Transforming strokes - Illustrator Tutorial

- [Instructor] Adobe Illustrator has hundreds of tools, pull-down menus, and functionality. So in this movie, we'll create some transform effects, then utilize some lesser known transform tools to manipulate and transform them even more. This is going to be fun. So let's get started. We're going to start off with creating just a white stroke. And we'll use the line segment tool here, and we'll find somewhere in here, and we'll just draw it out, kind of like that. Right now if we go to strokes, you can see this is 0.75, not even one point. We're actually going to go smaller. We're going to go to 0.25. So it's a white hairline stroke. And with this selected now, we can go to the appearance panel. This is where we'll set our transformation. We'll click on effects, go to distort and transform, to transform, click on that, it'll open up the transform effect window. And this is where we'll go ahead and set how we want to transform it. And this is the window where you can experiment and try different settings. That's all I did until I discovered what I liked, and that's what I'm punching in here. You want to make sure transform object is checked. All these other ones, you can experiment with these. But for what we're doing, we only need the transform objects for obvious reason. That's what we're doing. And on the copies, we're going to punch in 250. And if we want to preview it, make sure this on, I can click it, and you can see what we're going to get. That looks kind of cool. I like that it's not even all the way around. It's almost like you're going into hyperspace if you're out in deep space, but that's only because I'm a geek that I think that. So don't worry about that. Let's click OK. And all this is, if I go to key line view, which is Command + Y, you can see all this is is one singular vector stroke. It has the effect applied to it to show what it would look like if all of those transformations actually took place. What do I mean by actually took place? This is just an effect, and you won't get access to this vector art unless you go ahead and expand it. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go to object, we're going to go expand appearance. Now it expands it. So if we go back, let's deselect this and go back to key line view, we have all those anchor points and paths showing up now. So that's why you want to expand it. Right now it's group, so I'm going to go ahead and ungroup it as well. And you might have to do that a few times. There we go. Now we have the pass. Now that we have it expanded, I don't want it white, I think I'm going to recolor it. So let's go here. We're going to color this stroke blue like this, and then we're going to do something else. Under the strokes panel, this shows the size, but if you go down and you want to make sure you have the options open, so you see all these, it might be hidden, in which case, open it up, and you'll find what are called arrowheads. Now I always thought that term was kind of weird that they called this arrowheads and they call all of them arrowheads. Sure, you can do arrowheads like this, but if I scroll down, I'm going to go to what's nothing but a dot. But it still calls it an arrowhead. I don't know. That's never made sense to me. But we'll go ahead and select this dot on one end of each of the lines, the strokes in our design, and the corresponding ends we'll also put a dot like this. And if I click off, this is what you're going to get. That looks pretty good, but I think those dots are kind of small. So what I want to do is I want to increase the size of the dots, and you can set the scale for each end. They could be the same, they can be different from one end to the other. It just depends on what you're creating. In this case, I'll go ahead and bump the size up almost 200%, 175 like that. And now this is what it looks like. I think that looks pretty good. So now what I want to do is I want to take this shape, and I'll go ahead and group it just so it's easier to select. And we're going to select this, and then we're going to go over and we want to go under the width tool. You have all these warp tools here that can distort. And the first one we want to go to is the bloat tool. Let's double check this size. I think we want to try this larger. So I'll go ahead and set this size like that and click OK. Here's what the bloat tool does. If I just click on our transform design we did, this is what it kind of does. It kind of looks sci-fi-ish of sorts, almost like you're at the event horizon of a black hole or something. Kind of cool. I don't really want that, so I'm going to undo it. Let's try a different tool, and we'll try the warp tool. I'll select this, and the warp tool does what it just says. This might be a little too big to warp. Well, no, it does. It almost turns it into like a, it's either an alien tope or it's a filigree type creature that has long tendrils or whatever. Kind of a cool thing. I think the brush is a bit big. So if you wanted to, you could go into this tool again. And this size determines the brush, so I might go quite a bit smaller. And once again, from one tool to the next, some of these settings will just remain in place as you switch the tools. So that's kind of good because you might not need go adjust it, but this I think is a little too big. So let's click OK. I'll come back and you can see what you get. I'm purposely trying to be more organic with it, but you can see it just creates some crazy looking effects, which isn't bad, but not exactly what I think I want to do. So I'm going to just undo it to get the regular art back. Let's try a different tool. We'll go to the twirl tool, and I wonder what that does. Well, the name kind of implies what it does. And if I just click like this, it's going to create these kind of twirls. It's kind of interesting. If I click and drag, it'll just kind of spin it out of control like this. Let's go the other way. You get just some weird interaction with it. So let's undo that. I don't think that tool's going to help me. And actually a lot of these tools I've never used for actual work. I'm just showing you the possibilities of these tools. You might figure out some usage for it. And if so, that's awesome. That's what this course is all about. Let's go to the crystallize tool, and we'll just kind of move it like this. And this almost like explodes the strokes here. Let's do it from the inside out, since that's kind of what it does. That's interesting. But I don't think it's what I want. Let's really get crazy with it. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, just think of trying to build this without a tool like this, because you might have something where you want to demonstrate something like this. This would take forever. You wouldn't want to do that. So interesting, but not sure that's what I want. And the last one, let's go to the wrinkle tool. And this might be a little too big for the brush, but let's go ahead and wrinkle these. Yeah, I'm going to go in and set this. So let's go 120, I think 120 is fine, but I might knock it down in terms of the intensity. Maybe we go 60 like that, and all the other settings we'll leave. And then I'll go like this. Ooh, I kind of like that. Go like this. Oh yeah, let's see what that looks like. That looks kind of cool. I might go here and adjust some of these down here. I kind of like that. That looks really kind of cool. I'm going to clone this so I just have an idea. Command + C, Command + F. And just so it's not an exact replicate, I'm going to rotate it 180 degrees, and we'll go ahead and size it down a bit like that. I'll click into it, select all of these. And right now it's the blue. I'm going to go to the color panel. And because we're using global colors, I'm going to set a tint to this color to like 50 just so it looks like it's glowing from the inside out. And that looks kind of cool. So what could this be used for? Well, I don't know, but it kind reminds me of alien DNA. These are all experimentations with transform tools, so you might figure out a great usage for it. I do like the effect, so I think there could be appropriate usage for it. That just depends on the context and the project you're working on. Let's take a look at another stroke transform. And this stroke transform, we're just going to create, let's go back to the line segment tool. And we'll just create a stroke, make sure we're on the right layer. There we go, and I'll just draw a stroke out. And we're going to color this magenta. It's the same thickness, it's still 25. I think that'll work great. And what I want to do now is I want to apply the same kind of arrowhead to this. So we'll go to the dot, we'll select that, and we'll go to the opposite side and select that. Let's take a look. I think that's a little too small again. Oops, it's still in the tint mode. Oops, don't need that. So let's see what that looks like. I think the dots are a little too small. So we will go and bump these up again, 175, and here, 175. And that looks fine. Now I'll select this. And by the way, I'm using 0.25. If you wanted to bump this up a little, you could, but we're going to check it out here first. So we're going to go effect, distort, transform, transform again, we'll use some different numbers here. 199, we'll use different angle, we're going to punch in 72. And instead of 250, we're going to do, I don't know, let's try 107. And that looks pretty cool. So I'm going to go ahead and commit to that. That looks really cool actually. Let's go ahead and click in on this stroke. I'm going to bump this stroke up. Let's try 0.35 first, like that. And I think that looks better, but that looks really, really cool. I have an idea. I'm going to go ahead and copy this. Command + C, Command + F. And then I'm going to click into my copy and I'm going to recolor it gold like this. And then I'm going to take this and just kind of rotate it and place the other one kind of in between the magenta one like that. That looks kind of cool. So a lot of things you can do here, but that looks really neat. I like that design. So kind of a cool way to work, transform. Well, you might be thinking, what would this be good for? Well, I just think of the word inspire when I see stuff like this. And maybe even we could take this graphic and we could even position it like right behind the I of inspire, something like that. So a lot of things you can do with these transformation effects. It's just up to your own imagination and really working it out. Now, one thing, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to go into this. And I'm going to go into transform here. I'm just curious what it'd look like if we do do a larger number. So let's do 250. And, ooh, okay, I should have done a larger number to begin with. I think I like it better. So we'll go into this one and we'll transform this one as well so it matches like that. Oh, I like that a lot more. So there you go. That looks even cooler. I like how the dots kind of concentrically merge into the middle. Creates a cool effect. So once again, very flexible. Go in, adjust the settings, experiment, experimentation is the key here. So let's take a look at another one. This one, we'll go back to the line segment tool. I think I want this one green, and we'll go ahead and just type it out. And we'll go to effects, distort and transform, transform. And we'll try a different number here. We're going to punch in 95, and instead of 11 or 52, we're going to go 173, like that. And instead of 250, we're going to get crazy and go 300. And let's see what that does. Look at that. That's kind of cool. Again, I think right now if we go to stroke, I believe this is 0.35, let's check it out. It is maybe even better if we, I think one's too fat. We'll go to 0.5. That just looks cool. That's like, it almost reminds me of a spiral staircase or something spinning out of control from SpaceX on their latest shoot up or whatever. So kind of a cool spiral kind of look. Maybe you could use it in your branding, a company called Spiral Logic. So maybe this is their brand mark or something. Probably need to be a little simpler. But once again, just experiment with these. Try them for yourself, try different settings, see what you can come up with. The next thing I want to show you is to simplify the process of doing this is to use graphic styles. Graphic styles in combination with a lot of vector art will make the process faster. So if you take the time to create a stroke like this, and if we go to the stroke palette and put these arrowheads on the end, rather than recreating the wheel every time, just take this one, I'm going to drag it in my graphic styles here. I'll go ahead and double click on it and we'll name this Gold - Dot like that. Now I have a resource I can use over and over again, and I can go ahead and select this over here. And let's say on this one, I want to use the graphic style magenta. So I can just click it, and then immediately it applies the effect. I can select this, go to effect, distort, transform, bring up the transform effects, and now I can go ahead and punch in the coordinates I want. So on this one, we'll go 97. I kind of like what we got with 52, so I'll reuse that again. And then on this one, I'm going to go 107 like that. And we get a cool design as shown here. Now here's the thing. Once you have a transformation, if you like that, instead of having to recreate the wheel all the time, just grab this, drag and drop it to the graphic styles menu. Always get in the habit of naming these. So maybe you go spiral FX, and this is your first one, you can call it that. We can get rid of this now. So what you can do is just draw a simple stroke, and then you can click your graphic style, and it'll apply it to that stroke so you don't have to walk through everything. And if you get in the habit of using global colors, let's say I want to recolor this, well, the easiest thing to do is you don't even have to select the object. You could go to the color that we're using, which is this magenta. And let's say you want to bring in more of the blue in it, you want to pull this out, and you're kind of creating a purplish type color like this, or a raspberry color. And that's how you could do it. You could also, maybe you want this to be more of a green type color. You could do that. Or maybe you want it more of a teal color like that. Obviously you'd want to change the name. If you're going to go with teal, I would just call it teal and then click OK. Now you've recolred your graphics. So a combination of functionality and features in Illustrator like graphic styles, like global colors will help you speed up the creative process and you don't have to recreate the wheel every time. So let's go over one more thing. And this is something that's been in Illustrator since day one, so well over 25 years. And we're going to use what's called the tilde key. If you look at your keyboard, look at the top left of your keyboard, you'll see this tilde symbol on the keypad. People have referred to it as the lounging snake, like he's laying on his back. I guess I can see that, it's a creative insight. But what is this good for? Well, there is no official name for it, it was just a hidden feature somebody discovered. And I have used it over the years on certain types of projects. And I'll show you one of those in a second. But I want to show you how it works because it's kind of fun. We're going to go to gold so you can see what's going on. And we're going to be utilizing the shape tool. So once again, let's go ahead and open up the shapes panel here and drag it out. And the one I think it works best with is the circular or the ellipse tool. And you want to be working in outline only, no fill, and all you have to do is start drawing an elliptical shape. Then you'll hold the tilde key down. So if you start drawing it out, then you'll hold the tilde key down, you can create something like this. Before you deselect, group it, that way it's easier to select it, but you can create stuff like this in a matter of seconds. And it's kind of cool. It's kind of fun to play with. I call it spirograph effect. That's how I refer to it because I grew up with a toy called spirograph where you could do this kind of stuff with these little plastic templates and colored pins. So it'll work on any kind of shape tool. Like let's go to the polygon tool, we'll change the color, we'll change this to blue, and once again, you can start drawing with it and then hold the tilde key down, and you can get some pretty crazy effects like that. This is almost like it's opening a portal to creativity. How do you like that? Okay, let's go to another one. I like using the star tool. When I use the star tool, let's go ahead and go to green on this one. And I draw it out. I like the stars. They're kind of shaped kind of like that. So I'd probably start there. So you can finesse it, just don't let go of your mouse, and then just hold the tilde key down and then you can have fun with it like that. So it works on any of the shape tools. So just give it a try, experiment with it, have fun with it. And you might be wondering, "Well, what would I actually use this for?" Well, I used it on this kind of collage poster design. If you look in the background, the bottom right, you can see it there. You can see it going through the background of almost the entire design up here in the background like this. Not only that, notice I use color halftone with this, along with the spirograph type of effect. I also use bitmap TIFFs. I used a lot of those things that I'm covering in this course in this design, and that's the best part about it. You can mix and match all of the functionality, all the features, and create what you want to create. To be honest, I've only used a few of these tools, specifically the warp Tools in the last two decades. That's why I wanted to show them to you in this movie. Are they all super useful? Well, I guess that's debatable, but a few of them are, in my opinion. Until I created this movie's content, I'd never used the wrinkle tool, but was pleasantly surprised by it. I might be using that in other ways moving forward. So I encourage you to click around your toolbox. You never know what you might discover if you click on it and see what it does.