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

905 Drawing a pool cue in Illustrator

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

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905 Drawing a pool cue in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques, the deep in the July episodes. Today we're still inside Illustrator where I'll show you how to create a very basic pool cue, that is to say the stick. Now at its heart it's a rectangle, along with an ellipse for the tip, a few anchor point level modifications, some adjustments using dynamic round corners, a bunch of linear gradients, and a clipping mask. The result is an hour hand for our pool hall clock. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are inside Adobe Illustrator and just to cut down on the clutter I'm going to go ahead and turn off the balls layer here inside the Layers panel. Then I'll click on the table layer in order to select it and I'm going to create a new layer by dropping down to this little plus icon at the bottom of the panel. In previous version of Illustrator it looks like a page icon. Regardless of its appearance, you Alt or Option + click on it in order to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box. And I'll go ahead and call this layer sticks and then I'll change the Color to Violet and click OK. All right, now I want to bring back the guides layer, so that we can see our vertical and horizontal center guides, and I'm going to zoom in on this location right here and I'm doing that using the Zoom Tool, which you can get on the fly by pressing the Control and Spacebar keys, that's Command and Spacebar on the Mac. And next I'll go up to the View menu and just confirm that my Smart Guides are turned on. After which point I'll go ahead and select the Rectangle Tool from the Shape Tool fly-out menu. And now I'll go ahead and click at the intersection of those two center guides in order to bring up the Rectangle dialog box. And I want to create a rectangle that's 320 points wide and 16 points tall, I just happen to know that's going to work out, and then I'll click OK. All right, I'm going to zoom in a little more here, just so I can see the rectangle in a little more detail. I don't want a stroke, so I'll click on the second swatch up here in the horizontal control panel. If you can't see that panel then go to the Window menu and just choose the Control command. I happen to like this panel much better than the new bloated Properties panel. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on that second swatch right there and set it to none, so that we have no stroke, like so. And then I'll go to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the Gradient panel. Now if you're working along with me you want to make sure your Swatches panel is up on-screen, in which case notice this third group, it's called felt and sticks. And it contains a couple of swatches for the felt, the green felt in the background. So we have the highlight and shadow colors. And then we have these colors called light wood, dark brown, and medium wood. I'm going to grab dark brown right there and drag it and drop it at the very beginning of my gradient slider, as you can see right here. And notice that we have just this eensy-teensy bit of white over on the far left-hand side of the rectangle and that's because I didn't replace white, it's still there, I just put brown on top of it. So I'm going to grab that white color stop and drag it down to get rid of it. And then I'll drag this brown color stop all the way over to the left, so its Location value is 0%. And so that's something you want to keep an eye on. Every once in a while Illustrator doesn't replace the color in a gradient, it just adds to it. All right, now you want to grab this guy, medium wood, and drag it and drop it onto the final color swatch. This time I did successfully replace that swatch, as you can see. So I'll go ahead and drag it back over, so the Location is 100%. And then I'll grab the light wood swatch and drag it and drop it any old place. And now I'll change its Location value to 50%. So that's right there in the center of the gradient. And then I'll change this angle value to 90 degrees, so the gradient is going straight up and down. All right, now we want to add a little bit of contour to our pool cue. And so I'm going to go ahead and select the Pen Tool, which you can get by pressing the P key, and this tool allows you not only to draw a new path outline, but to add to an existing one. And so I'm going to hover my cursor right here, so that I'm seeing the word Intersect, which tells me that I'm aligned with that center point right there. And notice that I'm seeing the little plus sign next to the cursor. And that tells me that if I click at this location I will add an anchor point. And now I'll click down here to add an anchor point that aligns to that center point as well. All right, now you want to switch to the white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Direct Selection Tool, but it has a keyboard of A for arrow. So I'll go ahead and grab that guy and Shift + click on this anchor point, so both of these guys are selected right here, and then you want to press Control + K or Command + K on the Mac in order to make sure that the Keyboard Increment, so K for keyboard, is set to one point, which it is by default. I'll just go ahead and click OK. And now I'll press Shift + left arrow one, two, three times in order to move those points 30 points over to the left. All right, now I actually want this pool cue to be centered on the horizontal guideline, so I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and I'll click right there to select the entire shape and I'll drag it by its center point until it snaps into alignment with the horizontal guideline. And if you want to make sure you're dragging exactly vertically then you should press the Shift key until after you release the mouse button. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and scroll over to this location here and I'm going to zoom in some more as well and I'm zooming in on the selection, so that sent me to a different location. All right, now what I want to do is press the A key to switch back to my white arrow tool and I'll go ahead and marquee this right edge right here and I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. All right, now I'm going to add a round tip to the pool cue by selecting the Ellipse Tool from the Shape Tool fly-out menu, and I'll go ahead and Alt or Option + click at this location right here at the intersection of the horizontal guideline to bring up the Ellipse dialog box and these are the values I came up with. A Width value of six points and a Height of eight. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. So it's a very tiny ellipse indeed. And now I'll press the A key to switch back to my white arrow tool and I'll go ahead and drag this entire shape by its right edge, incidentally, until it snaps into alignment with the rectangle, like so. And incidentally, if you want to be able to drag anchor points around like this and get really great alignment as a result then you want to make sure that your Bounding Box is turned off. So you go to the View menu and if this command reads Hide Bounding Box choose it, if it reads Show Bounding Box, as it does for me, leave it alone. All right, now I'm going to click on this edge right here, this left-hand anchor point, and I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. Now select this top right point of the rectangle and drag it down until it snaps into alignment, so you want to see a white arrow cursor. And then go ahead and drag this guy and notice that when you're not snapping it appears black, as soon as you achieve a snap it turns white. So go ahead and make sure you're snapping. Then press the V key to switch back to your black arrow tool, this guy right here, the one that Illustrator calls the Selection Tool, and marquee these two shapes, like so. And then you want to go up to the Object menu, choose Path, and choose Join, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + J here on a PC or Command + J on a Mac, and that should join everything together. If you want to make sure that your points have been adhered to each other you can go ahead and press the A key to switch back to the white arrow tool and then click on this anchor point, for example, and drag it around and drag this guy as well. So as you can see, those anchor points have been fused together. All right, I'll undo those modifications by pressing Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac a couple of times. You don't want to undo the Join however, leave things joined together. All right, now we're going to scroll over to the left-hand side of this pool cue and I'm going to switch back to the Pen Tool, again, you can get that tool by pressing the P key, and then you want to hover your cursor over this left-hand edge, so you're seeing a little plus sign, and then click in order to create an anchor point at this location and about here as well. It doesn't matter where you put it, they just need to be some place on this left-hand edge. All right, now press the A key to switch back to the white arrow tool and select this top left anchor point and press the right arrow key one, two, three times to move that point three points to the right. All right, now select this guy right here and drag it upward until it snaps into alignment with this anchor point, then select it and press the down arrow key one, two, three times in order to move that point down three points. Now select this guy, I guess I could've selected it at the same time as this point, but that ship has sailed, so I'll just go ahead and select this guy and press the right arrow key one, two, three times. And then I'll grab this guy, drag it down, so it snaps into alignment with this one, and then press the up arrow key one, two, three times. All right, now you want to marquee all four of those points, so that you can see their round corner widgets right there, and you can drag a widget if you want to in order to round the corners on the fly, or you can change this Corners value up here in the control panel to 2.5 is what I came up with and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right, I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, click on the shape to select the entire thing, and then press Control + Minus or Command + Minus on the Mac until I can see the entire length of that stick, like so. All right, now I want to create some definition inside this pool cue. And I'm going to do that using the Rectangle Tool. So I'll go ahead and select the Rectangle Tool once again from the Shape Tool fly-out menu and then I'll go ahead and click at this point right here, so that I'm aligning to the existing object, as well as bringing up the Rectangle dialog box. I'll set the Width to 130 points and I'll set the Height to 16 points, actually I'll leave it set that way, and click OK in order to create this shape right here. And then I'll go over to the Swatches panel, make sure the fill is active, and then I'll just click on this guy, dark brown, in order to fill the object with a solid color. And that's what we're going to be doing from now on, so I'm just going to switch away from the Gradient panel by clicking on the Stroke tab, which is going to give us more room where the Layers panel is concerned. All right, now I'll go up to this Opacity value up here in the control panel and I'll change it to 66% is what I came up with, so we can see through to the gradient in the background. All right, now I'm going to zoom back in by Control + Spacebar + clicking, that's a Command + Spacebar + click on a Mac, and I'm going to go up to the View menu and choose the Outline command, which has a traditional keyboard shortcut of Control + Y here on the PC or Command + Y on the Mac, and then I'll press the Control key or the Command key on a Mac, so I've got that key down, that allows me to access my last used arrow tool on the fly, and so I'll click on this path to select it. So I'm selecting that first path outline that we drew, and that will allow me to drag from this point right here and then snap into alignment. Notice that I'm snapping into alignment with this anchor point right there. You want you to notice that. So I'll go ahead and do that again. Or I could even start from this anchor point, like so, and then drag until I snap into alignment with that top left corner. And then notice I'm seeing in this heads-up display that the height value is 16 points, very important, and the width is 4.04 points. Well, whatever it is, it snaps nicely. And so now I'll switch back to the preview mode by pressing Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac, so that same keyboard shortcut that was available to us before. And I'm going to fill this path outline with dark brown, once again. But this time I'm going to leave the Opacity set to 100%. All right, I'm going to zoom out a little bit here by pressing Control + Minus or Command + Minus on a Mac, and then I'll just go ahead and Spacebar drag over until I see the far right side of my pool cue. And then with the Rectangle Tool still active I'll go ahead and Alt or Option + click along this horizontal guideline in order to not only bring up the Rectangle dialog box, but this will draw the shape from the center outward as well. And I'll change the Width value this time around to 22 points, we want to leave the Height set to 16 points, at which point I'll click OK. All right, now I'll press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac to temporarily access my black arrow tool on the fly and I'll drag this right edge over and I'm pressing the Shift key as well to constrain the angle of my drag to exactly horizontal. And my intention here is to snap into alignment with the far right-hand anchor point in that pool cue. All right, now I'll just go ahead and change the fill to white here inside the Swatches panel and then I'll change the Opacity value up here in the control panel to 50%. All right, we need to draw just one more path outline, so I'll go ahead and click right about here let's say and I'll change the Width value to four points, that's it, and then press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac, press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac in order to get my black arrow tool on the fly and drag that top right point until it snaps into alignment, like so. And then I'll go ahead and change its color to that dark brown. And I'll leave the Opacity set to 100%. All right, now I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on a Mac in order to deselect all the paths. And what I want to do is put them all inside the pool cue, so in other words I want to turn the pool cue into a mask. And so I'll just go ahead and switch to my black arrow tool, which I can get by pressing the V key, and I'll marquee all these path outlines, like so. And then I'll Shift + click on the pool cue to deselect it. Now if I were to create a clipping mask by going to the Object menu, choosing Clipping Mask, and then choosing the Make command then I would end up losing the fill and stroke attributes that are associated with my pool cue. I don't want that to happen, so instead I'll go to the Edit menu and choose the Cut command or you can press Control + X or Command + X on a Mac, then go ahead and click on that path outline to select it, and then over here at the bottom of the tool box you want to select this guy, Draw Inside, so that we're drawing inside the path outline. Now go up to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Place and that will paste those paths inside the pool cue. At which point you can go ahead and switch back to Draw Normal, like so, and then click off the path to deselect it. All right, that's it. At this point I'm just going to turn off the guides layer and then I'll go up to the View menu and choose Presentation Mode, so that we're seeing nothing by the artwork. And I'll go ahead and zoom in on that guy and pan it over a little bit to the left. And that is how you draw a pool cue by combining gradients, various opacity levels, and a clipping mask here inside Illustrator. Okay, so we now have a single pool cue pointing to three o'clock. But what if you want to add a minute hand? And you want to precisely rotate both the hour and minute hands, so that the time is 3:53? By which I mean the minute hand points to 53 minutes and the hour hand is 53 increments from the three on the right clockwise on its journey to the four. Sorry, that's impossible. That is to say, unless you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, in which case I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to do exactly precisely that. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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