From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating a looped design - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating a looped design

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- [Lecturer] Welcome to drawing vector graphics laboratory. Creating motifs that repeat visually into a seamless design doesn't have to be a complicated process. So in this movie, I want to break down how to think about structuring a loop design that I created a few years ago, it was for Ink-tober. And all I did initially, when I drew this out, was I drew this first dog head here. And by the way, this theme is dog eat dog world. That's why they're all kind of eating one another here. But I drew this first one, the top left out and just inked that, I scanned it in. Then in Photoshop, I replicated it to make it a circular motif. Then I printed it out and just did some ink wash on it. I was doing everything in black and white that year for Ink-tober. And somebody saw this design said, "How would you pull this off if you're creating a vector-based design?" So that's what this movie is in response to that question I received. And it's a simple approach and thinking when you work on something like this. So the first thing I usually do is I create what I call a drawing template. So I just lay out, we're working on an eight and a half by 11, horizontally formatted document here. And I just lay out a simple grid using basically a drawing grid that is of just using elliptical shapes circles. So this inner shape of the circle will be the inner most. And when I draw on top of this, this will guide the interior of my design. I don't want to fill it. Otherwise you kind of lose that circular shape and this outer line here, this will guide the very edge. I'll break that edge just for interest's sake. We're not going to align it perfectly geometrically with this curve. It's just a rough guide. You can see this one breaks it from my original drawing in same principle, going inward on the smaller circle. It kind of breaks inward, but we're going to create this in vector format because I want to turn this into like a t-shirt design. So this is the principle we're going to use. It's just a circular motif. It has four quadrants, upper left, upper right, bottom left, and bottom right. And we only need to focus on one fourth of this. So let's go ahead and turn off this layer. And I'm going to show you my sketch that I drew out using this grid. I just printed it out. And then on a light table just started sketching until I worked out how my dog character was going to flow within that shape, that one fourth section of this overall circular shape. And this is what I ended up with. Now, once I scan it in and place this a bitmap TIF image, I'm just going to go ahead and adjust the opacity, just to knock it back to about there, I'll lock the layer and we can go ahead and turn off the drawing template now. And this is what I'm going to be building on in vector form. Now this is simple vector buildings. Let's turn on my base factors. We'll go and zoom in here like this simple vector building. These are all just simple straight lines. And if you take the time to draw it out, you can see there is no guesswork and how do I form and shape it? You just follow what you have drawn. That is, when I work on something like this, I also think in shapes, I don't try to draw this whole perimeter of his nose, into the nostrils and try to do these perfect circles because it's easier just starting with the elliptical shape and adjusting it down here if I need to, to create that detail. So elliptical shapes are probably the fastest ones you can create in illustrator, When you create the connection, the tricky part with pulling off these motifs is how it connects to the previous one. And the easiest way to think of that is it's going to be coming out in this case from his mouth. So it's easier to build it based off of what you already created down here. Then we can rotate it in place and see how it structures itself with the backside. And you might need to make adjustments. So it's not hard. So all we're going to do is we're going to take these two shapes. That's the tongue and this part of the dog's head coming out of this mouth. And we're going to clone it again. Command C, command F, I'm going to turn on a layer and this just a copy from the drawing template that I had created. So with our copy selected, we'll select this circular shape, and I'm just going to go from the middle here and hold shift down in a lock it into coordinates of a fourth. And I'll just rotate it like that. It'll rotate it into place. So this is how it will come out of the dog's mouth. The previous dog's mouth that is, like this. And then what I normally do, is when I run into something like this, I don't try to line this up and bring it back and snap it here. You don't need to. All you need to do is close the path. So I'll connect this one to this one, that closes that path. And we'll connect this one to this one. You might be thinking, "Well, that creates these odd shapes." But it's okay. Those are easy to fix. So now if I select the whole dog head, you can see it's a closed shape, but I'm just going to hit unite. And it takes care of anything on the inside in terms of that weird shape that it left. And then we might hit unite again. Then we can select this outer one and just delete it. So that's how I resolve those problems. Now that we have, we know it's going to work. When we rotate here, we don't need this original shape. That was just to do the primary building upfront. So what we're going to do now is we're going to select the teeth because it is easier to create these separate than trying to create it as part of this outline on the whole dog's head. So we'll select these three shapes. We're going to unite and it's going to fuse them together with the whole head of the dog. Now all the interior shapes, the shapes that are going to punch through the bottom shape. We're going to select the tongue, the inside of the ear, the elements of the eye. We'll take his whiskers here and all of these we'll go ahead and unite those. Now, when you unite something, if we look on the appearance panel, it's going to become a group. We want to make sure this is a compound path. Make notice I have F7. So I never come up here. I just select everything. Hit F7. It turns into compound as showing an appearance, we're going to do the same thing with these nostrils. We're going to select both of these. And I'm just going to hit F7, which is my keyboard shortcut to create a compound. We'll select those nostrils inside shapes here. And just so you can see what I'm doing. I'm just going to go ahead and we're going to color these yellow like that. And we're going to take the shape of the dog's head here. We want to make sure these are on top of the dog's heads. We'll bring that to front, select this, and let's go ahead and just color the dog had black like that. So you can see these shapes are sitting on top. So now all I have to do is once again, this bottom shape, if you look here is just a path. There is no like punch through areas. So it's not a compound. It's just regular path. The yellow's a compound sitting on top of it. So we're going to select both. We're going to go minus front. It's going to push through the black like that. That looks great. We're going to select the nostrils now, which are on top, select our dog head shape. And we're going to go minus front kind of cookie cutter that detail in there. And now we have all the base artwork we need to create this nice loop design. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off my sketch. I don't need that anymore. Now that we have this, I can go ahead and select it. I can go command C, command F, which I have an F key shortcut set up called F3. I just hit F3 and it does those commands for me. I can select this circle 'cause we'll use this to register everything and I'll just rotate it, holding shift. That looks great. We'll make another copy of this, command C, command F. I'll select the circle, and we'll just rotate it into that position. And we'll do it one more time. Select this circle, hold shift. And that's as easy as it gets to create this motif. That's a circular motif like this. They're all coming out from the next dog. And I actually liked this better in my original drawing. And this is also where I'll go in at this stage. Once I have my base art, all refined and in illustrator, whenever a path or shape vector shape comes to a point, I have smart guides turned on, by the way, command U. That's why it's saying anchor. And if I'm over a path that says path, these get really dagger sharp. So what I like to do is I'd like to zoom in on areas like this, I'll select an anchor point, and if you're using the native rounding, you can just select the anchor, grab the control for the coroner widget. And I usually put a nice, subtle round on these really sharp anchors or really sharp vertices that is on these corners, just 'cause I think it looks, it just looks a little more handcrafted. Now. I don't want to do too much. That kind of ruins the aesthetic. I just want it not to be dagger sharp. So if you can compare this point with that point, that's what I'll do on all the detail here, just to button it up really nicely. And I probably do that before I rotated them into position. It's easier to do one and then you just copy and repeat and rotate to create everything. So I just wanted to point that out because I don't want to go through all that. That'll take me about five minutes to do all that rounding. But when it's all said and done this artwork is all rounded. So if I zoom in on this, any detail, you can see the little rounds, I've put up this cut in on his nose, around the areas, by his nostrils and even on his teeth, even though I want the teeth sharp, this is just going to look better. Having those really subtle rounds. It looks less computer-driven if you will. And so at this point, this a very easy design, this is going to be used on a t-shirt. Ultimately I want to create. And we just want to do some coloring on this. So maybe, you want to color it where we could go ahead and select this one. And maybe this one's going to be this red color. We'll select this will be gray. Maybe this is orange and black will just stay black like that. So you could do it multiple colored like this, but I think it's going to look even better if it's my favorite color palette, to be honest with you is probably red, black, and white. I just like the contrast. It tends to look like. So if we color it like this, I would much rather see a design like this on a t-shirt. Now I don't like wearing white t-shirts. I prefer black, like most designers it seems like. And so we want to put this on a dark background. And so this is where I think it's really going to look a lot more dramatic on a dark background. So we're going to select these two. And all I'm going to do here is I'm going to color these, not the outline, do the fill, we'll color these red, and instead of black, since it's on a black t-shirt that won't work, we'll color these gray. And I think that looks really, really cool. So a very easy principle to apply to any kind of concept. You have this concept once again, is dog eat dog world. So this is how I would kind of approach it. Just break up into coordinates. You'll only have to focus on one coordinate, then you rotate to get all the rest. But I also want to show you another way you can handle this type of thinking. It doesn't always have to be created from scratch. Like I just showed you. So let's go ahead and turn on this design. This is captain quack, who was a rejected logo concept for a project a few years ago, but I still like him. So I'm bringing him back and we're going to create a more complete design for captain quack. And we're going to focus on creating it using a brush. So if you've ever used a pattern brush, this is a perfect and ideal usage for taking advantage of this technology in Illustrator. Let's zoom in on this. So you can see exactly what I have here. It's like a golden braid type design. You just have to realize top and bottom can be however you want. It's just from left to right, it has to be a repeat. It has to be able to snap the left side here to the right side and repeat that along the course of a path to create the artwork. So if we go ahead and copy this, command C, command F. And I rotate or slide this over, and we're just going to snap. You can see how it just repeats that design. Now, when it applies to a path, the path will be in the direct center. So the top and bottom doesn't matter, but the left and right need to match to create that seamless look. So I just wanted to point that out really quick. So all we're going to do now is we're going to go to brushes. We're going to grab our artwork and just drag and drop into brush. And we're going to select pattern brush, click okay. It'll try to create a corner for you automatically. I never use those. I just turned that off. In this case, we don't need it since it's going to be a circular motif. If this was just a black standard brush and you wanted to color it, however, and explore colors, then you would drag this in as a black and white image. And then you would click tint under here, but because we already have it colored, we don't need to worry about that. We're just going to name it. So we'll go, naval. Oh, let's call it braid. Think that's how you spell it, or naval. I'm thinking of those golden kind of cords that are on the Naval uniform. So let's call it cords. That'd probably be better and we'll click okay. So we have that selected there. We can go in and get rid of our artwork. I'll just delete that. So we're just going to select our pattern brush now and apply it to this path. And this is what you get. It looks really great. And obviously it's still in a brush format. So we'd have to expand this and clean up the artwork a little bit. And you know, you'd never want to give a file that's a live edible brush to final art. You're just askin' for problems, but this is how you'd fundamentally create it. And it goes a lot faster than trying to do this manually. So this is one way you can do that. And of course on this design, this is how I'd lock it up with type. So a couple different approaches you can do for creating a loop design. And I encourage you to give this a try yourself. The circular motif I loop for the dog eat dog world was based on a pretty small circle using a one fourth ratio. Now, keep in mind, you could use this same principle in another way. You can create a design based on a larger circle that has a one eighth ratio, which means instead of four repeated pieces of art, you'd have eight pieces of art that repeat around into a loop design and you could even change it. So they're different on each coordinate if you wanted to. So a lot of different ways you can customize it to pull off a design that's really intriguing. So this principle is flexible in that respect. So hope you enjoyed this. I want to see what you can create using these methods. So make sure if you try this, send it to me at questions@dvglab.com. I'd love to look at it. And if I do another video based off of these kinds of principles, I'll showcase them as well. Thank you for watching DVG lab, and in a dog-eat-dog world, remember, never stop drawing.

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