Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey, everyone, my name is! Aaron Gifford. I have been a graphic designer for over 15 years and I’m back with you today for another new illustrator tutorial. I’m going to show you how to recreate this drawing that I have in front of me and we’re gonna go over. It includes two things we are going. I’m going to show you how to use the scissor tool, which is over here kind of towards the middle of your tool pallet and then apply how to apply this color gradient by using the gradient palette so to get started. I’m just gonna move this current drawing out of my way as soon as my computer steps thinking there we go and, okay so first we’re gonna start with over here In our shape palette. We’re gonna choose the star tool and we’re gonna hold Ctrl shift, Alt right in the middle of the page control shift. Well, first we got to click and hold ctrl shift Alt and then drag out and we’ll get a nice star shape, so let’s go ahead and add a stroke up to your stroke palette, and we want a pretty wide stroke, so let’s go ahead and start with probably about 20 points. There we go and we’re. I’m gonna show you how to create that gradient, so we’ll just start with black, and we could go even a little bit thicker, so let’s go 30 points. Yep, and my arrow tool. And then I just smooth that in the center. Cuz it bugs me when it’s not so right now you can see that our star has pointy tips and we don’t for this drawing. We don’t want pointy tips. We want rounded corners, so if we go to our stroke palette and choose the middle two options around cap, it’s gonna go ahead and round our corners for us, which is what we want now in order to get these little, okay. This is bugging me -. I gotta get rid of this film. I’m sorry, my computer tends to slow down when I have the recorder on, but okay, so now we’re gonna, I’m gonna use the scissor tool and we’re gonna cut these two pieces out of the star, so let’s go to our scissor tool and first wait first. We want our director selection tool and we’re gonna select our star so we can see the path of it. Then we’re gonna use the scissor tool and just like a scissors. You just have to click on the path exactly where you want to make a cut. So in this case, we’re gonna make it in this upper left-hand corner here. We’re gonna click once here and once over here and now you can see it just kind of made a cut. It’s still there, though, and we’re gonna do the same thing down here in the corner, so click and a click and now using the White Arrow tool direct selection, we can see if we click where we cut. Those segments are still there, so we can just click and move those out of the way and actually we can just go ahead and delete them because we won’t need them. So that is how easy it is to use the scissor tool now to give that kind of this 3 3 dimensional. Look, we just have to add a gradient, so let’s take our. I forget the name of it the I call it the open arrow tool and we’re gonna click and drag so that all of our segments are selected and then we are going to go to color palette. Make sure that our stroke is what we’re changing right now. It’s black, and then you want to bring up your gradient palette and here is the gradient. I’m gonna select it. Yours is probably gray right now. So if that’s true here, let me start at the default, which is probably where you’re at there, so this is probably where you’re at because it defaults black and white. So first you can tell that our gradient isn’t going the direction we want like. It’s starting out with our left-hand color here and ending with our right-hand color, our darker color here, and we want the gradient to go the width of the stroke, so in order to change that if you see underneath here, make sure that your type is set to linear, and then we have our three options down here and you can see. I’ll show you the difference. The one this first one is is right now, the direction of the gradient, and then when you click in the center and apply it along the stroke, it gives it a completely different. Look, it starts the gradient at the beginning of the path and ends it at the end of the path, which is not what we want either, so we’re gonna choose this third one, and we’re gonna apply the stroke across the gradient, so that is looking a little bit closer to what we have here now. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning your colors within the stroke, so let’s double click on our first color and we’re just gonna make that like a mid color green, not not too light, not too dark and then we’re gonna go ahead and click about a quarter of the way here in our palette and we’re gonna add another little notch here another slider and then we’re gonna double click to bring up the color palette and that color we’re gonna make a lighter green because that’s gonna be like the highlight. I’m gonna go even a little lighter. Mmm, there we go, then we’re gonna add another slider about 3/4 of the way, just by clicking once to add the slider and then double click to bring up the color, and that color is gonna be a little bit darker green. There we go and then our final one on the right. We just have to double Click. It’ll probably default to this black. We just have to go up here to the corner. Change it to! I’m gonna do with this in RGB, and then I want to click a pretty dark green for this bottom color. Yeah, so if you see here now, we have our 3d looking star with the little parts of the outline that we cut off so. I hope this helps in your creative journey. It’s a pretty simple illustration to make, but I can’t wait to see what you guys would other things You guys come up to do with it, so let me know if you have a master creation that you’d like to share, that would be great until next time. Have a great week you.