Alright so far you might have been watching my tutorials and following along
hopefully, but if not ,at least just watching the tutorials and trying to remember
some of the key concepts. But I do suggest you follow along with them
especially in these activities. So these activities are meant to put into
practice some of the techniques we've already learned in this section.
So I have streetlights.ai from the support files and you can open up that and use it as a kind of
inspiration or example of a cityscape. I just took a photo and just traced over it
a little bit, certain elements and then created this design and this is really a
good exercise to practice for example, shapes like a rounded rectangle here as
well as the Pen tool especially when you're dealing with straight lines like this.
There's not many curved lines, may be along the edge there a little bit.
So you what you want to do. You can use some of the photos that I've taken and that I've
included in the support files. You just go to File, New, Create a new document and then go
to File, Place and then I have one called Boston. That was when I was on a work
trip to Boston, same thing here and Las Vegas. When I was at Photoshop World, I took
this photo years ago and then this one is kind of like the other one,
example I have, and I actually took this one in my hometown and you can just use it to
trace around if you want. So what you want to do is go to Window and then Layers.
We don't think about layers as much
compared to in Illustrator but InDesign and Illustrator do have layers and
when, you can create a new layer if you want to make sure things are
on top, you can group them together. But even if you just stay on the same layer,
you're still going to be in these sub-layers here.
What you want to do is arrange them on top and behind, different elements or
whatever you create last is on top.
So with this example here, let's just say I wanted to create the bottom of
this here. Well, you could use just the Ellipse tool for that. So we can practice
using the Ellipse tool. So click and hold on the Rectangle tool, go to the Ellipse tool.
And remember if we go from the side, we have to try to guess and we can create
it right away and then adjust it or if you remember, you hold down ALT on the PC
or OPTION on the MAC and we'll go from the center like so, and that will probably be closer to
what we're trying to do. Pretty close, right. And then you can still use the
white arrow and adjust it if you want,
and we just have to decide what colors we want these to be. So you can click on
the Fill here and just choose some kind of color and then that's our first shape.
And then you want to create another shape and another shape and so on. And these
illustrations when we trace over something is just meant to simplify a complex photo.
So for the things right here, the power lines, you can just click and then
click back. You can make a little bit thicker or even keep it the same, either way.
Or you can just have it, just a line like that. I'll just hit Escape,
and I'll select it like so and then you can make it a little bit thicker and you can go to
the Layers panel and just click the eye icon on the background to see where we're at.
We're actually off the artboard a little bit so I need to make it a bit smaller but you get the idea.
You can make this artboard larger too, so if you go to Artboard and bring it down a little bit.
Artboard tool so it will fit. So you can go and click the eye icon and there we go.
Before, after and you can arrange them in here. Now if there's something on top, let me just
show you an example. I'm going to use the Pen tool
again and click here and I'm going to probably just
click something like that, a little bit above it because I'm going to move it down in a second.
And then this part you need to click and drag up to make it a little bit curved there.
Make this a slightly different color and you notice how it's on top, I need it behind.
So you can click this. Go to Object, Arrange, Send Backward or you can use the
shortcut, CTRL or Command left bracket
until it goes behind that. If you do send it back all the way, it will go behind the photo.
So you could do that and just put the photo behind it but for this example I'm actually
going to choose this bottom part here and go to Object, Arrange. Bring to Front.
Now it's on top. You can bring this down a little bit and it doesn't have to look exactly like the example.
Alright, so we're on our way to creating a stylized look and we can change it,
the colors as we go along. Again, we don't want to just use just the Pen tool. You can
also use these custom shapes or even the Rounded Rectangle you could use in some of these.
If you want to create, and of course once you draw it, you can use the
Selection tool and hover off the edge here. Rotate it, you can change the color a little bit.
We can keep toggling that so just keep working on that. I have a couple of
images you can use. If you go to File, Place and it's too large and you want it to fit
in the artboard, you can just click and drag the corner after you've placed it. Be sure to
hold SHIFT to maintain the correct proportion so something like that and
you can also click the Artboard tool if you really want the same exact size.
You can do something like that and then
with this one, for example, if you wanted a background that was kind of a
gradient, you could do that. We cover gradient later in the course but you can
just go to Rectangle tool and really just draw around the edge here
You can apply some sort of a gradient. You'd want it that way and of course you'd want to make it color.
So when I click up here and go RGB or CMYK either way, something like that.
And we wouldn't want that showing right away obviously so we'd want to draw the other elements first.
That'll be on top and if you want to use the Pen Tool, a really good one to
practice with is, I mean this one is pretty good too, but if you go to File, Place and
place this one in here. So this one, a little bit more simple and you can really
use the Pen tool here if you really just practice what they do in Curves,
going around and so this one you could create
one color as the foundation, one shape as a foundation and then you put another one
on top and another and another. I had to really simplify it so you go around like that,
however you want to do it. So once you have your traced image and you have some stylized
look, go to File and then Save for Web
and then just, up here where it says GIF, just change it to JPG or PNG. Either one will be fine.
GIF is not going to have as many available colors. If it's a simple
drawing that should be fine but I would say JPG or PNG would be better, and I want you to hit
Save. And then just place it as an image in the course discussion board and then
it just is available there for peer critique so other students can check out your
work, get feedback, how to improve, what you did well and then I can provide feedback as well.
Alright. Thanks.