Lessons
Week 3: Cubes continued, and a wee bit’o color
Click here for the class notes from Week 2.
If you’ve stumbled upon this site from Google or the ATCO homepage: This section of ATCO posts the class notes from my Creative Suite Tutorial class, which is taught through the Department of Art, Art History and Design at the University of Notre Dame.
From the GD 1 Syllabus
9.13—Due: mounted 11” x 11” cube drawing. Workday on cube and letterform; Read GDB 136–153. Assignment: complete 7” x 7” sketches; bring sharpie to class.
Shapes
Shapes are different from straight lines because they have a defined “inner” and “outer” section, and therefor, can have both stroke properties and fill properties. (Straight lines will only represent Stroke properties). To my way of thinking, ONLY straight line segments with two control points would count as lines. Everything else would be a shape. Shapes can be open or closed. The difference is that closed shapes have no start or end point.
Reference Points
Every shape element of your Illustrator file, no matter how complicated, have nine reference points: one for each corner of the imaginary square around the shape, one each for the midpoint of each side of this square, and one for the center.
Reference points are different front control points. Reference points define the outer boundaries of your shape. They sort of treat every shape, no matter how complex as existing in a rectangular area with. This is important for positioning. Control points are the actual points of the shape that define the vectors that create the shape.
Lines only have three such points: two end points and a mid point. Curves are considered “shapes.”
You can see the outside reference points by turning on “Show Bounding Box” accesible from the View menu. Although the center point isn’t visible, it “exists” at the intersection of the two midpoint references.
The Compass Rose
In the options bar at the top of the screen you will find the following tools (when a shape is selected)
I call the graphic on the far left the “Compass Rose” but it’s technically the “reference point tool.” Each of the little boxes in the shape represent one of the reference points in your active shape and each can be positioned mechanically using the X and Y coordinate fields. The black box represents the active reference point. In this case, the center of the active shape is located at X:3.8728 and Y:5.5608.
Shapes
Use the shape tool to create basic shapes. Hold down the shift key to create shapes in constrained proportions (perfect circles, squares, etc.). This works with all of the shape tools. Click and hold on the shape tool to reveal the hidden tools beneath.
The Rounded Rectangle Tool
This tool creates exactly what it says it creates. The problem is that the corner rounds are applied to the shape only when it’s created, so as soon as you try to resize the shape, they will lose the integrity of their radius. (Flatten out). For this reason, I rarely use the rounded rectangle tool.
For situations where a rounded rectangle is needed, it’s better to use the rectangle tool and apply a corner round from the Effect>Stylize>Round Corners menu. Because this is an effect, it will be reapplied after each resize of the shape and it can be tweaked if, for example, you want a larger radius later.
The Polygon Tool
Creates shapes with more then the four sides in the rectangle tool. type the up and down arrow keys while clicking and dragging to increase or decrease the number of sides.
The Star Tool
Similar to the polygon tool, but made up of two “circles” of control points with different radiuses which creates star shapes. Again, hitting the arrow keys will add or subtract “points” of the star shape (not to be confused with control or reference points).
Alternatively, you can click once on the art board to customize the radiuses of these two circles of points.
Typing the down arrow key enough times will result in a triangle, which is the best way, in my opinion to draw triangles in Illustrator.
Lines
Use the Stroke panel (window>stroke) to control the thickness and properties of your lines.
Weight sets the thickness of the line’s stroke. The three buttons to the right control how the lines draws it’s end point. Miter limit is a setting that helps strokes draw themselves properly around angled points with very low measures (see image at left). The right angle has a mitre limit of 17 to compensate for the tight angle. Otherwise, the angle draws itself like the shape on the left. The buttons next to “align stroke” are for shapes. They indicate wether the stroke is alligned outside the shape, inside the shape, or evenly inside and outside the shape.
Expanding
Lines can be changed into shapes by expanding them. Select the line you wish to turn into a shape and click on Object>Expand. Make sure only “stroke” is checked, and click okay. Now you have a shape rather then a line.
Your cube
In the example I used last week, where we used the align tool to mechanically construct our cube out of lines, you can use the expand tool to turn your set of lines into shapes so that you can “trim” the extra points with the Pathfinder tool. We’ll get to this.
The Illustrator Ideal
But first. You need a Platonic Form of sorts so you know that you’re working the right way. In Illustrator, the Ideal is “Use As Few Control Points as Possible.” (There are Ideals for Photoshop and InDesign too…we’ll get to them).
The Pathfinder
The pathfinder panel controls how shapes interact to form new shapes.
In the example above, the two black circles on the far right, look like one shape but they’re still two separate circles. This becomes obvious when we try to apply a stroke as in the center illustration. The solution is to use the Merge function in the Pathfinder. Selecting the two objects together, clicke Merge and then clicking “expand” will delete all of the control points where the two shapes overlap and create a brand new, single shape. Looking at this from another perspective:
These sets of shapes are before being merged and after being merged.
The other tools in the Pathfinder panel do similar things and they are very intuitively illustrated. If you can grasp the basic concept of the Merge command, the others are obvious.
How this relates to your cube
One of the problems you might have run into in creating your cube is getting the corners to look right. This is because strokes are controlled by default by the lines at their centers, so the outside edges of the lines form weird points that are nearly impossible to line up properly because to move them you have to move the end point of the stroke, which is in a different place.
All I’m going to say is that this is how I would build my cube if the assignment were presented to me today. It’s more efficient then messing around with the strokes for hours. Even if you’re not supposed to do it this way for this particular assignment, the concepts we’ll discuss will help with our next project.
This is one way to build your cube (just sayin’)
You COULD, if you were so inclined, sketch the cube out in single lines like we did last week, get to about the point where you think it’s largely close to perfect (except for the corners). get the strokes to the desired weight and MAKE A COPY OF YOUR STROKES. (once you complete the next step, if you don’t copy them, they will be lost forever). Expand the strokes, then use the pathfinder to merge them together. The result should, pretty much be the exact same thing you had when everything was treated as a line, but now what before were strokes are shapes and can be controlled like shapes…which means that you can use other shapes to clip way the stubborn parts of the stroke that you can’t make line up, or you can use the delete point tool (under the pen tool) to remove control points. that are cutting into your shape where you need a full line).
But…oak…what about the fills on the sides?
Drag a copy of your expanded cube shape to one side. (Use the shift key to keep it mechanically aligned). Now use the white arrow to select any point, group of ponts, or edge on the OUTER edge of the shape. Hit delete twice and you should end up with JUST the three polygon shapes on the inside. Click Shift+Cmd+G to ungroup this and you’re left with three seperated shapes that should perfectly align with the interior shapes of the original. Because you ungrouped them, you should be able to control each fill color sparately.
Now…if they DON’T ungroup properly…
KEEP YOUR ORIGINAL and use Shift+Alt copy three copies of this group and use the white arrow (as we did above) to delete two of the shapes from each set until you’re left with three separate shapes. Now use the Align panel to snap these back to the original. Delete the original and you’ve got three separated shapes.
Finally
Use the white arrow to delete the interior shapes in the very first instance of the cube. This should result in the outer edge only, filled entirely with black. Group your three separate interior shapes and align them with the large black shape and they should snap back to the original.
Color
The active color is represented by the overlapping squares at the bottom of the tool panel. The same squares are also in the Color panel (Window>Color). These squares represent the Fill Color (top square) and the Stroke Color (bottom square with a gray box in the center).
This is different from Photoshop where the squares represent foreground/background.
Color Spaces
You can set the color space when you create a new document. It can be changed from the file menu under “Document Color Mode.” The two color spaces you need to be most concerned with are RGB for screen work and CMYK for print work.
The RGB color space is larger
That means that colors can be made in RGB that it is impossible to represent in CMYK, so you can’t print them, (this is especially true with blues). When you wander into selecting a color that is not CMYK safe you will see the following icon in the color picker:
If you use the CMYK sliders in the color panel, you won’t have to worry about this. It’s only an issue if you drag the selector around in the Color Picker (above).
Picking a Color
Use the sliders in the color panel to select your color. Use the panel’s options menu to set the sliders for CMYK or RGB. If you know the CMYK value of the color that you want, type the numbers into the value fields next to the sliders. (Use TAB to move quickly between the fields).
Setting a Color
As discussed above, the overlapping shape is the upper square represents the fill color, the other square (with a grey box inside) represents the stroke. Clicking either square will bring it to the overlapping position so that it can be adjusted.
Swatches
Swatches are color chips that allow you save colors you’ve created for use later. To create a new swatch from a color you’ve already created, simply drag the color out of the Color panel and into the swatch panel. Clicking “new swatch” either in the swaches options menu, or the bottom bar of the swatches panel will bring up a color picker with the active fill color automatically set.Drag the sliders to alter the color.
Global Colors
Double click on a swatch to bring up it’s edit field. Click the “Global” check box and hit okay. Notice that the swatch now has a white corner tab on it. This is now a Global Color and when it is used in the document, you can control all instances of the color at the same time.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t retroactive, so in other words, if you set a global color you have to go back to the other uses of the color and reset their Fills with the new chip, otherwise they won’t change with it.
Swatches set to Global Colors are editable in the color panel, but only as tints. (Pulling the slider to the left adds a percentage of white to the global color, lightening it’s tint).
Kuler
kuler.adobe.com is a great resource for finding colors and color pallettes. (Also colourlovers.com for that matter). Kuler allows you to download themes to your local machine and then load them in Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop. To do this, click the “Download This Theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange File” button in the center of the screen. Then, in Illustrator, in the swatches panel options select “Open Swatch Library>Other Library” and select the file that you downloaded. (It should be an .ase file).
