Stylish Shadow Tutorial

A short and simple way to make shadows like this as shown below.

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Illustrator
• Clipping Masks
• Gaussian Blur

Steps:

1. First create an ellipse that is very thin and long. Make it black.

 

2. Make sure that this object is selected and go to Effect>Blur>Gaussian Blur.

 

3. A window should pop up. Enter 20 pixels for the Radius and click OK.

4. It should look this. Now we will stray away from this for a second.

5. Draw a rectangle over half of this shadow. Make sure goes farther than the edge of the show.

6. Make sure both the shadow and rectangle are selected. Also make sure that the rectangle is on top. Right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask.

7. Double-click the clipping mask to edit its insides. Scale the shadow down if needed but it is not recommended to scale it up.

 

8. It should look like this. Adjust the opacity if needed.

 

I hoped you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new.

Cork Board Texture Tutorial

This tutorial will guide you on creating a cork board texture using the Effect Gallery.

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Illustrator
• Effect Gallery
• Texturerizer
• Crystallize
• Craquelure

Steps:

1. Create a rectangle/square as big as you want it to be. Change the color to a light brown or RGB: 177, 141, 90 or #B18D5A.

2. A. Select the rectangle then go to Effect>Texture>Texurizer.

B. A window should pop up. For Scaling, enter a value of 170. For the Belief, enter a value of 5. Finally, change the light to Top. Then click OK.

C. It should look like this. See picture below.

3. A. Make sure your object is still selected then go to Effect>Pixelate>Crystallize.

B. A window should pop up. Enter a value of 10 for the Cell Size. Then click OK.

C. It should look like what you see below.

4. A. Make sure your object is still selected then go to Effect>Texture>Craquelure.

B. A window should pop up. Enter 60 for Crack Spacing. Enter 2 for the Crack Depth. Enter 8 for the Crack Brightness. Then click OK.

6. It should finally look this afterwards. Granted I used altered methods for my poster, this one is still usable for your artistic needs and you’re free to alter values if needed.

I hoped you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new.

Wooden Frame Tutorial Part 2

An optional secondary portion of the Wooden Frame Tutorial that will help you make the edges cleaner.

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Illustrator
• Clipping Masks
• Effect Gallery
• Gradients

Steps:

7. A. Select the left portion of the frame. And go to Edit>Copy or Cmd+V/Ctrl+V.

B. Then go to Edit>Paste in Front or Cmd+F/Ctrl+F.

8. A. Open the appearance window if you haven’t already. If lacking it, go to Window> Appearance. Select the object we pasted and go to the Appearance window and select the grain effect and delete it (don’t click on the blue text link).

B. Draw a selection box over the left portions so that you select both the object with the grain effect and the one without. Then right-click>Create Clipping Mask.

C. Now we have a clipping mask on the left portion.

9. A. Double-click the clipping mask to get inside it.

B. Increase the size of the frame portion so the that we can get rid of the unappealing edges. It won’t matter how large we make it since the mask will clip the size we set earlier.

10. The left side should look like this now.

11. Repeat the process for the other three portions and it should look like this in the end.

I hoped you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. An optional part 2 comes after this but feel free to skip it if you want.

Wooden Frame Tutorial Part 1

A some-what advanced tutorial that will guide you on how to make a wooden frame vector in Illustrator. The next tutorial after this will be about making the cork-board texture.

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Illustrator
• Clipping Masks
• Effect Gallery
• Gradients

Steps:

1. A. Create a rectangle as big as you and give it a fill so you can see it.

B. Select it and go to Object>Path>Offset Path.

C. An options window should pop up. Enter a negative value so the object’s offset can go inward. Click the Up/Down Arrow Key to see what suits you. Then click OK. Change its color so you can notice it.

D. Draw some straight segments from the corners of the big rectangle to the corners of the smaller rectangle.

2. A. Have the pathfinder window open. If it’s not open go to Window>Pathfinder. Select both rectangles and the segments and click the Divide button in the Pathfinder window. The Divide button is in the bottom-left corner.

B. The pathfinder will divide all your selected shapes into smaller portions.

C. Select the inner rectangle with the White Arrow Tool and delete it.

D. Also make sure to ungroup the portions so that you can select one part without selecting the other.

3. A. Select the top and bottom portion and add the default linear gradient.

B. Enter -90° for the angle so that the gradient is vertical.

C. Inside the gradient window, double-click the white box and change the color to #B8996F or RGB: 184, 153, 11 or a light brown color. Change the black color to #806C4F or RGB: 128, 108, 79 or a dark brown color.

D. Add another linear gradient to the left portion. Adjust the color of the light-brown color to #C1A175 or RGB: 193, 161, 117. 

E. Add the same gradient to the right portion but reverse the gradient. The reverse button is the one to the left of the angle box.

4. A. Select the left portion again and go to Effect>Effect Gallery.

B. A window should pop up and should look like what you see below.

C. Locate the grain effect which is in the texture folder like you see below.

D. Change the grain type to Vertical.

E. Change the Intensity to 12 and the Contrast to 20. Then click OK.

5. A. To save time, select the right portion and go to Effect>Grain which will be at the top of the drop-down menu since you’ve used it previously.

B. Make sure the values are the same as last time.

C. Select the top portion and go to Effect>Grain.

D. The only thing to change this time is setting the grain type to Horizontal.

E. Select the bottom portion and go to Effect>Grain.

F. Set the grain type to horizontal again if needed.

6. A. Now you know how to make your own wooden frame. Though, as you can see, there are unappealing white edges on all the frame parts. If you would like to know how to hide them, go to the next part of the tutorial.

I hoped you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. An optional part 2 comes after this but feel free to skip it if you want.

Gradual Change

With the events after the art show, I had ran out of things to work on. With day after day, I decided to help some students with tutorials they follow such as mine or others. Luck would have it, no one has worked on an iParent poster and that the competition for Got Plans was still open. With those two in mind, I decided to put some effort in these last days of high school.

This is the final efforts on my Got Plans? poster. I will have an exuberant amount of time for the iParent poster, which is what my current focus is as of now.

I will make a tutorial on how to create a cork-board effect in Illustrator.

Re: Senior

Not only did I redo the buttons from Junior year but I also recreated the Senior Awards Evening covers for Senior graduation. I have many tutorials to post but I’ll start with a “Making a…” first with one object you can see in the picture.

Adding Texture Tutorial

It may be uncanny to see me make Photoshop tutorials but you’ll get used to it. As a student requested, I will show you how to add textures to some parts of your photograph (i.e. dirt onto a ball).

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Photoshop
• Quick Selection Tool
• Pictures/Stocks
• Layermasks
• Brush

Steps:

1. A. Make a new document.

B. Bring in your texture first onto one layer.

C. Bring in the picture you want to add the texture too.

2. If you haven’t done so already, move your texture layer below the layer of the picture you’re working on.

3. Press W to bring up the Quick Selection Tool. Your cursor should change to that of a circle with a plus sign in the middle. Use this tool select the area of which you want to place a texture on. You will a moving dashed line as the outline of your selection.

4. A. When your selection is perfected, move up the texture layer above your working photograph layer. You will still see the dashed outline on top of all the layers.

B. With the selection visible and the texture layer highlighted, click the Add Layer Mask button (the one that looks like a gray box with a white circle inside of it).

C. After doing so, your texture will be masked inside your selection. You can stop from here but you wouldn’t really want to without refining it a bit.

D. You could alter the fill’s opacity. You could even paint the mask with white (using just the brush) to soften  the edges.

5. Continue to play around and experiment to refine your masked texture.

Adding texture is key to enhancing images.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new.

Clipping Mask Tip

I was busy for some two weeks but I’m posting today since someone requested at tutorial.

Today, you will learn how to use a clipping mask. Clipping Mask is extremely useful and is a valuable technique for Digital Artists.

What You’ll Be Making:

Tools:

• Illustrator
• Clipping Mask

Steps:

1. Start by placing a texture or any grouped object onto your workspace. In this case, I placed a wood texture.

2. Draw any shape you want ( I’m using a circle). NOTE: Make sure your shape is on top of your texture/other object.

3. Select both objects using the Selection Tool (V). Then right-click on your objects, then select Make Clipping Mask.

4. Now your texture will be bounded to the shape you made.

There are varieties of things you can do with clipping masks but it’s always important to know how to make one.

I hope you enjoyed this tip and learned something new.