s just leave it. It is what it is, but anyway, The point is as I when I insist that I’m gonna stop working. You know that I’m not, but anyway. The the front side of the ribbon just looks too heavy. Right like this whole front corner is. Superduper heavy! Well, the part of the reason is when I when a ribbon bends around, you kind of get the front corner of the ribbon bending off. If you will, so there are a couple things we can do. We can select the ribbon and just select that individual point and try rounding the corner, right and just see what that looks like. Maybe that’ll do it if that looks a little bit too much like a butter knife, maybe? I’m thinking butter knife because of the yellow. You can even use the pen tool and just come in here and say well. I’m going to well deselect number one, so we don’t add to the path. I’m gonna begin on the path, and maybe I’ll just. I’ll just cut a really shallow sort of sloping piece here out of the corner. I’m gonna totally change the color of this, so you can see that it’s completely different, right, and you would just shift and select both the front piece of the ribbon and the little cutter piece we made and just do the minus front game, right and just minus out the front and just give a nice round off to the front of the ribbon now. I think I prefer going in with the direct selection tool, but just know that you can do either way. I think I’m just going to give it like a gentle little gentle thing like that, and that’ll just help bend it around. Maybe you would want to do the same for up here and kind of have the shape flow a little bit more into the corner, right, so you could select the anchor point here and say if you’re coming off the path here, maybe we should really be cutting into the corner more like that, right and then alter option. Let’s just see there’s gonna be an experiment here. This blue piece is my cutter piece. I shift select just the face of the ribbon, and I can cut the ribbon like that. And then we would obviously just have to adjust our the first piece of the back of the ribbon. Here, lets. Just take this and nudge you / until it covers something like so, so there’s a lot you can do in terms of playing with the ribbon face and just doing what needs to be done it now. It looks a little bit too fat through the middle, but again you can adjust and play with it. All you like lets. Turn on the sketch and get back to business, so I’m gonna actually select all these pieces and move them upward. A little bits, just so kind of the bottom right corner of the ribbon aligns with where I have it aligning with here in the sketch, and I’m gonna deselect We’re gonna begin off of that Anchor Point as we did before, and I’m gonna go through and just create my ribbon sort of like that, and then I’ll create just a little back, You know, bring it back around and we go from 90 degrees. We’re dropping five at a time, so we’re going to 85 and then we drop it back behind the face of the ribbon, and we just keep going right from point and then here. I’m coming over to this guy boom. Some thin like that. This one’s almost straight, but we’ll just bring it right back, and we got to come all the way up. This really fine point. Make sure we’re covering everything. Go eighty percent brightness, and this we drop behind behind behind, and we have another piece here. Of course. What would be the fun if we didn’t? I think I’ll take this one all the way around. Pull the path back. Kind of like we did before. Let’s pull actually want to pull this. Anchor Point way out here. Let’s pull this handle out here to make the end of the ribbon. A little bigger and we’re gonna use the pen tool. Make sure we select our path. Grab the pen tool and you can click on your open. Anchor Point. And that’s gonna sort of reactivate your path so you can continue. Drawing with the pen tool looks a little funky. I’m not gonna lie. I’m gonna select that, though. Let’s just change the color and get it behind everything. And then we can make our adjustments in a minute here there. We have it so this really has to be coming out of this angle, matching the angle of matching that angle much better than it is, so lets. Select this angle. We’re gonna say look. You really have to be kind of coming out of it like that. Which means if you want this to splay off to the side, you probably have to be over here. Kind of something like, so maybe pull it down that way. Something like that, it’s all a labor of love here. Well, sometimes it’s a labor of love. Sometimes you just you’re ready to break something. Alright, so that’s probably close enough for what we want to do here and again. We’ll do the same thing where we’ll select the face of our ribbon. Select that top right corner and just pull it back this. I think I’m gonna give this more of an extreme, a Bend just to really emphasize the flow into the corner and we can do the same thing here with this path because they look. We really want you to just cut into this corner. I’m actually going to affect the yeah. The face of the ribbon itself. There’s no rule against going and tinkering and trying to make the shape better. All right, something like that and we’ll zoom out. And, of course, this is just preliminary draft. If you’re really making your own ribbon, you just want to take your time and really do a nice job with it, but you can see you’re. Just do it, you’re creating those difficult looking hitch backs by just layering different colors on top of one another. Let me just zoom out so. I stop grabbing my artboard and I’ll just make this a little bit bigger here, and we can see ladies and gents. Look at what we’ve done. We’ve done a straight ribbon. We’ve talked about some cool tips and tricks. We did the aero ribbon. We did a bendy ribbon. We did a different kind of bendy ribbon, and then we did a flowy ribbon, just like that zigging and zagging all over the place. And, yeah, that is how. I create ribbons in Adobe Illustrator. I hope you enjoyed the video. Well, there you have it, folks. If you enjoyed the video number one, make sure you subscribe to channel and turn the notifications on. So you get a little big. Bell every time a new video comes up, and if you did create some cool ribbons or a ribbon or a ribbon based project or just a pile of ribbons in Adobe Illustrator. I’d love to see it uploaded to Instagram and tag me in your Instagram. My Instagram handle is act. Tut Vid! I would love to see it. Show you a little bit of love all that good stuff. And if you enjoyed this video, we’ll check out what’s on the screen now? I’ve got this other tutorial on creating this cool cowboy silhouette, western desert scene. That’s a whole bunch of fun to create, and just to reminder that. I love all the good people that watch these videos, But especially I love people like you who watch these videos all the way until the end. Get it. Got it Good, Nathaniel. Dodson, tuck vidcom. I’ll catch you in the next one.