Transcript:
In today’s a graphic design illustrator tutorial. I’m gonna show you guys how to make some realistic shadows within Adobe Illustrator. Now for today’s tutorial. I found it really neat. PNG of an iPhone on Google And you can find this file link down below for you to download. If you want to use it for yourself to practice the techniques that we’re going to go through right now, so in today’s video is gonna be really really helpful to use and utilize the layer’s window and you will see just why, as we get on with the video, but yeah, next we’re going to make a background, and you’ve seen me Do this many many times on my channel, so just press M for the rectangle tool and cover the entire artboard with a rectangle. It might be a good idea to make the background color a sample from the image itself, so in this case, the iPhone and just use the eyedropper tool to navigate around the iPhone, picking off different colors and seeing what’s gonna work best for your background design. So once you finally land on the color that you want to use, we can lock the background layer in the layer’s window by just clicking next to the eye icon. I’m gonna bring down a guide from the rulers that’s gonna act as a kind of fictitious or a imaginary ground level, and this will help me build up the shadow as I move along the design. This isn’t necessary, but I just find it helps quite a lot we’re making shadows. You can also right-click or control-click the background to lock the guides down in place. If you don’t want them moving around or being in the way so now it’s finally time to make the first shadow, so press M for the rectangle tool and then generate a rectangle like so and add a gradient fill now in the gradient window, apply black to both sides of the gradient, but then lower the opacity down to 0% on one of the ends of the gradient and this will help blend in the shadow to the background as you will soon see in the layer’s window, make sure to bring the iPhone to the front of all layers, and actually, we can lock this down as well, which will be very handy. When building up the shadows in our design, so going back to the rectangle here, and we can use the live corners in illustrator. CC – rounded off like so, but if you don’t have illustrator CC just head up to effect and then round corners. Another really useful tip here is to press the G which will access the gradient tool and here we can actually dictate the direction of the gradient and also the slider, which will help blend in the shadow to the background. As far as you can see. This is already looking pretty needs, but I’ve got some more techniques that are really gonna help build up your realistic shadows for your graphic designs in Illustrator Sonax. Come up to effect and then blur and Gaussian blur we’re going to apply a Gaussian blur to the shadow. Now how much you apply is completely up to you and also your design, but after you’ve applied it. I do suggest that you come up to the document or raster effect settings and increase this value here as it’s going to help all of the blends and the blurs. Look, that much more smooth. So that’s looking pretty neat already. I’m imagining a light source coming from the kind of top left direction coming down. So the rest of the shadow is going to be behind the iPhone itself. Kind of and I would suggest that my light source is kind of more vertically, speaking than far out to the left, so my shadows not going to be too long and elongated, so when you’re ready, press a P for the pen tool and still with the same gradient selected in the color palette, we’re going to draw a shape that will dictate the shadow. I remember this doesn’t have to be too perfect right now because we can adjust it later and also the Gaussian blur effect means that we didn’t have to be neat with our pencil paths if you’ve been drawing the path of just a stroke only press shift annex to flick the stroke over to a field or gradient and then move the iPhone layer back up to the top of the layers, and this is why we use the layers panel because even though the iPhone is locked, we can still move around the positioning of the layers Now again, press G for the gradient tool and adjust the gradient until you’re happy with the final outcome of this part of the shadow now again, go ahead and add a Gaussian blur effect to the shadow, and I really do love this gradient because it blends so well into the background, and that is one of the most, you know, crucial techniques for this kind of design, but yeah. I suggest that you add a few more shadows closer to the bottom of the iPhone to make it darker in that area, and this will add more emphasis and again some more realism to the shadows on your graphic design, But I was today’s video on making shadows in Adobe Illustrator That adds some realism to your graphic designs. I hope you learned something today. And if you want to keep learning essential skills as a graphic designer, subscribe to my channel for weekly graphic design content and of course, until next time design your future today, peace you.