[Music] [Michael Fugoso] All right, everybody. What's up, homies? You know what's funny? I've never rehearsed that.
We did 50 rehearsals for that Keynote. You all watched the Keynote.
So we did-- Yeah, we did 50 rehearsals for that thing. And I've never said that. Ever. And then the first thing I said, I came up there and I was like, Oh, shit. All my Miami homies are here. I'm like, what's up, homies? Yeah. I also didn't plan to giggle that much up there.
What else did I not plan to do? Yeah, well, no.
I had fun up there. That's that's all that matters. Anyway, so my name is Michael Fugoso. I'm a Senior-- Oh, my gosh. I almost said, my little script at the Keynote. My name is Michael Fugoso, and I make space stuff. No, but my name is Michael Fugoso. I'm a Senior Adobe Evangelist. What does that mean? I kind of mentioned it earlier when we were asking questions.
I am hired to make some really cool stuff using Adobe products and show everybody how to make them, and then travel mostly around the United States, sometimes in Europe, sometimes in Japan, to show some really cool stuff with mainly an Illustrator. Because I'm primarily an Illustrator.
That's the Instagram account, if you want to check out some of that work over there. So prior to Adobe, I've worked mainly in the aerospace industry. These are the companies I've worked with. So I have a lot of insight in the aerospace industry.
Anyone work there in the aerospace industry now? It's crazy. The last, because this is my second time doing this session at MAX here. And the last one there was half of the people were aerospace people. So I was like, shoot. That's why I was like, wait, when I was talking about Boeing, I'm like, oh, no.
Oh, shoot. But, yeah, so I have a lot of insight. If you're looking into penetrating this industry and getting your foot into the door. There's actually about 750 aerospace companies in the United States alone...
So there's plenty of opportunity out there. Most of them are engineers and very technical people, so they all need really good design. There's actually a huge need for design with that industry.
Yeah. And then I ended-- Adobe reached out one day and was like, hey, you want to work here? And that's what got me out of the aerospace industry. I've been working at Adobe for about a year and a half. Oh, I forgot to mention, so the first half of this presentation will be kind of more background stuff, maybe inspirational, maybe not, and then we're going to go over the tools afterwards. Sweet. Yeah. Okay. So also, if you want to know any insight on how to work with Adobe...
I can help out there too, If you have questions on that. We also have a microphone there and a microphone there. Feel free to come up and interrupt anytime and ask a question. Heck yeah. All right, so this is one of the Illustration styles we're going to go over today. It's kind of the first. When I started posting on Instagram, this is probably the first style that kind of got me rolling on that platform. It's just this really hardcore layers, shapes on top of shapes and then things get blurred and things like that. It creates this kind of skeuomorphic, hyper realistic look.
Infinitely, semi-infinitely scalable. I use things like Gaussian Blur in Illustrator a lot, which is technically a raster effect, but I would say it's virtually infinitely scalable because I've blown these things up the size of billboards, even the size of skyscrapers in the past and I've never had an issue. So some people tell me like, hey, why don't you use like gradient maps and stuff? It's because I prefer the look of this. It's just a little more painterly looking.
And I mean, I don't think I never had any issues scaling them bigger than a skyscraper.
So this is an example of that style I did for Nike. This is for their Back to the Future day. It's funny, it was a private event where only 82 people were invited because I guess 82 was the year of Back to the Future, and they made 82 self lacing shoes. Do you remember when they had that campaign, and they invited nobody, not even me? I wasn't invited. I asked them to take a picture of the little mural for their private event and they're like, no, we can't. But it's all good. They paid. I got money, it's fine, you know.
So this is the bonus that I was going to talk about today.
So the premise here is, to my left, it's this flat version. I make sure this flat, simple version is as cool as it can be and it can pass off as its own illustration. So the idea is the foundation needs to be really good before you spend the hours and hours, maybe even weeks of putting texturing and depth into your stuff. So that's pretty much how I base off of my work. This is something I picked up from DKNG Studios. You know that, you know those homies? They have a booth over and they're selling merch. They're amazing illustrators and I learned a lot of stuff from them and I will shout them out every time-- I wish I could have shouted them out at the Keynote, but I think that was more about Adobe stuff, so.
But they're amazing DKNG studios and they also give you a lot of really cool resources.
So one person asked me over here. Do you typically sketch things and then is that your process? Yes, typically I do, but sometimes if I have an idea where I can just build it in Illustrator, I just jump straight into Illustrator. This is made all with triangles.
That's a lie, because the smokestack there is not a triangle. Okay. Mostly triangles. Okay. And that window, that's technically like a pizza triangle. Okay. All right? But there's a lot you can do with one shape.
That's one thing I've learned is limitations. If you go to any art school, some of the first classes they teach you is like, just put limitations on your stuff and that's how you learn to be a great artist. So when you start off with a blank canvas, you have more intention to your stuff. My limitation here was try to use this same triangle as much as I could, which maybe it's a failure, but whatever, it's all good.
This is kind of the extent of I can draw a little bit better than this. Okay. But this is kind of the extent of my drawing ability. I typically draw to the point where I have an idea of how to build this in shapes in Illustrator. The Shape Builder Tool is probably my favorite tool of all time.
And then it turns into something like that. So it starts from sketch and then to the left side in a flat mode, I typically start the Illustrator stuff in black and white so I can gauge the amount of contrast with the color, and then I choose the color scheme after. and then I add the texture and stuff. So one thing about this style too, is make sure if I go back here, the flat part, make sure if you're doing this for a client, like, they approve the flat one because you're going to-- It's a nightmare making edits when you're done with. So that's a flaw of this style and the flaw of everything that I do because once I give them the final. It's like, no, we passed the edits mark. But if they pay you enough, sure. But, yeah.
You know what, though? What I love about this style? The title of this course was creating wow factor and depth to your work. So, yeah, this is kind of like a depth diorama style. But I do think it's an easy style to give that wow factor to clients because things are literally popping out at them, even though it's like a flat thing, you know? So, had a ton of success with this kind of stuff, and it's pretty much how I built my career and how I got the aerospace jobs and then how I ended up getting the Adobe job.
How many of you do this? You draw outside of the art board? So I'm telling you, I work for Adobe and I still do crap like this. So you're going to see when I-- You're probably going to be like, there's so much faster ways in how you do things, Michael. I'm like, well, that's how I do things, you know? But just to say there's no wrong way to do things, just as long as you get to your end result, you know what I mean? And you're happy enjoying the process. I mean, that turns to something like that.
This got flagged on Instagram, too. They thought it was some type of war statement, like I'm bombing a city or something. Like, no, it's a magical blimp with a ship.
But whatever, it's all good.
Sure. It's up to interpretation.
Yeah. So this file and the one with the castle earlier. I'm actually, if you downloaded the files earlier and I'll go back to that QR code, I'm giving you those entire files for you to break down yourself.
Yeah, I'm giving you all of my stuff for free.
Heck, yeah.
This is one version of Depth. We have shadows and highlights and midtones in a very minimal form. This is one of the first NASA collaborations I've done. Is anyone from Purdue University here? Whoa. Yeah. Nice. This got blasted off into outer space, I heard. Is that true? They didn't send me a picture.
I'm just going to tell everybody that's what happened.
Anyway, this is one I did. Like I said, you can go very minimal, and it's very powerful, too. This is what I did for Blue Origin, which is Amazon. Jeff Bezos Space company.
This is what I did here. This is my favorite project ever. I did this, I was talking about earlier. This is a poster I did for NASA's Apollo 11, 50th anniversary. That's one thing, when I said I worked for aerospace, I wasn't a rocket designer or an engineer or anything like that. I'm not a smart person like that. Okay? I made them like T-shirts and koozies and posters...
The fun stuff. And I made radars with blues lines and red dots.
This is another one of my favorite projects. This is for Ariane Space. I don't even know if I pronounced that right, but this is a rocket that-- Ariane 5 is a rocket that shot the James Webb Telescope into space. So this is their mission patch for that, which is a really awesome project.
Okay, this is something I'm not showing you here, but I want to show you this really cool thing that you can do, and it's fairly easy to do. This is using Adobe Aero. So you shine your stuff onto artwork and boom like, things just pop out at you.
Any AR designers in here? Oh, nice. I'm telling you right now, AR is, It's a great time to learn how to design for AR because there's things like the Vision Pro that's picking up a little bit of steam, and I don't think it'll ever be-- The difficulty with AR right now is the accessibility. It's like you need an app in order to experience any of these things.
But with things like Vision Pro, it's built into the device, and then Meta just announced that they're shrinking it down to the size of glasses. So I think the accessibility issue will be solved pretty soon. And it's a good time, the best time to get into anything is when a lot of people aren't doing it. So, you know, when people are like, you know like NFTs, and crypto and stuff, it's like, well, yeah, it's because you heard, everyone's doing it already.
I'm not talking bad about that. If you like that stuff. I'm sorry.
Yeah. So a lot of stuff you could do with Adobe Aero, this is tap triggers. There's also proximity triggers. One is when I move the camera close, the rocket launches from the thing and then the thing comes back down.
That was a collaboration with Adobe and NASA in the past. You could do this with poster designs. It's really cool. This is an effect that takes about five minutes to do. You just split the layers and you tell Adobe Aero to like, hey, when the camera sees this image, activate these split layers. That's all it is. And I have a tutorial of that.
Yup I have a tutorial of that in the link in my bio, which is-- Yeah, it's free. It's the Adobe Live, Day 1 and 2. So we're not going over that today. But hey, I got a tutorial on that, homies. So I'm 40 years young...
Which is a lie because I'm 41. But 40 sounds way better, right? It's an even number.
It's never too late to start. I started when I was 30.
I went to design school when I turned 30, 29 and a half. So I'm just a bunch of lies today. 29 and a half, I started design school and in 10 years, I'm able to work at the aerospace industry, work at Adobe and stuff. I think this is a great industry. It's kind of like a blessing and a curse that you can move really fast in this industry, using things like social media to boost your stuff up.
The curse about it is, at least this is how I see it, is you're kind of judged by the last thing that you make or the stuff that you're making currently, just because how cutting-edge are you? You have a really cool, timeless style-- The cool thing about this stuff, I think it's pretty timeless, this whole depth stuff. People have been making things with paper forever, so, yeah, blessing and a curse. You can move fast, but you kind of have to keep moving. At least that's how I see it. That could be interpreted in any way.
This is kind of the motto I live by, think like an artist, execute like a designer. What do I mean by that? So I like to split my brain into two, where I have an artist side and a design side. A lot of people disagree with this. They want to put that together and think they're the same thing. I don't think so, at least to me. The art side, none of this is fact, by the way. It's just how I think. The art side is, what's kind of selfish to you? What makes your stuff unique? The stuff that you want to make, stuff that you enjoy, what you feel, where you come from. So the reason why I do aerospace stuff is because of my dad. He wanted me to be an engineer really bad. It's a thing with Asian families where they want you to be engineers, and doctors, and lawyers.
Where my Asians at in here, you know? Yeah. So you experienced that? I mean, I know that's not true for everybody, but that's what it was for me. My dad wanted me to be an engineer. And I tried it, went to school.
I got expelled out of school too, or university and stuff. Anyway, it wasn't like speaking to me, all the stuff wasn't speaking. All that stuff wasn't speaking to me. But I was-- I call it like I wanted revenge on my dad. Like a happy revenge. I love my dad, by the way. Happy revenge where I'm like, dad, I'm going to fulfill your dream and fulfill my dream. I'm going to work for these aerospace companies, but I'm going to do it as an artist, right? So where you come from...
That's a big part of what makes your stuff unique. And I think that's what a successful illustration is, is when people can feel the passion and the uniqueness to your work world-- Hey, you're the only person that could do this, which is technically not true, but people feel that, I can only get this from you, you know? And the design side is-- Also, really quick about my dad, he took me to a lot of aerospace shows, air shows, when I was younger, really got me into this stuff. His dream was to become an aerospace engineer. He became a mechanical engineer. So that's why he was trying to push that on me. And I tried my best, dad, but I did it my way, you know? Yeah. And I got paid more than those engineers too. Heck, yeah. No, maybe about the same. They get paid a lot.
So the design side is what makes your stuff more marketable? You're always thinking of an end user in mind, someone who's going to consume your stuff, right? When I post on Instagram, there's an element to that, right? Cause there's an audience that you have. Like, how are they going to view your things? How are they going to digest these things? It's important too, right, to think of an audience and to think of an end user. That's why we have stuff like user experience design...
And our clients, our fulfilling clients, needs and things. The thing is, okay, so if you're too far on the artist side, which could be great, you might hit lightning in a bottle and become the next Picasso or something. But you run this risk of being no one understanding what you're doing, it's just too personal to you, but it's great.
Sometimes you need these explorations. But if you're too far on the design side, you run the risk of your stuff being super boring, you know? Anyone design a real estate flyer in here? I mean, no, real estate industry is great. There's a lot of money to be made there, but I don't think anyone feels any passion from a real estate flyer. That's a great headshot you took with a picture of a house and, yeah. Anyway, so I like to be-- I wouldn't say I like to be somewhere in the middle. I usually like to be a little bit more on the artist side by having that designer brain constantly conflicting. I think these two always need to constantly conflict with each other because every project calls for something different. So to think that there's one proper answer to approach something. No. These things always need to be battling back and forth, and I think it's great to spend a ton of time figuring out where your project falls in this spectrum. Does that make sense? Think like an artist, homies. Execute like a designer. Dang. What else we got? So I have a bunch of these tutorials here, because the tutorial part's going to be really short here. I'm just going to show you some very basic techniques today. My goal today is for you all to be disappointed, honestly, because I use very, very simple things, very simple tools, the Keynote and stuff, which is awesome, all the new tools in Illustrator, the latest, greatest stuff. I do use those from time to time, right? But really, it's all about that foundation. Remember the flat piece that I made earlier with the castle? That's all that matters. It's about 7 to 14 tools in Illustrator. That's your foundation. Pen Tool, Shape Builder Tool, making sketches. That's what this is about.
I love the new stuff, too, but it's really all about that foundation. So my goal is for me to be like a magician, where, oh, you're all nice stuff. And then I show you how to do it, and you're like, that's it! That's all! Man! That's the goal today. All right, nice. So check out those files. Let's jump into Illustrator, homies. So let's open that up really quick right here.
So this is the diagram I give you in those files that I sent you earlier. Okay. Actually, before this, really quickly, I'll put that-- No, actually, we're going to keep moving, and then I'll bring the QR code back at the end.
This is a diagram I give you in the files. This is kind of like how I start every process here. So I have a light source, a single point light source, because that's the most dramatic way you can create an illustration. So light's only coming from one direction. And if you look at all of my work, the light is always coming from the top left. No one has ever called me out on that.
It's like highlights are in the top left, shadows are in the bottom right. Every single piece of illustration I did does that. Who cares, right? Nobody can notice it, so all good. It just makes things easier for me. So I usually start off with a sketch. These are the different styles here to how I interpret depth. I do it in a very simple line style. Also notice how everything is very flat. I'm very comfortable making flat stuff. Sometimes I turn things into isometric 3/4 view. But you can do a lot of stuff with very-- Just sticking with this flat angle. Like I said, like I was telling you earlier, limitations. That's usually what art school teaches you. Just put a bunch of limitations on your stuff.
That's what I do. I just do it a lot.
So this line style here, you can see this focuses primarily with a single width line. So check this out. I'm going to-- Oh, okay, okay. Let me just make sure I lock all this stuff here.
I'm going to create a layer on top of this and I'm just going to draw on top of my sketch here, just to show you that you probably all know this stuff already. I'm going to grab a point there and use my Pen Tool and make a simple curve right here. Hold my Option key. Nice. Do you all start like this? Yeah.
Pretty simple stuff. I hope this is validation to all of you that you can. This is all you need to do, increase the stroke of that to kind of match that size. Maybe down a little bit there.
Cool. Okay, that works for me. And just adjust this to your liking. It doesn't have to fit your sketch perfectly. And then I just duplicate this over to the other side and reflect this over just like that.
And move that over here. Get my Direct Selection tool. Hover over these two points. Command+Option+Shift+J. That combines those two points together. Let me do that again. So you all can see.
Are most people here intermediate? What would we say? Intermediate? Beginner? How many beginners? Oh, nice. Intermediates.
Okay. Yeah. A lot of you are going to be like, that's it, man. Yup. Yes. So Command+Option+Shift+J. Boom. So that combines your two points together. As you can see, it's now those two points are one. Hello.
Can I click on this right here? That's right. Oh, that's right. I'm sorry, guys. I'm still on the beta version of Illustrator. So there's a few bugs in here. My bad, homies. It's all good. We could still make it work. Yeah. So we have one point there. It's just a simple mirror of one line. And then I just finish this off by grabbing a point there and then holding my Option key so I don't have that extra handle and then finishing that off like so. Nice. All right? And then I grab a line or-- Yeah, let's just use the line tool here and then create a line going down in the center to kind of split that lighting up in a very minimal fashion.
Cool. And then what else do I do here? I'll create this window off to the side. So a lot of this stuff that I do, it's usually fairly symmetrical. So I usually hover over to a center point right there, and then I just duplicate them over to the side. Right-click, Transform, Reflect. Boom! Hey! And then move this over.
Okay. Get my direct-- I use the Direct Selection tool a ton. Command+Option+Shift+J.
Command+Option+Shift+J here, too. Nice. So that's all one. And then move that over right here.
Easy stuff. Yeah? What do you all think? Fairly easy? Yeah? Do you all do it this way? Yeah, I would say so. Maybe you do it better. Maybe you're actually using the key commands. It's all good.
Okay, let's create the little fin, again, this is all I'm doing is just doing the same stuff, right? And then I'm going to move this over to the side. Transform reflection. You all let me know if I'm moving too fast or too slow. And then I'm willing to adjust any way you all like to.
We have microphones up there. Everybody, feel free to come up and interrupt me anytime. Ask me questions about the Illustration, about career stuff. I'm happy to answer anybody, you know. So I move this over here...
Also, usually, I like to not scale my strokes and effects so the strokes stay the same all the time. I forgot to tell you all that. Well, the strokes are actually scaling. Hold on. Settings General, right here. Don't scale the strokes and effects. Just uncheck that right there. Nice.
So watch this. It's not going to scale anymore.
Nice. Okay, so again, I was saying, the Shape Builder tool is one of my favorite tools. Usually I have this OCD and I want to align this perfectly to this center.
And again, apologies. I'm in a beta version of Illustrator because I work for Adobe...
So some of the alignments are probably not working, but it's all good. So I'll put Shift+M right here, and if I hover over any of these lines and I hold the Option key. When I hold the Option key, you see this little minus icon on the arrow? That means you can knock out any of the intersecting points just like that. Cool. You all do this like this? Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay, so in interest of time, just to make sure we can get through this fairly quickly here. Oh, yeah. We could do it one more time here. Sorry. Let's do that. So select my window and select this piece right there. Shift+M. And then I will knock out this middle piece right there.
Okay, so with the interest of time, I won't finish the rest of that. I'm just going to create a layer below this. So this is what I typically do. I make the lines in one layer and then I lock that and then I create the color in the layer below. The reason why I do that, because you can actually fill all these shapes if you want to. But I do it this way because it's typically easier for manufacturers if you need to send this over. They need this separation of color. That's why I usually split. Everything I do is pretty much split into layers. And there's probably faster ways to do it.
I just got stuck in my ways as an Adobe employee, I'm telling you, just get stuck in your ways and just do it the way you want to do it, you know? You know what I'm saying? Like, I've had like my boss be like, you still do it that way? You better believe it, man. I'll change it when-- Maybe never. So here, all I do, I'm going to sample the color there. So as you can see, because this is a cylindrical object...
Lighting usually can roll off to half of the rocket. That's why even though the light's coming from the top left hand corner, it will probably light up that entire half of that rocket. So here, I'm going to move this there and then sample that. So does this make sense how I'm doing this, everybody? Just to make sure before I move on to the next thing, can I get a yes, homies? Nice.
I've never said homies this many times in my entire life. I promise. But now it's a part of me now, I guess.
So I'm going to sample the color here. Okay, cool. So that's the gist of that. And then I usually have-- Notice how I'm never perfect with the shape too underneath the lines, because the lines are covering them.
That's another really cool thing about having it separated in another layer. Another thing you can do here is, you notice here, you could do this in a simple way like this, or you could do it with a bit more detail and add a little bit more highlights. These are little hotspots to add more of a dramatic lighting effect. That's easy. We just grab a pen tool and then make a really quick sliver of light right there. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll move this up here...
And then combine these.
You all disappointed yet? That's what I hope. Okay. Yeah, so basically that's how I complete this style. And then once you do this a ton of times, you can create something like this right there. It's really the same techniques. The only thing difference here is I'm using a drop shadow on these shapes, and I'm going to show you that right now. But you see what I mean? There's a lot you could do with very simple things as long as you plan this out. This was like, I wanted this to be very art deco. This is perfect for art deco art, by the way, like this type of style. And then again, my light source from the top left, can you see? Coming from the top left again. So this file I will also be giving to you as well to break down at home. You know what? Actually this one might not be that well organized. Just heads up, because this was actually a huge pain in the ass for me to make. And then I was like, forget naming the layers.
Sometimes I feel that way. You all feel that way sometimes? Hey, five times performance boost.
Shut up, Michael. Okay.
Really quickly here, let's just add that shadow. I'm going to show you this really cool shadow technique. Oh, apologies. I forgot to group these, so I'm going to have to group this in front of you all live. It's cool though. I hope that's cool. Actually-- Yeah, sure. Let's take that here and move that to a layer on top there, and let's take all of this here...
And then Command+X. Whoops, I forgot one little, I got my little wings over there.
Apologies, homies. Grab this here. Command+X. Nice. And then we're going to move this in a layer below that.
And I'm going to lock those just so I can show you all this stuff right here. So for the shadows and stuff, I'm going to grab this piece here, move this over to the side.
Let's go to Object, Path and let's outline those strokes.
Nice. And then I'm going to use my Pathfinder Tool...
to combine everything into one shape. There you go. Okay, so now we have a really cool looking silhouette there. And send this behind my rocket.
Send to-- Oh, I'm sorry, arrange. Send to back. Key commands, homies. I don't use them sometimes. Okay, so here I'm going to change this over to multiply. So every time you make shadows and you're using the color black on top of color, always change it to Multiply, usually when people-- I teach people how to create the style and then they ask me to critique it, the first thing I usually notice is, did you use Multiply? Because sometimes the shadows look very muddy at the end. Right now it looks like it's not going to do anything, but I promise you, when you do this 500 layers on top of each other, you're going to notice how muddy it looks in the end. So make sure you change it to Multiply, when you're using black over any type of color, I'm going to set the opacity down a bit to maybe around 45, 40. That is my magic number. 35 to 40 is usually my magic number on how I have shadows here. I adjust it based off of the color, but typically that works for most stuff. And then I go to Effect, Blur, Gaussian Blur, like that. And I move this down a little bit there. Simple drop shadow, but hey, I have a really unique technique here. It's called the double shadow technique. I'm going anime style on you guys right now. Double shadows. Let's grab this right here and duplicate this over. Sorry if a lot of you thought that was dorky. That's, you know, I love anime. What can I say? One Piece fans over here. One Piece. Heck yeah.
If you're not a fan of One Piece, it's all good.
All right, I'm going to increase the blur on that second shadow there. So the premise of the double shadow technique, you see how kind of more natural that shadow looks now when you have two of them stacked on top of each other? I'm going to move this downwards a bit so you can see it a bit more.
I discovered this in a bathroom alone with the lights off and a flashlight.
I'm serious. Actually, you can kind of notice it here on my cup.
When you shine a flashlight onto any object in the dark, it usually casts two shadows.
Have you all noticed that when you look at your own shadow, when the sun's shining on you, there's usually two of you, even if the light's coming from one direction? So that's where this double shadow technique comes from. And it makes your shadows pop way more. And if people are asking, why does your stuff look realistic but fake, but kind of realistic? It's because of the double shadow, homies. So double shadow technique. If there's anything that I want you to take out of this course, it's the double shadows. Cool.
Yeah. Which one? One of the layers. So. Okay, well, I probably need to split them into. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, if you use the Gaussian Blur, your shape needs to be on its own layer. Heads up, it's going to be a nightmare if you don't do that, so. And that's why a lot of people are like, "Yeah, use the gradient maps or, yeah, the gradient mesh." Like, yeah, the gradient mesh is cool. But I like the look of this. I feel like it's more natural to me. I like the banding of color sometimes, and it looks a bit more painterly, too. So okay, I'm going to turn that one off there and I'm going to turn this one off there. So notice when I turn this off, that's how the shadow looks. You turn this on...
It looks so much more like, oh, my gosh! And it's just a very easy, simple thing to do, you know? How much time we got here? We're good. We're good with time, homies.
Okay, I did a final version of this piece here just to show you shape building-- Oh, turn off all these, though.
Hey, turn off-- Yeah, so you can see right here.
Actually, I've moved to the future a bit too much. But I did the double shadow technique a ton here. And then you can see just a final result. It looks really cool. And I'm also giving you this file because this is a much more minimal file than my others that you can break down a bit more easy. It's a little more easy to digest.
Hey, what do you. What? Star. I'm sorry, Star, get out of there.
I'm also giving you this robot file here, the one that I was like over at the Keynote. So you all have this to break down too.
You know what I mean? Basically, as long as I work for Adobe, everything I do from now on is going to be free for you all. Just a heads up. You just get on that Instagram account, the link in bio. You usually see a lot of source files for you to download. Actually, no, you won't. You got to go somewhere like this to get source files.
So the next style I want to talk to you about is this Shape Build Gradient style.
Which is basically this finished piece right here, this is a shape builder. This is primarily with the Shape Builder Tool, a little bit of Pen Tool. It's almost like building Legos and putting shapes on top of each other, right? So really quickly here, I'm going to turn this thing into a Shape Build style. So let's just delete all the color there. Actually, it was on its own layer. I could have just deleted. Whatever. Who cares? Who cares? All good. So I'm going to delete all these pieces there.
All these lines, we don't need them. We don't need them because we're shape building.
I don't know when I started talking like this, when did that happen? That's right, I did. Okay, we got to redo this line here. So I'm going to delete these two points here...
And I'm going to quickly...
Just make that right there. Okay, so I'm going to turn this into a flat shape with no lines. It's all fill, right? And then I'm going to just grab a rectangle, drag a rectangle over that into the center right there.
Cool. And I'm going to hold Shift and select both of those, Shift+M, and see, I can hover over any of these pieces here to knock out. And we're going to knock out this excess piece there. That's how I do this style, homies. Really simple. Just a simple shape builder. And I'm going to select this piece right-- Hello. Select this piece right there.
Does that make sense? Can you all tell from me just doing that on how I built the rest of that rocket ship here? This one? Who wants me to build the rest of it? Or who wants me to move on? Move on. Yeah! All right. Really quickly here. Oh, yeah. You could-- Here, let me select this right here. Or actually, if you want to take this to the next level, what we did here when we took the aligned shines here to the next level, all you gotta do is fill the shapes with gradients, if I can tell where that layer is. Where's that layer at? Is it over here somewhere? There you go. So you can see like you can fill each of the shapes here with gradients too, if you want to add an extra highlight or an extra hot spot if you want to. And if you want to add another level of realism to that, you can do something like this kind of skeuomorphic style, which is basically a Gaussian Blurred shape on top of another shape. So if you want me to demonstrate that really fast before I go over to my Photoshop bonus homies, let's do it. I'm just going to grab a Pen Tool here. Maybe I should do this on another layer just so we don't get mixed up with stuff. And I'm just going to draw a quick sliver right there. Hold my Option key.
Hey, what's up? Hey, Direct Selection Tool. Come on, man.
Yeah, I'm sorry, homies. It's this again. It's either user error or it's the beta. It's probably user error.
And then I'm going to select here and finish this line off. This shape here does not have to be perfect, by the way, because we're going to end up blurring it...
So I'm going to turn this over to white. See how I didn't make that perfect? But it's bothering me. I have that OCD. I have that little bit of OCD. Anyway, so we select this here and we go to Effects, Blur. Gaussian Blur. That's it. That's all I do. And then I move this upwards if I want it more blurry. You know how we had a double shadow technique? We also have a double highlight technique.
All these anime references, I'm sorry. The technique!
I'm stupid. Okay.
All right, so...
Let's lock this and I'm going to-- Actually, I'm going to decrease the-- Oh, yeah, I need to select it, that's why-- I need to decrease the opacity really quick here and go back to my layers.
Then I'm going to lock this layer here. So double highlight technique, I just grab a layer on top of that...
And I'm going to create a sliver.
Am I allowed to go overtime in here? Friend? Who has something that they have to go to immediately after this? Okay, I'll go faster.
But I'm willing to hang out with anyone who wants to hang out, ask me questions, want to do more stuff. As long as they don't kick me out of this room, we could do more stuff...
Probably should have changed the color of this so I could see what's happening.
But I can see it right there. You see it? I see it, I see it. Oh, I got it. Nice. So I'm going to make a slimmer sliver right there...
And kind of decrease the size right there. Nice. So that's kind of like a skinnier highlight right there. And then I go to Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and then I decrease the amount of-- So now we have like kind of like a hotspot shine and a soft shine below it. It's just such a better effect than just having one simple gradient follow there. Double shadow, double highlights, homies. That's how you do this really cool skeuomorphic style. And then the file I'm giving you all for that is this. Oh, you look at all those named layers right there for all of you. So yeah, you just pretty much have to just turn these layers on and off to see what I did with that. So that's a hotspot blur right there. And because this is a shiny looking car, we have hard shaped highlights. So if you want things to look shiny and glossy, you make sure you don't blur out the shape. If you want to look matte finished, blur out the shape. Make sense? Cool. Look at this, Command+Y, 100%, all vector shapes right there. So this is a file for you that you can all have and break down at home, exclusive to the session, homies. Okay, so that's what I got for you in Illustrator. Let's just do our bonus. What time we got? We got 15 minutes. Perfect, let's do it. So I did this really quick file here just to demonstrate how I make that paper castle that we did. I'm going to show you how I do that really fast. So I made these simple things here and I split these all up into layers, as you can see.
And I'm going to change, actually when I did this demo earlier, we couldn't see this because it was so dark, so I'm going to change the color here and it's flickering like that because, again, I'm in a beta version of Illustrator that has bugs and I apologize for that, but I'm also top secret like that.
Okay, so I'm going to have it like this and then I'm going to go ahead and as you can see again the shapes I'll call-- You know what, let's name all these. Donut, circle, and background. Cool. And then these are all split into layers right there, as you can see. Go to File, Export, Export as. And then I change this over to Photoshop. Does anyone do this? Yeah, a lot of people don't know that you can export into Photoshop and retain the layers. Did you all know you can do that? There's so much people that don't know you can do that, which is such a useful thing to do, because when you text yourself in Photoshop you have all your shapes split into different layers, which is awesome. So I'm going to change the name of this file to TEXTURE-- I don't know, SESSIONS, in all caps so I can find it in my messy desktop there. And I'm going to hit Export. Make sure here that we have the color over set to RGB. I like to have the resolution here set as high as I could. I'm going to do it around 500ppi, so you can actually adjust it. Usually the highest you could go is 300, but if you click on other you can make it even higher. The reason I'm doing this is because when we go into Photoshop you want it to be as high resolution as you can. So you can scale this a bit bigger, because we're getting out of vector mode here. So I'm going to hit OK.
And now, it's open in my desktop there somewhere. It's called TEXTURE SESSION, and I'm going to move this over to Photoshop. Not the beta version this time. You saw a little bit of a spoiler there. It's all good. So as you can see, when I move this file over to Photoshop, all the layers are split here too. The only drawback is that these are not vector smart objects, they're all rasterized, which is fine. I think sometimes we over romanticize things being completely vector. When things are 500ppi or 700ppi, it's usually enough for most applications. All right, The other thing I'm giving you in my files is this textures folder. These are all my favorite textures that I've curated over time. So check this out. This really cool paper texture, I dare you to find a better paper texture. You won't. This is the best one you can find because I took the picture and it's yours to keep. My friends, my homies.
I have a high resolution version and a low resolution version if you want to keep your files smaller. Look at these textures. I have distressed paper textures too. Again, the best that you can find. See these really cool character damaged areas? It's really cool when it highlights over your paper artwork there. I have marble textures in here. Look at that.
Really cool stuff. This one is the best one ever. Heads up. You want me to mark that green so you know that it's the best one? I'll mark this one green too. I'm so-- Yeah, okay. Wood textures? Absolutely. This is okay.
Oh, man. My fiddly little fingers are clicking on stuff. Okay.
This is the best wood texture. The reason why I say this is when you take a picture of wood, it's usually like very muddy and blocked out. This is a wood stamp. Someone stamped the wood.
Then you see all the separation in the-- You won't find a better wood texture than that unless you make it yourself. You know, all the best textures for my homies. All right, so let's go back over to my file here. I'm going to drag this. Let's go over to my-- Let's do this craft texture. Let's do the high res. Let's do the high res one. I'm going to move this over on top of that.
I'll tell you right now, the drawback of this style is how long it takes to make this stuff and how large your file is after. But your stuff looks so good. And a question I usually get is, why don't you do this stuff in Illustrator and texture in Illustrator? The simple reason is because it looks better in Photoshop. That is the best answer I could give there. You know, you have a wider gamut of color in Photoshop and if you're making things look more realistic, generally you want to do them in Photoshop. So I'll set this over to Multiply, right? So you can see that's my texture. I'm sorry, I forgot to show you the mask, how I did that. I just Command+Clicked on the shape there. You can do that in multiple ways. You can set a clipping mask if you want to. I just do it this way because it gives me a little bit more control. And then I'll set this over to Multiply. Nice. So what I do here next is I create a layer on top of this and I call this highlights.
I spelled that wrong, but it's okay because it looks like the word highlight. And then I grab a brush here, I set the brush over to white.
And I make sure my brush is at the most feathered option there.
Okay, and what I do here is I paint, I size the brush down a little bit there. It's a little too big. And then I paint off the edges to paint in the highlights.
Cool? Nice! And then I'll change the color over to black.
And then I'll create a layer on top of this and call this inner shadow. There's a reason I'm calling that, and you'll see in a second.
And then I paint off the edges here and make this a black color. So this doesn't look like much now, but I promise when you have like 700 of these shapes, maybe 200 of these shapes, it looks really cool when every single shape has this kind of like transition of highlight to highlight to shadow. If I set this again, we're doing black on top of color, right? So we're going to set this over to multiply. I promise you, don't forget that step. It doesn't look like it's doing much, but it's actually going to do a ton later. Okay, so I'm going to decrease the opacity there for that. So it was a little too harsh when I painted it, right? So I'm decreasing that to my liking pretty much here. Okay, I'm going to zoom up right here. Let's create the shadow, the drop shadow, my double shadow technique. Command+Click there and I'm going to create a layer below that and I'm going to call this shadow. Cool. We have about eight minutes left by the way. Feel free to hang out if you want to ask questions. You're not kicking me out of here, right, homies? Heck yeah. We got this room. So I'm willing to hang out if you are. Not too long though, but I'm willing to hang out. I'm going to set this over to Multiply and filter Gaussian Blur. And oh, I'm sorry, before I did that Filter, Convert this to a Smart Filter because we want non destructive editing there and then filter Gaussian Blur. And now I want to adjust this to be kind of like a deeper shadow like that where it's not really casted out too much. And then I'm going to decrease the opacity. For Photoshop, my magic number is 35.
- What's that? Sorry? - Mine's 33. Sorry. Hey, let's do 33.
That's probably going to be better. You're right. 33 is a magic number.
All right, and then I'll duplicate this and then I'm going to move, I'm going to move that over. You see that double shadow right there? Yeah, Double shadows. And then I'm going to right click here to adjust the blur. Look at this. It's just going to fall so nice over that red right there. And right there I could tell I want to make this other shadow a bit blurrier. So I just go over there. Another question I get is like, can't you do this with an action? You could totally do this with an action. I used to have one and I find that I just jump in and make the edits anyway. So up to you. If you want to make an action, cool. But I adjust every shape, and I do everything the long, tedious way because that's who I am? And I think it ends up looking better and more custom when you do it with every single shape like that. And if you ask me, do you do this with every 700 shapes that you do sometimes? The answer is, yes, I do. And that's why sometimes it takes me two weeks to do something. If it's much more simple, it takes me a few days, a few hours maybe. But I do think the more custom your stuff is, the better they typically look, usually. Sorry. I'm doing stuff without even telling you what I'm doing. Okay, so I'm going to create a layer on top of this shadow, my double shadow there. Actually, just to be organized, let's select these two, group that and call this double shadow.
And then here I'm going to call this rim light.
So what I did is I Command+Click my donut shape again, and I created a layer below my donut above the double shadow, and I fill this with white. So if you can see, if I move this over, you can see it's just the white shape underneath there. Watch this. A lot of people are like, how do you do that little, really cool, realistic thing that you do? All I do is I create a white shape underneath, and then I arrow to the left twice, arrow to the upwards twice. Look at that. We had this really cool sliver of light at the edge there to give that sense of touch, sense of realism. Yeah, that's basically what I do, everyone. And over here, I kind of finished it off in another session I did earlier. Actually, you guys had it better. The first session, I was super hungover, and I was like, couldn't find any of my layers. And I'm like, oh my gosh. They still got the files, though. They're good.
Yeah.
All right, so check this out. So one thing I forgot to say here, we established a light source. Again, the top left corner. Bottom right, we have shadows.
One thing I forgot to mention is, see this bottom shape here? It's almost like it's glued to that back piece. Whatever your highlight of your art piece is the star, which in this case it's this donut, you want that to be popping out at you the most because that's what you want the hierarchy to be. Oh, in your face, subject. So you cast a wider double shadow there. I didn't do a double shadow here because one shadow was sufficient to make a really quick sliver of shadow, which makes it look like it's glued on to the paper. So let's go back to my presentation mode to finish this off, homies. Really quickly. There's the QR code. I'll leave it on here for a little bit for you to download the files. Actually, before I do that, I just want to say thanks to everybody. You guys are freaking awesome. This is my favorite event ever, I've ever done. It was such a high. The Keynote was such a high. You guys are amazing here. Even the first session, I feel like I failed people in the first session, but they were amazing, too.
Thanks, everybody. Thanks.
Here are the files, so feel free to ask any questions. I can hang out here, too.
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