Transcript:
Hey, everybody, this is. Spencer, from Pixel & Bracket. And in this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to design a flat minimal tree in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started. I’m going to open up a new document that is 1920 by 1080 pixels and the RGB color mode. Go ahead and create that. And the first thing I’m going to do is pull in all my colors that I had. I’ve got a few swatches over here. We’ll, just copy those paste them over here. That’s Command C and Command V to copy/paste. And then I’m going to add all these as a Swatch in my swatches up here, and I’m just going to create a new color group out of those well. Call this we’ll call this. The forest color group hit. OK, and it because I had all of these selected. It goes and populates all the colors here in this folder, which allows me to use them quickly later on, so I’m going to create using the rectangle tool and by just clicking on that artboard here a 1920 by 1080 rectangle. That way, we can have a background, so I’m going to select this rectangle and set it to be this sort of lighter tan color. I’m going to use my align tools up here. Align the artboard and without moving my window. I’m going to use the horizontal and vertical align. Then we’re going to lock this layer with command -. Alright, so now we’re going to start creating the top of my tree, and I’m going to go ahead and use the eyedropper tool to select this first color here, this green color and then I’m going to select instead of the rectangle tool. I’m going to click and hold and select the polygon tool if I click. Once on my artboard, a little dialog box pops up. I’m just leave the radius at 50 for now and I want three sides. We’re going to be creating a triangle to start with. I’m going to hit OK, and we’ve got a triangle. So now I’m going to grab the direct selection tool. It’s the second tool in your tool bar tool panel over here to the left and I’m just going to click off the shape and then click and drag to select that top point. Then I’m going to hold shift and use the up arrow key a couple of times just to make this triangle a little bit taller now. I’ll go back to my regular selection tool and click on this triangle. I’m going to hold option to start to duplicate it and I’m going to hold shift to keep it in line, and I think I’m just going to drag it down until it. The top of it intersects with the bottom of the triangle from there. I’m going to come up here to the width and height. Make sure that they are constrained. Here that this link is is depressed. This button here and then. I’m going to click to the right of it and a little trick here is you can actually do math inside of these, so I’m going to do the multiplication icon, which is the star icon, and then I’m going to do times 1.5 which will be like increasing the size by 50% of that triangle, then go ahead and hit enter and it creates this new triangle here. I’m going to bring it up until it touches the top of this. And then how about we shift-click it down one two three clicks perfect so now. I’m going to do that, maybe two more times and just a hold option. Then hold shift, drag this down until it intersects the bottom, we’ll resize it times 1.5 bring it up until it hits the top of that triangle, which is right here and then we’ll go down three clicks, one, two, three and we’ll do this one more time hold option, hold shift, drag it down and then multiply by 1.5 times 1.5 bring it up until it intersects with the top of the triangle before it. Bring it down shift. Click arrow down one. Two three. There we go, You can see. Our tree is really starting to take shape here. I’m going to click and drag and just group all of this with command. Actually, it’s command G or you can right-click on the everything you have selected and then get group here and then what I’m going to do with this group is just centered up on the entire canvas here, so we’re going to do horizontal and then vertical line. You’ll see that these are still all separate triangles and I am going to go ahead and combine all of these into one shape with the Pathfinder tool over here in the right toolbar. If you don’t have it go down to window and then find Pathfinder, That’s a PE that it is Pathfinder. First thing I’m going to use here is shape mode, and it’s going to be the unite and it’s going to just merge everything together. Now we have one shape here. We are going to create the trunk at the bottom of the tree. We’re going to do that just with the regular old rectangle tool and before. I use it actually. I’m gonna eyedropper. Oh, well! I dropped with this brown. Oops, don’t have your tree selected when you do that. So we’re going to click off of it and then we’re going to eyedropper this Brown just to sort of load up that color and then click the rectangle tool. Now I’m going to create just a maybe tall sort of narrow rectangle. That’ll be our trunk. I’m going to switch over to the selection tool. We’re going to grab a hold of this and then shift-click on my tree and then click on my tree without holding shift. You can see this blue stroke. That’s around the tree. Now that means it is our key object, and we are ready to align to the tree. So anything else that I have selected is going to align to the tree when I use my lineman tools. So if I Center this up, it centers up on the tree, I can click off, and then I’m going to zoom in here a little bit and we can just drag this up until it hits right at the bottom of that tree, and now we actually have leaves or branches and things with a trunk at the bottom. So it’s a real tree now. If you guys aren’t seeing any of these pink lines popping up, it could be because you do not have smart guides enabled which you can go to the view drop-down and enable them down here. It’s also command you. I like having them enabled it. Lets me line things up correctly. You might have trouble lining up the initial, creating these initial branches when were aligned up earlier. If you don’t have that turned on, okay, now, what we want to do is cut this tree and half so that we create a shadow on the right side of it. First thing I want to do is just select. The tree branches select the branches they’ll start calling the branches. Sorry, guys select the branches switch over to the pin tool. Shortcut, key P. And if you’re not seeing the plus icon on the pin tool, it could be because this trunk is in front of the tree. So we’re going to grab this tree and make sure that it is on top of everything. Just right, click. Bring to front now. I’m going to switch back over to that pin tool. We should see a plus icon. There it is so that plus icon means we’re about to add an anchor point to our branches. So if we line this up using those smart guides. I know that I’m in the center, so I’m going to add an anchor point right there. Now if we start if we switch over to the direct selection tool, select all of these points to the right side of the tree and make sure you don’t select the center point or any of the trunk points hit the. Delete key and we have half of our tree branches, which is exactly what we want, so I’m going to switch over to the regular selection tool and with our branches selected, we’re going to go to object transform reflect and we’re going to reflect over the vertical axis. It’s a little confusing, It’s not like you’re reflecting vertical or horizontal. It is reflecting over that axis, the vertical axis, so it’s going to flip it to the right and we can ignore angle, don’t. You can preview it if you’re unsure what’s going to happen, but that’s exactly what we want, so we’re going to actually hit copy instead of. Okay, so I’m going to hit copy to create a duplicate because we want to keep the other side of the tree. We don’t just want to flip it, so I’m gonna hit copy And now we have a duplicate. I’m going to drag this over and my smart guides should line me up in the center, and I held shift to keep that vertically in the same axis as the other side of the tree. So now it looks like we have the same result as we had before. However, now I can grab this right side and I drop or the darker green color to create that shadow. So now we’re really getting somewhere. Let’s go ahead and create a shadow on the tree trunk as well. We’re going to copy this up in the Edit Drop-down copy and then we’re going to paste in place back in the Edit, Drop Down again, also shift control or shift Command V Shift Control V on a PC So paste that in place. If you don’t believe me, check it out, there it is. Oh, there it is so well. Go back so it’s in place. I’m actually going to change. The color of this will zoom out a little bit. I’m gonna eyedropper the darker Brown and then we’re going to zoom in and we’re going to bring this not to the center, but maybe a little bit offset of that. Otherwise there’s just this very vertical line throughout the entire piece of art throughout the entire tree, and I think it’s a little distracting, have that, so I think this is also a little bit too dark. So what we can do, there’s two things. I’m going to do first. I’m going to multiply it with the transparency window. Oh, it looks like it’s already multiplied from Swatch. I had before so it is multiplied, but it’s a little darker than the shadow of this. I’m going to go ahead and go down to maybe 50% on that. Just a slight shadow on that trunk, zoom out! This is looking great. Actually, the last thing we’re going to add is a long shadow to this, so lets. Grab everything, actually. No, we’re going to only grab the right side of the tree, so we’re going to only grab the right side of the tree, and I’m going to shift-click on the trunk of the tree, so we’ve got the right side selected and the trunk of the tree selected without this shadow and without the left side. Now what I’m going to do is go ahead and copy that, and then we’ll paste that in place again, so I’ve got it pasted in place on top of what we had before group that, and then well, you don’t need to group it and then we’re going to use the Pathfinder tool again and the Unite shape mode. Click on that, and now we have this shape that includes the right side of the tree and the trunk, so that’s laying over top. Let’s change that to black and then. I’m going to zoom out a little bit So now we’ve got this black shape layer on top of the rest of our tree. We’re going to duplicate this and at the same time, so I’ve got it. I’m kind of duplicating it. I’m holding option at the same time, going to hold shift and go 45 degree angle down to the right. We’ll take it down to where the branch is sort of hit the edge of our artboard so now. I’ve got two shapes here and we’re going to create a blend between them. So first thing I want to do is actually select this bottom shape. I’m going to go to transparency and turn the transparent transparency to zero. That’s so that our shadow doesn’t just remain a solid black all the way through. It actually goes from black and fades out so now. I’m going to select both of these. Go up to object blend, and then we’ll look at the blend options. First I want to select specified distance and we’ll do one pixel and then on the orientation, just keep it aligned to page hit. OK, nothing happens yet. We set set the blend options first, and then we’re going to make the blend second, so we’ll go back to the option. Go back up to the object, Drop-down so like blend and then make there it is our long shadow. There’s a couple things, it’s a little too harsh, so it also placed it on top of our artwork. Right, click, and we’re going to arrange and send it to the back next. Let’s unlock our background with option Command 2 and then let’s go ahead and send that to the back as well and then this shadows a little harsh, so lets let’s adjust it, lets. Take it down to 30% Okay, that’s looking pretty good. One thing you might notice here Is that that shadow actually crosses over our artboard. It’s nice to have that sort of clipped there, so let’s create a quick clipping mask. I’m going to copy the background there edit copy and then we’re going to paste it in place again, and so it pasted it in place on top of everything. We’re going to select that. Let’s get rid of the fill and I’m going to change that to a red on the stroke and let’s make it like 10-point. So now you see that a lot better will click on the clipping mask and then shift-click on the blend, and now that we have them both selected, we can right, click on either object and make clipping mask. What that does is it keeps anything that we clipped inside of it inside of the bounds of that top object, which, in this case was a stroke around the edge of our artboard so now that shadows clipped inside the artboard. That’s it for this tutorial. I hope you guys learned something during it. I hope it didn’t drag on too long for you. If you want to see more tips and tutorials, check out my Channel Pixel & Bracket click the link. Click subscribe below. And I will see you guys next time you [Music]!