Retro Low Poly Effect Illustrator CC 2018 Tutorial Video Lecture | Adobe Illustrator: Become a Pro at Designing - Design Softwares

(magical jingle)
Hey everybody, my name is Nathaniel Dodson from
tutvid.com. Welcome right into this Adobe Illustrator
tutorial where today we're going to take a look at
this very sort of retro outrun low poly... I'm not
really sure how to describe it. It's got a lot
of different characteristics of retro and outrun
and low poly stuff. Now I also have to say. I
saw this piece of artwork a long time ago on
Behance. I don't know, a long time ago. It
must be a couple months maybe a couple
years. But I made a sketch of it I wish I
had a link to the original artwork I had
a screenshot that I saved but I cannot
for the life of me find this so if you are
the original artist of this, I would love to
hear from you so I can link your info here.
Usually, I try to link in artists especially when
doing tutorials that are based around their
artwork. But yeah, if I can find the link for this
artist's stuff I'll make sure I link them in here for sure
But we're going to take a look how to create that
effect and everything that goes along with it here
in Adobe Illustrator today right here, right now. If
you enjoy this video make sure you subscribe to
my youtube channel. let's get into Illustrator and
check this thing out!
Alright, well here we are in Adobe Illustrator and I've
gone ahead and created a new document, 2000 px
wide by 2560 tall and it's in the RGB mode. One thing
I'm going to do here before we even get going is I'm
going to shut of smart guides that I dearly love, but
in this perticular case I think they are going to be
helpful for us not to have them on, at least for a little
while. I'm going to drag in this sketch that I have this
PDF. I will make this downloadable probably as
a JPEG. I'll include it here in the description of the
video. You can see here we have it. I'm going to
go ahead and just hold down shift. I'm going to
scale it up so it's about the size of my document.
Something like this works. It really doesn't need
to be perfect. So we're going to push and pull
stuff here a little bit. And what I'll do is I will
go ahead and lock this layer. I'm going to
name it just, probably assets because it's
kind of my background assets and stuff I'm
referencing. I'm going to come down here to
panel options as well and just go with a nice
big 75 px thumbnail so we can see it and really
know what's going on with all our different layers.
I need to create a new layer here now that I locked
up my assets layer and the first thing we want to
do is begin laying out just the outline of our artwork.
So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to get rid of
the fill layer here. We're just going to work with
a stroke and I'm going to double-click on the stroke.
Let's make it something you know rediculous or very
very obvious. I'm going to go with just a very bright
blue so it's going to be easy to see what we're doing.
I'm going to grab my rectangle tool; I'm going to
click once. remember the width of our document
is 2000 px and the hight 2560 so I'm going to begin
with that. This will make up our background because
we're going to have sort of this sunset. Now we need
to go over here to the align panel. Your align panel
might not be here so you may need to go window
align and find your align panel. I'm going to make
sure that I am aligning here. Align to the artboard,
not to a selection and I'm going to go ahead and
align the horizontal and verticle center. There we
go. In fact, I'm going to give this like a five-point stroke
just so we can see what's going on. See it there?
great. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab
my the rectangle tool again actually. So let's go ahead
and just drag something out Kinda sorta like that.
But obviously, it's all kind of mixed up and
messed up. What we'll do is we'll come up here
to the properties panel and the width I know
only has to be 2000 because our document
is only that wide and then the hight here
we can probably push it a little bit bigger
maybe go like, 1075. Ohh, no. 1075 is way
too much. Let's just go 1025. There we go.
It's right around the horizon and then we
will use the align panel once again to make
sure we align horizontal, but this time we're
going to make sure we push this all the way
to the bottom. So align verticle bottom, there
we go. So that's in place, that's our foreground
Next, we'll grab the ellipse tool, I'm going to
hold down shift and I'm just going to drag
out a nice ellipse. Again, I'm just following
my sketch here. And again like I said, this
was a sketch where I was-I think I straight-up
traced it from this particular artist. So I'm going
to go with a little sun action that's right about
there. That's probably good. Don't worry about
all this stuff, you know, hanging out everywhere.
We're going to clean all this up in a moment. After
I do all this, I want to take my pen tool and I want
to begin tracing kind of each element of the tree.
The trunk and the main leaves. So I'm going
to zoom in just a touch here. I'm going to grab
my pen tool and I'll begin right up here. I'll
click once, hold down shift, come straight
down the trunk. And again it does absolutely
not have to be perfect. You can add a little
bit of your own sort of flavor to this if you
will. I'm going to just try to follow my lines
as best as possible. Give myself a nice
bit of tree trunk to work with that will
be hidden by the leaf. So that's why
I'm kind of going way up there. And
then what I'm going to do is I probably
should begin with the leaves in the front
first. So I'm going to start with this leaf
and I'll just, you know, the pen tool's
perfect because it's just straight lines, right?
As long as it's relatively close to what we've got
it's going to work. So just come through here
and now you can see I've got this leaf that would
be underneath so I'll begin out here on the
point. So I'll make the lines that I can see.
and then I'll just like pretend the leaf goes
back to there or something. I'll bring it out this way
How should I do this? I'll bring it out this way
and then like that, like that and like that. So
you can just, you know, let your imagination
kind of go wild for some of that and I'm going
to take this leaf here and it's going to pass underneath
this leaf. I'm not concerned about the lines. We're
going to kind of stack everything in its own
proper order when the time comes. I'm not
really concerned about that. I can get like
this folded overlooking leaf up here. That
would be cool. Maybe grab that. Bing, chop
back. I'm not going to worry about that little
line, we'll take care of that later. This probably
should go just like that. And I'll probably just speed
up the video here so you will be watching me
just in a sped up version of this just kind of
flying through and creating the rest of this
Illustration and getting these paths exactly
as we need them so we can go ahead and
create our own low poly palm tree. You can
see, pretty simple pretty straightforward. It
looks really complex, but we're really just
tracing those lines that we had. Now one
thing I should have done, I'm just going to
select all of these paths especially the ones
in the middle here. Now it's going to select
all the shapes for me. You know what,
We'll go ahead and select all the shapes.
I'm going to come over here and click
on stroke. I just want to make sure that
the corner caps are not points but
rather the rounded joint. It's just going
to give us a better smoother look for
this particular application. So I'm going
to roll with that. So now when I open up
layer two here you can see it contains all
these different paths that we just drew.
I'm going to begin with the path in the back
first, and let's kind of layer our color and all
of our detail and texture. Bring it from the
background all the way to the foreground. So
here we are with our rectangle and I want to
get rid of this stroke and we're going to give
this a fill but we're going to click on the gradient
swatch because we want to fill this with a
gradient. It looks terrible, don't worry. We're
going to fix that here in just a moment. Let's set
the gradient angle to -85 degrees first and foremost.
And then, the white color stop, we want to select
that come up here to our color panel and I'm
going hit the flyout menu choose RGB because
I can punch in a custom hexadecimal code here.
And the hex code I want here is C84298. So you
can see it's just this very pink color and actually,
you know what, we want this pink color as our
second color stop. So I'm going to drag that
color stop over. I'm missing a color here.
I'm going to select this first color stop.
let's try adding something that's a little bit
different here. We're going to go 3374BA
for more of this kind of blue that can transition
into this pinkish color. And then for our final color
stop over here on the right. Let's go ahead and
once more go RGB and in the hex code for this
we're going to go something brighter here.
F7911E. So we get this nice orange here.
What I'm going to do is the pink slider, I'm
going to shift it over until it's right around
25% location. And the orange slider I'm
going to shift it up until it's around about
the same 60% location just like that. So
you can see it's going to give us this really
cool sort of you know, I don't know, outrun
style backdrop that I think is pretty neat.
Now it looks like I may have dragged us
out alignment but I bet you that white
we're seeing there is just overlap from
our sketch and sure enough, if I shut the
sketch off temporarily, it goes away. We're
going to be bringing this sketch back I think
in a moment, so I want to leave it there for now.
Let's go ahead and focus on our rectangle here
and build out our foreground. So once more,
select the stroke over here in the bottom of
your toolbar. Set that to none to get rid of it.
And then we will give this a gradient as well.
Now we don't want the same gradient, but
don't worry. We can go ahead and just drag
one of these color stops off and just repurpose
what we've got here. I'm going to set this to straight
-90 to go just to one color straight to the other,
just top to bottom like that. The left color stop
I'm going to select it and we're going to change
the hex code. We'll change it to 23CCFF. You can
see very very bright blue. And I think I'll drag
this color stop inward a little bit. Let's go like
around 15% location wise. That looks about
right. We'll select the right color stop here.
The hex code for this is going to be, 2161CA.
It's going to be more of a darker blue. And
what I'm going to do here. Ummm, I think I
will just leave it at 100% actually. Let's leave
that kind of like that. So this is going to kind
of be our foreground. We've got our background
We're introducing some bright colors here,
but we're having fun while we're doing it.
Let's grab the big ellipse. Once more I'll
dump the stroke by hitting the little slash icon
select the fill. Go ahead and throw a gradient
into it. We're going to customize the gradient
here in just a second, no sweat. We're going
to first and foremost set the gradient to the
same angle as the sky. So we're going to go
-85 degrees. And I'm going to select the left
color stop here. The hex code is going to change
to, let's go F5E2, there's two, 02. So that's kind of
this yellowish it almost looks green when compared
with the blue, but let get rid of that blue and see how
it looks. Let's go ahead and double tap the hex
code for this blue stop over here on the right.
This one is going to be F0, we're going to go 50,
and finish it off with a good old 69. There we go.
Now you can see how it just looks a lot warmer.
What I think I'm going to do, I'm going to bump the yellow
location up to around 15 or so or 16, whatever.
Who's counting? I guess I'm counting technically.
And then let's push the pink back to around 7580.
Something like that. I think that looks good. Now
of course this looks funky because it's showing up in
front of our foreground so we probably want to select
this and right click on it. Choose arrange, and we
can choose send backward, not send to the back
That would put it behind the background. But if we
just choose to send backward you can see it just
sends it back one layer. So this essentially moves
the foreground in front of it, now we have sort of
a proper little sun floating in our artistic sky. Now
before we go any further, let's select the foreground
once more. Let's copy it. CMD or CTRL + C, and past
in front which it essentially pastes in place. CMD or
CTRL + F. You can see we have a duplicate of
it. I'm going to come over to my swatches panel
right here, and I'm going to choose the
simple black to white gradient. Black to white,
voila. I may extend the black a little bit. Maybe
a little bit more. I'm dragging that top diamond.
We're not moving the actual color stop. It's
just kind of extending it's range a little bit.
And then what I will do is go effect, texture,
there's texture and choose grain. And here
from this dialogue box the grain we want
is this stippled looking grain. Now we can
play with the intensity. But I think an
intensity you know, somewhere in between
20, 25 and 30 is going to work great. Contrast,
we can try bumping that up and see what it looks
like. Sometimes high contrast grain actually
looks pretty good. You may need to, that's
too much contrast. You may need to reduce
or increase the intensity and see what you get.
You know, we'll push the intensity back a little
bit. Let's go ten on the intensity and 60 on the contrast.
Go ahead and hit okay. I think that looked
pretty good. And it looks pretty bad, but we're
going to make it look good. I knew this was
going to happen by the way. Because we need
to finish the effect by setting it to the blend mode
by the way in the transparency panel. Which if you
don't have, window, transparency. Right there. You're
going to go ahead and set this to multiply and we'le
also reduce the opacity to something like 50%,
we might have to go a little bit lower. but I think
in this case, 50% will probably work for us just fine.
Alright, lets now create a series of lines here above
our... above our little foreground. So let's grab the
line tool right here and I'm going to just drag a line
straight across, holding my shift key. Just like that.
That's perfect. Now, there's no fill of stroke associated
with it as we see indicated here. So I'm going to select
stroke and let's give this a specific color. let's go something
bright. Let's go F5E202. Hit tab. you can see it's going
to be this nice yellow. I'm going to hit okay. Great. And
I'm going to increase the size of the stroke up
here in my properties panel. I'm going to go,
instead of one point, we're going to go 10
points. It's going to be nice and fat up there.
Then I'm going to grab my select arrow,
my selection tool. And I'm going to duplicate
this by holding down my ALT or OPT key
and holding down SHIFT and dragging out
a copy, and just pulling it down to, I don't
know. Roundabout right there. And we're
going to set the stroke of this one to two points.
Now what we'll do is select both of these stroked
lines and we'll go object, blend. I'm going to
choose blend options. We're going to choose
from spacing specified steps. I'm going to choose
four for my specified steps and hit okay. And then
we'll go object, blend. We still have these two lines
selected, and choose blend, if I can get it. There we go.
Blend and make. You can see this is going to give us
a perfect series of just straight lines going from the
fatter lines to the thinner line, looks good. Now I
want to select this blend of lines and right now
it's going to be way up here at the top of our panel.
I want to bring this down so it's just on top of the
foreground so we don't lose track of it. The hot
key for arranging, if I right click and go to arrange,
you can see send backward. It's the CMD and left
square bracket key. On the PC this would be the CTRL
and square bracket key. Just as a little FYI. you can
see as I do this it's just going to move it's self right
down my layers panel, I'll Kind of track the progress
of it. Where is it, here it is. Coming in for his landing.
Boom, just like that. And once we have this, we're
going to set this to the blend mode of overlay.
That's going to allow it to really strongly interact
with that bright blue behind it. And we obviously
don't want the lines hanging off the edge of our
artwork. So we'll select that blend and what I'm
going to do is I'm going to add a mask to it. so
here in the transparency panel, we can double
tap this little thumbnail and that's going to create
a filled layer mask, that's totally fine. Let's grab the
ellipse tool here and just drag out an ellipse, ummm,
maybe about, maybe about that big. A little bit wider
than our sun. We're going to get rid of the stroke on
this ellipse. This is our mask we're now working in. See
how the layers panel has changed? We're working
in this black mask, this stuff in here that's white
will show through. And you can see how the lines
have completely disappeared. Why? Because our
mask is solid black. If we go ahead and just give
this a fill of white, only the lines within our circle
will reappear, right? Voila. But that doesn't look
very good because it's got that very hard edge.
Ummm, actually hard edges aren't too bad with
this design. But I think I want it to be a little bit
faded. So I'm going to go ahead and change the
fill to a gradient. And I'm going to go with, not
the linear, but rather the radial gradient. And then
I'm going to just begin adjusting this. So I want more
of the lines to be showing. So I'm going to drag the
diamond over to increase the power of the white,
and I'm going to slide the black over. Now you
can see how the lines never quite entirely fade away.
That's because this black is not a true black. You can see
how it's not getting all the way back down, all the way down
to those really solid blacks. There we go, now,
now we've got some fading action going on just
like that, looking good. Alright, once we're done
creating this mask we can go ahead and just click
on the regular thumbnail and resume our normal
editing process. So at this point we want to go ahead
and turn on our smart guides again by going
view, smart guides, turn them on. And we're
going to, I'm going to lock up anything in
the background that we've created already
so just turn on the locks in the layers panel
for all these objects all the way up to the
blend of lines. Now what we're going to do is
we're going to trace out the trunk and we're
going to do it with the leaves as well but I'm
going to begin with the trunk because hey,
the trunk is cool. So I'm going to grab the
pen tool and let's go ahead and choose our
stroke color. This is going to be important
because it's going to be the stoke color we
roll with. We can always change it later, but
we just want it to be something very visible.
So the stroke is going to be 29E6FF. A very very
light, bright blue. I'm going to hit okay for that
and I'm going to bump the stroke way up
to three points and I'm going to make sure
the cap is a rounded join. Not the corner
straight joint. I also want to give these shapes
a fill color, and that fill color is going to
be 2470BC. So just kind of like a medium
cobalty looking blue. We'll hit ok there and
now with smart guides turned on, we can
hover over, you can see there it's telling me
yup, that's an anchor point. So I can click there.
I can draw all the way down. Get down to the
next anchor point, great. And what I can do is
just begin creating my design. I can say yup,
intersect with the path, there we go. There's my
first shape. Then I can hold down shift as I hover
over an anchor point. That's going to allow me to
create a totally new path. I can just go ahead and
start drawing out this tree trunk. Once I've done that,
hold down shift here at the point. let's go ahead
and bend the tree trunk this way. And voila, just
like that. Hold down shift once more and let's
go ahead and create the tree trunk this way. I
really want to make sure that I'm hovering, you
can see it's going to tell me, yup you're at an
anchor point. That's going to just ensure that
everything lines up absolutely perfectly. We
just get this really cool looking tree trunk now.
and at this point, you can hover over this and
select. You're going to have all your new shapes
up here at the top. But remember, we have that
tree trunk path. We technically don't need that
anymore and you really don't want it to be there,
because it's going... It could potentially show a
little bit outside of the shapes that you're drawing.
That's going to be no good. So that, I would probably
take this point and just drag it to the garbidge. What
I would do with the trunk, I would probably grab the
trunk and hit CMD or CTRL + G. Group it together.
And if you're an organization freak, you can just
give it a name (trunk). There we go, we know
there is our low poly trunk. We're going to go in
later and adjust the brightness of the colors
and you know, add some depth and dimension
to this as well. But, I'm going to go ahead really
really quickly. Well, you know what? Let's do
one of the leaves together and then I'm going
to just speed through the rest of the leaves
and then we'll talk about coloring and shading.
So let's take the pen tool. Let's go with this
foreground leaf here. So there's an anchor.
What I like to do with the leaves is actually
not begin at the back. I like to begin at the
front, because the idea is I want to split
the leaf in half with my shapes. So just
watch this. I'm going to begin at the anchor
and I'm going to say, look, come back to here
first, and then find the anchor point joint
in the edge, there we go. All these shapes
should be triangles. So we have a perfect
triangle, great. I'm going to hold down shift.
Let's draw out another triangle this way.
Let's come across, boom. Just like that. So
this middle line; remember this is sort of
going to have to come all the way back
to the rearmost point in the leaf if we
want this to be a really nice convincing
looking leaf. Hold down shift. Let's join
this over here. Let's go this way, and boom.
Then I'll go ahead and hold shift. Let's bring
this up to about here. And then we will join this across.
We're just making triangle after triangle after triangle.
I'm going to bring this right up to here, voila. Always of
course, make sure you join it off. Hold down shift.
I'm going to make this completing triangle here.
Great. Right now we have this line and this line
here that are kind of making a b-line to the back
part of the leaf. So I'm going to hold down shift
here. Let's join this little triangle or make this little
triangle I should say. Hold down shift again. Come
off that anchor point. And now we're going to make
the leap to the back of the leaf if you will. There
we go. And then finally, just create the last little
triangle cell that you need just like that and
we have our first leaf and we can go ahead
and add you know, just brighten or darken
diferant cells of color, and we'll add some
dimension to this. Now we're not going to do
that right away. What you're seeing is me speeding
through and finishing off all of the low poly artwork
for the rest of these leaves to get us into a position
where we can go ahead and begin doing our coloring
and shading. And just like that, I can just zoom out here
and I can begin turning all these leaves back on. We can
work on getting all the stacking order correct now as well
because the leaves have some body to them. I'm just
going to make sure I, yup, I got them all here. Cool.
So obviously the trunk should be in the back. This leaf
one, this guy here who's really should be up front. This
is the leaf that I want all the way up front. Of course I
can't select it because I locked that layer. I'm going to
collapse the properties here for a second to make
this a little easier to see what's going on here. I'm
going to select leaf number one. We'll click on
him. We'll choose to arrange, and we'll bring him
all the way to the front. This one should be all
the way up front. I think this leaf right here
should be second. So we'll right-click, arrange.
and we'll bring this guy, well not quite to the front
I guess. We got to bring him back to the front
now. Arrange, bring to front. There we go. So
those two leaves definitely should be in the front.
This leaf should be behind that. That's great. Over
here we need to do some housekeeping I think.
This leaf should be in front of that leaf. Let's hit
CMD or CTRL and the right square bracket key.
Just until we see it pop up above it. So there we go.
Now it's popped up above it. And then this little guy
peaking out he should of course should be all the
way in the back because just the little tip is peaking out.
So the right side of the tree is stacked the way it should
be. This leaf should just be kind of hanging out. Actually
select that and maybe nudge it downward a little bit. Bring
it down, bring it a little bit closer. Just something kind of
like that. So it's overlapping the leaf. That looks cool. And then
this one here should be underneath this leaf so let's
select that. Hold down the CMD or CTRL key and hit the
left square bracket key until it moves just like it should.
So now let's go ahead and begin the shading process
here. So, we have all this stuff grouped up so we
can't grab anything just using our regular selection
tool. We need to go with the direct selection tool.
I'll show you how I do this. Let's unlock the trunk.
Let's begin with the trunk. I'm going to zoom
in a little bit here. We still want to see the whole
tree in context and I'm going to hit the letter
A which gives me my direct selection tool.
I'm going to select this guy right here. What
we can do is we could use the RGB sliders.
I find it a little easier to go HSB because we
have a brightness slider. So we can just
say, yup make that one a little bit darker
and make this one a little darker but not
quite as dark as the one next to it. And then
maybe like this side of the tree we'll make
this one a bit darker. So kind of something like
that. We just change the color, we add some shape
to it, looks good. Now what we can do is begin
changing up our leaves. So I'll go with this guy in
the front. let's go with this front leaf here. We'll
make that, we'll actually make that relatively dark.
This one, the one next to it as well we'll make a little
bit darker. Again, it should almost feel like that part
of the leaf is bending under. And then up here we'll
darken this one a little bit and maybe this one back here
we'll darken just a smidge. Maybe even this one. We'll
darken just a really really little bit. Just add some
variation there. Now for the leaf right behind it. Let's
select this little cell. Let's darken that up, let's darken
this up as well. Just a little bit, oops wrong one. Let's
make sure we select the right shape there. There we
go, that shape, voila. I should probably darken the
bit here in front just a little more. Just for some variation.
Make sure it's really set off well. I'm going to select both
of these shapes. So if I select one and hold down shift
and select another, I can select multiple shapes. I'm going
to darken both of these, that's a little much. Kind of
something like that. And now you can see, I'm just going
to go through this at sort of hyperspeed. I'm going to select
the shapes that need to be darkened and just go ahead
and darken them and build up a little bit of depth here in
my little low poly retro-futuristic whatever you want to
call it illustration, it's a bunch of fun. And there we have
it. You can see, just adding that adds so much to it. In
fact, I think I'm going to make this one a little bit darker
here. Sometimes you just look at it and you realize, you
know what, that needs to have a little bit more shape
and oomph to it. So there we go. We do that, umm
and now I think the last thing I'm going to do here
before I I kind of ship this off and maybe we'll add
a little grain or maybe we'll take it over to Photoshop
bump all the colors up and add the grain there because
that's really where you should be adding grain anyway.
But let's go ahead and grab our line tool once again. I'm
going to get rid of my fill color. In fact, I'll swap my fill
and my stroke because I want it to be dark. And I'm
just going to get rid of the fill. So we're going to go
with this little stroke. And I 'm going to make it
about as wide as the base of the tree trunk. And I'm
going to open up my properties panel and we're going
to make this about 10 points. It's going to be kind of a
nice and thick down here. And I'm going to nudge it
so it's just off the tree trunk right about there. Hold down
the ALT or OPT key and drag a copy of it straight down
to about, I don't know, right about there. And then hold
down your ALT or OPT key and we want to try to stretch
this out. Maybe holding ALT or OPT's not the best way
to do this here. So let's just come up here to our hight
and we'll make this; remember our document's 2000
pixels wide. So let's go like 1751 wide. We'll make it
nice. Nice and wide. Something like that. And this one
the stroke is going to be reduced to 1. So we're going
to go very narrow on the stroke, to the thick stroke and
we're going to go object. Remember how we created a
blend before? But we need more than 4 steps or 6 steps
or whatever we did. Let's go like 25, something like that.
Hit Okay. And then we're going to go object and choose
blend and choose to make the blend. Now with this
blend, we'll go object, we'll choose to expand it. Now
we're only going to expand the object. It's a blend
object, not the fill or the stroke. So I'm going to hit
okay. And it's all grouped together. What we'll do
just temporarily is we'll ungroup this. So I'm going
to hit CMD SHIFT +G. That would be CTRL SHIFT + G
on the PC. That's going to ungroup. And now I'm
going to zoom in. We can grab these lines now and
begin just shifting them. So I want to kind of randomise
them a little bit because this sort of supposed to be
kind of the reflection of the tree in what would be
this sort of watery surface which it is sitting on. You
can see we're going to just going to drag these guys
around. They can really go any which way. I'll probably
speed the video up here just so you don't have to sit
here and painstakingly watch me go through every
little step and detail like this. And now I'll just drag a
selection over to grab them all again and regroup
them by hitting CMD or CTRL + G. I'm going to set
this group of strokes. I'm going to set it to the, not
pathfinder. I want the transparency panel, there it is.
I'm going to set this to the blend mode of overlay.
And I need to drag this down beneath the grain
because right now, you can see how it's almost like
highlighting the grain. It just interacts with the grain
differently when it's on top of it. So I'm going to select
this, and we're going to use that hotkey, CMD or the-
AND excuse me; CMD and CTRL and the left bracket key.
We're going to nudge this down. Let's move down our
layers panel. Just wait for it's arrival. Get through all
these open paths. Well, not really these open paths.
They're closed, but they don't have a fill so they appear
to be open. And there we go. We got it down beneath.
This is our grain layer here. There's our reflection.
And you can see it just changes it a little bit. Makes
it a little bit different. So that's cool. And one more thing
we can do here is grab this group, let's zoom in on it a
little bit. You can see how it's just this very harsh edge.
We could go ahead and just choose stroke and choose
to cap it with a little round cap, just like that. Maybe
it will make it look a little more organic. At the very
least, it will match the round corners we already have
in the design. But it's, you know water. Water's not like
straight and sharp-edged or anything like that. Let's
move all the way down. Shut off that underlying sketch.
This is our sketch. So what I can do now is select this
entire layer here. Well, let's just make sure nothing
is locked up cus I think we still have the background
and what-not locked up. Let's unlock all that stuff
including this blend layer. We can go ahead and just
select the overall layer. We could group this together
CMD or CTRL + G. There we go. We have it in a group.
It's kind of already grouped under the layer but meh,
whatever. We'll do it there. And let's come over here
and go up to window asset export here. And what I'll
do is I'll drag this group into this panel. You can see
because it's a group, it's going to export as one giant
asset which is exactly what I want. I don't need all these
multiple versions of PNG and SVG and all that stuff. So
I'll choose to go ahead and export this. And what I'll do
is I'll just save it right here to my desktop. There we go.
And if I bump out to my desktop, sure enough, there's
a PNG and that is my document. Now I'm going to open
this up in Photoshop real quick. So here in Photoshop,
probably the first thing we should do is add some grain
to it. So I'll just right click. I'll convert this to a smart
object. Then I'll throw it out to the camera raw editor
using camera raw filter. And here in the camera raw
editor, we're going to come over here to the effects.
And here I've got grain. So it's a good idea to just
zoom into 100% so you can just make sure you're
really seeing what you're getting here. Maybe we'll
increase the size a little bit and the roughness. We
probably need to take the amount down. You know
what, I don't want it to be quite that rough. Meh, a
little rougher than 37. Reduce the size a little bit.
maybe increase the amount just a little. We don't
want to go to crazy with it but we want it to be there.
And then I'll hit okay. And now we can like throw a,
maybe a color balance over this. Let's see what works
better if we add a little blue maybe add a little magenta
add some red to it in the mid tones. We'll go over the
highlights. What works good for the highlights?
Yellow? Umm, actually a little blue works good for
the highlights. A little magenta in the highlights.
You know, a little red will really add to the pinkness.
Although cyan makes it super blue. Let's go to the
shadows. What works good, blue. Yeah, I think a little
blue in the shadows. A little magenta in the shadows.
A little red. You're going to see. This really just takes all
those colors and just like super intensifies them very
very quickly. And then of course here from Photoshop
you could save it out wherever you want, or if you just
don't want to intensify the colors, that's totally fine
as well. You can hang out with your artwork here
in Illustrator. It looks great. It's ready to rock and roll. you
can export it, save it out as whatever kind of image you like
Alright, so you can see it was a little bit of a process. Now
speaking of processes, if you compleated the process and
you made this piece of artwork, I would love to see it. Make
sure you upload it to Instagram and tag me in it. Tag me in
the image. I'll, it will come into my tagged images section
of Instagram. I'm going to make sure I see it, I comment.
give you a little love. And ummm, yeah. It's just cool to see
what people make. Or you can also join our discord server
which the URL is popping up on screen here. Feel free
of course to jump into the Illustration and graphic design
section of Discord and share it with the world there and
let everybody see the awesome stuff you've created. We're
a friendly bunch over there. We'd love to have you. And
also remember to subscribe to my YouTube Channel here
ummm. (clears throat)
And also remember to subscribe to my YouTube Channel
right here and right now before you forget about it so
you never miss any Adobe Illustrator or graphic design
related tutorials in the past present or future. Guys, for
working with this low poly, futuristic, retro, outrun style
what do you want to call it. Palm tree, sunrise reflection
type effect here in Adobe Illustrator. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good! Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com.
I'll catch you in the next one.