Creative Typography

5.1 The Basic Shapes

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we are going to be starting to do the real fun part of the course. Where all of the work up until now, all of the conceptual thinking and forming ideas, sketching, all of that has been leading to these few lessons where we're going to actually start creating. And making our final artwork from the story. So, I've just opened up Illustrator here and made myself a new document. I've gone for a art board which is 210 millimeters by 210 millimeters. I've chosen a square to be working with because I think that's gonna be a really good shape for the sketch that I've been working with. So I've just set that up for now, but I can always get back and change that. It just seemed like a good place to start. So in this lesson I'm just going to be looking at doing the basic shapes of the background. So I'm gonna get the walls, the doorway in, and also the phone. So here we go, I'm just gonna start by selecting the rectangle tool here and building the background shapes. And at this stage as well I'm just gonna be working in just shades of grey. I just want to be able to see the different shapes I'm building, but I don't want to get bogged down in colors or anything yet. That will be I think too distracting. So I've just drawn the back wall here and the floor and these are quite rough at this stage. I'll probably go back and refine how big they all are just in a minute when I've drawn all the rest of the shapes. I'm just drawing a doorway now Great, so immediately we've got there a few basic shapes. And it's already starting to look like the sketch I've been working with. Now I'm gonna use the Pen tool here. And start drawing the doorway, or the phone, and what I'm going to do is just draw the top half of it. So again, I'm just keeping these shapes pretty rough at this stage. I'll probably refine them in a moment. So I've just drawn the top half of it, cuz what I'm going to do now is hold down Alt, and click, which means it duplicates that shape we've just been working with. So now we have two of those, but what I'm going to do is use the Reflect tool, flip it around. So we've flipped that around, and now we're going to move that down to the bottom half of that doorway, of the top of the doorway. So now, if you come to the Pathfinder tab and we can connect those together. So now we have the shape that we're after. Great, so that's the basic part of the doorway. I'm just gonna get rid of these anchor points here. So I've done that, so I drew that top half and then flipped it to create the bottom half. Because then the angle of this line is then like the exact opposite of it and it would just, I could have drawn the bottom line separately. But having them the same just helps to make the whole thing feel more correct when you're looking at it. So that's just a very quick way of making sure those angles are the same. So that's one part of the doorway. I'm just gonna do the same thing but just for the edge of it. Then we're gonna flip it again. Combine up and this probably, how we're looking here, so that's not quite on the same length. So I'm just going to. There we go and so those anchor points line up together now, the bottom of this edge of a door and the bottom of the opposite edge there. And that one lines up too, and now the angles of these, that probably looks about right. How this one is going away down here like that feels like it looks right, looks realistic. We don't need to go too much into detail of realism here, but I think as long as it kind of it looks like it makes sense. Doesn't look like it jars too much. That doesn't bother me too much. I don't like to be too scientifically correct with these things. Sometimes if you do work out all of the correct angles, how that one should be sloping away from this offset angle it can almost look incorrect somehow. And the realism to it just kind of is a bit, I'm not sure if it's distracting or, I'm not sure what it is which feels odd about it. But sometimes I would, it just doesn't really work so I think what I want to do is just move these up four little nudges, gonna nudge that down a bit too. That looks like it's looking good, so I'm just gonna change the color of these. Okay great so, everything's forming together quite nicely. And now what I'm going to do is draw the screen of the phone. What I'm going to do with that is copy this shape, so that's Command + C. And then I'm going to place it exactly in the same place. So to do that it's Shift + Alt + Command and V, yep. And so, I now have the exact same, so if we go into layers here. You can see that is the first one I copied and then just pasted it and that is the exact same shape. It just a few layers up up. So now what I'm going to do is hold down Shift and Alt to make the proportions all the same. I'm gonna make it slightly smaller, just bring it down a bit. And I'll change the color, just so we can see what we're doing. So I've done that because then these angles will remain the same, and what I was just talking about before making everything all the angles like completely correct with each other. Sometimes looks a little bit odd, so, if we are imagining a perspective of this line here and this line traveling away into distance. That these two here won't be exactly the same they'll be slightly shallower. So I'm just gonna nudge that up a little bit, nudge this point down a little bit. And it's starting to take shape. And then I'm gonna move these ones up again, cuz I wanna allow some space down here for a circle, a back botton that you get on phnes. So I'm gonna nudge this down to kind of correct the perspective of it. Okay, that's beginning to look good. I'm just gonna move across a little bit as well just to help the perspective again, just to help it feel a little more real. Okay, great, and now I'm gonna use the Circle tool here, and just draw what roughly feels right. Now I may do this again, depending on what it looks like here. Okay, so I think I might need to do is just lean it slightly away. And then that helps create the effect that it's going off into the distance as well, but it's following the perspective of this line and the line above it, but it feels a little more real. Okay, great. Yeah, that's looking good. So I think for this lesson I'm gonna stop there. And then in the next lesson we're gonna start looking at drawing on the lettering, and start choosing some fonts. So thanks very much for watching, and see you all next time.