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

928 Creating real artwork with basic shapes

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

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928 Creating real artwork with basic shapes

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, I'm going to show you how to make this guy, this floating triangle-face man, inside Adobe illustrator. Now trust me, even if you can't draw, you can draw this. Mostly just a bunch of equal lateral triangles set against a photographic background, a real piece of artwork made exclusively using a bunch of basic shapes. How did I come up with this? How did I, your humble narrator, come up with such an awesome, like "Wow. Deke, this is actually really good" idea? YouTube, Broken Bells, "Leave It Alone." Scrub to about a minute, 57 seconds in. I know, what a rip-off. These next several minutes, they're like something out of a crazy heist film. Like the 1955 French classic "Rififi," only, you've probably never seen "Rififi," whereas you're about to see this. All right, here's the final version of the artwork, open inside illustrator. We're going to start off inside this blank document here. Notice that it contains a couple of center guides. And so what I'd like you to do is go over to the shape tool fly-out menu and select the polygon tool which allows you to draw regular polygons and then go up to the View menu and make sure that your smart guides are turned on. Next, go ahead and click at the intersection of these two guidelines in order to bring up the polygon dialogue box. We want to create a triangle, so I'll set the sides value to three, and then I'll switch to the radius value and set it to a hundred points and then click okay. All right, I want to thicken up the stroke so I'll go up here to the horizontal control panel which if you're not seeing it, you can go to the window menu and choose the control command. Or if you prefer, you can work inside the much larger properties panel. In any event, I'm going to take this value right here and I'm going to bump it up to two points and then I'll click on the word stroke to bring up the stroke panel, and I'll change the corner to round join. And that way our neighboring shapes will align that much better. All right, I'll go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss that panel. And next I'll switch to the rotate tool which you can get by pressing the R key. Now, I want you to notice something here, see that little target, that represents the transformation origin, which in this case is going to be the center of the rotation. Now that point should actually be right there at the center of the shape which is the location where those two guidelines intersect. However, for whatever reason illustrator has chosen to place that center at the center of the bounding box and to see what that looks like, I'll go to the view menu and I'll choose show bounding box in order to turn it on. Now that's not going to immediately show you the bounding box because I'm working with the rotate tool, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key so that we can see the bounding box and the appropriate center right there at this location. However, if you take a look at where the center of the bounding box is, notice that it's much higher. It's going to be right about there. And sure enough, if I press the R key to switch back to the rotate tool, there it is. Well naturally that would not be to my liking, but it happens to work in this case, and let me show you why. I'll go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box. Then you want to turn on the preview option, start with an angle value of zero degrees and then press shift-up arrow in order to watch that shape rotate around that point there, that little target point, and you can see that at 60 degrees, I end up turning the shape upside down because it's a triangle. It only has three sides. And I also offset it over to the right, which happens to be exactly what I want. And so at 60 degrees, you can play with other ones if you want to, you can just sit there and press shift-up arrow a bunch of additional times. And that'll give you an idea of exactly how that center point works. Notice once I take it all the way up to 180 degrees the angle value that is, that I realign that shape with the vertical guide. That is not what I want, however, so I will set it back to 60 degrees like so. We still get an upside down triangle but it's now offset, at which point I'll click okay o accept that change. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. I do not want this bounding box. It's just going to get in my way. And so I'll go up to the view menu and choose hide bounding box. Notice that this command has a keyboard shortcut of control-shift-B, that's command-shift-B on the Mac. I really recommend you memorize that shortcut, because there are times where the bounding box is useful and there are times like now where it's not. In any event, I'll choose that command to get rid of it and then I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit here. And I'll drag this bottom anchor point like so up to this location so that it snaps into alignment with itself. You should see the white snapping cursor by the way. So notice when we're not snapping, we're seeing a black arrowhead. When we are snapping, when you and I are snapping together, we see a white arrowhead, at which point I'll go ahead and press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, at which point I'm seeing a double arrowhead. That tells me I'm going to create a copy of the shape like so. All right, now I want to duplicate both these guys. So I'm going to shift-click on the first shape. And you know, as long as they're both selected let's go ahead and give them a fill. And so notice that I'm seeing the swatches panel in the top right corner of my screen. If it's not there for you, you can choose the swatches command from the window menu. In any event, I'm going to change my fill, which is currently active, to this shade of orange right here. It's not necessary that you use the same shade of orange. In the long run, we're not going to be using orange at all. It'll just help us keep track of our shapes. All right, now you want to drag this guy by his top right anchor point right there until it snaps into alignment with this point right there, and then go ahead and press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, so you're seeing the double white arrow cursor, which tells you you're going to create a duplicate like so, and then click off the shapes to de-select them, click on this guy to select it and then press control-D or command-D on the Mac to duplicate it all by itself. All right, now I want to fill in a few more shapes. So I'll select this guy, that top right shape and then I'll switch back to the rotate tool. Again, you can get it by pressing the R key. Great shortcut, use this tool all the time. You want to alt or option-click on this bottom anchor point, right there. An angle value of 60 degrees is going to work just great. Except this time, you want to click on the copy button in order to create a copy of that shape. And I'm going to change its fill. Again, I'm just doing this so that I can better keep track of all the shapes we'll be creating here. And so I'm going to set it to the shade of blue. Let's say just cause it's a nice complement, and then I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll drag this new guy by his top anchor point until it snaps into alignment with this point right here, at which point I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac in order to create a duplicate of that shape. All right, now I want to scale that shape a little bit, so I'm going to go in and switch to the scale tool which has a keyboard shortcut of S and I want to alt-click or option-click on the top anchor point. That brings up the scale dialog box, and it also goes ahead and sets the location of the origin point right there. And I'm looking for a uniform value, just arbitrary of 108%. That's just what I came up with. And then I'll click okay. All right, I also want to scale this guy right here. So I'll temporarily switch to the black arrow tool by pressing the control key or the command key on the Mac and clicking on it like so, and now you want to release that key to switch back to your scale tool and alt or option-click on its bottom anchor point. Notice that sets the origin point to that same location once again, and this time I'm looking for a uniform value of 120%, at which point I will click okay to accept that change. All right, now we want to give this guy a chin down here. And so I'll go ahead and press the V key in order to switch back to the black arrow tool, I'll click on this shape right here in order to select it, which as you may recall, is the very first shape that we drew. And then I'll go ahead and drag it by its top-right anchor point until it snaps to this location here. So we're snapping to the bottom of the orange triangle, not the blue one, notice, so the orange one right there and then you want to press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and release in order to duplicate the shape like so, and now we're going to nudge it to a new location. And so just to confirm that we're on the same page, go ahead and check out your keyboard increment by pressing control-K or command-K on a Mac. We're looking for this guy to be one point as by default in which case click okay to accept that change if you made a change, which of course I did not. In any event, I'm going to nudge this shape 40 points to the left by pressing shift-left arrow one, two, three, four times, and now I'm going to nudge it 50 points down by pressing shift-down arrow one, two, three, four, five times. All right, now I'll click off the shape in order to de-select it, and I'll go ahead and turn off the guides because believe it or not, we just don't need them anymore. And while what we've created so far is extremely primitive. It's going to end up looking like this, which is fairly remarkable, given that we're working with one of the simplest shapes there is, an equilateral triangle here inside illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which we take what we've made so far and turn it into something that we're going to make a few minutes from now. If you're looking forward to next week, that's when we're going to take our various triangles and other exceedingly basic shapes and paint them with a few relatively complex gradients that include a few suspenseful moments of translucency. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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