hello hello welcome to another video i am actually going to demonstrate some incredible plugins
for illustrator today so this video is actually sponsored by astute graphics i have been testing
out these plugins for a couple of months now and i'm just very impressed i've been itching to
tell you because if you design things if you're a creative you know time is money and these plugins
really have saved so much time and they've really sped up my workflow so what i'm gonna do in this
video i am going to create a greeting card and i created this card using three of my favorite
plugins from astute graphics so we're using the ag block shadow tool using phantasm and we're
also using vector first aid if you do see anything in this video that kind of tickles your fancy and
you want to have a go astute graphics do actually offer a seven day free trial over on their website
so you can try it for free i'll leave the link in the description thank you very much to astute
graphics and yeah i guess let's get into this video so i have illustrator open and on screen
is the graphic that we are going to create on here you can see i've got like a half tone
texture i've added these block shadows and i made this so quickly and i'm going to show
you exactly how i did it scrolling over to this new artboard i firstly need to create the text
now this is in itc avent guard gothic pro font one of my favorites once you have these words how you
like we're gonna go in and we're gonna apply the ag block shadow so i'm gonna go to window and i'm
gonna go down to astute graphics ag block shadow now this little menu pops up here i recommend
applying the block shadow so click that button and there it is applied all these settings so
now if we tweak them you can see it moving so we can change the length so if you just want a small
simple block shadow behind the letters something that doesn't go off the page you lower that down
you can change the angle scale is actually a really fun one so if you lower the percentage of
this it sort of makes it thinner at the end so it sort of tapers there's also gap which adds a small
space in between the letter and the shadow you can see that it's adding a white space before the
shadow you can click this button and it would adopt the fill color you can change the layer
style and also the opacity but for this one i actually want the scale firstly to be on 100 i
want the gap to be on zero and the angle let's just lower this angle a little bit and for the
length i want it to be pretty high i want it to go fully fully off the page i just like that effect
i like how it works so straight up you can see how editable everything is i'm gonna adjust
this and the shadows come with it i don't have to do it again i don't have to over complicate
things and that's what the plugins are all about straight up we've got two different lines of text
however if we go back to the other one you can see i've got it in four different colors so i'm going
to show you how easy it is to break things up and change them so if i go on to here and hit the t
button or go up here to the text tool you can see that the words are still editable i'm going to
cut those out and paste them back in basically so i can separate the words now these two do not
have the shadow applied to them but all we need to do is click the apply ag block shadow and it will
reapply the previous settings we could change the colors of these by going into here into the shadow
color finding a color you like as you press ok you can see it changes it same with these ones
you can also still change the color of the font as you would normally so you're going to fill up here
and change it to i don't know yellow and you can see that it changes so it's very very editable i'm
quite happy with these block shadows so i am going to set these in stone i am going to highlight all
of these and i'm actually going to expand them now don't forget if you've used illustrator a lot when
you expand things you can't get them back so if you want to save a copy across the other side
of the screen as a backup plan go ahead i do this a lot if you've watched my videos before you will
know so i'm going to highlight these i'm going to go to object expand appearance now if i zoom in
you can see that each shadow has its own path anchor points etc it's its own individual
shape which means we've got a little bit more freedom when playing with the colors so what we
want to do now is color each element itself so at the minute they're all grouped so i'm going
to right click i'm going to ungroup and then we have the block shadow and then the word as another
so this applies to all of them so i'm going to ungroup all of them and i actually want the text
to be in pure white and then i'm going to go into each of these colors and if i zoom out
you can see that i've got these colors saved over here so i'm just going to eye dropper
and then let's add a background if we just compare them side by side it's looking pretty
pretty neat so what i want to do now is have a play around with the color combos these colors
actually look quite dull in comparison to these so we're going to go in and use the phantasm tool
to play around with the colours so again window astute graphics phantasm first up we have these
are things that you usually get in like lightroom or photoshop but this has allowed us to apply
the same things in illustrator without affecting the original artwork so we've got brightness and
contrast does what it says on the tin there's hue saturation and lightness so maybe like up
the saturation if we change the hue it changes the color combo exposure we've got the color
balance if you want it blue tone if you want it warm there's the shift to color so if i drag this
slider up it's set to red so the more you slide it the more red is applied and if there's anything in
a menu that you don't understand just hover your mouse over it and a little pop-up will appear
telling you what it is that that thing does if you don't want any of these to be applied
you literally go down here get rid of them and it takes you straight back to what you started
with i'm actually going to use a couple of things up here so this top left one is levels if you're
familiar with photoshop you will know levels and again it's just adding that photoshop function to
an illustrator file there's also curves again if you're familiar with photoshop you'll know
you can click adjustments on here then there's also this one which is duo tone quite a fun effect
this is a one that you can definitely play with so you can change the tint level and the colors
and it will apply that color to each object again it's something really fun to play with however for
the moment i am just going to go with contrast so i want it to be a little bit more bright so
this literally saves me from going in each color going to a color library finding a brighter color
or going to the color swatches and you know like it saves that i can literally think oh i like the
orange i want it a bit brighter drag that slider done so now we've got the colors sort of set
how we like them i'm going to apply this half tone effect now half tone is this like circle pattern
and it sort of fades down what i'm going to do i'm going to click on this yay and i want to apply it
to this first so i'm actually going to copy it so command c and i'm going to paste it in front so
to paste in front edit paste in front and then i want to apply the half tone to this so if i click
this you can see it's added those circles now i'm going to firstly i want the color to be white
and i want it to be monochrome you can change what samples is so cmyk or sampled again i recommend
just having a play so grid you can do fm you can do radial but we want grid i want it on
alternating so it's like a brick pattern you can change the dpi which basically changes the size of
the dots you can change the angle you can in fact add an undercoat which would kind of take out that
step of me copying and pasting in front but we're gonna ignore that for now and we can also clip to
object so if you just look here you can see that there are some dots outside if i click this it
would get rid of them it uses effectively clipping mask and the thing i want to focus on is down here
so it's dot gain now after fiddling with this i was amazed so if i drag one of these sliders
up you can see that it adds dots to like basically everywhere and i can drag these around and i
can even drag them in the middle to change the different properties which i thought was really
cool i wanted to be a little bit of a gradient so you can play around with this change the sizes etc
or remember this thing we pasted on top i am going to apply a gradient to it i'm just doing
this black to white one so we've got it minus 60. so then when we go back into phantasm and apply
the half tone can you see that it's got a gradient to it i thought this was incredible so what i'm
going to do is find a combo that i like quite like that i do need to change it back to white
and i'm actually going to save this setting so i can load it again for these others so i'm going
to click up here save and i'm going to call it ht1 once you've done that then you can go into
layers or you could go up here i guess and change the opacity thinking maybe like 20 and then we go
back in and we can do the same effects to these three copy paste in front and i want to apply
a gradient and then we're going to go back into phantasm and apply the half tone and of course we
can load that one we've just saved exactly how we wanted it press ok and then if i go into opacity
put that at 20 and there we have the like gradient half tone effect if i zoom in you can see that
there is a little bit of an overlap here that's just because how i copied it out what i'm going
to do is group these together and just bring them forward and there we have the cool halftone effect
and of course we want to sort of get rid of all this so i'm gonna just use a clipping mask which
is command seven look at that how easy was that now what i'm gonna do is show you how i use vector
first aid to finally prep this for print again window astute graphics and vector first aid now
this is so intuitive so this font obviously we know what this font was called but i don't know
a month down the line i'd probably forget what it was called i can't edit this anymore i can't
go into the text tool it's now a vector well if you click this button here this magic tool
has sort of got a download of all the fonts on my system and it's i'm gonna search for those fonts
and it's gonna make this text editable again when i first clicked it it took maybe three minutes it
kind of looked through all my fonts and then did it but now because it knows them and it sussed out
what's on my system it takes a couple of seconds and there you go i mean you can see because these
lines have appeared at the bottom it's made this text editable again so as long as you have that
font on your system still this tool will find them i just thought that was incredible it also has an
option to replace all missing fonts so if you've been sent a document from someone else rather than
trying to like re-link them this button literally does it for you i actually want to show you how
vector first aid can help when you've maybe hand drawn something and you've image traced it or you
know it's something that's not quite as smooth as like a pre-made font i use this as a mirror decal
i take it over to my cricut software and i cut it out however if we press a on my keyboard and
zoom in you can see that there's quite a lot of unnecessary points in here and my cricut machine
would register these and it wouldn't create a smooth cut adobe illustrator actually has a tool
that is supposed to reduce excess points and that is in object path and simplify if i turn this on
you can see original path and i can change these points however as i'm changing it you can see
things are moving see this yes it's simplifying my work but it's also changing the shape of my
artwork and that's not what i want to get around this astute graphics have created this amazing
thing and it's called the super smart remove points if we click on this it removes points
that's it that is literally it if you go down here it says 277 points removed you can see for
yourself the artwork didn't change at all if i undo it literally looks exactly the same click it
again exactly the same but there are significantly less points 277 less points to be precise and
going back up here same principle applies if we go into the clipping mask we've got lots of circles
which will inevitably be a lot of points so i've just released the clipping mask if we highlight
everything and go up here to super smart remove it will remove any excess points so this time
it's removed 21 and click it again see if it does any more no points to be removed we're good to go
this is neatened up and there's no excess anchor points and there we have it that is the video i'll
insert a picture here of what the greeting card looks like in a mock-up they have been ordered
and they're getting delivered soon and i'm so happy it kind of took the complicated
stress out of product creation for me having the plugins really did speed it up
you can get all 20 plugins for just $119 so head over to their website now to check it out
like i said try the seven day free trial on astute graphics website and let me know how
you get on i'm intrigued i'm already excited to create more things thank you very much to astute
graphics for sponsoring this video i hope you've enjoyed it and i'll see you soon for another one