Figma Course 06: Pen Tool Advanced

hi everybody this is josh and this is lesson six in our figma course we're gonna talk up more about the pen tool and get some more practice with it and we're gonna create an illustration from a sketch once again so we have a little bit of a reference to work with but i'm gonna show you some more advanced features of the pen tool to give you some new tricks in ways that you can manipulate and modify your vector shapes let's get started so here we are once again in our sigma course this is kind of cool to see the progress here look at everything that we've created so far and now we're on lesson six so we're going to take the things that we learned in our last lesson when we illustrated or vectorized this apple using a sketch let me show you the little sketch that we started with here i'll hide all my other layers this is a really handy thing using being able to use the layers panel to turn things on and off without deleting them you can just hide them clicking on that eyeball so there's the sketch that we started with and we started building up by creating the shape of the apple the shape of the leaf and the shape of the stem so just those three basic vector shapes then we can hide our sketch layer and that's what we ended up with last time we're going to create a little bit more advanced illustration still very simple and let's do that right now so we're going to start exactly the same way almost all of the lessons in here i'm going to be using a square canvas just because it's nice to be able to export if you want to use it on instagram and it's just a great size for sharing but if you don't want to hit f on the keyboard and choose the instagram story or just draw it out here's another way that you can do this just like we can with duplicating shapes we can hold alt hover over our frame and duplicate the entire frame so that's what i'm going to do here just move it on down and then i'm going to lasso select all of my content in here and delete also delete our hidden sketch layer there so we have a clean canvas and we can double click on the label and i'm going to call this lesson six or with a zero six and now our frame is set up and ready to go once again we're going to use some assets for this lesson so just head on over to joshuaprimary.com downloads and you'll see get assets for lesson six this will take you to a shared google drive folder you want to download both of these if you want to use the color palette that i've provided you can download the palette 06 svg you can also use coolers.co if you want to generate your own color palette or just pick from the color picker whatever colors that you want i just want to make it easy to give you a starting color palette here so we'll download this one and then we have plants illustration dot jpg let's download that so once those are in your default downloads folder we can go back over to figma and pull them right in so here's our palette i'll just line it up here to the side of my canvas and i'll pull in the jpeg illustration and drag and drop it again it's going to be larger than our canvas size so let's grab one of the handles and hold shift and alt and it will resize it from the center point of the object shift and alt we can shrink it down i'm going to line it up here and then maybe make it a little bit larger size it up to almost the size of the canvas and then we're going to go over to the layers panel and click that lock button so we don't accidentally move it around while we're creating our vector shapes there we go holding ctrl and the and using the mouse wheel we can zoom in and out you can also do this with a track pad most likely you can also hit the plus or minus keys on your keyboard to zoom in and out and holding the space bar i'm panning around my viewport to help me focus in on my frame here so i've colored the lines in this illustration different colors just to kind of indicate to give helpful guides on what kind of shapes that we're going to be creating for this illustration so for the these little potted plants here we're going to use just the pen tool and we'll start illustrating these so p on the keyboard selects the pen tool and let's choose something to start with so let's start with the big vase here so i'm going to click to add a point this is pretty much a straight line so i'm just going to rather than click and drag click where i have sort of the next juncture i'll click there i've got another juncture down here remember we can use our direct selection tool to push and pull things after we get our anchor points set so we're going to do the same thing here so i'm just going to basically put a point in all of the corners wherever i feel like there's going to be a junction and you can see that these red smart guides can really help line things up for us so we can get a nice more symmetrical shape here so now we have a rough polygon shape i'm going to hit v on the keyboard to go to the selection tool while i'm still editing this path i can hold control and push these push these line segments into place i'm noticing that this is getting hard to see so one thing i can do is click on my plants illustration jpeg layer and i can lower the opacity maybe to something like 30 and you can do that just by hitting three on the keyboard that's a lot easier to see what i'm doing now i'll go back to selecting i'll double click on my vector shape that i started creating and and drag out this side and i'll grab my handles to sort of change my curve and edit that so playing with those handles and using control in between line segments to push and pull these shapes into place is what i want you to practice i'm going to give a little bit of a curve right there at the top to kind of match up the illustration and i don't want this to be outlined you can leave the outline if you want but i'm going to remove the outline right over here under stroke so i'll take the stroke off and then click on my fill so i just added a fill and then i'll choose a color what do i want the pots color to be well for now let's just make them this dark color so i just hit eye on the keyboard and grab that color from our palette now i can't see what's behind here now to create my other shapes in this this is why i love using a vector graphics tool that gives you a paste board or ability to drag things off of your frame or canvas and just set them off to the side so what we're basically doing is creating our own vector assets almost like small pieces or cutouts of paper that we're going to later arrange on top of each other to finish this illustration let's continue on with all of the pots p on the keyboard to select the pen tool once again and let's start creating this one again i'm just doing the corners and then i'll do the curves and the line segments later finish off my shape by clicking on my first anchor point v on the keyboard to use the selection tool hold ctrl and i'll make this curve here right at the bottom that's pretty good i might actually curve these curve the underside here just holding ctrl again curve the underside here and deviate from what the sketch was this is the nice thing about vector graphics we can use a guide as as a reference but we can change it up as we want so there we go and we're going to copy the properties i'm going to select my larger vase here ctrl alt c and now select my new path control v and we can set this one off to the side as well so now we're creating some more assets for ourselves let's do the last pot and we're going to get faster at doing these things the more we do it i'll choose this corner here click into the next corner the bottom corner all the way across this corner i'm going to use those smart guides and to help line myself up there and all the way back to our first point v on the keyboard to switch to our selection tool and push our curves into place this one will have curves here on the bottom as well see how quickly we can create these more complex shapes these more organic shapes just using the pen tool v on the keyboard paste my properties again we still had those properties copied to our clipboard so now we have all of our vases and another great thing about vector graphics is if we want to change any of these colors at any time i'll select the large vase here i can maybe say you want this one let's make it pink so i on the keyboard and i can grab any of the colors that i want now if you've done this all in the same document you've got all of these color palettes that we've generated from coolers.co that we can choose from or the one that i provided for this lesson or any of the ones that you want to create or generate yourself okay the next thing i'm going to do is move on to the leafy part of these plants so i'm going to do this by overlapping just a little bit of the shapes that i've already created so again we're just using this sketch as a guide and i'm going to start a point a little bit lower than the top of my vase we're going to put this shape underneath our vase now this is a kind of strange and bumpy shape so one thing that we can do is click and drag to create those curves in between click and drag to create another curve and if we want to change the direction of our next line segment hold alt and you can see we can line it up with where we want the next line to go click click and drag we can also click on our last node or point and change it to a sharp point just like that and then continue on our shape here we'll make that a sharp point click and drag change our direction by holding alt click and drag create that little bump let's make that a sharp point by clicking back on our on our last created node we'll create this little hump click and drag change our direction by holding alt click click and drag click on our point to create a straight line segment click and drag to create a curve hold alt to change the direction and we'll just continue doing these methods over and over at the top here i want this to be a sharp point now we can use all of our other nodes to help line up the other side of this leafy part of the the plant so while you're using the pen tool see how now this isn't going to match up with the line how the reference goes so i need to change it to a sharp point by clicking on the last node that i created then i'm going to click and drag to get this curve and we've got a corner point we can just click click and drag for that little bit of a hump there hold alt to change our direction click and drag for that second little hump then we can click on our node and create a sharp point click and drag let's create a sharp point click and drag for a curve create a sharp point click and drag for another curve change our direction holding alt click and drag for a curve and then finally finish it off by clicking on the first node or point that we created so this is a very complex shape and just by using those few techniques holding alt to change the direction of your next line segment and then clicking on your last node to change it to a sharp point or a sharp angle you can practice doing that to create these very organic and much more complex shapes using the pen tool okay for this one i'm going to remove the stroke again click i and let's make it our green color that we have here once again we can just click and drag we'll pull it off of the canvas and just set it aside let's do the same thing we're going to go faster here now these are a little bit more simple shapes we'll create our little leafy bits p on the keyboard to select the pen tool click let's keep that a straight line here so we can we can use the help of the snapping and those red guides to help us out there click and drag create a sharp point click and drag create a sharp point click and drag create a sharp point and i'm just going to keep doing this all the way around i want curves between these you could do this the other method as well just click all of your junctures or corners then v on the keyboard use the ctrl key holding that down and push your lines into place i want to show you several different ways of getting the kind of results that that you might be wanting so [Music] paste our attributes we'll move those leaves off to the side and our last one here is a little a little bit more stubby and rounded we'll do the same thing i'll start with the bottom here you can hold shift to create a perfectly straight line just to make sure that it's perfectly straight and i'm going to try to create this one with as few points as possible so i'll do my simple polygon method and then push all of our line segments into place it really is the fastest way that i know to creating organic shapes that have very clean curves so we've got sort of this polygon shape here hold ctrl and we're going to push these lines grab the handles and move them into place and all of this just takes a little bit of practice grab these handles and we can modify the curves hold ctrl push the straight line segment into a curve grab those handles move it around see how this is a little bit different than what we were doing before whichever way is easier for you to understand or faster or more suits your style that's what i want to do is give you some options some different ways of getting the results that we're getting here so we will copy our properties from our last leaf and paste them in it will remove our stroke and fill it with our green color then we'll just drag that one again off to the side and if you want to while you do this we can rename each of these pieces in the layers panel and that's something i really highly recommend otherwise you're just going to get vector 1 vector 2 vector three vector four and in the layers panel it's gonna get kind of cluttery so i wanna name these so i'm gonna call this one the big vase second vase third vase big leaves you can call them whatever you want okay i've got all those renamed now i've got one more thing that i want to draw and it's these branches for this bigger plant right up here so we're going to do that again with the pen tool p on the keyboard let's just start by by placing a node we're going to click at the end of our line segment here and you can actually while you have the pen tool selected hold ctrl and push these things into place now i'm going to create a new node on my current line segment just like that and click and create that little branch there now just hit escape and that will detach your pen tool you can add a new node to your line you'll see you get a little plus icon next to the pen icon so we can keep this entire branch in a single shape then hit escape on your keyboard again and we can actually draw all of these branches so that they're all on one layer holding ctrl i can bend them just a little bit we'll add a new line segment click click and drag hit escape to detach the pen tool we'll create a new line segment here escape and just do the same thing with the last branch escape to detach the pen tool hover over that line segment when you get the plus icon you know you're creating a new node that's attached to your line segment and then escape then we can hit v and double click to sort of get out of our node editing mode so now we've got a stroke over here i want to show you how we can style this stroke to better match our illustration first i'm going to bump up the line weight right over here so under stroke we can just start pushing the up arrow and we can bump up the thickness of our line so you can choose how thick or thin you want them to be i'm going to try to match up to our reference looks to be about seven or eight now we've got this little three dot icon that says advanced stroke settings let's open that so that we can round out the ends of our strokes here i'm gonna make sure the corners around as well and then from the cap i'm going to select from none and choose round now look at how our branches look now that's a little better i'll click on my stroke color here choose my eyedropper tool and let's make them our dark color here there we go now that's all one piece all one shape here let's double click and name this whatever you want to call it i'm going to call it branches so we can see everything nice and clear in the layers panel when we start arranging all of this stuff here so now this is where we're going to get into some layers and overlapping so we've gotten a lot better using our pen tool if you've created shapes that look something like you see on the screen here you're doing a great job so now let's start arranging this illustration how we want it do we want these both of these smaller plants in front do we want them behind i'm leaving some of this up to your creativity i'm just going to show you how i'm going to do it i want my vase to be on top of these branches so i'm going to just grab it and drag it back onto my frame and let's line it up right there with the center now they're going to be on top of my branches so the branches are hidden underneath so it looks like they're coming out from the vase that's what i want great now we need our big leafy bits here but they're in front so we we can either use control and the bracket key the left bracket key will move it back in our layers panel as you can see what's going on over here or we can just use our layers here and drag them and say it needs to be beneath the branches and beneath the vase see how we're now using overlapping to create something that is a much more recognizable thing than just a bunch of shapes here okay same thing here let's grab our second vase or a little pot here let's say and we can line it back up with our reference here these are the leaves and they need to be behind our pot just a little bit so we can click and drag in the layers panel to reorder them and we can also resize our graphics and change them we can resize our vector shapes and change them maybe i want to squash this one down a little bit we can make changes you can double click in here and decide on how you want your curves to be make little adjustments we can also group these things together so i'm going to put these two the the the vase and the leaves with control g into a group now when i select that on the canvas it's a lot easier to manage i'm going to do that same thing with this big one select all of that lasso select by clicking and dragging ctrl g to put that into a big group and i can rename these groups as well in our layers panel this is going to be the big vase and plant two and let's get our last plant at least on the canvas so that we can get the layers in the right order and we'll put these two things in a group as well control g plant three you'll call it so now if we want the smaller plant here to be behind our larger vase kind of like it is in our reference we can in the layers panel pull it behind the big vase there we go so that little parts kind of sneaking behind there i like that so we're creating some depth you start to get the illusion of depth by stacking up these shapes and arranging them in different ways this is looking really great so now let's go ahead and use o on our keyboard we're going to create a big ellipse here i'm going to hold down the shift key and try to match up that big circle then i'm going to move it to the back with ctrl shift and the left bracket key that will move it to the very bottom layer and let's select a color for this let's use this bright yellow r for the rectangle tool just to give this some kind of ground or desk to sit on and again we'll move this to the back control shift left bracket using these shortcut keys is going to make things a lot faster we can then rearrange them in our layers panel i want that rectangle above the ellipse and let's give that a color let's use our orange color now we can hide our plant illustration and see what we got there it is if we want to give the background a color we can do that as well and maybe let's create a gradient so i'm going to click on the fill of our background just by selecting our frame then we select our fill and open our color picker here let's change it from a solid to a radial gradient and let's make our first color yellow and our second color whatever you want to try out maybe i'll make it that orange color so we get kind of a glow effect here so play around with some colors you could play around with different color palettes different configuration or a different composition that maybe you like better maybe these plants should be all in a row something like this that's an interesting composition so i hope you've been able to master the pen tool a little bit better keep practicing with it and then use your layers panel to help you arrange them front and back to get them to sit the way that you you want so that's it for lesson six thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next lesson bye for now

Channel: Joshua Pomeroy

Views: 1,551

Keywords: Creative, Pomeroy, Create, Tutorial, Design, Studio, Tips, Graphics, Art, Computer

Id: akb4Mxyd1Us

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021