From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating neon graphics - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating neon graphics

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(machinery clicking) - [Narrator] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. Creating vector-based artwork is like any skill, the more you do it, the better you get. I've done a previous DVG Lab episode where we replicated the look and feel of neon, but over time, you always learn to do things a little better than you did it previously. So in this movie, I want to show you a better way that I discovered to pull off this effect. The good thing about it is it makes it very easy to turn it into an asset you can use forever. So let's dive into it and I'll show you how to do it. So it all starts with a simple stroke. I have a three point stroke here. If I go to the strokes palette, we want to have, make sure to have two attributes applied to the stroke before we start adding a different look and feel to this through the appearance panel. I want to first beef this up to the base width I want to use, which is seven. We're going to color this stroke. Instead of white, it's going to be this teal, and you want to make sure to have round caps turned on, the middle one here. That way it looks more authentic as neon, and you want to have round corners so when you apply it to a path to use it in the context of your design, it's going to wrap around it and look really authentic because neon tubing never comes to a sharp corner, it's always rounded off. So you want to keep that illusion going. Over in the appearance panel. Appearance panel is just like layers, but with magical abilities that's going to allow us to put multiple attributes or characteristics and settings on one vector object. In this case, the stroke. This is where it starts with seven. We're going to add a drop shadow now. So we're going to go up and we're going to click add new stroke here. And it's just going to remember your last setting. So we'll leave that one. The one below we'll go ahead and color it this rich black I have here in my palette, and this is going to basically be the drop shadow. Now we're going to collapse this, so we can get access to some of the controls because now we're going to apply with this selected, this layer with this stroke selected, we're going to apply a transform. So we're going to go to distort, transform, open this up, and all we're going to do is this is going to offset it from the positioning of the base stroke of teal by two points to the right horizontal and to the bottom vertical two points like this. And we can apply it, you're not going to see anything on screen since the background's black, but you will see it coming up when we apply some of the other effects. So that's all we have to do, click okay. Now that we have that, we don't want the value to be 100%, so we're going to knock the opacity down to 40, and we're going to turn on multiply for that stroke as well. So once we have those, we can collapse this. I found that if you keep these collapsed after you set it, it's a lot easier because there's times when you have multiple colors that might be the same applied to the same shape, and you might think you're working on one when you're working on the other. I know I've done that. So I just find it's easier to keep them collapsed, then access them when needed to change or revise something. We're going to keep moving forward and add more attributes. The first ones we're going to add are going to be above this base stroke. So we're going to go ahead and add a new stroke above this one, this is going to be a smaller one. We're going to make this only four points. And on this stroke, we want to simply recolor this to a tint of the base color. So I have that my color palette. You can see how it's starting to give that illusion of depth, but we want to add a nice Gaussian blur to this. Not a lot. This is actually small, so it's not going to be a large Gaussian blur, but let's go ahead and go down to blur, Gaussian blur. Two points is fine, so we'll click that. And that's just so it's not hard edge. It just softens the overall look and kind of lends to that glowing value you're going to see coming up. So once that's done, we can go ahead and collapse that again, just to keep it clean and easy and organized. And we're going to keep adding to this illusion, so we're going to add one more above it. So let's go ahead and add a new stroke. This one's going to be two and we're going to color this white. You can see how it's showing up over here in the right. And we're going to go ahead and set up a couple things with this as well. And on this one, we want to transform this, as well, and much like the drop shadow, we want to kind of reposition this with transform, so make sure you have the layer selected, click effects, clicks transform, distort and transform, then transform to open the palette, and this is where we're going to make a few selections. And on this one, we'll go ahead and reposition this minus one. So horizontally and minus one vertically. By the way, I'm using points, it's easier than using inches, in this case, because it's whole numbers and it just makes the math easier to figure out. And you don't have to sit there and well 1.01 whatever if you're using inches, it just makes life easier. I always build all my vector art in points. So I actually, over the years, I've done it so much, I kind of think in points. So that's just what I prefer, you can use whatever measurement method you want. We're going to click okay. And you can see how it's positioned it on top of that other stroke, that's great. We're going to do a few more things. We're going to go ahead and Gaussian blur this stroke, too cause I don't want it to be a hard edge. So let's go ahead and go effects, blur, Gaussian blur. We're going to use the same setting we used before, that's fine. And we'll just click okay. So you can see all these attributes: transform, Gaussian blur, all applied to this one stroke layer. That's fine. And the last thing we're going to do is we're going to adjust the opacity. We're going to knock it down by half, like this, and that's going to look fine. So if we de-select now and look at the stroke, you can see the illusion it's building. That's all we're doing is we're creating an illusion. We can go ahead and collapse that. You can see how it simplifies it if you do that, and that way you won't get lost within the appearance panel. The more attributes you have, it can get confusing, so. I wish they would let you put a title on these layers, like a real layers palette, then I could name it, and then that would make sense even more, but you can't. So I try to keep it organized by keeping it collapsed because it makes it simplified, even on the fill. We're not going to have any fill, we can go ahead and collapse that as well. We're going to keep adding a few more attributes, and this is where the illusion is going to start coming to life for this because these will be kind of that glowing, will create that glowing effect. So we're going to go down here and we're going to go ahead and add new stroke. And the stroke color we want will be the tint of the teal here. And then on the stroke size, on this stroke size, that is, we want to be the same as the base, so we'll go ahead and make that seven. And now we're going to go ahead and add a outer glow to this. So if we go to effects, it'll be under style and we'll go outer glow, like that. And the color, we're going to have to select the color, so the color on this will be the same as the stroke, which will be the tint. So let's go to our tint right there, 70% tint, click okay. The mode, the mode is how do you want this color handled? You could select a lot of different blend modes, but in this case, we're just going to keep it normal. And you can see already that you can see a subtle glow and you can even subtly see the drop shadow. That's why we added that. If you look at neon, you always see a drop shadow. And so that's it, that's the key. Now we're going to adjust the opacity because I don't want the opacity this strong. I want it to be 70 and I don't want the blur to be this much. I do want it larger than the stroke, so we'll make that eight and we'll click okay. So that looks good. Let's go ahead and collapse this again. And we're going to add another stroke here. So let's go ahead and add that. It's going to default to what we used previously with the tint and the seven, that's fine, but we're going to add another glow. Now it's going to be replicating what we just did, pretty much. And I found that stacking these glows gives a better effect than trying to get it with one effect. I'm not sure why, but it just works, so I'm sticking with it and I'll show you what I'm going to do here. Let's go ahead and add another outer glow here by going to stylize and to outer glow. It's going to remember our last setting, so this is fine, that's what we want, we want it normal still. But this one, instead of being 70, we're going to do 100% and instead of eight, we could do this up to 10. I think we're going to do nine, and you can see it's going to double down on the glow here. And I think that looks even better. So let's go ahead and click that. Now, just to show you a difference, without that secondary glow, it looks like this, which is less obvious, you add the second glow, looks really, really, really nice. One last thing we're going to do. We're going to go back to the top here and I want to go ahead and add a new one to the very top. On this last one, we're going to make this even smaller. We're going to go 1.5, we want to keep it white, white's fine. But what we want to do is we want to reposition this. Let's go in here and we want to knock the value down. We don't want 100% white, so we're going to go ahead and knock this down to 70%, like that. And then the last thing we're going to do is we're going to do another transform. Let's go to distort and transform, transform, and here. So horizontally, we're going to go minus 1.5 and we're going to go vertical minus 1.5, as well. And then we're going to click okay. So this basically created the highlight or the hotspot, if you will, for our neon and we can collapse this. So all of these attributes now have been applied to this one stroke. This one stroke contains all of these attributes and here's the magic, go over to graphic styles here, like this, and just drag this into your graphic styles. You can double click it and we'll name it. We'll call it, for lack of a better term, teal neon. So now we have this attribute, or this asset, that is, that we can start using. And this is the fun part, so let's dive into how we can utilize this for our designs, for our artwork to create really captivating stuff. So let's turn on this layer, here's an illustration. Once again, it's just a stroke, a white stroke, but if we just click the teal we just created, we can instantly turn it into neon. Is that not cool or what? There's a lot more you could do. If you want to add even larger glow, you could do that if you will. But I think this looks absolutely great. Let's take a look at another one. Maybe you just have some nice kind of hand lettering you created and you built as a stroke like this, and we're just going to select all of this, and we're going to go ahead and color it the teal, and just look at how authentic that looks. It looks like the, almost looks, reminds me of a vintage movie. So that looks awesome. So a lot of fun you can have with this. Let's take a look, another one. Here's one. Maybe you have something more structured. Maybe it's actually a sign shop. You could apply it to something like this as well. I mean, just look at how authentic that looks. It'd be great for mock-ups if you want to convince a client they should do some neon for some signage, for example. Let's take a look at a couple more. Now I'm a huge fan of blues music. So I might have a linear piece of artwork like this. I created a B.B. King, maybe this is his logo for his club. You know, we color this blue and maybe this is on a wall inside the club. And I have another graphic style, same exact setup, but it's blue because this is blues music. Would that not make the coolest neon sign in the world? I'm like, God, I wish I could have that in my studio on the wall, so really cool. And it could be as simple as something like this, my daughter did this design. So we're going to just simply select this artwork here and we're going to go ahead and we're going to color it with the teal, and even though that looks great, maybe you might be thinking, wow, you know what, this would really be cool if we were able to make this almost like a heart type of color. Well, here's the thing, if you work in global colors, we can go in here like this. Maybe we're going to make this more magenta. So we could go in here on something like this and then click preview, even if you wanted to preview it, and click okay, and you could get a neon sign that's colored more like that. I think this needs to be a deeper color, to be honest with you. So let's go ahead and add more magenta to it, like that. And that looks pretty good. So creating a digital resource like this can be called upon any time needed. You could use this with border treatments, headlines, or take a brand seal you created for a client and pitch them by turning it into a neon sign for their business. Thank you for watching DVG Lab, and as always, remember, never stop drawing.

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