In this lesson you'll learn how to use Envelope Distort function in Illustrator.
It can be used to warp text as well just like this, or work with it to custom shapes
as I'll show you. So I'm going to move this out of the way then press CTRL or command A.
Select it all and move it over to the side.
Go ahead go to File, New, create a new document. I like to teach the Warp tool
using text so go ahead and choose the Type tool, click and let go and just type in
some text. I'm going to click and drag the corner here holding SHIFT to maintain
proportion and I want to change the color of this, so I'll change it to something like that.
We've got some text typed in
and what we need to, we need to warp it.
If you look up here,
Control Panel, there's Make Envelope. There's a little down arrow so just click
the Make Envelope and it comes up with Warp Options and the one I was using is
Bulge. It kind of looks like a skateboard that we'd ride on. There's Arc, there's Arc Lower, Arc Upper.
There's Shell Lower, Flag, Wave, a bunch of different ones and they're all
customizable. So if you select one and then just left and right, move that to the right,
you can distort the perspective of it. If you just want it to reset to the default, you can go to 0,
and then do Bend, whatever you want to do. So for my example, I was using Bulge which is way too
much. I 've got to bring that back down and then you can go to Vertical as well.
Mine wasn't using that but just check out all those different effects and so once we
have, once it looks like how we want it to look like and make sure, if it's not
changing, just make sure Preview here is checked. alright. So click OK.
We've got our effect and for my example that you saw earlier this,
involves the Pathfinder panel which I cover in a different lesson but I'll show
how to use it in this context. so I'm going to just choose some kind of color for the wheels.
And what we'll do, I'm just going to click and drag down with rounded rectangle and then I'm
going to, choose a better color here, and then I'm going to ALT click and drag or OPTION
click and drag on the MAC. Hold SHIFT if you want, keep it level here and then what we need to
do is draw a shape on top of it that will subtract from... like that, maybe
a little bit lower but we can fix it and then something like this. It's a little bit off, I'm going
to reset the angle here and then something like that. So I need to copy this entire shape here
so the black arrow is selected. Click it, Edit, Copy and then we need to select this
top shape as well as these back tires and then right here in the Pathfinder panel,
just go to Window then Pathfinder, then Minus Front. Now we need to bring back
that shape, so go to Edit, Paste in Place so it's in the same exact spot and then hold
SHIFT. Click this one as well so we've got both of these selected. Minus Front again. You notice
it's a little bit off there. We can use the white arrow and just slightly modify it.
We can drag it down a little bit. If we need to zoom in, we can do that.
Something like that, and then I'll zoom out again and that one looks fine down there.
So there we go. That's the Warp tool. It can be pretty useful. There's another way to
create warp text, though, that's more customizable. So let's go ahead and
click in some more text. I'm going to show you two examples, change the color of this.
And then I'm going to ALT click and drag, and the one over here, I'll just keep it the same text
and so, instead of using a warp by clicking and making an envelope up here, or going
to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Warp, that would just warp it just like we were doing
with the skate example, right. So we could do Wave for this and that would be
pretty neat but let's just create a custom shape first and distort it to that.
So I'm going to use the Pen tool. Click, click and drag. I'm going to reset the angles and
click on that, click and drag out here, click over there again and reset the angle. So I'm creating
something custom. I'm going to make it a little bit larger So what we want to do is click and drag around both of
these and then go to Object, Envelope Distort and then instead of Make with Warp, which is what
we did earlier, we're going to Make with Top Object. What that does is it takes
the bottom object and then distorts it to the shape of the top object.
You could take even a paragraph of text and distort it to kind of a wave or a
flag pattern or some kind of page or a page that has curves that's kind of
crumpled or curved. So let's just try another one just to give you another example here.
So we have the Pen tool here. Let's just try the Ellipse tool. Click and drag that out
like that and, it doesn't matter about the color really. I'm going to customize this first though
so I'm going to use the Pen tool.
Click some extra ones in here like so and then I'm going to use,
move this in a little bit. I'm just customizing it with the white Direct Selection tool.
Just a custom shape. Then I'm going to click and drag around both of these so they're both
selected and then go to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Top Object. So there you go.
So you can create new designs with text using Envelope Distort whether
we're using a pre-made warp even if we customize it, or we can create a shape,
put it on top and then we can use Envelope Distort with a top shape. And some
designers use this to add text on a poster or a t-shirt. It just stylizes the
text as long as it's still readable. So see you in the next lesson.