Realism in Illustrator, Part 1: Gradients

For my Full Sail classes, I've had a couple assignments to create realistic mechanical objects in Adobe Illustrator. The above camera, for example, was my recent assignment. Before that, I also made a cork screw (below).

For the curious, here's a wireframe view of the camera illustration:

That's a lot of lines, right?? Don't worry, I will teach you how to do everything. This tutorial will be the first of an ongoing series on the tools I used to create these realistic illustrations. So grab a photo reference, open up Adobe Illustrator on your computer, and get ready to make amazing digital art!

Starting out

The first step for making any illustration in Adobe Illustrator is to block out the main shapes of your object, using the pen tool. (If you've forgotten how to use the pen tool, or have never used it before, refer to my previous tutorial.)

The photo you see behind this was my photo reference. It's helpful to have a photograph underneath your layers as you work so you can make your shapes proportional.

An image with a lot of detail may seem daunting, so start off big. Do what you know you can do. Make the largest shapes first, alternating colors so you can tell them apart. (You can see I was getting ahead in this picture and already applied a couple gradients and finer details, but you can ignore that.)

After you've made all your big shapes, start pen tooling the smaller details. Use the eye dropper tool to fill in your shapes with colors from the original photo.

However, with nothing but shapes and colors, your picture will not look very realistic. It may be a nice illustration, but it'll be a far cry from photorealism. That's when you start using the tools in Illustrator to make your object come to life. In this blog post, I'll introduce you to the most useful tool for illustrating mechanical objects: gradients.

Using gradients

If you look at the completed camera at the beginning of this blog post, you'll see that most of it consists of gradients. While gradients are probably the simplest of the tools I'll show you, they're also one of the most powerful, especially with mechanical objects (as opposed to organic objects).

Because of their perceived simplicity, gradients are probably overlooked in light of the more complex tools (such as gradient meshes, which I'll teach you in the next tutorial). But, I encourage you to really use gradients to their full potential. As my instructors used to say, a simple gradient goes a long way.

Here, I started to add some gradients. I still had some smaller details to add, though.

More gradients and details...

Now, I'll show you how to use gradients. First, open up a new Illustrator document and create two rectangles. Remove the strokes on both of them and fill them with whatever color you like.

Then, save this color by going to your swatches panel (if it's not open, bring it up by selecting Window --> Swatches) and clicking "New Swatch."

This window will open. Click "OK".

Your color will now be saved in your swatches panel. (We'll come back to this later.)

Now that your color is saved, select one of your rectangles and click the "gradient" button on the toolbar. 

Now your rectangle should look like this.

On the righthand side of your screen, you should see the gradient panel open up. (If not, go to Window --> Gradient to pull it up.)

Also, you may see a bar appear across your rectangle (for some reason, this bar was not visible in my screenshots). If the bar doesn't show up automatically, it can be accessed with the G key on your keyboard. Moving this gradient bar around will allow you to change the angle of your gradient. You can also change the angle with the drop-down menu on the gradient panel.

A few other things you can change. The gradient panel has a drop-down menu that allows you to change the gradient from "linear" to "radial". Radial is great for round shapes (although it looks a little awkward with our boxy shape).

For this example, I'm going to keep my gradient linear at its original angle measurement. But you can do whatever you like.

There's a problem with this gradient. It's black and white, and that's not what we want. We want it to be blue.

Go back to your gradient panel and double-click on one of the pointy box sliders underneath the gradient preview. This will bring up a new window where you can change the color.

Right now you're in the "color" window. Switch over to your swatches.

From there, select the color you saved earlier. Or, if you've changed your mind, pick any color you like.

Now, click on the other slider and make it the same color. It'll make the gradient look like one solid color again, but that's okay.

Click underneath the gradient preview, toward the middle, to create a new slider.

Double-click on it again. This time, switch over to "color".

Use the drop-down menu in the top right corner to make sure you are in HSB mode. HSB mode is the best mode for adjusting colors to look like natural highlights and shadows, which is what we are about to do.

Move the middle slider to the left to make a lighter color. Now your gradient has a highlight.

Change the color of the other two sliders to a darker blue. The best way to do this is with the bottom slider in HSB mode.

See, the rectangle on the right is already looking so much more rounded and three-dimensional than the rectangle on the left. There are still things we could do to tweak it, though. For example, the highlight in the middle is far too harsh; it could be smoothed out a bit.

We can do this by moving the little diamonds above the gradient preview.

 


Much better!

There's a lot you can do to adjust a gradient and add more detail. You can add more sliders, move them around, and experiment with changing their colors. (If you need to delete a slider, simply click the trashcan next to the gradient preview.)

Kind of looks like a metallic shine...

For a different effect, try alternating between lighter and darker colors to create a rippling texture. If a gradient just isn't working for you, you can always try adjusting the angle or switching between linear and radial.

That's the gist of gradients; play around with it and see what you can come up with!

Coming up!

Taking gradients to the next level with Illustrator's most infamous tool: gradient meshes.

Illustrated Movie Poster

Here's another project I did at Full Sail.  I had to recreate this Wall-E movie poster in Adobe Illustrator... but there was a catch!  We could use nothing but the basic, somewhat cartoon-looking pen tool (see my previous tutorial on how to use it), and we were limited to a five-color color scheme (plus white).  The result was an image that was relatively close to the original poster, but stylized.

The original poster (left) next to my recreation again (right).

 

As you can see in the wireframe view below, everything in my Wall-E recreation was just plain shapes. (No gradients, meshes, blends, opacities, etc.)

I tried to give the illusion of the junk around Wall-E by making lots and lots of strange shapes (which took far more hours than I care to think about!).  I used shapes I saw in the original poster as a guide.  However, my professor thought all the shapes in the junkyard were too "busy" (a.k.a. messy, cluttered), and they took away from Wall-E, who should have be been the main focus.  What do you think?

Zoom in to the junk around Wall-E

Designing a Concert Flyer

A few months ago, I designed this poster in Adobe Illustrator for a Full Sail assignment.  The assignment was, in a nutshell, to turn an assigned, roughly-sketched-on-paper (or on-napkin) concept from a fictional client into a fully-designed, digital concert poster.  The project I chose was a poster for violinist "Ira Kozlov" from Ukraine.  This Ira Kozlov wanted the poster for his concert, which he allegedly scribbled out on paper for me, to evoke the style of Russian constructivism.  So, I did some research on this style.

Examples of Russian constructivism from Google Images







There were a few things I noticed throughout all the pictures I saw.

1) The posters were all very simplistic, using lots of geometric shapes and silhouettes.

2) Their messages were clear, bold, in-your-face militant, and easy to understand in a glance.

3) There was a pretty consistent color scheme of black, red, white, and yellow.

4) The posters generally followed a minimalist design, with an effective usage of blank space.

I kept these styles at the forefront of my mind as I turned Kozlov's poster concept into a clean, minimalist, bold design.  Choosing the violinist silhouette, conductor's hand, Kozlov's signature, and text at the top were all "Kozlov's" ideas.  But there were several decisions I made along the way to make this design work in the way I thought it should.

Wireframe view in Illustrator and normal view

First, I chose to make the background red, both to relate it to the Russian constructivist style, and to allow the black silhouettes to stand out.

Second, I decided to use yellow to draw the viewer's eye to what was important, and to allow those elements to pop off the page.  Ira Kozlov's name was most important, and also the silhouette of him playing violin was one of the focuses of the graphic. (You may notice, even the angles of the shadow, the conductor's hand, and the slanted text boxes draw the viewer's eye toward the violinist.)

Third, (speaking of the text), I chose to slant all the text to help give the flyer a sense of movement and interest, a technique I observed a lot in examples of Russian constructivism.

Fourth, I placed the info in black rectangles (again, constructivist style, and also very minimalist and modern), using white text against black to make that text pop - but still not popping as much as the yellow text, which is where the viewer's eyes would travel first.

What other design techniques do you see used in this flyer?  If you are a designer, is there anything you would have done differently, had you been the one in my place?  Leave your comments below!