Creating railings in Illustrator

Many of the buildings in Amsterdam have these nice little balconies with little railings or, or guards, window guards and stuff which are very ornate. Let us zoom on some of these, on building seven on the right, so we can see some of these because these are pretty ornate, and they you, you see them. There's two sets right there, okay? And actually there's a, a few the ones on top are different from the ones down here which are different from the ones down here. See? A whole bunch of different ones. Different railings. Now, these railings really required the use of Illustrator. You could do them in Photoshop, but it's just so much easier in Illustrator. I'm going to switch over to Illustrator right now and show you what's involved. Here's the file of the railings for building seven. Now, there's the window. And these two pertain to the little balconies. Now, up here, this one is where I sized them down. I work much larger than I need, makes it easier on the eye and files and so on. And then when I'm done, I shrink them down to the size that I need. And even then, once they're brought into the Photoshop file, they get distorted and twisted around to, and shrunk even more till they sort of exactly where they meet. As I shrink them, they tighten up. The resolution it just will conform with the resolution of file and it's easier to go down than it is to go up. If I work small and then blow it up in Photoshop, it's not going to look as good as if I go in the opposite direction. Start big and shrink it down. Okay it's just like taking a 35-millimeter photograph and try to make into the cover of a magazine. Doesn't work as well. Okay, because you're dealing very tiny little picture as opposed to a big giant picture. A 35 millimeter and that's for those people who still remember film. Okay, so now. I'm going to go in here and create a railing. Now, this is why Illustrator makes it a lot easier. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a little line here and let's make it a five-point line and it's going to go straight up and down like that. And that's the beginning of my little railing. So now I'm going to go in here and I'm going to give a little curly q, because you said there was quite a few of those in the image. So we can give it a little curly q and we have little lines that we, we little boxes that we can make and all kinds of things, but here on the line tool we have the little spirals. So I'm going to go in there and there's the spiral. So, I'm going to go in here and it still remembers that I'm working with five points so I'm going to go in here and just create this little spiral. And it's going to be just like this. There we go. That's going to be our spiral. So let me grab it and put it in position where I want it. I want it to line up right there with that. Now I don't want that many spirals so after it's done, I can easily go in there and say let's start knocking up out parts that we don't want. So I'm going to take away a few of these and let's just say we take away that one too. There's the spiral that I want and right beneath that we'll put, say a little circle or maybe two circles, whatever, it doesn't matter. Right now we're going to do just one circle. We're going to draw it right from here, let's get it nice and round, okay and this one we're going to not have it perfectly on line with it cause this one is going to be a little off. And let's move it over, just a little. There we go. It's just touching, the top and bottom. There they are. So, I can even maybe, possibly, shrink it down, just a little bit. Just so that it's in line with that other one. Right there like that. Okay? So now that I have that, what I can do is very quickly, grab these, and copy them over. Just like this. Just so that they're right in there, just like they were on the other side. Just like that. See? Now once I have it I can just say Cmd+D, Cmd+D, Cmd+D. And there you can see where I have quite a few of them. Then on the top, I can very quickly just create the another little thing which we'll say let's deselect that last one. And we'll reverse this so it's filled with black, and I'll just create the top railing just like that. Okay, and we'll go right about there, okay, so now. Now that we have that, I can take these two pieces right here, those two, and throw them away. And there's our little railing. And that's how easy it is to start to create the basic shapes that you want using some of the primitives that are here, and so on. And if you want those little guys to be a little more of a curve to them. So I can go in there and grab those. Right? And I just go into my line controls, right here, and let's go in here and then the stroke, let's bring this expanders down. Show my options. And I can say I want it to end with a little rounded tip. Just like that. And there you can see that now we have the nice little rounded edges at the ends of our curly qs. Now, in the next move what we're going to do is we're going to take this railing and bring it into Photoshop where we're going to add dimension and depth.