Geometric shape dot artwork in Adobe Illustrator (AMAZING TRICK!)

my name is Nathaniel Dodson and in today's Illustrator tutorial we're gonna take a look at creating this cool geometric dot artwork it's really neat and there's some really cool techniques and sort of little tricks that you can do to create this type of artwork quickly and get that sort of dappled color or just randomized color everywhere it's really neat I think you're really going to enjoy it so stick around and check it out it all gets started right now all right we're gonna create this cool geometric artwork here in Adobe Illustrator I'm gonna throw a new layer here on my document to see what I'm doing now this I'm not gonna lie it was inspired by a tutorial I saw it had to been a couple of years ago on YouTube about geometric shape design or something like that where they do a similar thing with hexagons but we're gonna kind of take it to another level and do it the way that I kind of have been doing designs like this probably pretty much ever since seeing that tutorial it's a really cool technique but we're gonna take it a couple steps further as you're gonna see here in just a moment alright we kick it off by grabbing the polygon tool and we click a single time and I'm gonna say give me a polygon of 900 pixels in the radius department and let's go with the six sided affair here so you can see it is absolutely massive quite a bit bigger then maybe I initially thought but we're gonna work with it out here on the gray I know we just had that beautiful background but we're gonna move it back over the background in a minute and I'm gonna pop open my other set of toolbars here because I'm worried about the properties panel right now I want to flip my fill and stroke so I'm gonna hit the little flippy flop arrow over here to swap fill and stroke you can see the stroke is tiny I'll make it a little bit bigger hey let's go like 15 points you can see that right we can all see that and what I want to do is click on the word stroke to open my stroke panel a couple things we want to do here number one we want to make this a dashed line so we can see here we got this nice little - enos happening but I want them to be dots I don't want them to be these kind of weird look in little square pellets or whatever they are so we want them to be dots so I'm zooming in to get a closer look alright back to the stroke panel I'm gonna round to the caps alright and also what I'm gonna do is say look - I don't want you to be 12 points I want you to be like one point and I want a pretty reasonable size gap let's go with like 50 points maybe something like that so now we can see we have this dotted line shooting all the way around our our polygon here now let me zoom back in I don't know if you notice this look at this where we have our dots that land on the corners stroke panel Here I am by the way using this anchor sort of align the dash to the corners and path ends I was think of it as anchoring to the corners what that means is we're gonna have a dot on each one of the corners of our polygon rights the others at each corner there is a nice dot so it's a very uniform set of dots which is beautiful and perfect exactly what I want however if i zoom back in you can see that the corner dots have this weird to your drop effect which is not cool not what we want at all how do we fix that well if we go back to stroke not only do we change cap to rounded cap we need to change corner to rounded corner and there we go we just kind of round out it's still slightly oblong unless I'm just seeing things but it's way less noticeable as far as being a funky looking shape then that little teardrop shaped corner dot was just a moment ago so let's apply a gradient to the stroke that's right you can't apply a gradient to the stroke now we want to do this if I look up here to my color panel you're gonna see that I have the fill color to the foreground that means if I adjust the color it's gonna add a big fill to this we don't want that we want to select stroke bring the stroke to the foreground and now you can see now we got a red stroke and now it's kind of greenish yellow and all that we want to add a gradient though so I'm gonna select gradients and let's go with like a yellow to orange to like a hot pink kind of gradients I'm gonna add a middle point to my gradient let's select the white point here and I am going to say let's go HSB and I'm going to make this yellow so I'm gonna pump the saturation up and let's slide this over to about yellow there we go let's go for the middle point now and we're gonna again HSB we're gonna give this about an orange so let's say orange orange orange something kind of like that should be good and then over here for this part we're getting gonna hit the flyout menu choose not RGB we're gonna choose HSB cuz we're just going all full-custom here and I want to go red but like with sort of a just a tip a favor toward this kind of hot pink red not just a full rich cherry red but something it has a little bit of that just a tinge of that hot pink to it so there's our gradient and we've applied that gradient to our stroke so you can see the gradient is applied to the stroke not the fill all right now here's where things get cool and a little crazy we're gonna go effect we're gonna choose distort and transform and transform now here in the transform a panel if it pops up here we go I'm going to set it over here here in the transform panel we want to do a couple things I am going to first and foremost say look create a bunch of copies let's go with like 25 we might end up doing more than that but let's go 25 now and I turn on preview and nothing happens what's the big deal well we need to we need to make some adjustments here so let's say let's change this let's change the scale let's say each each additional copy needs to be a 90 percent thinner and 90 percent less tall so now you can see this effect that we're getting here and things are getting a little wild but that's not quite good enough actually I know that I want this to be at ninety one percent not ninety percent and then I want to tweak the angle so I'm just gonna select the angle input and use my arrow key here and just twist this design until I like the way it looks so if you go kind of too far you're gonna start getting this really starburst effect but maybe that's what you want and that looks really cool to you for me that's a little bit too complex with all these dots I'm gonna untwist it I probably want around twelve degrees let's see what 12 degrees looks like that looks like a bit of a vortex and if we want the vortex to go deeper see how big the hole in the center is just bump up the number of copies maybe we'll push this up to like 32 and see that we're just adding layers there to the middle I'm gonna hit OK and this is kind of the effect that I remember from the other tutorial I don't know if the they use dots or not or just solid solid strokes so if we go to stroke and we shut off the dashed line you see you're gonna get this kind of effect I'm gonna keep the dashed or the dotted line I should say but use the I've got a card I'm just gonna link to that video so you can check that out as well in case something else was covered there that I missed here like I said it was a little while ago that I watched it and this is just how I kind of always do it now so you can check that out show him some love and then continue on of course for this tutorial cuz we got a lot more cool stuff coming here so now to create the system of dots we actually want to get rid of the gradient I just had it there to kind of show you how cool it looked and really be able to visualize this twist that we're putting on our graphics let's just go ahead and get rid of the gradient we're gonna do that by hitting the little solid color here in the bottom of our toolbar for our stroke and you can see we're back to just this system of just kind of playing colored dots still looks cool doesn't have the same kind of dimension but we're gonna be changing this up here in just a minute we want here and she was object expand appearance and what we've done if I open up this layer is we have this polygon and you can see with it we have this whole series of groups of dots we need to expand this further we need to keep expanding and ungrouping until we just have a bunch of little dots shapes so we're gonna choose expand and I'm gonna expand all the strokes I don't want to expand the fills I don't need to expand the fills so I'm just gonna leave stroke checked on expanded the strokes to fills and now what I have is a bunch of groups as well so I want to ungroup object ungroup and if I do that you can see I still have a bunch of groups so we're gonna go object ungroup again and I still have a bunch of groups so I'm gonna go object ungroup again and now I've got a bunch of compound paths as well as regular paths so we're gonna go object compound path release those compound paths and now we have a whole bunch of dots now because I have my artboard clean and I can easily drag a selection around all these I don't need to group them up but if you were working with complex artwork I would probably regroup the dots and then right before we apply the colors we would just ungroup this series of thoughts so I'm gonna group it up just so I can just click it a single time and the whole thing will be selected but it's really up to you however you want to select it at that point the next step is to jump out somewhere like Adobe color and choose a color scheme that you like choose five or six colors or maybe have some colors in mind or maybe you want to go ahead and create a new color scheme you can do that under here or under create you can also drag an image in that you like a landscape a photo of somebody or a scene that you really enjoy maybe from a movie and you want to get the essence of that that still film a grab or that film frame I should say you can drag it into here an Adobe color will automatically detect the colors and create a five swatch color scheme for you I'm just gonna go back to Explorer and what you can do is just let's say we like this color scheme you can click on it here and just choose to add it to your library and it'll add it to your library here in Illustrator where is that well it's under window libraries and by the way this only works if you have Creative Cloud in terms of getting the color this way if you don't have Creative Cloud you can still follow along with the tutorial you're just gonna need to create a color scheme kind of manually which is no problem I have all these color themes here but maybe let's jump back out to Adobe color let's see if we can find something that we we think is interesting here I'm gonna deselect I want a little bit more of like a red white blue so let's go French I guess I could say American but it's kind of those French colors are dancing in my head right now so maybe we can go with something like this this is kind of a cool looking color scheme right here so I'm just gonna select this I'm gonna choose add to library it's gonna say look theme was successfully added your color schemes library that's great and by the way up here is where you choose the library to which the color schemes are added I just have color schema selected so if it's not going to you to a color scheme or a folder like that in your Creative Cloud library that might be what the problem is and here it is a French affair duel and we're gonna take this and I'm gonna right-click on it and say look add this entire theme to my swatches and we're done with the Creative Cloud stuff over here in swatches there's our color theme so now how do we apply this across all these dots and make it look good and interesting and everything else well this is where you want to download a script for illustrator and don't be scared it's free and it's so easy to do out here run a Google search for like random random swatches fill illustrator script and you're gonna find this and you want to go ahead and download this script and you can see here you install the script into whether you have Windows or Mac just install it into the appropriate folder and what's going to happen is you need to close illustrator down and reopen it and here under file scripts you're gonna have random swatches fill as an option and this is exactly what we want but how does this work well here's all you have to do we select that group of course we want to ungroup it because we want all overall pieces of artwork so object ungroup and then we need to command or control click in our swatches panel the swatches that were interested in so I want to get all the colors for my little French theme here so I'm gonna hold down commander control click on the seafoam green that bluish purplish the red the white and that mustard a yellow color I got all those colors selected I just held down my command key that we control on the windows and clicked all of them once you have that and you have all your artwork selected you go file you go scripts random swatches fill and there you have it we've created all of those shapes and they all have all those different colors and they're applied that fast and that easy select them all commander control G to group them up and then I would take this down and for the real test just scale it down a little bit place it here over the background and look at the final effect that I have now maybe to make this a little bit more interesting here I could do something like select the group go to my transparency panel double click to add a layer mask and well you know before I create the layer mask let's create the actual mask shape so let's go ellipse tool and let's drag out an ellipse here kind of over the middle of our shape you know roughly like that I'm gonna select it and I'm going to go to my fill I'm gonna choose a black to white gradient and then I'm gonna choose gradient options which is gonna pop open my gradient panel which is actually already open here and I am gonna set this to a radial gradient I want black to be on the outside but it's not really like a true rich black it's kind of like a flat yeah crappy black so we're gonna select our color panel I have selected that handle right there I'm sorry I need to hit edit gradient and now I have selected that black handle and I'm just gonna hit the the true rich black swatch right there to give me like a real solid black see that and now what I can do is just kind of constrain the black want to pull the middle point over and just push the black out to the outside a little bit something like that will work and now that I have this what's gonna be used as the mask where it's gonna fade from the white and drop off to black and everything outside the black is gonna be gone I'm gonna take this shape and we're gonna cut it edit cut and now I go back to the group select the group double click to open my transparency panel double click to add a mask see the mask is set to clip already which means that it's all solid black and we just go edit paste in front and it's going to paste our little gradient in place and you can see it's fading from white out to solid black I deselect it I can select here to go back to my original artwork and there now we have this a bit of artwork and it's just kind of spraying all over the place looking pretty cool now what we can do is we can take this we can duplicate it so just drag out a copy here and duplicate it and we drag it up here and I'm going to ungroup this so right there we've got we've got what we've got i'm going to ungroup this object ungroup and you can see it says look i got to release the mask so the mask shape is here as well i'm just gonna hide the mask shape we're gonna select this entire thing make sure while it is selected we're gonna go back to our swatches panel and maybe we want to add another color scheme and try try another color scheme let's go window let's go libraries not links let's go window let's go libraries and i have a bunch of other colors here let's scroll down we've got this here which is a little bit more of a red white and blue pher that might be kind of cooler let's right-click on that and choose to add that theme to swatches and maybe what I'll do - I'm gonna bump up here to just colors and I'm gonna add all these colors to swatches as well so I'll command or control click these since their individual swatches with them all selected right-click and choose add color to swatches and you can see voila all those colors just got added so we have a couple different options we can play with here we have all these pieces selected let's go with our red white and blue and I did not import the red white and blue let's go libraries I must have accidentally undone that or undid that right-click add theme to swatches it's so fast and easy and then with that selected I'm gonna just well I'll save select it just to be sure file scripts and random swatches fill and we've got a totally different looking set of stuff here which is kind of cool and what I'll do is turn the mask back on I'm gonna select the mask shape and we need to cut it again edit cut and then group all these shapes together and I grab objects group the hot keys command or ctrl G by the way and we'll just add that mask like we did before boom paste it right in place and voila we have that and what I can do here is take this and I'll zoom out let's maybe set this up in the top corner alright so something like that actually let's do these let's do them all across the middle something like so and I'll grab both of these groups open up my align panel I'll just align them to each other make sure that they're looking right and then I'll drag them over into the document kind of something like so so very quickly and easily we're not gonna get quick to the red one today cause it's just gonna take extra time and you get the point at this point right all these cool randomized colored dots and there'll be a pole here on the video at this point a little I up in the top right corner of the video which color scheme do you like more the sort of French or the more red white and blue color scheme which one do you think is cooler and of course the more you zoom in you just see more and more crazy rich detail that's in here it is certainly not lacking for detail but that is how you take and create these geometric shapes and add a ton of randomized color throughout them in seconds so yeah that's it for this one everybody thank you so much for watching it if you enjoyed this video number one make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn those notifications on so you never miss any tutorials in the future and also check out this tutorial all about how to create custom fonts in Adobe Illustrator using the font self plug-in it's really cool if you're a graphic designer and you work with clients and you want the ability to create custom typefaces or tweak and adjust typefaces and save them as new custom typefaces that you can use ah it's so powerful it's such a cool tool you absolutely should check it out and thank you so much for sticking around and watching this video all the way to the end ladies gentlemen that's it get it got it good Nathaniel Dodson Chuck vidcom I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: tutvid

Views: 50,712

Keywords: geometric design, geometric artwork, adobe illustrator, illustrator tutorials, graphic design, graphic designer, adobe creative cloud, nathaniel dodson, tutvid, random colors illustrator, illustrator tips, illustrator hacks, how to, AI, geometric art, geometric, illustrator tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, graphic design tutorials

Id: j6Ok73Kg1B4

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019