Layers and Polystar Tools
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI 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.
Hi! This video were going to look at layers and the polystar tool, nice simple stuff. So down the bottom were given our first layer, its called layer one. what we’re going to do is rename it so layer one were going to call maybe building. And what were going to do just to make it easier, so we don’t go and wreck things later on is were going to lock it, see this little lock icon here, click this and it just means I cant move it or wreck it.
I'm going to create a new layer, so this little turned up page down here says new layer, its called layer two, I'm going to rename it and this ones going to be called stars. And I'm going to draw on this layer, I know I'm on this layer, can you see its this highlighted colour in this case its an orange colour and were going to use the polystar tool, the polystar tool is this one here, I'm going to click on it and when you get started with the polystar tool it comes out with less of a star and more of a polygon. So I don’t want that, I've selected it and deleted it, back to my polystar tool. I'm going to click on my options and to find stars, there you are. From polygon I'm going to switch it to star, and if I leave it on default it’s going to give you a traditional star shape. What I want to do is, we’ll have a couple of those actually. So I'm going to pick yellow for stars because stars are yellow. A couple of these around, great. So I want a couple of different shapes, so I'm going to go to options and bring this back down. Lets look at number of sides, I'm going to bump it up to 10 so there's lots more of these edges here and the star point size just means, can you see it goes in, the inset here is half of the size, so 0.5, if I go way down to 0.2, click on this and then I drag it out. Can you see I get a real sparkly star, with really pointed tips and obviously if you go the other way, and you crank it right up, if you get up to 0.9, and I say 50, you get more of a starburst, that kind. What I wanted was, I wanted this up to 0.9, there you go. More like a starburst and, kind of like a sticker gold label type thing.
Okay so that’s how to make some terrible looking stars in your terrible looking skyline.