Adobe Illustrator Coloring Tutorial using Gradients

welcome back this is jason seacrest we are going to go through the coloring portion of our elephant today and at the end of the last video we basically did all of the eraser cleaned up all of our nice little edges now what i would do is if you want to keep everything the same color for these strokes this would be a good time to just grab all of your lines come over to pathfinder and then unite them so all of your lines and then just come on over and unite them so they are all together if you were going to color anything separately this you might want to just kind of hold off on that but for the most part i like to do the uniting the lines before we do our our live paint bucket all right so let's build our swatches i am just going to pull that on over now if you said hey i just want to do the grays all the way to the blacks not an awful idea i'm going to do a little bit of a greenish and actually let's move it over to i'd rather do a little bluish to be honest with you now what i'm going to do is go right along this line where it's a little bit more grayed out so i'm going to say okay with that one and what we're looking to do is pretty much build up a full value range so just notice i'm going to start move up a little bit until i can see a difference good double click so this will be fairly monochromatic double click and if it's coloring the lines because it's still selected that's not a big deal not a big deal at all so this is going to be our highlights our shadows base colors things like that so the more you have just the more full range you have in your gradients almost to white there and then we'll stop it there good let's just click on our dark and then deselect so what we are going to then do we are going to grab everything let's go to live paints make now all we are going to do is click on k and i'm going to say let's just start here and all we're looking to do for the first part is i just want to fill in elephant let's come back to our lights and let's just fill everything in highlights included so i just want to make sure everything's filled first now we can have some fun so things could be a little bit separated let's just say on this side that'll be pretty dark everything else will probably have to cut out i might say over here could be pretty dark too all right i say good now whenever you're doing the live paint bucket just be aware that it's also creating shapes so we can color and modify those shapes later so even if you say hey i just want it to be white my recommendation is to still color them white and then you can always modify them later so next little thing we're going to do is ungroup usually the magic number is three for some reason and what we are able looking to do maybe we have to do it again because we want to be able to just grab individual shapes so as soon as we can do that again then you are good to go so i'm gonna file save what we also want to do is let's call that one flat color i am then going to duplicate flat color now if i wanted to change anything right now this might not be a bad idea to say hey i want some things to be lighter darker so let's just say you know this one will get a little bit one step up maybe this one will be one step up okay so at that point now we can come over and this will be our shadow layer and i do want to make sure i save the flat color by the way because that is going to be our gradient later so when we do our gradients we want that going over the full colors and more than likely we'll add that to the bottom as well so just so you can kind of see where we're going with it all right decisions decisions now i would say that it's going to be let's say it's almost coming down at a pretty directly down angle so that would be our light source which is why the left hand side of the face is going to be a little bit darker so we have two options for our shadows so let's do one version first and then we'll come back and do a little bit of the the fancier one i think we'll do the line with our pen tool in the shift c just because there's a lot of curves happening so version one is i can select the shape we do have under the eraser tool a nice little knife tool and then all i need to do is go all the way through the shapes and then i can come in and say hey i want to color those one step up so a lot of the times with it being a little bit more free form i would suggest having smaller line segments so if i say there's one there's one let's bring that one up so it is just a little bit sloppier so if you guys like that i think it's quite easy to use but if you say hey i want it to be a little bit more of a professional um line or a stroke let's go through the other version i'll leave this ear one over here by the way so let's just look at our light source everything's going to be coming down so let's just zoom in on the face again we're on our shadow layer let's get rid of swatches all right so i'm just gonna do line and then we're going to come back with shift c the answer is one hundred percent yes if you wanted to use the pen tool for this so there's one let's do the other one just so you can kind of see where we're going with this and let's i'm gonna say all the way by the tusk shift c i will tuck that one up we already have the other one which you can't see notice there is no fill on this by the way no fill no fill okay so i've got black arrow all right so i want both my lines grabbed and then i also want to grab face color now whenever we're doing this just kind of double check that things are overlapping we're going to come over to pathfinder we're going to come down to divide next we are going to ungroup so notice i'm also deselecting so i should be able to just come over grab my shapes one up with it if i like that shape next little thing i would do is unite what we just did so that is seen as one big shape good this one looks like a pretty easy little short one so let's do our knife tool with that just go one up with it let's do the same thing over here so let's just say the eye brow is going to cast a nice little cast shadow so i'm going to divide ungroup go one up with it okay let's say i'm gonna do pen tool for this one that there's going to be a little cast shadow under that cheek all right let's keep it going now i say there's gonna be a big there's gonna be all sorts of different values hanging out under here so there's gonna be a value under the tusk going down i will also say there's going to be a big cast shadow kind of on this side of the body so let's do pen tool for that and i will come back and modify these by the way let's let's just do that one first now let's just do an easy one straight down this will be the trunk grab that divide ungroup all right let's do a little bit of our trunk here now i'm going to go one and then we'll go straight down let's just go right over here i'm hold down shift by the way shift c just double check whenever you guys are doing this that there is no fill good click on divide ungroup all right i'd say we are getting pretty close all i want to do i'm going to grab these and we're just going to do a nice little curve grab this one and this is again the knife tool nice little curve good i'm gonna file save now i say four shadows in the final you might see me do a little bit more here and there but i say for for right now i say that is probably okay for shadow layer so what we're going to do is lock that guy out what i'm going to do is take our flat color layer i'm going to duplicate it it will look like everything just went away that is okay i'm gonna say gradients for this one we're gonna unlock it now what we're looking to do is i would probably say let's just see how picky this is going to be i say that looks good so i want it to pretty much go over the entire elephant so i'm going to grab all of the gray let's just come over to the top here i'm going to go object compound path we can make now really your choice if you want linear or radial let's just try radial and see how uh how we like it now the first thing we're going to do is i would go let's go really really light with it and then let's try our darkest color now i'm going to say let's start at 40 for both of these now when the 40 comes in you'll notice right away that the shadows will start popping back in so really your choice on how light and or how dark so if i say hey i want this to be brighter and then maybe when we do our darks maybe that'll be ten percent so that would be kind of step one now what we're gonna do is i'm gonna come over to the left hand side we're gonna click on the gradient tool and since we said hey where is our light source we wanna drop the light source where we think it's going to go now since this one's radial this really shouldn't matter it's in the in the direction now notice that we have a very very see-through 10 so the more i drag this out you're going to notice that the closer it is to the light source the more subtle those values are going to be so totally up to you on if you how big you want this to be or how small you want it to be i say right there i'm okay with that all right good next let's grab our light areas i'm going to click on it again it is going to add some different stuff to it but i'm going to go i say white and then we can start playing around with how dark we want these to go now our white is at 70 percent your choice if you want to keep it there now notice that these are all hanging out in the center so each little white will have its own little little guy your choice if you want to modify each one of these most of the time you just kind of have to think of where is my light source coming from and if you just move the middle kind of up in that direction it'll actually probably play out the way you want it to now if you didn't want to highlight in the uh center of the eyes then i would just change that let's just move that up right there okay i am not too concerned with that that looks okay let's do one other little layer let's get fancy today so i want to take my gradient layer i'm going to drop that guy down notice that they're all locked out by the way now this one we're going to do highlights so we're going to be building kind of our separate ones now when we do our gradients it's going to be basically linear and all we're going to be focusing on is kind of these top areas so i might do the top of the trunk maybe we'll do top of the ear top of the forehead i think we'll be pretty good with right stopping those for the sake of the tutorial now i might go one two three shift c no notice i think the gradient is still selected by the way all right so let's just zoom in so you guys don't yell at me uh one let's just do it right away so you guys are seeing where we're going with it so i want linear and then this top part is going to be the part that's the most getting light now notice i don't have this connected i will probably say i want to connect them so i can control the shape i might have to come back over here that's not a big deal now right now the highlights hitting on this side what we are then going to do is with our nice little tool we're just going to and this is totally just guess and check by the way and then we're gonna shrink that guy up now since we haven't really messed with it so we want linear this one is zero percent so the closer we are under that line i want that white and the idea is to basically mess with it until this one just kind of just goes away on you so it's nice and subtle little tiny bit but i don't want to necessarily see where it connects to the forehead it'll read out as a highlight a lot nicer if you don't have it connect like that all right let's do the ear and go shift c down at the bottom just so we can round that out another little thing just to be aware of too is notice that we aren't going straight up to that edge i want it to be pulled back a little bit you can always kind of pull this and it's really just guess and check what do i want how far do i want this to be all right good i say we do one for just the trunk here and then we can call it a day now if you want more than one that would be totally your choice and meaning if i wanted to continue all the way down you could totally do that meaning it would go all the way down to the bottom here now this one we're probably going to mess with it a tiny bit and it might not hold true to where the light's coming from but what we're not looking to do have it light up over here and i might not want it to rather it just be along this edge to be honest with you all right guys done and done save away so if you guys are liking the channel definitely subscribe definitely share away uh we've got a crazy amount of different cartoon tutorials on this channel so if you guys are having questions as you're going through definitely put a comment i do read those and try and get back to you as soon as i can especially since i know you're probably working on the tutorial so i'm very very quick about getting uh back in touch with you uh next little thing is thank you for always staying positive since a lot of my students do read those comments so i do appreciate that uh greatly so other than that thanks for hanging out and i will see you guys on the next tutorial

Channel: Jason Secrest

Views: 8,417

Keywords: adobe illustrator tutorial for beginners, adobe illustrator cartoon tutorial, easy adobe illustrator tutorials, illustrator cartoon tutorial, step by step illustrator tutorial, how to color cartoons in illustrator, best illustrator tutorials for beginners, easy to follow illustrator tutorials, coloring tutorial in adobe illustrator, how to use gradients in adobe illustrator, how to use live paint in adobe illustrator

Id: 2QlOnw9j3oo

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016