Transcript:
Hello, my name is. Nathaniel Dodson. Welcome into this Adobe Illustrator Tutorial brought to you as always bye. Tutt vidcom. Today We’re gonna take a look at creating a low poly piece of artwork from this sketch. Can you see that? Is it coming out? Clearly on camera, We got this sketch from an iPhone or I guess a iPhone or Android app called Nammu. It looks pretty cool. I’m not really sure what the app does, but the icon is really sick looking, so we’re gonna create our own sort of a variation of that and explore how to create low poly artwork in Adobe Illustrator. As I always say, guys. If you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure you subscribe to the channel and also turn notifications on. That’s a helpful little thing. Make sure you never miss one of these tutorials in the future. Alright, let’s jump into Illustrator. Now and check this thing out. Alright, here We are in Adobe Illustrator. What I want to do is jump over to my finder and just drag the sketch into illustrator. I just scan the sketch into my computer. You can use your iPhone. Whatever you’ll want to just get this sketch from wherever you’ve sketched it or download the sketch, you can download it from a link down in the Bayeux. I get the sketch into illustrator because it’s what we’re gonna be using here to create the artwork. I’m gonna go up to view and I’m gonna make sure my bounding box is turned on yours. Probably is. I just shut mine off for a project. I was working on and now I’m gonna hold down shift and just drag this image up. Maybe to about right there and maybe. I’ll make it a little bit bigger. If, and why not make it a little bit bigger, something kind of like that. That’s cool. We’ll make this tree right in the middle and once. I’ve done that I can just lock this layer up, so I’m gonna hit the little space between the eyeball and the colored bar. Lock that layer up. We can name it if we want, we really don’t have to. I’m gonna create a new layer and this is where we’re gonna begin creating artwork. So just before we begin drawing anything. I just want to kind of show you how. I’m gonna break this down. We’re gonna draw the ground first, then. I’m going to draw the sort of tree trunk in this little tree branch, and then I’m gonna do the bulk of the leaves, and then we’ll add these little rocks and node looking things to the tree afterward, so let’s begin here, drawing the ground first, in fact. I think I’m gonna name this layer ground. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna grab my pen tool and we’re gonna get ourselves a a nice, thick stroke. No, fill yet. We’ll get we’ll work on, fills in a little bit, but I’m gonna go through strokes. I’m gonna double click stroke and I’m gonna give it like a blue stroke. Something that’s very noticeable and maybe. I’ll make it like 2 or 3 points pretty big now before we even start drawing one thing. You absolutely want to make sure you do is turn on smart guides. It just makes this step so so fast and easy, and they’re just really helpful, So what I like to do is begin drawing just a single triangle anywhere, so remember, we’re working with the ground. In fact, I’m gonna take the ground all the way out. It’s like the edges of the document. This black line is the edge of my document, So I’m gonna go with, like a big triangle like right here, so I’m just gonna go. Triangle boom and the bigger. Your triangle is probably the better off. You’re gonna be because it’ll just be less drawing for you to do later on then from this triangle. I’m gonna draw another triangle, but what I need to do is hold down my shift key. When you do that, you can hover over an existing. Anchor Point and drop a new anchor point exactly on top of that and smart guides. By the way a smart guides will help you do this perfectly every single time. So hold down shift, and I’m gonna click there to begin drawing another triangle. I’m gonna draw this triangle out here, Boom, just like that. And now we’re we’re beginning to build a grid now. I’m gonna hold down shift right here and I’m gonna draw. I’m gonna bring my first triangle up to meet the ground there we go and make sure. I join it off cool, and then I’m gonna hold down shift and I’m gonna make a triangle that comes all the way across, maybe to like here and then loops back ends. It’s a very thin triangle, but we’re beginning to create that horizon very cool. I’m gonna hold down shift. I’m gonna create another sort of horizon triangle. Here you can see there. We go very nice and now. I want to continue kind of bringing this horizon out, So I’m going to hold down shift here. I’m gonna draw a triangle that looks kind of like that, and you can see just just like this. We can very quickly and effectively draw out the entire grid for the ground and now. I’m going to hold down shift. I’m gonna draw one final triangle. Maybe I’ll have it come way over like that, and I’ll bring it all the way back over just weak. You kind of stay true to our whole triangle shape thing here. I need to come into here and draw a few triangles this way. Just to complete the foreground of our ground, hold down shift. And that’s just again. Allowing me to create an anchor point right on top of another anchor point. You can see very quickly. We’re creating this really complex grid, very cool there. We go and don’t worry about all this extra stuff down here. We’re gonna mask all of that away at the end of this whole thing, so no need to worry about that. Hold down, shift, lets. Click on that anchor point lets. Go right up there. Bam, just like that, very cool. Hold down, shift again and let’s create the triangle. That’s gonna go here behind the tree trunk. And if you’re having a difficult time by the way, the the sketch is too heavy, you can always double click on that layer and just choose dim images to like 50% something like that, so that makes a lot easier to see our line it’s. Actually, uh, maybe should have done that a little earlier. I’m going to hold down shift again and well. I’m not going to do anything because we still have our layer. One select to go back to the ground layer. Now hold down shift and let’s draw another piece of the ground plane. There we go and let’s draw it. Another triangle like here, make a triangle about that size. That looks good. Let’s create another triangle. Maybe like this, all right, cool. Something like that looks good. Hold down, shift, Let’s create a triangle. That’s going to. We’ve set ourselves up for trouble here. I’m gonna undo this, actually. We’re gonna get rid of that. That last triangle We made wasn’t maybe the best way to create that triangle, so lets. Try this again. Let’s hold down shift. Let’s create a triangle that goes like this and brings us up a little bit closer to our ground plane. Hold down shift, and now we’ll come through and fill in this triangle underneath here. Don’t be afraid to undo and get rid of a triangle. If you realize that’s just not going to give you the shape that you want, that’s totally fine. It happens happens all the time. In fact, there we go and I’m gonna continue drawing out some triangles triangles on top of triangles on top of triangles and then. I think I’m gonna going to complete my effect well. I’m not quite gonna complete it here. We got one giant triangle there. Whoops, and I’m gonna hold down shift and we’re gonna draw one one final, really long triangle right there. So what we now have are a bunch. I don’t want to create a new shape. Well, we now have a bunch of triangles as our ground planes, so our ground is set. In fact, if we shut off the tree, you can see. There’s the ground plane and on top of this little hill that we’ve created, We’re going to draw the tree. I’m gonna turn the sketch for the tree. Back on, we’re gonna create a new layer. In fact, I’m gonna lock the ground layer, so we don’t accidentally damage it. I’m gonna call this tree effect. Maybe I should call it trunk, but I’m gonna stick with tree and what I’m gonna do here for the tree is. I’m gonna just, I’m not really gonna low-poly this too much. We’re just gonna create a shape. That’s about the outline of our of our little tree trunk, So I’m gonna bring it up here. Maybe it to like right around there, but see how it’s given me all these intersecting points. I’m gonna go up to view. I’m gonna temporarily shut off Smart guides just to kind of free me up for a second. I’m gonna go there and then I’m gonna come up to here and then up to here by the way I’m dropping these points here because I can see my lines are gonna intersect with anchor points there, so we have a line coming out of that part of the branch and the same for there. It’s just gonna give us a nice place for for our shapes to kind of latch on to, so there’s the the tree branch or the the tree trunk. I should say what I now want to do is go view. I want to turn smart guides back on real quick because I want to create the shape down the middle of the tree, so you can see this is just yeah, the single line, But I want smart guides to be turned back on because I want. I should probably assume in here to make this easier to see. I want to make sure that I’m lining up exactly with these anchor points. Because really what this is gonna be as we can see on our sketch. The part of this tree trunk is gonna be shaded, so this is just gonna be the darker side of the tree trunk and the smart guides just make sure we’re creating this half of the shape, exactly the same as as the the tree trunk was before and then. I’ll just join it here, but what I want to do Is I want to move the path down, so I’m gonna grab my direct selection tool and I’ll just select that one single Anchor Point and smart guides will help. Make sure I lock it right into place, so it’s just aligned perfectly so there we go. We got the trunk and the piece that’s gonna become the shadow on top of the trunk. Let’s draw out the branch so once more, we’re going to hold down shift. I’m gonna just draw out the branch. Just kind of like this, don’t worry. I’m going into the trees into the leafy area of the tree a bit because the leaves are gonna fall on top of the trunk and the branch here. So I’m not too concerned about that so first we’ll just draw out the full branch shape, right, just like that great, and then I’ll create this little triangle here on the bottom part of the branch, so hold down shift. I’m gonna come across here. Link up with that Anchor Point link up with that Anchor Point. Great, so we got the little triangle shape, and now we’ve got two shapes, so the rest of this branch is kind of gonna be split in two so once more, hold down shift, and we’re gonna come out two out here and then bring it up to about here and then over and then down to this point and then back across to our starting point. Great, there’s that shape and then the remaining piece that’s going to be just the original branch we drew so that that’ll be able to kind of live and fill into that little piece that goes right in there, all right, so once again, if I double click and bring my my sketch back up to 100% you can see it. That’s the darkest part of the branch, because in theory, it’s gonna have the most shadow cast on it from the leaves above, so we have a three shapes that make up the branch and two shapes that make up the trunk and you can see here in our tree Layer has a nice rendition of what would be a very geometric low-poly style tree trunk, so I’m gonna lock that layer up and now we’re gonna begin with the leaves, so let’s create a new layer. Let’s name this layer leaves, and I’m gonna move up to the point where we’re drawing leaves now, though, the real key to drawing these leaves. I’m once again going to double Click on my sketch layer. I’m just going to dim it to 50% again. The real key to this is begin in the center. Make sure you select the leaves layer. Begin in the center and work your way out and don’t worry about making big triangles. So I’m gonna do like a very big inverted triangle right here in the middle. All right, just like that, and then I’m gonna hold down shift and let’s draw out another triangle. You want you kind of want to try to make the triangles a little bit smaller as you get closer to the edges, all right, so with that in mind? I’m gonna try to just draw out These triangles draw out these triangles and make them pretty decent-size, but now here we’re getting up closer to the edge, So I’m gonna make this triangle Just a little bit smaller. You can see it’s still big, but it’s just a little bit smaller. Same thing out here. I’m gonna make this one a little bit smaller, and if you begin with the center of an object, if for some reason, it just makes it a lot easier than trying to work your way from very tiny edge pieces in toward much much larger center triangles. So I prefer to work from the center out, so then I’ll shift. Click over here. We’re gonna create this little triangle, right, and we’re very quickly building out this grid you can see. I’m gonna hold down shift. I’m gonna come up over here with the triangle, just like that. Join that off on the end. I’ll do the same thing. Hold down shift and now, obviously because I’m getting closer to the edges, I’m making a concerted effort to just make my triangles a little bit smaller. It’ll just it’ll really help to add some shape and dimension to our tree leaves here, and you’ll really see when we begin coloring it. Just how much of a difference this this will make. I’m gonna bring this over this way and voila! Hey, if you’re enjoying what you’re seeing here in this tutorial, We’ll make sure you follow me on Instagram. My handle is at. Tut Vid! There’s just lots of cool stuff over there. We do a lot of live streaming and fun stuff like that. So again handle is at Tut Vid! You can find me over there on Instagram. You can see, we’re getting very close to the edge here. In fact, one of these maybe this one will reach out and touch the edge. Something like that, although might be, it just might be a little bit too big. I think it is, it’s gonna look a little weird. I’m gonna create that small triangle There instead. Hold down shift. Let’s create this nice Elongated triangle. Here, cool, let’s hold down shift again as we begin that shape, and you know, it’s just this kind of a long process, but it’s definitely worth it of just creating triangle after triangle after triangle. I think now I’m gonna reach down and touch the edge. Here we’re just touching with a point of a triangle, that’s. Alright, though, we’ll come back and fill all this in a little bit. So I right-click there. Make sure you don’t right-click there. We go hold down shift once more, and I think what I’m going to do is bring this over to the edge as well. Voila, hold down shift! I’m not quite gonna bring this guy to the edge because over here, especially this is the shadow side of the tree. I want to be careful that I don’t make too many triangles that even get close to being too large. Because that’ll start to look bad kind of in a hurry shift. I’m gonna bring this over and we’ve got a nice, small triangle. There that’s cool. Hold down, shift! Now we’re gonna reach out and touch the edge. Here, cool! Finish that triangle. And now what? I’m going to do here is maybe bring this over this way. Come back, create like this kind of skinny triangle. Hold down, shift, lets. Bring this triangle out this way. Very cool, which means that right here we can just bring this across connect for the triangle that way, and then once more here, reach out and touch the edge. And now you can see how we’re really beginning to fill this in all the way to the edge, We’re getting the the shape of our tree and we’re just roughly following the line. The line is just there is a little bit of a guide, you know? I’m gonna bring this guy over here. Something like that there we go hold down shift. Once more, there’s a kind of like, super skinny ish triangles and also see how this almost looks like a straight line. Just be careful not to get too tempted. You want to join at the anchor point corners kind of like this, right, You don’t want to try to just suck a straight line across there. You’ll almost always regret it. If you just go from point to point to point and you just get a better finished product, we’re going to anchor point to anchor point to anchor point. There we go and then right here, see, we’re gonna bring this down this way and loop it through just like that, and then we’re gonna come across this way. Join that anchor point and then. I’m gonna come across here. I think kind of like this. There we go and then we got this nice little nice little angle that we can put on the bottom part of the tree there. Great, and then right here we can fill this in beautifully. That’s a nice little bottom part of the tree. We’re gonna bring this over. I think maybe we should just go with the I can’t go with the I can’t go with a leaf that big on the bottom. We’re gonna go with something. Looks like that, and then we’re gonna bring this guy across here and go with a nice, big shape triangle that way and then. I’m gonna stretch it out to about there. We’re gonna come across for that little leaf on the bottom and we’ll come up to here. Close that triangle off great and let’s see here. I think we’ll make one big kind of skinny leaf shape there, and then what we can do is for the outside Part of the tree. Make a triangle this way and join that back across great. I’ll come up over here. Let’s give that a triangle and then. I think I’ll kind of backfill this a little bit by giving this a triangle shape. Voila, and hold down shift and let’s join this across here and complete that you can see how we’re just we’re really quickly creating this grid. It’s not too bad at all. No, a lot of little interesting little interesting caveats as you will as we attack every little piece of this grid. Just join this thing off and make sure we get it just perfect and then hold down shift. Bring this across here to there and then join it right off great. So there we go now. It looks a little crazy because we have. These really pointed, jagged edges on some parts of our lines. Don’t worry about that because we’re not. We’re not gonna leave this as a stroke. We’re gonna be using this as a fill, but you can see here if I shut the leaves off or actually, I should really shut the sketch off underneath. Here’s what we have so far now what I am gonna do? I’m gonna speed it up because I’m gonna quickly just create. Maybe, like two of these rocks here on the ground. I’ll leave out the weird-looking Mickey Mouse Rock. And then I’ll create those nodes on the tree. But I won’t make you suffer through watching me do that. I’ll just create a new layer here and name it nodes, and you’ll see me speeding through all of this as as I continue to talk and we’ll be onto the next thing here before you know it. And there it is just some gridded out nodes. They look really weird, and they’re gonna look strange until we put color in them, but I don’t worry about that. We’ll shut that off for now. What I do want to do is begin working on the leaves first, because the leaves are going to help us dictate or determine. I should say the color even for the ground, so I’m gonna select the leaves layer here and we want to determine our color scheme. In fact, let’s do the colors for the entire thing and save them as squatches as swatches, so we can go ahead and just reference them later. I’m gonna open up my swatches panel. If that’s not the swatch, it kind of let me pop this open here. Swatches are right down here. I’ll drag it out here so we can see it. I’m also going to drag my color panel out here because these are what we’re gonna work with. I’m gonna collapse the rest of that stuff, so I don’t have to try to icon. Read anymore we want to do is. I’m gonna switch this to RGB. That’s because RGB will allow me to dial in kind of my hex code here, so we’re gonna begin first dying. Dialing in a D2F 4 4 0 We can see it’s kind of this very bright green, and then I’m gonna hit the new button down here at the bottom of the swatches panel, and we can name it if we want. I’m not gonna worry about naming it and I’m gonna hit OK and you can see there. It is showing up as a as a color and now we’re going to go. RGB once more. We’re gonna double Click on our hex code, And in this case, we’re gonna go 0 3 2 8 0 C. I believe is kind of the dark color, and then I’ll go ahead and I’ll save that. As a new Swatch. It almost looks Brown. Don’t worry, it’s more green than brown and I’m gonna hit, OK? There it is there. Those are gonna be kind of our greens, and then once more, we’re gonna reset this to RGB, and I’m gonna punch in some Browns for the tree-trunks. This is gonna be D 68 a 45 so it’s kind of this nice light, brownish orangey color. I’m gonna hit, okay. We’re gonna go for the darker color once more resetting our color to RGB. In this case, I’m gonna go with 6b A four seven to F there. We go nice, dark brown. I’m gonna hit new for that. I’m gonna hit, okay. So we’ve got our two leaf colors, and we’ve got our two tree-trunk colors, that’s great. I am going to go up here once more, and I’m going to choose RGB. Now we’re gonna choose the branch colors, remember? The branch has three colors as well. I’ve already picked all this out. So I kind of know where I’m going with this. I’m gonna go 5 4 3 a 29 So that’s the first of the branch colors, and then I’m going to reset this to RGB and I’m going to go with 2d 2 3 1 A. This is another of the branch colors. I’m gonna hit, okay. I’m gonna reset it to RGB. And now the third of the branch colors remember? The branch has 3 colors. This is gonna be 1 4 0 B 0 4 So there we go go ahead and commit that color, and that’s an even kind of darker Brown. We’re gonna reset it to RGB, and the last thing we need to do is just get the colors we’re going to use for our nodes, so these gonna be kind of orangey colors. We’re gonna go after 68 and let’s go with like 5 2 3 so kind of like an orangey brightest orange color you can see and then for the second of the node colors. We need something a little bit darker than that, So let’s go with like 6a to f17 there. We go, that’s a nice, dark, brownish orange color there. We go so you can see here. We got our greens, our trunk and branch colors. And then our node colors, alright? I’m gonna drag my color panel and just drop it back in place. I’ll drag my swatches back to wherever they were. I think they were in here. Before, and we’re gonna unlock the leaves layer. In fact, I’m gonna lock up the nodes layer Just so I don’t accidentally distort them. I’ll probably show ya shut the nodes off, so I don’t see them an accidentally sample or just do anything to them, but I’m gonna select all these triangles here, and we’re gonna duplicate these, so we’re gonna go edit copy, and then we’re gonna choose edit paste in front and we’ve just duplicated everything right now we’re gonna swap the fill and the stroke, so we’re gonna invert the fill on a stroke, therefore giving us this giant blue shape, but it’s still a bunch of little triangles, so we want to go to our Pathfinder panel here and choose to merge these shapes, so this is gonna merge it to one big tree like shape. Now you might be saying, but what are all the little spikes sticking out That’s because underneath this shape tree? We still have our grid because obviously we still want the grid. This is just gonna be where we place our color. Now the way we’re gonna get this color is by using a gradient, So I’m gonna come to the gradient panel. I’m going to apply a gradient. In fact, I’m gonna open up my big panel here because we’re going to want our swatches here. Now you can see, it doesn’t look like I’ve given it a gradient, and that’s because I’ve applied the gradient to the stroke. We don’t want that. I’m gonna just hit the none option here. Make sure it fill is my fill is what’s selected and then come over here. Just click on the gradient stripe in the gradient panel great and from the swatches panel now. I’m gonna drag the light very bright green up to the green spot and the very, very dark green up to the dark green spot. You can see there are very light to dark. Green cool, Let’s grab. Well, let’s first set to a radial gradient and then let’s grab the gradient tool over here. This might be the easiest way to handle this. So if we take a peek at our sketch real quick, the light is coming from a camera left, so it’s striking across the scene, forming these shadows on the right side of the scene, right, the right side of our landscape, The right side of our tree trunk, the under the undercarriage here of the branch. All of that stuff is all shadowed because of where our light sources so that’s telling us the bright green should be up here in the top left of the tree. The darker green should reside on the other side of the bulk of the tree. So with my gradient tool. I’m gonna begin drawing up here and I’m just gonna try well. I need to make sure I select that gradients shape. I’m gonna just draw a great kind of like that. Yeah, maybe not quite as drastic as I want. I really wanna make sure I get a lot of that. Bright green in there. Bring it up like this. Maybe, yeah, kind of something like that and then. I want there to be more bright green. That’s coming into play, so I’m gonna bring that over. Maybe I’ll actually draw it a little bit more like this. Nope, that’s a little bit too much mm-hmm. I’m really trying to get this right here. Something like that, maybe will increase the darks a little bit and will increase the brights a little bit. Just really bring those really bright greens into influence that side of our tree, All right, that’s! I think how we want to leave our colors. So what I’m gonna do now with this layer? I’m I should say I’m gonna right. Click on it. Choose a range and I’m just gonna send it to the back now. What we’re gonna do is select shapes one at a time and we will begin using the eyedropper tool to sample from that gradient. The problem is, let me just show you this here if I like, take this this front triangle, and I grab my eyedropper tool, and I say give me that green. In the gradient, It’s gonna actually sample the entire gradient. That’s gonna be a problem, so here’s what we want to do. I probably should have done this before. I send it to the back, but I’m just remembering now. I’m gonna grab that gradient shape. Make sure I have it selected and we’re gonna go object expand, and we’re gonna expand the fill and and illustrator knows this is a gradient, so it’s saying, hey, you want to expand the gradient to what a gradient mesh or specific objects, so we’re gonna specify that we want to expand this to 255 individual objects giving us a maximum range of color We’re gonna hit. OK, And now all those objects are nestled within this group, right, all those objects are in there, that’s. Great now! What we can do is if we select a shape like this little piece down here. We hit the letter. Ai to grab our eyedropper tool and select that dark green that shape as you can see, gets filled with that. Dark green, no stroke. The blue stroke automatically goes away, so then you can simply go through and begin selecting each of your shapes and just use the eyedropper tool and one by one piece by piece begin building out the actual low-poly effect for the tree here. I’m gonna keep selecting these shapes, even when it looks like not much as happening. Stuff’s happening. Stuff’s going on its. The changes are being made. Let me deselect accidentally selected the gradient you. She’s got to be careful here as you’re going through and selecting stuff, that’s alright, though, and I’ll probably speed the video up here, so you also watch me pains to taking lis select every single little piece of everything, and it’s just a little bit, not really a labor of love because doesn’t take too long, but it’s the labor, a labor of precision. Maybe, or you got to make sure you’re selecting stuff and and hitting pieces where they need to be hits and all of that, and just a moment passes pretty quickly. When you can speed the video up like that, and you can see we. We have this nice shape where it looks kind of naturally lit right with the brightest bits up here, the darkest bits down here, and if anything, the colors are too close, you can always select one cell, and you go to if you go to. Hsb mode here in your color panel, which, by the way a flyout menu HSB, you can just bump the brightness up one or two percent, just very, very slightly. It makes a difference. It gives you a little differentiation allows you to really see what’s going on. So what I’ll do now. I’m just gonna collapse. This leaves layer. I’m not gonna lock it up, though. I’m gonna turn my ground on, and I’m gonna unlock it because what I’m gonna do is begin lighting the ground or the same way. Now I could apply a big gradient over the ground or I could simply sample from what’s already been done for me up here because we’re gonna use those same greens, so I’m gonna select this piece of the ground over here and just get one of the kind of nice dark greens, and then I’ll just slowly, but surely walk it back from not so bright to getting brighter, getting brighter, getting bright or kind of thing and I’ll select. Maybe one of these down here up here. This still all this should be pretty dark back on the backside. The hill, it really shouldn’t start to get really bright until we’re cresting the hill. If you will, so this triangle back here, there should still be one of these. You know, pretty dark greens, something like that. I’ll select this shape here, and I’m just using the the letter. I to jump me over to my using the hotkey for the the eyedropper tool. Grab a nice, dark green there. And if you have any shape, that’s particularly difficult to select. You can try to hunt it down in the it’s not quite dark enough. Maybe in the layer’s panel. See if you can find it. See, it’s just too much too close to the cell right next to it, so what? I’ll do is come to HSB and just knock it down. A couple ticks, darkness wise, and then this one becomes a little too close, so I’ll knock that one down a couple ticks and Ill. Knock this one down a couple, and this one over here should be probably the absolute, darkest, so Ill. Make sure that’s knocked down a little bit. This one should probably come down a couple, which means that this one should go up. Maybe one or two, and that should go up just a little bit, so you’re just, you know, tweaking and making sure there’s still some some variation, and now as we crest the hill, in fact, let’s begin with the brightest bits over here, so I’m gonna go with a very bright green. I’m gonna go with another pretty, pretty bright, pretty bright green there, and then you know, again, just very quickly. It’s go from like, very, very bright green to just, you know, maybe not quite so darkened for the next one and the next one there he doesn’t even have to be quite that bright and so on and so forth and you can very quickly create a pretty cool-looking low poly graphic. It’s really there’s nothing to it, right nothing to it other than it requires a little bit of time there. We go something like that and then remember the tree. Brandt or the tree trunk is gonna fall in front of this, but we’re just we’re just kind of holding steady here with that for a second. I’m going to grab my move tool and let’s grab this. See this this first triangle that was drawn. It’s on the very bottom of everything. So if I come into my layer’s panel there it is on the bottom and it’s just really hard to select it when it’s down there, so I’ll select it manually and then I’ll give it like a big dose of kind of moderate green. Maybe make it just a couple clicks darker, just something kind of like that. So there we have the ground now. Obviously we need to start filling in the tree trunk because that is that that appears above the ground and it doesn’t look right with it without the tree trunk in place, so what? I’ll do, I can close my gradient because the tree trunk is just gonna be solid colors, right. We got these five colors. We got five pieces of the tree trunk, so lets. Unlock the tree trunk! I’m going to begin with the bottom here, so I’m gonna fill in the actual base of the trunk and that I believe is the first color we chose then. I’m going to select the well. I need to get rid of the stroke scene because not using the eyedropper tool, so it’s not automatically cancelling out the stroke. We don’t need the blue stroke. For obvious reasons, let’s grab the little darkening shadow shape on the tree trunk. There, dump the stroke, and we’re gonna give this that darker, brownish color. All right, what I did was I just applied it to the stroke because I did not choose to set the foreground. I didn’t choose to select the foreground. I’m sorry, so I’m gonna select the foreground, then select that darker brown. There’s our shadow for the trunk. Now we’re gonna go to the actual tree branch now. The underlying tree branch shape needs to be the darkest of the Browns that we selected. So I’m gonna go with that darkest of Browns. And then I’m gonna dump at the blue stroke and there we go. I’m gonna select now the triangle shape up here this. I believe is gonna be the lightest brown color. Get rid of the stroke! Select the fill and let’s go with the lightest brown color there, and then the last piece of the stroke is going to be that medium grayish brown color and once more, we’ll select the stroke and just get rid of the stroke as well. And if I deselect you can see here. We’ve got a nice series of shapes that are going on now. If you get a little bit closer and things aren’t quite lined up, you see, there’s a a little bit of a hairline crack there. We can either shift that shape over or just correct. That really should not have happened, but we’re gonna ignore it for the time being. That’s just a matter of drag the path over a little bit. I don’t wanna get into it. We spend enough time playing with this already. What we’re gonna do? Though, is we’re gonna rush up the sketch off because we probably have a nice little base going on here with our tree. I’m gonna speed it up and I’m gonna fill in the color for the nodes The way that I’m working with the nodes is basically you know again. The lighter colors go off to the left side of the node. The darker colors go on the left on the right side of the node. So I’m gonna real quick and speed the video up as I’m as I’m talking here. You’ll see me just filling in these nodes and rocks and stuff, and it’ll all look good for us, all right, so we have these very blocky looking nodes modules. Whatever you want to call them that are clinging to the tree to add just an extra sense of realism to all of this stuff. I want to create another another new layer here, and I’m gonna call this shadows. Now we’re gonna probably have a couple shadow layers, but this shadow layer. I want this to be underneath the nodes, but above the leaves. I’m gonna zoom in here. I want to make sure my smart guides is turned on. It’s up. You’re under view. Smart guides is still on good, and I’m gonna grab the pen tool and I’m just gonna draw out a few sort of like shadowy type shapes and just make them linked with the outermost points of my nodes and what I’ll do. Double-click on. The properties panel here will just reduce the opacity down to like 15% and maybe more than 15% scale like 25% Something like that, just so they’re they’re kind of noticeable you can see there. We’ve got a nice little shadow, and I’ll do the same thing back here and we’ll create a little shadow for this Ill. Bring it this way, something like that cool. Once more, set the opacity, let’s go with like 25% back here as well. I’ll do the same thing over here with this shape. I don’t know, just kind of randomize the shadows a little bit. If you will will set this to the opacity of like 25 here now just so it’s not brightening up. Maybe we’ll set this to the blend mode of multiply. That’ll make sure that’s always darkening a little bit, so we’ll select our original shape here. Well, not our original. The second shape we did. Let’s set that to multiply as well and we’ll grab the first guy. We’ll set that to multiply as well. You can see, it just adds a little bit more kind of darkening a darkening property to that shadow, lets. Grab that pen tool. Once more. Let’s draw draw a shadowy shape out of here. The shadowy shape will come all the way up to here. I think something like that cool. Once more, well set that opacity to multiply. We probably need a man. I don’t need to darken it up too much and then reduce the opacity to about 25% there and then last, but not least we’re gonna get a little shadow action happening over here, something kind of like that’s once more select opacity and reduce the bar set the blend mode to multiply and we’ll reduce the opacity to 25% as well cool. We did that. I think I wants you now. I’m gonna just zoom out a little bit. That looks pretty cool. Let’s add some shadows for the rocks on the ground as well, so let’s add kind of long, elongated shadows for the rocks, kind of something like that. We’ll use that same little technique set the blend mode to multiply set the opacity to let’s go with like, 20 here for the ground. I don’t know, I’m just arbitrarily choosing to make it different and the same thing over here with this little rock, Let’s go ahead and apply a little shadow for him. Boom opacity, once more should be set the multiply and the bloody! I’m sorry the blend mode, multiply opacity. Let’s knock it down to 20 and I’ll deselect and you can see. We got some shadows there for the ground and also up in the trees. Now a couple things were missing. I feel like there should be some shadowing beneath the leaves and maybe even for the tree as well, but those shadows would have to go beneath both the leaves and well not beneath the tree layer, but the tree layer shadow will have to go beneath that, so let’s do the shadow for the base of the tree. First, we’ll create a shadow layer just above the ground and we’ll call this tree shadow and once more. I’ll use my pen tool and let’s just create a nice, long shadow for the tree moving off this way. Kind of something like that, voila. And we will set this to the blend mode of multiply and we’ll reduce the opacity. I’m gonna go like 15% I’m gonna make that just a little bit lower than everything else, just so it’s it’s there, but it’s not like in your face and then what we’ll do is we’ll zoom in and we’ll create a shadow just beneath the tree layer, so I’m gonna add a layer here in between leaves and tree, and I’m gonna call this leaves shadow and all this is going to be is just a couple. Little triangular shapes may be able to do something kind of. Let’s begin right here and draw this straight up to here and then over to like my anchor, point there in the middle and just make it like a little triangular shape like that, set it to the blend mode multiply, and then what reduce the opacity, there’s something that’s reasonable, like 20% that. Yeah, that probably is fine and then. I’ll draw another triangular shape over here. Something like that. That’s great Once more. We’ll set the blend mode to multiply and this time. I’ll make this just a little bit darker, so I’ll go like 30% opacity on this side, and then we can even draw a nice little shadowy shape somewhere around here, something like that once more, of course, we reset the blend mode to multiply and I’ll reduce the opacity here to like. I don’t know what 55 something like that would probably be cool and I can deselect so we’re just adding a little bit more shadow Enos, as they branch gets closer to the tree itself. And now, if I zoom out, we only have a couple more things to do. I do want to throw a background behind this, and I also want to just mask the ground into place, so let’s apply the background by placing a new layer underneath our ground layer and we’ll just call this BG for background. I’m going to click my with my rectangle tool once. And the size of the document is 2560 by 1440 so now that I have that I can grab my selection tool, bring up my align panel and make sure that I’m aligning to my artboard and align the horizontal and vertical centers just like that and we’ll add a couple new swatches here for this background. So I’m gonna go once more to my RGB, and I’m gonna make my background run from a kind of a hot pink Magenta color to more of a dark desaturate of blue, so let’s go with kind of one of these very rich pinky colors, but I want to make it a little bit more. Yeah, a little bit more blue. We’ll add to it something kind of like that. I think that’ll work so well. Just go ahead and save that Swatch and then what I also want to do is get a very, very dark blue so very extremely dark. Maybe even somewhat, The saturated blue would go even darker than that. Yeah, like that, almost black Go ahead and create that Swatch great. Now we have these two colors. We’ll go ahead and create a gradient for the shape double click on the gradient panel until we see gradient click to apply. You can see, this is our crazy. Green gradient. We’re gonna set this to linear. We’re going to just drag these color stops back out where they belong and I’m gonna drag the hot pink and drop it on the light green, and I’m gonna drag that a really really dark blue and drop it on that dark green animals. Give this an angle of. Let’s try 90 degrees here. See how that puts the pink at the bottom? I think I want to constrain the Pinker. Push it down even more. Something kind of like that, maybe. I’ll brighten this blue, just a little bit or just, you know, tone it man, now, you know? I really don’t want to do that. Let’s go back to HSB. I want to play with the the hue of it A little bit. Maybe actually infuse a little brightness with saturation into it. Something kind of like that. I think that sort of looks cool, and maybe we’ll take that pink and we’ll just desaturate it. Just a hair Now. That we’re kind of seeing it in place. I think you could stand to be D saturated A tiny bit, maybe brightened up a little bit, something like that looks cool, and then all we need to do. We can even use the shape we just created as our mask, so just select that shape that gradient shape command or control C or just go edit. Copy, if you if you don’t use hotkeys, that’s fine and what we want to do is bring all of our shapes onto or into a new layer and we’ll do that by grouping them, so we’ll unlock all these layers, and by the way you could select each individual bit and just group it up, like if you wanted all the leaves to be grouped separately and so on and so forth, but what? I want to do here, I’m just locking up the background layer, So I don’t accidentally select that, and we will go through. Select all this stuff. We got all the little pieces. Shadows, everything will go object group, and now you can see, it’s all grouped into one layer up there. Deselect make sure we haven’t destroyed anything we haven’t and with that layer, we can now open up the properties panel, we’ll go to our opacity or our transparency panel and we’ll just double Click on the little opening here that’ll add a layer mask and I’m gonna choose to paste in front, which is gonna paste my sort of gradient rectangle in place and now we’re getting this weird effect, and it’s because we got this weird gradient. We’re gonna select our fill here double, click on it. I’m just gonna choose to fill it with white and hit OK, and there it will be our tree standing on a hill all by itself, and I’ve done that I can click opacity and just get out of my mask editing mode, select the artwork and we’re back to the artwork side of things. Honestly, it’s a little wonky, the way. The new appearance, opacity transform panel works and the new version of illustrator. You can still thankfully get the old transparency panel. If that’s what you prefer, and that’s what. I tend to prefer these days, but I’ll close that out now and we’ll try to play nice with the properties panel. You can see now. I get these empty layers underneath where we moved all of our artwork from that’s fine. I’m not too concerned about them for right now. What I do like is how this ended up turning out. We could add a little grain or a little bit of noise or a little bit of whatever you want to add to it. But really, that’s it for this one now. I do want to mention. If you guys do create something like this or create your own low poly sketch and convert it to low poly artwork in Adobe Illustrator, I would love he would share it on Instagram and tag me in the image that way it’ll show up in my tagged images. I can get in there. I can see what you guys are creating. Mix it up with you a little bit. Leave a comment. Drop a like, you know all that good stuff. I don’t need some elaborate. Shout out, just a simple little humble tag, just so I can see it. That’s all that that’s all that’s needed. So if you do create it, I would absolutely love to see it. That’s what I’m trying to say, And for creating this low-poly effect in Adobe Illustrator beginning with the sketch, bringing it into illustrator tracing out a bunch of triangles and doing all the stuff that we do with different gradients and sampling color and mix ended up, matching it up and all the good stuff that happened in this tutorial. Guys, that’s it, get it. Got it Good, Nathaniel. Dodson, tuck vidcom. I’ll catch you in the next one. And before you go make sure you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day, also, by my course. It helps us. Do what we do and this channel is supported by viewers. Just like you. You can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this channel. See you next time, guys.