Transcript:
Hello there. My name is Kevin and welcome to this video. Where it’s a little bit different from what I usually do, which is HTML and CSS tutorials. But we’re going to be diving into illustrator in this video. We’re going to be looking at how we can make a wave shape and a blob shape using illustrator in a future tutorial. I’m going to export these as Svgs and use them in a site as a clip path, it’s going to be animated, It’s going to be kind of cool, but this could be used for all sorts of things. It doesn’t have to be clip paths. It doesn’t have to be animated. Just making waves in illustrator can be really really useful, so I’m going to look at two different methods. The first one is for very uniform waves, and then the second one is another option that gives you a little bit more variety. You can make them all the same, and then we’re also going to look at how you can sort of come up with blobs and other shapes along with it. So if that sounds good to you, stick around, okay, so to make a wave, it actually isn’t that difficult to do, and I’m going to look at two different ways to do it, so one of them is, I’m just going to take my pen tool. I’m going to come anywhere here and just click. I’m going to hold shift down, so it locks, and it makes just a perfectly straight line and I’ll click right there at the other side now. My canvas is 400 by 400 So as long as I see that the width here is exactly 400 I’m happy The height doesn’t really matter too much. Um, you know if I wanted to. I could put it right in the middle there. I guess at 200. Um, and what I’m going to do is make sure I have a stroke just so I can actually see my line. When it’s not selected, so from here, what we’re going to do is go to effect and go to distort and distort. We have a zigzag now. Zigzag is going to do this and just make sure you have preview on. So you can actually see what’s happening and you wouldn’t think zigzag it would be the right thing because it makes pointy zigzags, but we do have a smooth option, which gives us some nice waves now for this to work for what I want it for. I want to make sure it doesn’t really matter. Exactly, I’m going to go with three. Actually, I just want to make sure the top here is matching up with the top there. It’s going to make it a bit easier to be seamless, so if you need a seamless wave, if you don’t need a seamless one, it doesn’t really matter. You could play around with these numbers A little bit, Um, and the size of it is how wavy it is. This isn’t actually going to make a big difference. How I’m using it? But, you know, depending on what you need it for, you might want to play with that number a little bit to get it exactly how you want and I’m going to push, okay, now you can see that it’s selected and it’s showing me the line in the middle. It’s not following the zigzag. This is a visual effect. It hasn’t actually applied it yet. It’s just making it look wavy now. Most of the time for vectors. That’s a good thing because it lets you, you know. I have a little bit more control. If I needed to move things around. If I only selected this point, I could, you know, move my line. Do other things and it’s going to work perfectly fine, but for my purposes, now what I want to do is select it and I’m going to go over to object and I’m going to expand appearance and what expand appearance does is it turns it into a shape instead? So now if I come and look, you can see, there’s different points along the way, it is a stroke still, but that’s perfectly fine. If you needed it not to be a stroke, you could come over to object path and I could do an outline stroke now. And by doing an outline stroke, it’s completely outlined. It’s a shape and not a stroke anymore. Don’t need to do that step, but if you do it, it doesn’t one way or another for what I’m going to do here. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to select. I’m just pushing M on my keyboard to get the rectangle tool, and I’m going to draw a rectangle or actually, I mean, maybe it’s even better to click and just say 400 by 400 Uh, except I don’t want it to be a stroke. I want it to be a fill only, and then I can bring that in. Now when you switch the stroke off. If you had one, just double check that your width and height are still the same, just so we can see what’s happening. Let’s give it a color and I’m going to push shift control and the opening square bracket to push it backwards, which is also, I think, right, click arrange, and you can bring it forward and backwards there, so with that done, I can select both shapes and I’m going to come over to my Pathfinder, and if you’re on a different version, you might have to go to your window and open Pathfinder right there, but I’m going to come to my Pathfinder. I’m going to click here and I’m just going to take the divide one over here, and that’s going to keep all of my shapes, but what it does Is it separates them all out. I can now select one of them and delete it and I’m left with a wave. Just like that, so that is nice and easy now. I did promise a second one, and this one could be used to make some cool shapes as well and you could play around with this and get other stuff out of it. But if you don’t like that one, that’s the one I’m going to use later on once. I bring it in as an SVG to my website in another tutorial, but if I take my ellipse tool and I make a perfect circle and then I’m going to option drag that or I’m on a PC, so it’s Alt drag and I’m going to drag it over, and then I’m just going to push command D, which is going to duplicate that movement. Now you don’t need three of them, but, you know, let’s go with three, and now there’s three separate shapes, But once again with the Pathfinder, I’m just going to click to unite all of them, so they’re one big shape and the cool thing now is I can select. Uh, you. Just gotta get it right because sometimes. It thinks you’re trying to do the wrong thing, but when I select this point here with my a tool just actually, I’m going to select just that point that point. That’s why it wasn’t working. Select these four points. And now I can actually come on here and I can control this here and how much the curve is. I would recommend doing all of them at the same time, because you know if you’re not doing them all at the same time, then it’s hard to make sure they’re all the same, so you can come through and just control that curvature right there. And, of course, you can make interesting blobs here if you had. Um, I mean, I could Pathfinder this lets. Just do it really fast. Whoops, M. I could make a square select both Pathfinder and I could use that top section as my wave so just to show you. There are more than one way to do it, but you could use this to make blobs and other stuff as well, so you see? Sometimes you get things like this. We, you know, bring them together. Select this point and this point. And then I can even that out or you could have a, you know, different shapes. Even if you already have one, you want to add to it. You can also come in and add to it. No problem, Pathfinder, just select those two points. I’m pushing a on my keyboard so I can be getting right there and I should be able. Oh, this one got a little screwed up. Actually, because of where it’s meeting, I might not be able to because there’s two points that are right next to each other. I would probably undo at that point and just make sure when I bring that over, lets. Try that again and now you can see. I only have the one point there and there, so now it’s actually going to let me do it. There is a maximum because of where this point is. Um, so you do want to watch out for that and the reason that’s happening. Is you see here? When this is selected, there’s this point that point will always be there, so what happened? The first time was see. I have a point here and a point there. If they’re over like if I see those points when I do my Pathfinder, they’re going to stay there. So if I just make sure that it’s overlapping a bit more now, it’s only gonna have this one’s point. Is there this one point there? So it’s just gonna have one here? It won’t have any extra ones hanging out, so that could be helpful, but then you can merge it in there and make whatever wave shape that you want, but a nice, easy way to make waves in illustrator, and now I’m going to bring this here, and if you want to see how I’m going to use this as a clip path, you can check that out in a future video, so I think that is nice, quick and easy to do in illustrator. I realize there is other vector software out there, and I think a lot of these features are available in those, so you might not be limited to illustrator, but it is what I am familiar with and what I know how to use. So that’s why we took a look at it here. If this is something you could do in other software, if there’s other ways of doing the same stuff, leave a comment down below and let me know, and if you’d like more design tutorials, or if you’d like me to use other design software for this type of stuff, give me suggestions on vector software that you would like to see and things that we could go from, say vector or other stuff like that to bring into websites. If that is something you’re interested in, thank you very much for watching. Thank you to my patreons. You guys are amazing! Your support means everything to me, So thank you very much for that. And, of course, until next time, don’t forget to make your corner of the Internet. It doesn’t really work now. If I’m doing design videos, keep on making cool designs. Every I have to come up with a new sign off crap. If you have any suggestions, I guess leave one of those in the comments below too. But yeah, just keep on being awesome. I guess I’ll see you next time.