Transcript:
Everybody welcome into this Adobe Illustrator Tutorial brought to you as always bite Vidcom today we’re going to talk about wrapping text or flowing text around an object. Now this can be a photo. It can be just a straight-up graphic. It can be something you’ve drawn illustrator flowing text around any object conceivable in Adobe Illustrator. I’ve got a pretty cool example here on my screen. This is going to just basically like a double page layout for a standard size is just basically 11 by 17 inches here, so it’s not exactly perfect, but it, you know, it does the job and what we’re doing is we’re just flowing the text. This is one text block that flows on both sides of this girl, and we just like took some text from a famous speech from Queen Elizabeth and some biography junk from Wikipedia. Messed it all together. Boom, we get this nice double text effect, but more importantly, it flows around the object in the photo. Which is this girl? And then we’ve got this little header up here as well, so we’re actually not going to cover this exact example. This is just a very real life, Sort of practical example of what you can do with this effect. We’re going to be using this photo and we’re going to take the same text and we’re going to mesh it and mold it around. This girl we’re going to throw a header in place and we’re going to throw text from either side or so without further ado, let’s go ahead and get started. So, of course, you can create text very easily here in Adobe Illustrator. You grab the text tool and you can begin typing or writing whatever you want. However, for the most part, I like to do all my text editing in a you know, in a text specific app that has all the power and functionality of a good, you know, text editor, something like pages, something like Microsoft Word or honestly, what I usually use is Google Drive and just create a new text document. I’m able to use, you know, different grammar, plugins and, you know, Spellcheck is amazing and just stuff like that that really allows me to settle in and get my text and now export or download that file as a RTF file or a rich text format. You can bring all kinds of different text formats here into Adobe Illustrator, but I’m going to be working with Rtf because that’s just what I normally work with, so I’m going to get going here by clicking file place and I have here this. Queen talks words, RTF Queen, like most of us does talk words when she talks doesn’t. Talk our stuff. And when we when we begin to do so we see this Microsoft word options, even though this was not created using Microsoft Word options don’t be confused or worried about that. If you see it, we can see we’re importing our RTF file. We can include table of contents, footnotes, endnotes or index text. We don’t really have any of that here with this document. I’m going to leave it all checked because I can. You can also remove text formatting now. I’ve placed some formatting on this text. This is a massive file that we’re working with, so it’s not really going to make that much of a difference here, but I’m still not going to remove it because you’ll be able to see exactly what all we have. I’m gonna hit OK, And it’s going to basically load the text onto the cursor. That’s of this funky-looking cursor is that I have now. This is not a bad saying. This is actually a really useful feature because what I like to do is I can just click and drag and drag out a text box and boom. It’s going to drop all of my type right into there now, as I said. This is a massive document so you can see my text that would work well in sort of a standard sized document like this is very, you know, tiny here in this document, so I’m not necessarily going to worry about scaling it up right now. What I’m going to do is just click in here and I’m going to select this first line in the words of the Queen, and I’m going to go edit cut to just get it out of there and we’re going to place a new text field up here because we’re going to place this text and sort of mask it in place and drop it behind your head. You’re going to see, it’s gonna be kind of cool here. Somebody grab my type tool and I’m going to drag out a text field. Think about this wide. Something like that’s probably good. You can see It’s got all kinds of lorem ipsum filler text. I’m going to just go edit paste and it’s going to paste that in the words of the Queen in place. I’m going to highlight that text. It’s still very, very tiny. In fact, it may be helpful for you to zoom in. You can see. Yes, in the words of the Queen and the souther text is still teeny, tiny way down. We have in the words of the Queen, and we have it selected. What I want to do is come over here to my character panel now. If you don’t have the character panel open, you can go window type character right there. Great and in the character panel. I’m going to first of all set the size of the text to 450 points, so it’s massive huge as you can see giant text and then from my text selector, I’m going to choose the font Latin modern Roman, and I want to go cap’s 10 oblique, and I’m gonna hit this little icon right here, which, as you can see all caps. So it’s me, give me all capital letters. Great now! What we want to do is go ahead and set our line height here or letting. I should say to 400 points. Great, so we’ve got in the words of and the Queen really just doesn’t even appear. So I’m going to grab my move tool or my selection tool here, and I’m just going to select this anchor handle right here. So that’s a center anchor handle right there, and I’m going to pull this out this way until I can see in the words of a queen boom, just like that in two lines. Great now that I have this, I’m going to crunch the bottom handle up a little bit just to kind of keep this whole thing a little bit more compact and I’m going to position this so part of the ear, part of the ear, part of the E And maybe a tiny part of the Q are disappearing behind her head. We use my arrow keys to nudge it exactly into place. In fact, maybe. I just want to go ahead. Make sure I have a line to artboard selected from my little align. Drop down here and just make sure I align the horizontal Center and you can see. We’re pretty close in our guest. We’ve got this bad boy Aligned to the horizontal. Center and we can also choose the align Center for the text. Specifically as you can see there. We now have our text specifically aligned to the center as well. Now what we want to do? I’m going to zoom in just a little bit. I just grabbed my zoom tool here, a zoom in just a touch, and I’m going to grab my eyedropper tool. So that’s this tool right here, and I’m going to sample. I don’t know, one of the lighter shades in her hair here, and that’s going to be the color of the text, so we’re going to sort of go with this mono tone effect with the image where everything is kind of pulling a color from our central photo here, so we’ve got this text great now to make it disappear behind your head, and this is not the text wrap that. I’m speaking of, we’re going to get to the text wrap in just a second. This is just a straight up mask, but it’s kind of a cool little way to create a mask up here in the transparency panel again. If you don’t have your transparency panel open, you can go window and transparency there. It is great, we can double click this little cross icon or whatever that icon is, and it’s going to fill that with black and that’s giving us a filled black mask, which is going to hide everything. We don’t want that. So in order to flip it, you just uncheck the clip option that are great and now. I’m going to grab this tool down here beneath my shape tool or my rectangle tool. This tool is called the blob Brush tool. I’m going to use this and I’m going to set my foreground. Color or my fill color. I should say to black, so I’m going. G row zero zero across the board and what I’m going to do now is I’m going to paint with this blob brush and wherever I paint with black, It’s going to hide it a letter E. So I’m just kind of roughly going to go along the edge of her hair. I don’t really care about it being too too perfect, but I want it to be, you know, somewhat decent and you can see there. We go! We have just sort of hidden that part of the E. In fact, there’s a little bit of the e there that I probably want to bring back. So I can grab my selection tool here and you can see. There is our our little blob selection that we’ve created. I can nudge it over a little bit. Maybe nudge it down. Just a touch. Just kind of, you know, nudge it until it looks just about right, and I’ll just deselect that and great when I zoom out. It’s going to just look like in the words of the Queen, and it’s tucking behind your head. Great, so we’ve got that out of the way now I can well. I need to get out of my opacity mask editing mode here, so I’m going to select this thumbnail right there. Voila, it’s going to bring me back to all of my artwork and my content and all that great, and I’m going to select my my original text and I’m just going to drag it down to get it out of the way for a second because what I also want to do is grab my line tool and just draw a line segment across my document. Maybe from like here, hold down my shift key and drag it to somewhere right around there, and I want this to have a stroke color, probably of one of the one of the shades of white in her dress. So again I’m going to grab my eyedropper tool. I’m going to select one of the darker shades in her dress. Something like that right there you can see. It’s almost a medium gray, maybe? I need to go a little bit lighter. I need to be conscientious of the fact that we’re over a fairly light colored background as well. Now this does absolutely nothing to this line because the line is only affected by the stroke. The hotkey to flip fill with stroke is shift and the letter. X, you can see we just take our fill blam! Drop it in to stroke now. The problem is, the stroke is very tiny, so we want to go to our stroke panel, which is up here under window stroke. There it is, and we’re going to set the weight of the stroke to 10 points there. We go great. Looks good and you can see we’ve. Got that right there? I think I’ll have the line going kind of right through your eye. Okay, you see that we’re going right through her eye now. One of the first thing we want to do here in fact, is just select this and align this to the center of our artboard, so we’re going to go ahead and align up to the center. Great now that we’ve done that we need a mask this to make it look like it’s kind of what we don’t want it to run over her face. So again back to the transparency found a double click to create a mask. Uncheck the clip grades in this case. I’m not going to use the blob brush, so I’m going to use the straight up rectangle tool and I’m going to drag a rectangle from about there. – something like there was not doing anything because we only have a stroke on this, so I’m going to select from the stroke, drop them and use a little cross or / icon to get rid of the stroke, and I’m going to select my fill options here and I’m going to choose black. Now this is probably not pure black, but I can double check it just by clicking on the fill option yet see, in fact, they can go much darker. Go ahead and hit, OK, and because it’s black, it’s going to hide that bit of the line. I can just select my thumbnail like I just did, and if I go back and grab my selection tool, deselect it, you can see that our line is running, and then it hides when it gets to our face. We have a nice line divider. Now we’re going to go ahead and do the text wrap flow option, which you’ve all been waiting for so. I think I kind of want the text to wrap basically from the top shoulder of her dress. Maybe a little bit higher than that down to about her knee. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to select my body of text here, and actually, I’m not going to do too much to resize it yet, maybe? I’ll resize it a tiny bit, but what I need to do is really come in and boost the size of the text. So we, you know we can see what we’re working with. So with this text selected, It’s got a couple different sizes in there, which is why in the character panel, we don’t see a size appearing because illustrators, saying there’s multiple sizes of text. What do you want me to do what I want you to do is make everything 48 points. Look at that, but it’s all stacked together because the lettings all messed up, so we’ll set the letting -. Well, let’s just set the letting to auto and see what that looks like. That’s pretty good. I think and we’re going to go with a Garamond. So I’m going to scroll down here and I’ll choose Ill. Just go through there. We Garamond Pro. That looks pretty decent. I kind of like it and before we go any further. I want to color this text, so I’m going to again, Grab my eyedropper tool and I’m going to sample one of the darker Browns from her hair. Me something like that. I don’t want it to be solid black. The Brown is just going to have a nice, subtle effect where it’s just going to look like it belongs. It’s not as harsh as a regular black. She’s going to look nice and beautiful like it belongs again. I’m not worried about the exact size of my container for this text quite yet. I’m also not worried about centering it because of the next step here, what we’re going to do is go type area type options now. I found that sometimes when you’re working with this in Illustrator, it tends to just kind of, like, make a very skinny column off to one side, so if that happens, don’t don’t freak out. We’ll fix that in a second. All we need to do is make two columns. The idea is going to be that there’s going to be one column, two left side in one column to her right side and we’ll kind of mask everything in the middle with this sort of live dynamic mask text option here, so we’re going to set columns to two, and I don’t see anything because another preview checked on so Ill. Check preview on sure enough. Everything bumps over to the side, great. I don’t really care and I’m going to set text flow to the by columns left to right. So you got that icon right there? It doesn’t really matter in this case. That’s more force of habit. It’s just what I do and you can also adjust the gutter. Which is this little bit of space between the two text blocks. It’s not really going to matter in this case. Let’s just push it to fifty. Just so you can see that, yes? In fact, there is the gutter, and you can put a place as many columns as you like. But for this particular effect, two is what we want, And in fact, if I just take a split second here two is all I used over here in this text block as well, so I had one block of text here and one block of text here, and you’re going to see how illustrator kind of flows this all right so now. Obviously this is way too tiny, so let’s bring this over and I have smart Guides turned on, so it kind of automatically will align to the edge of that line. We drew if it looks pretty good. I think I’ll start the text right about there, and then I’m going to pull the text out. I can pull it over here right to the point where it’s lining up with the other side of my line and by the way view, smart guides. That’s what I have turned on so we can see that, and you can see that it’s two two columns of text and I can go ahead and just align to the center the document, but it’s going to be automatically aligned because we have it aligned to the left and right edges of this line. We drew which we align to the center of our document, so a little bit of a complicated little, whatever going on there, but that’s that’s what’s happening. I’m going to double click here to get into my text and this is just live columns of text. So if I hit enter/return a bunch of times, you can see that it’s going to just push. The text out of this column right into the other columns are really pretty cool. I want to get rid of all these blank spaces, though. I just want to start with biography and it’s going to just flow down and over, but we need it to flow around her body. So how do we do that? Well, here is how we do that. It’s pretty cool. We’re gonna grab the the pen tool here, and I’m just going to draw a path with the pen tool right out around her body this way and we’re starting to get a fill, so I’m going to go ahead and swap the fill and the stroke, so I’m just seeing a stroke and an area like this where you can see this or underarm. I don’t really want text to fill in under there. So I’m going to go straight back to her body this way. I’m going to go around her leg eggs to come all the way down here, great. I come up around her body and you can just, you know if this does not have to be exact at all. This can be very rough selection. Great, something like that and what? I want to do once I have this outline. I’ll select it and you can see. There’s a little bit of stroke on there, so I’ll select it. I’m just going to get rid of the stroke by select the stroke down here in the bottom of the tool bin and hit the nun icon. Great, so we just have a path, no? Phil, no stroke. You can’t see anything. This is pretty easy here. Go object, text, wrap, make you can see it’s going to flow all that text right around it beautifully now. There is another kind of cool option. We have here under object text wrap. We can go text wrap options and we can set the offset here, so this is basically the these almost padding around this text wrap area. So if I set this to like 50 and I choose preview, you can see, it just gives me an extra bump, so if you have an exact selection around an area and you need there to be some space, you can come in here in a very quickly Add space or if you just want to add more space to what you have by all means. I actually kind of like 50 so I’m going to leave that. I’m going to hit, OK? I’m going to deselect and you can see what we’ve got. We have this text flowing all around and check this out to see this little plus icon down here. Let me just give a little zoom. You zoom on that till a plus icon. That means that there’s additional text that’s not showing. Well, what we can do is go in and edit this text any way we like. In fact, I can take the text and drag it like over here and you can see it’s going to live automatically update around our text wrap, so that’s pretty cool. I’m going to undo a couple times. I can also grab our text wrap and move that, and the text is going to adjust accordingly, so it’s very much a live effect, not really like using a mask where we’d be locked into one position, or if we drag it around. All the text isn’t going to reflow automatically. This is very much a live very edible effect. And what’s nice about that is if we want to bring the rest of the speech back, we can probably stand to make the biography section of the text, a little smaller, So I’ll double. Click here on the text. I’ll highlight the biography section and lets. Maybe make this. I don’t know 32 points or something. It’s much much smaller, in fact, too small, but it did bring back all of our text, so let’s just start sizing it up until our text kind of fills out a little bit more something like that, so we got up to 42 and we’ve got our text in place and it all looks pretty good now. At this point, all that’s left to do is throw some like footer text in and I did basically the same thing with the footer text where I just drew a path around the bottom of her legs. Here, it’s two columns of type. They mesh right together? They flow beautifully. And what do you have? You have a really nice sort of magazine type cover that we’ve created here in Adobe Illustrator with this live text flow. Oh, and you know, one thing we could do is we could unlock this and I could just come in here to the bottom of the text, and I could just place like an icon, a little dot or something and a lot of magazines kind of place little icons to indicate the end of their article and we’re so close here to the bottom. We’re still getting that little plus icon, and as you can see if I just simply pull down on the text field like I did, it goes away, but I kind of I don’t like that, so I’m just going to push it up a little bit and just kind of fill it out. I don’t mind if the plus it well now there. We actually made some of the speech. Go away, lets! Pull down, just just a smidge there. We go up there. We go alright, so it’s lined up close enough. I think, but you can see we easily place that text, and if you want your text to flow in and you want your text to glow, I’m not really Gloa’m it really glowing, but it’s so easy, and it’s so fast, and it’s so amazing and you can see. I mean, not only did we do This text wrap text flowing around an object effect in Illustrator, but we, in fact, basically laid out an entire magazine cover that quickly in Adobe Illustrator, based on one image and some text that we wrote up in whatever old text editor you like. If you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure you leave a little like on. It also drop a comment down below. Subscribe to the channel, so you never miss another video in the future and for flowing text wrapping text and making text just sits so beautifully around any given object photo illustration, You name it in Adobe Illustrator? That’s it, get it guy Good. Daniel Dawson touches calm. I’ll catch you [Music] [Music]!