Lessons

Lesson Info

Color & Function Tools

Let's go ahead and talk about color. So probably on your workspace at home, you don't have, these are the colors I've used in this document, which is why they're here, but I can select these and delete them. So we just have a blank space to work with. You probably have primary colors listed in your workspace, not necessarily beautiful things to work with, but like crayon colors. And so I want to talk about how to create custom color palettes, how to save them, how to access them later. And so we'll jump right into that. So, the way I did that, I'm gonna hide options. Up here, I just had this bar, I want to click on my fly-out menu right here to the right and hit Show Options. That brings up my stroke and fill on the right hand side too. So it's here and it's here, and then you can have access to your hues and making things different over here. So I'm just going to jump right in to making a custom color palette. And one of my favorite ways to do this is to work off photographs. So these...

are two photographs that I have taken, and I love the colors in them. And one really neat thing about nature is that nature tends to always have the perfect color palette. It has the perfect hues. It also usually has the perfect opposite hues and balances for a project. So I use photographs I've taken in nature and of flowers, of vegetables, and things like that all the time to create color palettes. So to grab colors off of these two photographs, the first thing I want to do is grab my rectangle tool. I'm just going to come down here and draw some squares. I'm gonna make them black. And I'm just going to I'm going to draw a bunch of them and the way I'm going to do that, going to introduce you to one more thing is if you have the square selected and I want to make another one. So rather than draw another one, I'm just going to drag and drop it over here. And it's kind of all over the place right now, but if I hold the Shift key down, it keeps it in line. If I hold the Option key down, it will duplicate it. And you'll know that because two arrows come up when I hold Shift and Option down. So there are two arrows there. I'll let up on Option, you'll only see one arrow. If you hold Option, you see two arrows and it will duplicate that square. So for now, let's just draw. We'll draw and duplicate like this. Okay? Okay* I'm going to introduce you to the eye dropper tool. Keyboard shortcut for that is I. So what that does is allow you to basically steal the appearance of anything else that you have in your art board. So if I have this black square selected, I'm going hit the Eyedropper tool, which is located over here on the left, and you'll see the Eyedropper tool come up. And if I click on something, it will change it to the color of whatever I'm working on. So I am going to play around with what color I might want to start with, like that one. And then I just want kind of a nice array of yellows. ] So maybe that one, maybe one more. Think we have the yellows covered so I'll move to green. That's pretty. And so the way I select this next, like if I just click here, then I've changed that to black. So I'm going to undo that. And what you have to do is hold the Command key down, like I told you before to get back to your last arrow tool. To select the next square, come right back up here and grab another green. And I'll move on to this pretty pink flower. I'll do that pink and maybe a deep, really bright pink and an orange. And I think I'm just going to select a few of these, and bring them down holding the shift key, and duplicate them by holding the Option key so that I can get a couple of other colors here. Think I want like a light orange, like that. And it's always nice to work with like a white, or like an off white. That's kind of gray, but I'll hit that one. It's always nice to just have a really neutral base color in your color palette. It doesn't tend to be what you go for though a lot of times. A deep green, and then maybe one more, like medium or really light pink here. So there I have like 11 colors or something. So they're just on my art board, but if I want to get them over into my swatches panel, all I need to do is select the colors, and then come over here to select new color group. You can name it if you want. You don't have to, but I will say CreativeLive and hit okay. And now we have all these colors in our color swatches. And it put them in order. And it put them in order. So now with this artwork over here, I can change the colors of this to something that we're going to be working with. Got it? So I'm just gonna scale that over to where it meets up. So if you were wanting to do this for say a blog post, just come in, I'm just going to do this really quickly, but you just grab these. Where am I going? Another orange? Sure. And you have a perfectly cohesive color palette. I'll tell you how to save that image. Perfect for the web. Pop on your blog and you look like a pro. I'm going to go back in to using these function tools a little bit and just show you some labels we can make out of them. Just to show you how you use these Pathfinder tools, how you build shapes, how you take things away from shapes, and why this is important to your work. So what if I just come in and make some... I already made kind of that banner? Yeah, with like to put the pointy edge banner, But say, I want to make like more of a tab and I want these to be rounded. So I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool and zoom way in and pretty good. You kind of have to eyeball making this. No, you don't. You're smart guides help you make like a circle that has the exact dimension of the rectangle that you just draw because it's snapping to that right there. So if I just bring this over, it snaps there too. Then I've rounded that. I can do the same thing over here. I am holding my Shift key to keep it in line, my Option key to drop a duplicate. That doesn't really look like it, but that's three shapes and you know that, but I just want it to be one shape. So I'm going to select all three of those and using my Pathfinder tool, hit Unite. It's one shape now. And if I want it to look kind of like a label, sort of, I'm gonna put some holes over here. So you can start like layering this. You could use this as scrapbooking or in your design work. So grab the Ellipse tool again. And I'm just going to draw like a little circle. I'm going to change it's color so we can see it. Change it to green. And it's gonna snap to the center of my object there. So I'm gonna do that. And over here, going to drop another one by using Shift and Option. Then, if you select both of these and hit Minus Front, it's gonna delete that from here. And you usually do one at a time. And when I did that, it brought it to the front. So when you want to change the arrangements of what you have on your art board, you can work a couple of different ways, but one of the easiest ways was just to right click and go to arrange, send backwards, or send to back. So there's my other green dot that I lost. So you have to have the object on top that you want to subtract from the one on bottom. So if I select both of those, it'll take that away. Then I took away my photograph, but then if you had this layered on top of the photograph, you can see the photograph peek through and maybe put a label on it or something like that. But you've just built that shape. Let's talk about the Rotate tool. So I have quickly sketched a little butterfly out for you here. This is nothing special, but you can quickly jot one out for yourself too, if you want. And we're going to be working with sketches tomorrow, but I just mainly wanted to illustrate the Reflect tool for you. So a lot of times when you're working in design, sometimes you don't want them to be symmetrical. Sometimes you do want them to be symmetrical. So I just did a butterfly line and I wanted both sides of the butterfly to be symmetrical. So I only drew half. In my sketchbook, I have lots of half butterflies because you only have to illustrate half. So I'm just gonna jump right in here and start drawing this guy. And I'm gonna use the Blob Brush tool. So Shift + B to grab the Blob Brush tool, left bracket tool to decrease the size here. And this is going to be maybe a little rough because I'm gonna use my mouse, but I'm going to try to not make it so rough and tomorrow we'll be using the Wacom tablet. And you can see that you can use both. Just one makes it a little easier than the other. I want him to be orange and I'm going to click off of him to grab this yellow color. And I'm going to start drawing this big shape here. Okay. So I could start doing this to color this in. I could even increase the size to start doing this in, but one really quick way to just get that a solid shape is to use a Shape Builder tool. And it's kind of similar to the Unite tool, but it works a little differently. It's over here, Shape Builder tool. Keyboard shortcut is Shift + M and if I select that, I can just draw straight through the shape and it makes it one shape. So you can do that with lots of different shapes. Lots of different shapes. I haven't seen that. You haven't seen that. Yeah. And I do believe this is something that's relatively new. I'm not sure how far it goes back in the CS, but if you don't have it, just use your Blob Brush tool to fill it in. But if you do have it, then all you have to do is drag through it to create one shape. I'm going to grab this one and Shift + B to get my Blob Brush tool. I mean, it's funny to have to talk about Blog Brush tools in a professional manner. I kinda like talking like Twitter always makes me feel silly, but it's so essential. Okay. I'll use your method and just get that line and did it bleed it. So the way that the white arrow tool works is that it'll delete the first point that you clicked on first. And if you hit delete again, it'll delete everything. So I'm just gonna like come in here and make some other elements. Like, I don't know, butterflies have little eyeball looking like things. Don't they? So now I can select everything on this side that I want to reflect on the opposite side. And the keyboard shortcut for Reflect is O and you can remember that because O is perfectly reflected in every direction. So I hit O. If you're not a keyboard shortcut kind of person, Reflect is over here on your toolbar. So the same thing with that marquee happens with the Reflect tool. Right now, it's dropped it in what it considers to be the middle of my illustration. So if I start reflecting this, it's going to be reflected around the middle. I want to reflect it around this body. So all you have to do is click to change the position of what it gets reflected around. Then you can start kind of, I always start on the right side and kind of do an arc over and just arc over this guy to the other side. If you hit the Shift key, it's gonna drop it exactly where it is on the other one. If you want freedom to drop it at any point, like I actually think that I do, because that is a little snugger because my body's not exactly lined up. I think I want to drop it like here. Which brings me to my next point. You have to copy it. So you hit Shift to keep it aligned. Don't hit Shift if you want to have freedom to do it, but then you have to hit the Option key to duplicate this reflection. So now I've hit the Option key, and if I drop it, it's duplicated. It is on top so I'm gonna bring the middle on top to where it's on top of everything and maybe move it over a little bit. But now we have a perfectly reflected wing set on both sides. And you know, I'm not going to finicky with this too much, but I might increase the scale wide a little bit so that it covers up all those white gaps. And you know, I don't know how, how pretty he is, but we'll work on his color and keep working with him but he's reflected. Let's draw some other shapes. Using the Shape tool, I'd like to show you the Polygon tool. So if you just start drawing, this is going to draw a polygon. And if you drop it, it's going to be filled with whatever color you were last using. To change that, you can take the fill away and just click on stroke to add a stroke to it. The other thing is that if you start drawing a polygon, this is not the only kind of polygon that exists, so if you want more or less edges, you can just use your up and down arrow keys to add those. So up adds a bunch of edges and down adds, I think you can get all the way to the triangle, using the Polygon tool. And then when you're drawing this, you can hit the Shift key to constrain the direction. So if you need one straight, like this one's not straight, but this one is. Same happens for the Star tool. If you want more points to your star, then you can just hit the up key and create some really fun things like this. More and more in this course, I believe I'm gonna hide my edges at times. So Command + H hides all these little blue points and lets you see just your work, But then you kind of lose what you're working on, but it's important to be able to zoom in and see what you're doing. So we'll go back to draw more. If I decrease the edges, I think it can get down to triangle. Yeah. And then you can just start layering these to build all kinds of different shapes using the Pathfinder tools. Whatever you are in need of, this is great for logo work. If you need a unique kind of shape, I had to do this recently, basically like a big teardrop. I'll show you this too. So it's kind of hard to make an exact replica over here using the pen tool. So we'll use the Rotate tool. So if I hold this... I'm sorry, we'll use the Reflect tool. And you grab your Reflect tool by hitting O, then you can choose to reflect over either point, but somewhere in the middle, and start dragging and dropping this guy. We lost it a little bit, but if I hold the Option key, it'll duplicate it and it'll be exact on both sides. Now these are two different shapes. I'm going to do that again in case you couldn't see it at home, I'm going to drop my reflect point at one of the anchor points that's in the center and then just bring it over here. And by holding the Shift key and the Option key, it keeps it exact and duplicates it. So this is still two shapes. And if you want it, there are so many ways to do this, but if you want it to be one shape, you can select both and use the Pathfinder tool. The other thing you can do is come in and with your Direct Selection tool, highlight both of these points right here and hit Command + J, which is join. So the keyboard shortcut for join is Command + J and what that does is join two points together. It won't join any more than that. It just has to be two that come to a point. So like when you're drawing a heart, this is great to use at both of the intersections of the heart. Then I needed to have this kind of weird shape where there was a circle cut out of the bottom here and let's make that like an oval. And I'm just going to select those two and say minus front. And this gave me a really nice symmetrical kind of teardrop with a circle out of the front. And that would have been a little more time consuming to do with the pen tool. And so using the Pathfinder and minus front tools, make that really easy.