Transcript:
You guys have been asking me for a long time to show you My go-to technique for adding textures to vector art in Adobe Illustrator? I finally managed to put together a tutorial about this, but I had to split it into two parts to make it easier to follow in this first episode. I will show you how to add shading to your artwork With texture. We will be using the grain effect on linear radial and freeform gradients. So here we are in Illustrator, and this is the sketch I started with now. I’m going to show you how I’ve done it. In procreate, It’s a quick time lapse. Normally What I start with is an idea, and then I just mess around. It takes only 10 to 15 minutes to create this type of sketches, but it’s very important to start with something solid before you come into Illustrator and do all the tracing, which is much more time-consuming and just so you can see a glimpse of this workflow. Here’s another time lapse. This was recorded in Illustrator and I was using predominantly. The pen tool. Now this tutorial’s focus is the last stage when we are applying the effects, so that’s like the detailing part, but once again, let me emphasize without the solid sketch show that has a good composition. In the beginning. There is no point in struggling in Illustrator because it can waste a lot of time and then you might not enjoy the final result, so practice a lot, the sketching phase, which is something? I can teach you a lot more about in another video. If you’re interested, let me know in the comment section below. But now that you see in these time lapses, let’s jump into Illustrator and let me show you what happens, so I bring that sketch that I created into Illustrator and place it on a separate layer, so I place in a layer. I said that as a template by double clicking on it and choosing template from this option that looks the layer and I can work on top of it, and this is how the tracing looks like, and then the other time-consuming part is adding textures. But once you know, the technique, it actually can be much faster for this illustration. It took me around half an hour extra to add all of this texture that you can see here in the final result. So now let me zoom a little bit closer, so you can see it better while. I’m talking about so this is without the shading, and this is with the shading. And this is a particular type of shading that a lot of illustrators use in Adobe Illustrator. It’s called the grain effect and it can be used in a very subtle way like here so first, let’s start using a simple linear or radial gradient with the effect. I’m going to show this on the hills so you can see when I turn off the shading. The hills all have something like a highlight, so as if the sun is shining and then it lights the top of these hills, so I’m going to start with this. Maybe pick this Hill here, so I’m going to turn off the shading. First thing is that you need to duplicate it so command or control C and then command or control F to paste in place or paste in front. It’s called in Illustrator that will place it the duplicate directly on top of the previous object. So now that we have that ready, we will also have to add a mask on this, so I’m going to go to the transparency panel and click on make mask if any of the panels. You don’t see that I’m using, just go to the window menu and you will find it there So now that I have the mask ready. I’m going to click on invert mask. This is also important and more importantly. I’m going to click on the mask itself. The way you know that you are in the mosque. Is that it’s going to say here? In the layers panel that you are inside the opacity mask and none of the other objects from the artwork will be visible. Only whatever you create inside this particular mask. So now that we are here, we will use the same shortcut again, pasting from command or control. F and we will see that object is certainly there in this mosque now. What color this is? It doesn’t really matter because we are going to change it anyway, but what’s more important is that you need to switch back to the original object or the duplicate, and you do that by clicking on this other thumbnail, so it’s almost like two different realms. You can work in the object’s realm and you can work in the mask realm, so you remember switching back and forth between them? I wish there was a shortcut to switch in it. That might be one. I just haven’t found it yet, but if you know of it, please let me know in the comment section below, so we are back in the object round and what I’m going to do is to change the color of this object. Now for this Normally, I would use the color panel and within the color panel. If we set your color mode to CMYK, it’s normally quite easy to work with these colors, but you can also work with HSB where you have hue, saturation and brightness, and sometimes I prefer to use this because I can very easily control just the brightness, so we want to make it brighter than the original color because this will be like a highlight instead of a shadow so it should be brighter, but it can also be a bit more saturated and maybe also a tint more warmer because we are simulating the sunshine, so something like that now the easiest way to check how it looks before we apply. The effect is to simply turn the layer or the object on and off and we can see the difference between it and the original base color. So I’m quite happy with this, but we can always come back and make changes, so I’m just going to keep my color panel handy and let’s go back to the object, so I select it and go back to the mosque. So once again, we switch sides and we are now inside the mosque now. This is where it gets interesting, and this is where the actual effect starts because we need to add first of all a gradient on the field. You can do this with the gradient panel quite easily. You just simply have to click on the gradient slider, so this is going to add the gradient, but you won’t notice much difference at the beginning because we are applying this gradient on the mosque and not on the object notice here in the opacity mask. It’s already visible now. The next thing we are going to do is to apply the effect from the effect menu. We go to texture and then choose grain. It will open up a separate window and make sure from the grain type. You choose this one. I think is pronounced stippled or stipple, not sure, but what’s more important is you have to also find the right intensity and contrast for the effect that you would like create now. I’m going to increase the intensity a bit just so we can see it better, but luckily, this is a live effect, so we can always come back and make changes to it, so let’s click on. OK, and we will already start seeing the effect, but at the moment, it’s in the wrong direction to change this simply just press G on the keyboard. That’s the gradient annotator or gradient tool with which you can click and drag and define the direction. Now we want to go from down up and you can see already how we are starting to introduce the texture. I’m going to zoom a little bit even closer, just so you can see it better and you don’t have to always click and drag to start again, creating the effect like this. Because once you have it roughly in the position that you need, you can also just simply drag these points around The bottom circle is normally the one that you move. The whole gradient around by the top square is the one with which you can control the distance or the transition between the two points. You can also move the white point up and down and notice how that’s also changing the spread or the transition of the effect and the little star icon here is also again the balance between the two sides of the black and the white. So essentially you are playing around with that gradient on the mask, but since we added the grain effect on it, it creates this cool transition and don’t. Forget if you feel like these little dots in the grain are too intense. You can always go to the appearance panel and change the values there, But if you’re seeing color, stop written there, all you have to do is to just press escape, so it goes back one step, and then you will see the grain effect inside the field. Click on that, which will bring you back to this menu here. We can reduce the intensity. Maybe increase the contrast a bit or reduce it and then click. OK, and as you can see, this is the change, so this was before, and this is after so very easy to adjust and customize it now. Of course, there’s another thing that you can do. If you feel like the color that you choose is not bright enough. All you have to do is to switch realms. Go back to the objects from the transparency panel and then from there, you can adjust those values as well so we can reduce the saturation or increase it again, play around with the hue and so on and so forth, so that’s how quick and easy It was to set it up and before. I forget there’s also one thing that you can change, and that is the direction or the type of gradient that you are using so once again, if we go back to the mosque and have that field color selected where we can see, it’s a gradient, you can very easily Switch it to radial gradient. Now with this one, you will have a different annotator, so when you’re using the gradient tool, remember pressing G will get you there. It’s going to work slightly differently. You have to click and drag out like this now. Sometimes it might be the wrong way around. In these cases. All you have to do is to click on this icon the reverse gradient. So now you can see, it’s much easier to control it. We can just grab the center point of the gradient and move it wherever we wanted or but I find it easier to do with. The radial gradient is to simply click and drag out from the point where I need it now. Notice that sometimes the grain effect is not visible. I found it the easiest to show it again is to simply move the white or the black point around a bit or any of these properties on the gradient annotator. So if I again draw it here on the top, you see, the grain effect is gone, but once I move this around, it will show once more, so the great thing about this technique is that it’s completely non-destructive and although it feels like it was a long time to set it up once you start doing it. It gets much faster and easier so just to prove this to you. I’m going to do it once again on one of the other hills. So first of all, I’m going to switch back to the normal object mode and then try to select that object. So here it is, I’m going to find it. It’s actually inside a clipping mask, so that’s the object. I’m going to copy and paste command C command. F change the color, make it darker this time because I’m going to use it for shading. So probably saturation doesn’t need to change just simply the brightness. Okay, something like that, and I’m going to add the mosque, invert the mask, Click on mask and paste in again, the same shape, then click on whichever gradient type. I want, let’s say this time. I’m going to use the linear gradient again, And then I go to effect menu and I don’t even have to go through the menus. Just simply choose apply grain. There’s also a shortcut for the previously use, the fact its command shift E or Ctrl shift E on PC, and you will see that’s already there, so that’s how quick and easy It was to recreate this effect on another object and I can press G on the keyboard and then click and drag to control the spread. Maybe something like this could be a little bit longer than that once again. If I don’t see the effect at all I have to do is to just move these points around a bit. Maybe set it down somewhere around there, so it didn’t take long at all to recreate it on another object and you can see that it would be very quick and easy to apply this to all of these other hills, but instead of showing the same thing over and over again. I’m going to move on and show you how to use the same grain effect, but using it with a free-form gradient before we continue. I just wanted to let you know about our creative membership program for a small monthly fee. You get access to over 200 hours of Adobe Certified online training courses. Master, all the tools and skills needed to become a professional graphic designer or illustrator as a pro member. You will get mentoring from me and my team access to Webinars, student forum and creative briefs to help you build an outstanding portfolio. Pro members can also download the project files for all of our Youtube tutorials sign up at the SME designer Dot-com slash memberships and start your free trial today, and now let’s head back to the tutorial. So that’s a new feature that was introduced recently in Illustrator, and I was really excited to try it out with this effect, so the reason I would switch to This is when I have objects that are more complex, so it’s not just a simple ellipse like these hills, but a more complex object like the body of the llama, so I’m going to switch back to the normal mode, Select the llama and I’m going to copy paste. So just you can see better. I’m going to drag this out here on the side. So that’s the shape. It’s definitely more complex than the previous objects that we work with. So in these cases, a free-form gradient will give us much more control on setting of the effect once we have the object duplicated. I am going to click on make mask invert mask and then click in the mask, but this is where the difference comes in instead of pasting in again, the same llama silhouette. I’m going to use the rectangle Tool. M is the shortcut for that and draw a big rectangle around the area where the llama’s body is. So I intentionally go, they beyond that, and I’m going to change this to a free-form gradient, So this rectangle will be set up with a free-form gradient on it. Now you might not notice much difference in the beginning, but we will make changes here first of all. I’m going to get rid of these gradient stops or pins, so I only have one here and I’m going to set that up to be black for now or maybe let’s just set it up for white in the beginning now. We don’t see much difference at the moment because the original object’s color is the same, so we have to switch back to the object itself and reduce the color. Maybe make it darker and also we can make it slightly more saturated. Something like this. Okay, now we can switch back to our gradient and lets. See what happens if we change the color? Stop to black see already? There is a difference when we set it to black because of invert mask. It’s going to show all the details of this puplic add object, so the object that is darker is now completely visible, but we don’t see the effect yet. So that see what happens if we add another stop, maybe somewhere around here and that’s set to white now. We already have a gradient going on here, but it’s not yet using the effect that we had before so all we have to do is simply add. The grain effect. Go up to effect menu, apply the green with the same settings and voila, there it is, but the coolest thing now is that I can drag these points around and instead of using the gradient annotator, I can be very specific where I want the effect to show so, for example, if we want to create a little shading under the head of the llama. So if I zoom a little bit closer here, all we have to do is to set the black point up there and then move the white point down until we want again, clear details and notice how here the gradient is already spreading onto the back of the llama. If I don’t want that, I can just add another white point there, but then if I want to have a bit more shading at the bottom on the legs, I can add another gradient point there. Switch it to black, and there you go, It’s already much better and more interesting. Now you can also increase the spread by dragging these perimeter lines when you’re using a free-form gradient or reduce them, something like that, but because we created the big rectangle on the illustration, we can also drag this point further out, so we can go beyond this silhouette and keep our points there, so that’s why I said in the beginning, It’s better to do that bigger shape and not use the llama’s body because this way I can be very specific where I want these points and I can be much more subtle with the fact itself. Now if I still feel like there’s too much grain seeping into the body, All I have to do is to just block it with a another stop. Something like that and you can put. As many pins in the freeform gradient as you want and you can even use gray pins, which will have an effect in between showing and hiding the grain effect. Now, if you enjoyed this tutorial so far. I’m going to go even deeper next time when I’m going to use the same grain effect, but on strokes, which will create a really cool silhouette on the objects so shading around the edges. And then I will also show you how to use the same grain effect with gradient meshes, which again can take your illustrations to a completely new level. So if you don’t want to miss out, make sure you subscribe now and also hit the bell icon to get notified when the you with, you will be released. Thanks a lot for watching like and share this video. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos. Click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys, and I will see you in the next one [Music].