From the course: Illustrator for Fashion Design: Drawing Flats
Drawing a collar and placket - Illustrator Tutorial
From the course: Illustrator for Fashion Design: Drawing Flats
Drawing a collar and placket
- [Instructor] Now that you've got a t-shirt under your belt, let's move on to something with a little more detail. We're going to cover a polo shirt in this chapter. So, just like when we started the t-shirt, we're going to open our start file, so, "open," "start file," and click "open," so, we're back to where we started again, with everything in place, except for one thing. In a previous video, I showed you how to change the default, and we never saved it to the file, so let's review that again, and then save it to our start file so it's there for next time. Instead of the Illustrator default, which has, right, these corners here, the Butt Cap and the Mitar Join, we want our default to have round corners so we can use the shortcut key for default. So, what we're going to do is click on the round graphic style, hold the option or alt key and drag it on top of the default graphic style, and that now changed the default to "round." I can change the default to any of these graphic styles, but I want it to be the round style, so let's go ahead and just draw something and hit "d" for default on my keyboard, and we can go to the stroke panel and see that, yes, default is actually round caps and round corners, so we're in good shape, so let's delete this, and now that it's set up, this would be a great time to re-save my start file so that this will be included in it the next time I open the file, and we can either go out to "file," "save," or you can just hit Command + S on your keyboard, and it will re-save the file right on top of the old file, and now we've got our default setup, so now I think we're ready to go. Let's start drawing the collar for the polo shirt. Again, it's a great idea to zoom in. It's one of the benefits of working on the computer. Don't need my glasses. Let's grab the pen tool, and we're going to do it again like we're playing connect the dots. The first click is going to be on the center guide, right where the guide meets the neckline, so click one. The second click is going to be up the neck, where the top of the collar sits. The third click is where the collar rests on the shoulder, and actually, let me undo that. I don't want it to sit exactly on this line, I want it to be maybe one point above the line so that the collar's going to sit on the shirt. The last click is going to be the collar point, and then close. You'll notice it's a little narrower up on the shoulder, and a little bit wider down here. Now, it's a pretty stiff looking collar, so we're going to finesse it a little bit using the anchor point tool. I'm going to curve it around the neckline. I'm going to curve the bottom to match. I'm going to go ahead and curve this end in just a little bit, 'cause polo collars tend to do this kind of flippy thing, and for the front, I'm going to grab about three quarters of the way up and just curve this a little bit so I get that shape. If you want, you can also grab the lower handle and sort of mess with this a little bit, pull this handle out, and kind of finesse this 'til you get a shape that you're happy with, and that's half the collar. We can switch to the black arrow, select it, and reflect it to the other side. So "o" for reflect, Option or Alt + Click on the center guide, vertical, copy. That takes care of that. Now, for the back of the collar, we're going to use existing pieces of the front of the collar, and the pieces that connect the front to the back are these two side pieces, right here. So, with the white arrow, we're going to select one on this side, hold your shift key so you can select the one on this side. And now we're going to copy them, Command + C, paste in back, which we did earlier, which is Command + B, and while they're still selected, we're going to right click, "join," and that joined the top. We're going to right click, "join" a second time, and that took care of the bottom, and now, we need to finesse this a little bit, so we'll grab the anchor point tool again, and I'm going to click right on the center line and curve this down, and then grab the top and curve that down a little bit, and that takes care of my polo collar. The next thing we want to add to the collar is a placket, and actually, before I add the placket, I'm going to select the two front collar pieces and group them together, and if I go ahead and open up my layers, you can see that group. Let's make this a little wider so we can read everything. I'm going to go ahead and name this, "front collar." And that makes this one, "back collar." Boy, my spelling is terrible. Let's make that a lowercase "a" and two "l"s. Alright, so, the placket. The placket is really just a rectangle, and the rectangle is going to sit centered right here, so I'm going to just draw a rectangle that starts where these two points meet, and down as low as I want the placket to go, and as wide as I want it to go. It's kind of a visual, there's no standard size, but you can see this isn't centered, so I'm going to grab my black arrow and I'm just going to move it, and you can see, it sort of says "intersect" there, it kind of centers itself, it snaps to that guideline really nicely. Now that we have the placket here, we need to put stitching on the placket, and there's a really nice way to do that, and we're going to do it by offsetting this path. Let's zoom in a little bit so it'll be easier to see. I'm going to select the path, and I'm going to go up here to "object," "path," "offset path." Now, when you offset a path, anything that's a positive number offsets to the outside of the path, and let's look at the preview here. See, it draws a line around the outside. If it's a negative number, it's going to draw a line on the inside, and we can see 10 point's really, really wide, so I'm going to change this to negative one point, which is just minus one. I don't have to type in points, because that's the default, and if you click "preview" again, you can see where it's going. Click "OK," and change it to "stitches," 'cause that's going to be our stitching line. Now, we don't need to see this top line of stitches, so I can select that and delete it. There's one more line of stitching we need to add, so we'll grab the pen tool, and we're going to add a line of stitching that just goes straight across from here to the other side, and if you hold the shift key, it'll keep your line constrained and nice and straight. That takes care of that part of the placket. It might be a good idea to group this together, now, so I'm going to select this whole piece of the placket and group it. Next thing we need on the placket is buttons, so I'm going to grab my ellipse tool, and we're going to draw a button. Buttons should be approximately one third the size of the placket, and I want to draw from the center out, and I want a perfect circle, so that means I'm going to hold the shift key and the option key, shift for a perfect circle, option to draw it from the center, and I'm just going to click and drag out my button, and it's about a third of the width of the placket. It's kind of a visual, and you can see right now the dash line is still set up. I don't want that, so we can go to "default," except "default" is a very, very thick outline for that button. I'd rather it be a little bit narrower, so if we go to the stroke panel, I can change the point size to point seven five, which I think is a little bit better for the shirt. I want a second button on the shirt, so, again with the black arrow, I'm going to select it, and the Alt + Drag, or the Option + Drag we used earlier, going to hold the option key, and I'm going to hold the shift key to keep them in line, and I've got the spinning wheel of death, so let's release this and try again. Going to hold the option and shift key, and I'm just going to drag this button straight down and into place where I want the next button. I'm going to release the mouse first, and then the keys, and now I've got my placket. I will select the buttons and group them together, and then I'm going to group the buttons to the placket, and now I can go, where's my placket? Here, right? Let's double check, there it is. So let's label this "placket," and notice the placket is sitting on top of the collar. We want it behind the collar, so we're going to grab this placket layer, and we're just going to drag it beneath the front collar layer, so it's sitting in the right place, and now we have a polo shirt collar with a placket. In the next movie, we're going to cover the body and the sleeves.
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.