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How to bend & warp shapes & text in Adobe Illustrator CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 6
CC Libraries 10:29
SECTION: 9
Free Templates 3:47

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Course info

45 lessons / 8 hours 12 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan.

I’m an designer, Adobe Certified Instructor & Adobe Certified Expert.

Together we’re going to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator. During our course we won’t just learn how to use the tools... we will create real world, practical projects together.

This course is aimed at people new to Illustrator & design in general. We’ll start right at the beginning, working our way through step by step.

We’ll start with the techniques you’ll need to create just about everything in Illustrator. Including icons, logos, postcards & hand drawn illustrations.

We’ll explore lines & brushes. You’ll master how to use and manipulate type. I’ll show you the clever secrets Illustrator has which will help you to discover & use beautiful color like a pro.

You’ll learn how to push, pull, cut & repeat artwork. You'll learn how to redraw real world examples of famous logos. We'll cover the essentials like correct saving & exporting along with so, so much more.

If you’ve never opened Illustrator before, or you’ve opened it and struggled, come with me, I’ll show you the easy way to make beautiful artwork. - Dan

What are the requirements?
  • You will need a copy of Adobe Illustrator 2018 or above. A free trial of the software can be downloaded from Adobe.com.

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 39 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • Drawing with Shapes & Lines
  • Drawing with the Shape Builder
  • Creating a custom logo
  • Working with Brushes
  • Drawing with the pen, pencil & curvature tool
  • Learn how to work with type & fonts.
  • How to mask images & graphics.
  • How to distort, bend, warp & liquefy illustrations.
  • How to make your own repeating wallpaper patterns.
  • How to create stencil style images from real drawings.
  • How to use free Illustrator templates.
  • How to save, print & export for Print, web & social media.
  • Lots of real world exercises for you to practice.
  • Loads or class projects for you to complete.
  • Printable PDF Cheat sheet.
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.
  • Downloadable exercise files.
  • Forum support from me.
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers.
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts.
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career.

What is the target audience?
  • No previous Adobe Illustrator experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to Illustrator. No previous design, drawing or illustration experience is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce a large range of drawing, illustration & logo work. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with this course.

Course duration 8 hours + your study.

Get the completed files here




Awarded the Best Illustrator Course by Learnopoly in 2023

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we take the simple, insignificant lines, with a little bit of Gradient in them, and then do this to them. Some would say, exciting shapes, some would say, crimes against design. It gets worse. We deal with Type too. Let's learn how to turn those lines using the Warp functions in Illustrator.

All right, let's get started. Now you can start with any shape. I've got a file open from 'Exercise Files', called 'Warp Transform'. And what I've done is I've just created three rectangles, and added a Gradient to them. Now for this to work properly, we need to group them but you can use any shape. I'm going to select them all, go to 'Object', and go to 'Group'. Let's look at the 'Effect'. And it is under 'Warp'. So we're going to start with 'Arc'. And yes, it bends it around like a warp. What's cool about it? It's still vector, scalable, it's awesome. You can go through some pre-defined ones. 'Arc'. 'Arc Upper'. I'm going to quickly go through them, just so that you get a sense of them. 'Bulge' is cool, even just like any of these. It's doing some cool stuff with those gradients and those colors. 'Flag', 'Wave'. 'Fish'. I'm going through them quickly so you don't have to. Just to see what's going in there, and you can jump to the one that you love. I'll play around with it. 'Squeeze', cool 'Twist'.

Now all of them have options. I'm going to go back to 'Wave', it's kind of my favorite. Actually no, let's go to 'Flag'. I love this, and you can look. You can exaggerate the bend, you can make it bend the other way. You can make kind of bounce on one side. Maybe up the top there, you can just do some really interesting stuff. Like just really how to deal with the Pen Tool or the Curvature Tool. So just whack it into the 'Effects', 'Wave'. And when you're ready, click 'OK'. Now if you want to go back and edit it, say you kind of like it, but later on you want to go and edit it again; with it selected, on your 'Properties Panel' you can kind of see, there's an Effect that's applied. And it's called Warp Flag, click on it. And I can go in here, and change it to something else. I'm going to go back to my 'Warp Flag'. Man, that was pretty cool. Let's click 'OK'.

The next thing to note is that, if I grab my 'Black Arrow' and have it selected, you can kind of see I still have this line selected, which is weird. It's just the way it is. The line still exists, they're in this kind of like distortion field that kind of makes him do this. But watch what happens, there's an Active Distortion. So if I grab and rotate these corners, look what happens, it's still trying to-- it's not rotating as we'd imagined. It's still trying to affect that Warp. You know, with the Wave, that's going through here. So it's kind of doing some weird stuff to it, you might like it. I'm going to undo it to go back to where it was. There it is there.

Let's say I want to move it around now and stop it kind of reacting. We need to do something called Expand Appearance. So with it selected, go up to 'Object', there's one called 'Expand Appearance'. Watch what happens to the lines. It kind of changes from this straight lines that have been distorted to actually just plain old distorted lines now. There's no effect, you can see, the effect's gone. I can't go back to those lines now. It's kind of a one-way street but now I get to kind of move this thing around a lot nicer. You can do it with Type. I'm going to-- not sure what I'm going to do now. I feel like I created a genius here, I love it.

So I'm going to draw a rectangle in the back. For no reason, because I don't like the white, I'll get it back there. It's blending into it. Not cool. It's going to pick a dark color. "Dan, just get on with the tutorial." I promise I will in one second. Dark gray. What I want to do is with Type, grab the 'Type Tool'. I'm just going to click once. And I type in '80s rule.' Start another pretty 80s. '80s rule.' Can't even see what I'm doing down there. Yes, 80s rule, that's what I've written. So I'm going to pick a font. Of the top of my head, an 80's font. Some of the 80s Lust. Here's you, new kind of look. 80s-ish, okay? I'm going to give it a 'white' Fill. So, the same thing with Type, you don't have to do anything to it. Now I'm going to make mine nice and big. I'm going to go up to 'Effect', go to 'Warp'. And I'm going to play around with it again. Make sure Preview's on, yours might not be on by default. Upper Arc is not working for me. What it's doing as well, it's trying to remember the last thing I did with this. I want to kind of get it back to 0, so I'm going to put you at '0'. You at '0'. And put the bend back this side. And now start playing around with them, normally at '0', '0'. 'Wave'. Wave's not really working. Let's go for 'Fish'.

Now I'm just playing around. You can leave this tutorial now. You've got the idea, right? 'Flag'. Mine's been terrible. So good with the Strokes, then so bad with the Type. The cool thing about the Type though, I guess, before we go, is watch this, with my 'Black Arrow', I can hover above it, I can type on, it's quite hard to do. 80s, let's say it's more a 70s thing. So it's editable type.

So that is going to be it for whooping around Shapes and Type using Adobe Illustrator. All right, I will see you in the next video.

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