From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

820 Drawing 3D isometric arrows in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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820 Drawing 3D isometric arrows in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're in Illustrator where I'm going to show you how to create this radial pattern of 3D isometric arrows in which the arrows appear to be pointing away from us, but without perspective. And everything you see here I drew with the simplest tool there is, that one tool that's easier than falling off a horse, by which I mean the Line Segment Tool. Here, let me show you exactly why that tool in particular is so great. All right, so here we are inside Illustrator looking at those isometric arrows. If you're working along with me make sure your Layers panel is up on screen and then drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of that panel and Alt or Option + click on it to force a display of the Layer Options dialog box and then go ahead and call this layer new arrows, let's say, and I'm going to change the Color to Violet, just so I can easily see what I'm doing, and I'll click OK. Now turn off the 3D arrows layer, because after all we're going to be drawing this artwork from scratch. And then go ahead and turn on the guides layer, which includes these center guides right here. So they're exactly centered inside the artboard. And we'll have these placeholder values that will come in handy later. All right, I want you to click on the word Stroke up here on the left side of the control panel, change the light weight value to two, and then go ahead and set Caps to Round Cap, and then set Corners to Round Join, and press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac to accept that change. Now the easiest way to draw very structured isometric artwork is to use the Line Segment Tool right here, so go ahead and select it from the Line Tool fly-out menu and then position your cursor at the exact intersection of those two guidelines. And by the way, for the best results you want to make sure that your Smart Guides under the View menu are turned on. All right, so I'll go ahead and click right there, that's going to force a display of this dialog box. And I'll change the Length value to 100 points and I'll change the Angle value to zero degrees, which will result in a horizontal line to the right of my click point. At which point I'll click OK and we end up with this two point line right here. All right, now we need to rotate it by switching to the Rotate Tool, which you can get by pressing the R key. And then go ahead and Alt or Option + click at the intersection of those two guidelines in order to force a display of the Rotate dialog box. We're looking for an Angle value of 60 degrees. If the Preview checkbox is on you can see what you're doing. Then click on the Copy button. All right, now press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and go ahead and drag this guy by its bottom left point and for this to work, incidentally, you need to make sure that the Bounding Box is turned off. So if under the View menu you see the words Hide Bounding Box right here choose the command. If the command reads Show Bounding Box, as it does for me, go ahead and hit the Escape key. All right, now drag this bottom left point here until it snaps into alignment with this right hand anchor point, the stationary one, and then press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac, so you're seeing a double arrowhead cursor, and release in order to duplicate that line. Now click the horizontal line to select it and drag it by its left hand point until it snaps into alignment right there, and then press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac in order to duplicate it. Now marquee these path outlines, like so. And if you end up selecting the guidelines, as I've done, then go to the View menu, choose Guides, and choose Lock Guides in order to lock them down. All right, next you want to go to the Object menu, choose Path, and then choose Join, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + J or Command + J on the Mac. And that will go ahead and fuse all those lines together. All right, note that my Swatches panel is up on screen. If yours isn't then go to the Window menu and choose the Swatches command. Do not choose the command if it has a check mark in front of it however, that will hide the panel. And now make sure the fill is active in the top left corner of the panel and select Color one in order to fill that shape, in this case with red. Now I've set things up so these are all global swatches, which means you can change the definition of your colors to anything you like. All right, now I want to rotate a copy of this guy, so I'll press the R key to switch to my Rotate Tool and I'll Alt or Option + click at the intersection of those two guidelines in order to, once again, bring up the Rotate dialog box. You should still see an Angle of 60 degrees, at which point click Copy. And now switch the fill to Color two. Then duplicate that rotation process by pressing Control + D for duplicate. That's Command + D on the Mac. And change the fill to Color three. Press Control or Command + D again and change the fill to Color four. You see where we're going with this. Control or Command + D, change the fill to Color five. Control or Command + D again and then change the fill to Color six. All right, that completes the base of the arrows. Now let's work on the arrows themselves by pressing the A key, which is going to switch you to the white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Direct Selection Tool, and click on this segment right here and Shift + click on this one, so we're just selecting the segments, then press Control + C to copy them, that's Command + C on the Mac, followed by Control + F here on the PC, that's Command + F on the Mac to paste them in front. Now go ahead and press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool up here at the top of the toolbox, click off the path outlines to deselect them, select this guy independently and drag this bottom right point here until it snaps into alignment with this guy, press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and release and that will create a duplicate. It's a little hard to see what's going on here, because they're sitting on top of the other paths, so I'll just grab them all and move them over. So I just clicked on one, Shift + clicked on the others. And now I'll go ahead and grab my Line Segment Tool once again and I will click right at this location in order to again bring up this dialog box. Change the Length value this time to 50, an Angle value of zero degrees is still going to work. At which point click OK in order to create that little line. All right, now press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool, go ahead and drag this line by this point right here, the right hand point, until it snaps into alignment at this location. And press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac and release in order to create a duplicate, like so. Now I'll partially marquee all these guys, that'll select these four, I forgot to select this one, so I'll Shift + click on it as well. So you want to have five path segments selected. And then go up to the Object menu, choose Path, and choose Join, or press Control + J or Command + J on the Mac in order to fuse them all together. All right, now move this guys back into its proper location by dragging that bottom left point until it snaps into alignment. And now you just want to grab the Pen Tool, which you can get by pressing the P key, and go ahead and click at this location here in order to activate the path, so that you are now actively drawing it, and then create this kind of stubby little tip right here. And finally, move your cursor back to the other end point and click in order to close that path. Now it's going to look terrible at this point and that's a real quandary. How do we determine where that tip should be located? And that is a question I will answer in a followup movie. OK, so as I said, we've got a problem with the tip of this arrowhead, which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a followup movie in which I show you how to make it all exactly better. The problem is when expressed as a repeating hex pattern it looks like this, which I hazard to say, is design garbage. Did I figure out a solution? Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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