647 Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous emoji

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now today, at least here in the States is Halloween, the world's spookiest holiday. And so I thought, what better way to celebrate than to create a custom emoji inside Illustrator. Now by way of example, I have these guys here which Apply is including along with iOS 11. And among them we have a couple of zombies, one for the boys and one for the girls, how cool is that. But I thought we could do even better by creating the original zombie in the form of Dr. Frankenstein's emoji.

(frightened gasp) Here let me show you exactly how it works. Alright here's the final Frank just so you have a chance to see it onscreen. We're going to start off inside this illustration and I demonstrated how to create it back in Deke's Techniques episode 500: Creating a custom angry emoji in Illustrator which first came out on March 8th of the year 2016. Now if you get a font warning, don't worry about it, we don't actually need this text. And so to get rid of it, go to the layers panel.

Notice the text layer up here at the top of the stack, click in its top right corner in order to select all the text objects and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of them. Alright now we need to adjust a few swatches and you can get to the swatches panel by going to the Window menu and choosing the Swatches command. In my case, it's already up onscreen. And notice down here at the bottom, we have this emoji group that contains a total of four global swatches meaning that if we edit any one of these swatches, Illustrator will transfer edits to the effected artwork.

And so I'm going to go ahead and double-click on this first guy Red 1 and I'm going to change its name to Green 1 and then I'll change the color mode to HSB and I'll go ahead and tab down to the hue value and change it to 80 degrees which gives us a kind of yellowish green. And then I'll change the saturation value to 80% and I'll take the brightness value down to 30%. And then I'll turn on the preview checkbox at which point you can see that change reflected inside the artwork. Around the perimeter of the head down here on the top of the lip and so forth.

At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK. So in other words, global swatches are really great tools if you want to make quick changes. Alright now I'll double-click on the second one Red 2, change it's name to Green 2. I'll tab down to the hue value and change it to 70 degrees which is an even yellower shade of green. I'll set the saturation value to 80% once again and I'll take the brightness value down to 50% and turn on the preview checkbox at which point even more of the artwork turns green.

And I want you to see that these changes are reflected not only inside this gradient fill as well as the gradient stroke around the mouth, but they are reflected inside this gradient swatch located inside the swatches panel. So anywhere these colors appear, Illustrator changes them automatically. Alright so I'll go ahead and click OK, double-click on Red 3 and I'll change the name of this swatch to Green 3 once again. Tab down to the hue value and I'll change it to 70 degrees. Then I'll set the saturation value to 70% and the brightness to 80%.

And you may look at these values and wonder if there's any reason they're so similar. The answer is no. This is ultimately just a factor of the way things work, but it does give us this pale almost lime green. And just to see how that looks, I'll turn on the preview checkbox and you can see that just about all the colors have now been modified. And this is the way I worked by the way. I didn't just invent these values out of whole cloth, I actually tested them on this piece of artwork. At which point I'll once again click OK. Alright now you can still see the shadow inside the teeth is set to this final swatch brown.

Now we don't really need these teeth and I do need a fourth swatch so I'm going to double-click on this guy and call him Green 4 and tab my way down to the hue value and dial in 80 degrees once again. I'll set the saturation value to very low to 30% and I'll take the brightness as high as it gets which is 100%. Now if I were to turn on the preview checkbox, you can see that I'm affecting the inside of the mouth. Doesn't really look all that great but it is going to work well for the Frankenstein artwork. So I'm just going to go ahead and click OK.

Alright now we don't really need many of these shapes, we just need this big outside circle. So if you're working along with me, click on it select it and then Shift + click on this right-hand eye, the big black eye right there. And what you want to do is go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command to reverse the selection so now I've selected everything but the things I clicked and Shift clicked on. And now I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of them. Next I'll click on the eye to select it and I'll go over here to the layers panel, notice this little blue square which represents the selection, go ahead and drag it and drop it onto the text layer and then double-click on the word text and change it to eyes because this is going to be our eyes layer.

Alright now with the black arrow tool active, go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialogue box. That's going to repeat my last movement which is sending the eye offscreen. Obviously that's not what I want, I'm going to change the horizontal value to zero and then I'll change the vertical value to 60 points and then I'll press the tab key. I'm assuming that your preview checkbox is turned on, you'll see the eye move downward at which point I'll click OK. Now I want to make the eye bigger so I'll switch to the scale tool which you can get by pressing the S key.

And I'll go up to the View menu and turn on my Smart Guides. So if you see a check mark in front of the command, don't worry about it, just leave it on. If you don't, choose the command to turn it on and then a Alt or Option + click on this left-hand anchor point to bring up the scale dialogue box, change the uniform value to 130% and click OK and we end up with this big eye. Alright now I want you to go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command to bring up the gradient panel. I need to be able to see all the options so I'll click this double arrow icon next to the word gradient a couple of times in order to expand that panel.

And then I'll just click on the white black gradient here inside the swatches panel to reset the gradient so we have just two swatches in all. No I want the type to be set to radial so I'll go ahead and choose that. And I'm going to set the angle value here to 90 degrees. I'll tab to the aspect ratio value and change it to 82%, it happens to work nicely. And then you want to switch to the gradient tool which you can get by pressing the G key. And notice this gradient annotator right here, you want to drag the top of it upward until it's just a little bigger than the ellipse.

And then you want to grab Green 4, the Green 4 swatch and drag it and drop it onto the first color stop on the left-hand side of this gradient ramp and then go ahead and grab Green 1 and drag it and drop it onto the final color stop like so. And you'll end up with an effect like this. Now I want to expand the light green in the center of the eye so I'm going to select this very first color stop and set its location value down here at the bottom of the gradient panel to 30% like so. Alright now we're kind of running out of room here so I'm going to double-click on the word swatches in order to collapse that panel and then I'll drag this horizontal bar upward so that we have more room for the layers panel.

Then I want you to go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to switch to the appearance panel so that you can see that this shape has two fills. So hopefully you just got done changing the bottommost of those two fills. Now what you want to do is select the top fill right there and change it to black in order to create a black pupil. Now notice the word transform right here. That represents a dynamic effect. So if I was to turn the effect off, then the black fill would take over the entire ellipse. But thanks to this transform effect which I'm going to turn back on, the fill is shrunken.

And to see what's going on there, click on the word transform to bring up the transform effect dialogue box. At which point you'll see that this particular fill is getting scaled 40% horizontally and 50% vertically. Alright now that's just fine, that's going to work nicely, but we need to change the move values so I'm going to turn on the preview checkbox, click inside the horizontal move value and take it up to six points. Not a big move, but it makes a little bit of a difference. It moves the pupil one point over to the right. And then I'm going to set the vertical value to negative four which is going to move it downward a little bit.

And that'll help to set the pupil behind the eyelid which will create the future movie. But for now, I'll go ahead and click OK. Alright now I want to create a shadow effect behind the eye and I'm going to do that by adding a couple of additional fills. And so I'll click on the word stroke toward the bottom of the stack here inside the appearance panel and then I'll drop down to the Add New Fill icon in the bottom left corner and click on it. And that creates a fill down here a the bottom of the stack. Now current it's set to black, we can't see it because it's covered by the gradient and we'll take care of that in a moment.

But first go ahead and change the color of the fill to Green 1, the darkest of our greens and then with that fill selected, drop down to the FX icon at the bottom of the panel, choose Distort & Transform and choose the Transform command to bring up that same transform dialogue box we saw just a moment ago. This time, I'm going to change both the horizontal and vertical scale values to 112% and I'll turn on the preview checkbox and you can see that that makes that fill that much larger. Now want it to go down and to the right and so I need to select this top left point inside the reference point matrix which depending on your version of the software may appear in a different location.

But at any rate, it's going to produce this effect here. So now we're moving the fill down into the right. It's actually a little bit too far to the right. So I'm going to click in horizontal value and press the down arrow key until I get negative four which is going to move that fill four points to the left. After which point I'll click OK to accept that change. And now make sure that fill is still selective, go ahead and click on the FX icon again, choose Blur this time and then choose Gaussian Blur. And we're looking for a radius value of four pixels.

And so if you turn on the preview checkbox, you're going to see Illustrator blur that fill at which point I'll click OK. Now you might ask if we're creating a drop shadow as we obviously are, why didn't we just use the drop shadow effect? Well the reason is I want to create a kind of bounce back right there so that we have a little bit of highlight directly into the eye to add a little bit of dimension. So we have what Photoshop would call a pillow emboss. And so I'll go and switch back here and I'm going to create that bounce by selecting that dark green fill and creating a copy of it which you can do by clicking on the little page icon down here at the bottom of the panel.

Now change the color of that fill to Green 2 this time around and then you want to click on the word transform in order to bring up the transform effect dialogue box and change both of the scale values to 104%. Ends up looking pretty good. Then all you need to do is turn on the preview checkbox in order to see this effect her after which point, click OK to accept that change. Alright now obviously our Frankenstein needs two eyes and so I'm going to flip this side to create a new one by clicking and holding a rotate tool and selecting the reflect tool from the flyout menu.

And then I'll press Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac to switch to the outline mode. And that way you can see the center point for the big circle in the background at which point you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on it to bring up the reflect dialogue box. Then make sure axis is set to vertical so that we're flipping around a vertical axis. And that way if you have the preview checkbox turned on, you'll see the left eye onscreen in which case go ahead and click on the Copy button or you've got a keyboard shortcut of Alt + Enter here on the PC or Option + Return on the Mac and that will create a copy of that eye.

After which I'll press Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac in order to switch back to the preview mode. I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I'll click off the artwork to deselect it. Alright now obviously that's not the entire Frankenstein, but that is how our Halloween monster begins here inside Illustrator. Alright now if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning, then I have a total of four, count them four followup movies.

Went a little nuts this time in which we will create the eyelids and the unibrow followed by the rippling hairline. Then we'll create the mouth and the scar both of which are actually perpendicular lines believe it or not, and we'll end with the iconic neck bolts. Deke's Techniques, look upon it each and every week! It's horrifying.