Lessons

Lesson Info

Create Perspective in Shapes

This is a total mind bender. I'd like to create a box, okay, very easy. Okay, there it is, alright, there is a box. Isn't that awesome? I know, isn't that crazy? It looks like a box, but it actually is a box. Now here's what we wanna do. I wanna go in and I wanna create a box and I wanna show you how we're gonna do this. So, make sure that I get this snapped to my grid very nicely. Okay, so I wanna create a box, so I have four sides, but I wanna kind of put it in perspective. So we're looking at the box, so I can see inside the box and have it be in a nice perspective. So I'm gonna take and I'm gonna select one side with my direct selection tool. And I'm just gonna move that down, like so, as being one side of my box. And I'm now gonna copy this, I'm gonna right-click on here, I'm gonna transform this and I wanna reflect it over itself vertically, so that I get that other angle there. And it looks better too, if we go in, and I'm gonna make this slightly darker, so you can understand t...

hat this is my highlight side and this is my shadow side. Now what I'm gonna do is, this makes a great chevron, by the way, and we could stop right here, but no, we're already going down this path, we're doing it. So now I wanna create the left-hand backside of the box, so I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna option click and drag and I'm gonna copy this, but I'm gonna send this to the back, so it's behind, okay. I'm gonna do the same thing here, where I'm gonna grab this, I'm gonna option click and drag and send this there and I send this to the back and then I can change the color of this as well. You know, maybe give it a darker side so we can see there and you kind of get that whole inside the box kind of effect. And that could be kind of cool as well. I'm gonna make that a slightly darker here. Right there, so we get a little bit more contrast. There we go, so kind of have the inside of my box. And that's kind of nice. If I wanted to kind of skew this off, I could go and I could take this and move it a little bit, take this, move that a little bit, and then take this side, move it a little bit more. And that kind of gives me kind of an offset box there, if I wanna do a rectangle. But that's how I can do a box. Now if I wanted to go in and do something even more crazy, this will blow your mind, so I'm gonna copy this right here. It actually kind of creates a cool shape, doesn't it? Highlight that whole thing, hmm. So, I would like to go in and I would like to create a little tower or an obelisk right here. So, okay, freak out time. I'm gonna take and I'm just going to extend the sides here, just to make them longer like that. Like so. Then I'm gonna go with my direct selection tool and select those two corners and I'm just gonna bring that up. Check out my nice little obelisk that I have there, cool. It needs windows, doesn't it? Mm hmm. So you can actually tell that it's an obelisk. So it's really freaky here, when you see this box, you're like that's a box and it's like, okay, what just happened? I'm gonna create windows. Well how do you create windows at all these angles. Well you don't go in and draw them, that's for sure. What I do is I just use these basic shapes and I fill them with a lighter color. I just reduce them down in size and I get my perfect angle and everything. It's like oh, there's a window. I need one over here, take this, reduce this down in size too, go ahead and I make that a window or a door or whatever. Oh my gosh, look at that. Mm hmm, oh yeah, it just goes on and on and on and on. And once you develop these angles right here, now you can basically take any shape and snap it to your grid and snap it to your angles as well. Mm hmm, I know, that probably was a bit of a mind bender right there. That's one of the ones where you're like okay, I gotta watch the video and I gotta do that. But really, it's truly a mind trick, because when you see this and you pull this point up, all of a sudden, it goes from a box to that, and it's like, wait a second. Well I purposely made this a little bit darker, so that that would actually happen. Because I've done this one before. Mm hmm, so that could be a little bit of fun as well, when you go in and do little dimensions right there. Another trick if you want to go and do implied dimensions too, I wanna create like a little sphere. And I don't wanna go in and do shadow or shading on this thing, but I just want to imply that this shape is, you know, kind of round. And one easy way of doing it is, I could just take this shape, copy it and I'm gonna get rid of half of the circle, just by selecting and deleting it. I'm gonna swap over my fill with my stroke and I'm just gonna put a white stroke on here, so we can see this. And then I'm gonna take this shape and I'm just going to kind of squash it a little bit and drop it right onto my object. (laughs) I know, doesn't it look like it's round? Yeah, and if I wanted to do some type of globe, I could take that thing, that kind of arc, and I could divide it up right there, ungroup the whole thing and I could then make that darker and now I have like two halves of something. Yep, now we're starting to get into dimension. Because, oh yeah, because then we can get into a little bit of 3D stuff, but yeah, so, on and on. So I think we've got a pretty good collection of things going on here so far. Let me just jump over here really quick, to our assortment here. We're doing pretty good, because we've got all these things. Oh look, I just created that little top right there. Oh, this little kind of fence-like thing, that's a good one. We're gonna do that right now. We're gonna make that happen. So this again, is really quite easy to do. You notice how I keep saying everything is easy to do? It's all easy to do, once you know how to do it. It's like, well yeah, definitely. So I'm gonna create four different shapes. One shape and duplicate it four different times. And so I'm gonna get that, I'm gonna kind of change the colors a bit here as we go. And I got our little shapes right there, that needs to be a better color than that. Okay, oh boy, that still vibrates terribly. Okay, there we go. So I can take each one of these shapes here and if I want to do kind of this angled effect, it's actually copying all of these right here, and then as I go, to make them bigger, what I can do, and I'm actually gonna separate these by a little bit, so you can see what I'm doing here. I can go in and I can actually use my distort to go ahead and distort this, but what I wanna do is I wanna keep them all together. So if I take these and group them and use my free distort tool and use my perspective distort, I could go in and hold down my shift key and I could distort them all together. I wanted to group them all together so that they acted as one unit. And then with my perspective distort, I can just hold down my shift key and distort them all, keeping them all at the original height on this size and distorting them all doing that. And then bringing that over here. And then I could go in and I could change all of these, because I wanna just put a slight tonal change on these. Now, if I went into each one of these, I'd have to ungroup this, go under object and choose ungroup. I'd have to go through each one of these, to my colors here and you know, maybe just add a little bit more black into each and every one. Which is kind of a pain to do, so if I wanna do a nice wholesale color shift on these, Illustrator has this cool feature where you go into the edit menu, choose edit color. What I wanna do is, I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna adjust the color balance overall. Or I can actually saturate them. I'm just gonna adjust the color balance in here. What I can do is kind of go in and I can add a little bit of color to all of these. There's a preview here, where I can just kind of darken or lighten all of these overall, to get kind of more of a shading effect overall and that creates kind of this, you know, effect that I have less light. Then I can take these original shapes, snap them over here and just go and pull them all and make them all fit. And now we have, and you see some of these infographics here where they get larger and smaller. And then of course, once you do that, you do have to go in and this is required, you do have to hot dog all the ends. Yes, now this could make a really cool, you know, tent fringe or something. Oh yeah, take this all, rotate it all, mm hmm. Look at that, oh yeah, mm hmm. Little storefront, things like that. Oh yeah, that's how they do it folks. Well that's how I do it anyway, I don't know how they do it. I have no idea. For things like question marks and exclamation points and all of that, do you go to the text box and play around or can you create those? Oh, I'd definitely use the fonts because there's, yeah, for something like that, I would definitely do that. So if I wanted something, I could use my type tool and then I could type in and I could scale that and then I could use any of my fonts here. And one of the cool font features that they just added to is before you can select your font and then just put your cursor up here in your font menu and run through the text. What they just added was if you call up, let me move this over here so we can see how this works, now if you use your dropdown menu like this and you have your type selected, when you just hover over your type, you can run through your type menu and you can find all of your items and find out what's gonna work really well. You can choose anything and then you can always turn this into an editable shape, by going into the type menu and creating an outline, so that you now have a completely editable shape to go ahead and change. And it's funny you should mention that because I'm gonna jump over to my blog here because one of the cool things that I've done is this right here. With the blog, I actually did a little series around Halloween for pumpkins. Well, guess what those little pumpkin stems are. Those are just apostrophe's in different fonts. That's all they are. And I'm like, well how do I get the perfect stem? And going through and doing that, and it's like, forget it. I just went through and I literally picked a font, ran through my font menu, and that was one of them. I hate to say I think it was papyrus, but shh, I won't say anything. But yeah, I just used apostrophes and I converted that and it's like, get out, those are all the pumpkin stems, yeah. Why not? There's so many typefaces out there that are beautiful, why not?