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Hey, everybody. Welcome into this Adobe Illustrator tutorial. Brought to you,
as always, by tutvid.com. Today, we're going to take a look at creating Fortnite
Scar. Is that in focus? Should be in focus somewhere around there. I'm not really
a big Fortnite player, but I've heard that this is a rather desirable weapon in the
game; and I thought, you know what? Let's try sketching one of these bad boys
out, and then take the sketch into Illustrator, and make this a pretty cool, little
piece of vector artwork. Now, you can download my sketch. It'll be the sketch
that we're actually going to be using here in the tutorial. This one's got some
shading and stuff on it. You can download that using the link down in the
description. And speaking of links in the description, I want to mention that
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'tutvid' for 10% off your website when you decide to launch. So, let's
jump into Adobe Illustrator and make this little Fortnite Scar. We're
going to rip through it pretty quick here. So, hang tight. Use that pause
button if you need it ; and let's get going. Okay, here we are in Adobe
Illustrator. In this tutorial, I'm going to speed through some of the stuff
a little bit faster than normal, just because it took about an hour and
forty-five minutes to draw this out, and there's a lot of repetitive stuff.
So, we'll try to explain it and get on with it. So here, what I'm doing is,
I'm going to go ahead and open up create a new document. I'm going
with the document that's 2560x1440. It's just a size I like to work with,
and then I'm going to go ahead and drag my sketch into Illustrator.
Now, you can download this sketch. There's a link down in the bio of this
video. You can go and grab this sketch, and play right along with me here.
Just move it around, resize it a little bit in Illustrator. So, here, as I create
a new layer I'm going to name it whatever I want. And I'm actually going
to drag it beneath that sketch. And then I'm going to set the sketch layer
to the blend mode multiply right there in the transparency panel. That's
going to allow the sketch to superimpose itself above the colored shapes
that I'm drawing. And then I'm going to grab the pen tool, I'm going to
use any old colored fill, and I'm going to begin drawing the shapes. And
I'm going to begin with the shapes that I think are closest to me as I'm
looking at the side of this Fortnite Scar. I'm going to create those shapes
first, and then work with layer stacking and arrangement to make
everything look as good as possible. Now, all I'm concerned about here
are laying down very rough, base shapes. I'm going to make sure smart
guides is turned on, because that's going to help all my shapes line up
a little bit better; allow me to draw a little bit more accurately. But I'm
concerned with creating very rudimentary - tons of sharp lines, maybe
a little curve here or there. But just these very rough, overlapping shapes.
Now, speaking of overlapping shapes, I'm going to go to Objects>Arrange
and I'm going to be using this send backward. The hotkey for it is CMD/CTRL
and the left bracket key. It's going to be super useful for the process of
creating these shapes. And then it's a process of going through and
creating a bunch of very, very rudimentary shapes. We can always come
in and adjust and tweak our paths later. We just want to get our initial
shapes laid down. And again, liberally use that CMD/CTRL and the left
bracket key to send layers to the back and you know, give yourself a perfect
edge. That's why I work with the front-most shape that I see first. So,
I'll just move through here and continue drawing and creating shapes.
And when it comes to creating the little rail that runs across the top of
the Scar, I'm just going to create a series of little squares. All the same
size. And I'm just ALT/OPT dragging out copies of the squares, and just
lining them up a little bit with my sketch. Again, the sketch it more a
suggestion than anything. As long as we're hanging around the sketch,
we're probably going to get a pretty good result. But then I'm going to
select all these little squares, and I'm going to use my align panel. And
I'm just going to make sure I space and distribute the horizontal space
evenly, just to line them up nicely, and it'll make it look a little bit more
perfectly. And then just go in and create a lot of these smaller shapes near
the front sight of the weapon. Create the barrel and the flash suppressor,
and everything that has to do with the front of the weapon. The rear sight,
we'll make sure we get that taken care of, and just build out these shapes
one by one. And again, the whole time as I'm drawing, I'm just drawing
very blocky, sharp cornered, straight edged shapes, for the most part.
Here on the butt-stock, I'm rounding it off a very little bit. With the pen
tool - I'm drawing these shapes with the pen tool, that is. And then I'm
going ahead and making sure I'm using that arrangement to push stuff
behind, behind, behind. And you can see, I'm filling the shapes with all
sorts of random colors - a lot of pinks and blues. That's just to give me
some differentiation, so I can quickly see, alright, this is on top, or this
is underneath. We'll worry about all the colorization later on. Now,
something like the handle, I'm going to create that and I'm probably
going to work some of the curves right into it. You can see, I'm not going
with a straight blocky shape. We'll begin giving that some curves, and
then interestingly here for the magazine what I'm going to do, is I'm
going to drag out an ellipse that follows the curvature of the magazine
sticking out of the gun; and then I'm going to use my scissors tool and
just snip the path, and save only the little piece that I want. So, I'll
select the bulk of the rest of that path, just delete it. And I've got this
little path and then I'll apply a nice, fat, I don't know, 100-150 point
stroke. It was something like that. And then we have a nice, little shape.
And you can adjust, and rotate, position it. And one thing I do do to
the shape here, is I go Object>Expand and choose to expand strokes
to fills. And this then gives me just a standard shape and I can go
ahead and arrange just as I did before with the rest of the shapes.
Push it behind the bottom of the weapon a little bit. And then I'll
just add the little cap to the bottom of the magazine, as well.
You can see, we're really doing a lot here. Now, we can zoom in and
begin refining the shapes. I'm cutting out little pieces of shapes
as needed. And you can see, as I cut things out, you probably are
going to need to push things back in the stack. Again, using CMD/CTRL
and the square bracket key, no problem there. We can just do that.
And I'm cutting these shapes out by drawing a shape on top of what
I have there. And then using the minus front option in the path finder
panel. Very, very useful. You can Window>Path Finder, open up the
path finder panel and just begin knocking holes in the shapes you're
creating. And you can see, we can go over here - the trigger, we can
go in and draw the trigger shape and the little hole that goes through
the lower part of the weapon for that. And then the little slot there
on the rear sight, we'll use a little rounded rectangle. And really, once
you have the base of shapes, you can see we have a very rough
outline of the weapon. It looks pretty good when the sketch is shut off.
But it could look so much better, right? So this is where we begin
the process of rounding some corners, beginning to add some flow
and organic feel to our object. And I'm going to begin by using the
direct selection tool. That's the white arrow. Because you can select
individual corners of a shape and then you'll see the little dot appear
next to the corner. You can click that round just that one individual
corner. So, I'm going to round off a bunch of the pieces of the shape,
beginning there with the trigger, as you can see. And you can also
select shapes wholesale. And you can go Effect>Stylize and choose to
round corners that way. I'm giving the bulk of these just big shapes
that have a bunch of straight edges and sharp corners. I'm just going
Effect>Stylize>Rounded Corners, and giving it a 5 pixeled rounded
corner. I can always go in later, and tweak and adjust. But for now,
I'm liking what I've got. So, I'll go through very, very quickly and round
off the corners of a lot of these shapes; and anything that needs to be
done by hand, you can always grab with that direct selection tool.
Select that corner, and make the round exactly as you want it to be.
So, here with the lower receiver of the weapon, I can select all of the
points on the bottom and round them maybe a little bit more. And
then here, to the sides of the magazine, I can round those a little bit
more. And you just have a lot of options, so here around the handle
of the weapon, I can also round all of those corners and points just
to subdue that a little bit. And just go over generally and round things
just to make it look a little bit better. Again, it's all personal taste,
what you think is going to look good and feel right, and just go ahead
and do that. It's a little time consuming, but once you get it done,
you'll be really happy with it. Alrighty, let's take a quick break from all
of that drawing shapes, and colors, and everything we're throwing
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thank you for supporting this video, as well. Guys, let's jump back into
this video and continue building our little Scar. So, this part is important.
Once we have the base of our object, our icon, whatever it is we're
drawing, laid down, I want to select all the shapes and group them by
going Object>Group, and then I'm going to duplicate the group by
going Edit>Copy, and then Edit>Paste in Front, and what I can do then
is with that group selected, I can get rid of the fill using the color
swatches in the bottom of the toolbox, and give it a nice, thick stroke.
So, I'm going with a 5 point black stroke, and I'm hitting the stroke
option in the properties panel. And I'm making sure that all the corners
and caps are rounded. So, once we've done that, we'll actually select
all these strokes we just created and then go Object>Ungroup. I like
to lock up my underlying layer. So all those colored layers in that group,
just lock that whole group up so we don't mess around with it. And all
of these strokes should now be individual shapes on their own little
shape layers. And we can begin selecting these shapes one at a time,
and again, with smart guides turned on, it makes this really easy. Use
the scissors tool and begin snipping away all the bits of path that you
don't want. And once you make the cuts in the path, you can just
select that piece of path and delete it right away. It's really a piece of
cake, and this is just a little time consuming. You want to go over your
sketch and nip away anything that you don't like. There are a lot of
different ways to do this in Illustrator, this is just a tried and true,
simple method that I like to use sometimes. But there's all kinds of
ways you can do this. In this case, I'm just using the scissors tool.
And once we've wrapped that up, I'm looking here at the butt-stock,
I think I want to add a little bit of that gripped texture. I can see in
my sketch. So, I'm going to create a series of shapes. Just duplicate
them along the backside. Group them up, and then what I'll do is
I'll select those shapes, and just that one little piece of the butt-stock.
And I'll use the minus front there in my path finder panel, and just
punch that hole in there. And make sure I create a stroke to go along
with it. Just like that. And I think that looks pretty good. We've got
that texture now added to the pad of the butt-stock of our rifle. At
this point, I can select all of those strokes that we just created. Group
them up into their own layer group and lock that up, just set it aside.
So, we have the color block set aside and all the strokes associated with
them set aside, as well. And now begins the process of using shape tools.
I'll use the ellipse and lay down some little knobs and screws and things
that hold this weapon together. I'll use the pen tool to draw some little
texturized scratches. Use the rounded rectangle tool to add this little
module here next to the trigger, and I'll also add a little knob for the
fire safe knob next to the trigger, as well. So, we'll build that out.
Using a couple of rounded rectangles, very thin, I can create the little
holes up here that are probably for air flow and cooling things down
here for us. So, we'll add those. That's kind of a cool element of this
weapon in Fortnite. So, I'll make sure I throw those shapes in there,
angle them a little bit. Whatever it takes to make it look right. And I'll
add the slide and ejection compartment here, and this other little
doodad here on the side of the weapon, as well. Again, you can use
the rounded rectangle, or you can use the rectangle and round the
corners, and you can round individual corners more than others,
again, by using that direct selection tool. Very, very useful and
convenient. And again, it's just a matter of using your drawing tools.
The pen tool, you know, different shape tools to go in and create
some of these textures with the little scratch marks, I was creating
a simple path, and then using the stroke width tool to widen one
side of the stroke and make the other side really narrow to give me
these very cat-like scratch marks. It's a really easy, really cool way to
create that kind of effect. And then, I want to create a much thicker
stroke that runs along the side of the weapon here. And this is going to
differentiate and set apart the top part of this Fortnite Scar from the
bottom part. Almost create the illusion of a shadow. So, I'll create that
and I pinch one end of the stroke with the stroke width tool and just
lined it up in here, just to give a nice, thick stroke. Maybe 8 or 10 points
in width is what I went with. Just to help differentiate here and set off
the different parts of this Scar; and then just keep continuing, going
through, adding texture. These are scratch-like textures I'm adding
at this point, and they're to add some of that scratchy texture, but also
to add a shadow-like element, I'll put it to you that way. And I'll just
build this stuff in. Just put it, honestly, wherever it feels right. I was
following what I had in the sketch loosely. But not at all exactly.
Just adding lines and strokes where I thought it was applicable. After
that, I created a new path that just went with the flow of the magazine.
Widened the path and expanded the stroke to a fill like we did before
with the magazine, and then just colorize these strokes just to give
myself an offset of the pressed metal that runs down the sides of
these magazines. And again, one side note here, you're going to want
to make sure you use your arrangement hotkey to push that into
place, so it sits on top of the magazine, but beneath the Scar itself.
And then I also added a stroke to these and just trimmed the stroke.
Just like we did before, with the scissors. Again, it takes a little bit
of time, but you'll get used to it. And then what we move on and work
on, is the grip on the handle. So, I just drew a simple stroke around
the handle and then, use the pen tool to draw a series of crosshatch
lines; and duplicated those crosshatch lines and rotated him around.
And then I selected all of those lines, and merged them together
using the path finder panel, and then I duplicated the underlying
oval that we had just created and moved it forward. And I used the
crop feature functionality, after selecting that oval and the crosshatch
pattern that I created, and use the crop path finder there in the
path finder panel, to just cut it out and leave the bit of crosshatch
that's right there to form the grip on the handle. And after we've done
that, we've created a lot of the deep texture-y stuff on the Scar,
and it's time to start creating some highlights and shadows, and I did
this just by working a nice, thick, white stroke and the pen tool and this
is adding all the highlight-y stuff. And what I did, is I just worked with
whatever stroke width looks good to you - and then just set it to the
blend mode of soft light using the transparency panel. It's a really, really
effective way. And the nice thing about this is it's going to work with
all sorts of different colors. So when we colorize this Scar at the end,
all of our highlights and shadows will pass right through, and it's going
to look great. So, again, I'm just going through and adding highlights
wherever it feels right. Wherever I think there's going to be a ridge
in the metal, and I think it would catch some light, if it was, let's say,
lit from straight above. I'll go ahead and add a little highlight there,
until I'm happy with the way all the highlights look. I built out some
shapes on the top of the butt-stock, and I'm happy with that. And it's
time to move on to shadows; and you do the same exact thing with
shadows. Just you're going to be drawing shapes that are filled with
black, and set that to soft light, instead of shapes that are filled with
white. And go through, and you're going to have some really nice
shadowing and highlighting here on this Scar. Now, when it comes to
the safe and fire toggle switch, I'm just going to fill that. I don't want
that to be a stroke. I want that to look and appear like a solid toggle
switch that can be used. And I'm being picky right here at this point
in the video, and going through and just looking at the barrel and
making all of it one color. Just setting things apart, and then what I'm
going to do is duplicate the whole weapon up, and you can see that
because of the way we created those highlights, if this would appear
over a darker background, you're going to get all of that white that
appears across the rail on the top of the Scar. That's problematic.
So, I'm going to zoom back in and I'm going to open up one of these
groups. I'm going to ungroup; because I grouped all the highlights
and shadows together. So I'm going to ungroup the highlights and
shadows. I'm going to select that highlight, that stroke that runs
along the top, and I'm going to go in painstakingly with the scissor
tool, and cut and snip the highlight so it just drops on the very top
of each one of those little bits of the rail. And after that, I can select
all of these groups and my layer groups are the colored blocks on the
bottom, then the outline we created, then a layer group of all those
textures and everything that we applied, and then a layer group of
all the highlights and shadows. I'll duplicate that up, and keep a copy
down here on my artboard. And I'm going to drag in a copy of the
Fortnite Scar, and we'll sample a couple colors from this. Now, the really
important thing here, is not to go too crazy with the colorization process.
Keep it simple. Five or six colors is probably fine. You don't need to sample
every single little area of the Scar, that's just going to start to make things
look muddied and complicated; and we really don't want that. So, what
I'm doing is establishing one or two beige colors on the Scar, and then
resampling that beige across other areas. And then I'll select some of the
areas I think should be more of a dark gray, and try to sample a pretty
dark gray, but not too dark, for the handle on the rail on the top. The
barrel, I definitely want to be the darkest part of the weapon. So, once -
you know, again, go through and make it look the way you want it to
look. And really, the last thing I want to do here is just select that layer
group that contains all of the blocks of color and everything. Copy it,
by going Edit>Copy and then Edit>Paste in Front, and I want to just
set the fill of all these shapes to some random color. I'm going with
this salmon, pinky color, and then I'm going to use the merge
capabilities of my path finder panel to merge all of these shapes
into one giant shape which equals the outline of this Scar. And then
I'm going to get rid of the fill, swap the fill and the stroke, and you
can see here, I've got the stroke. And I'm going to give it a nice,
thick probably 10 point, or so, stroke, and again, I'm going to make
sure that I round the corners and round any caps, things like that.
And I'm going to set the color of the stroke to black, not that weird,
funky salmon color; and maybe I'll even increase the size of the stroke
up to 15 or something like that. It just gives it a nice popart, really heavy
inked outline border to just really complete the effect of this Scar.
This Fortnite Scar that we have just created here in Adobe Illustrator.
Indeed, indeed, that is it. Now, I've got to say, if you got this far. If you
completed this whole thing - well, now it doesn't just look like the
sketch, it's got all the colors and everything in it that we like so much -
I would love it if you would upload it to Instagram, and tag me in your
Instagram post. My Instagram is @tutvid, if you tag me in the image
it shows up in my tagged images and I can check it out, because this
takes some time to do, and I would love to see how you customized
yours and drew yours and maybe the colors you used. All kinds of cool
stuff that can be done. That would be really, really cool to see. I try to
go and like and comment on pretty much everything that gets tagged
to me on Instagram. As long as it's relevant design stuff, you know what
I'm saying. But ladies and gentlemen, for creating a nice, little Scar from
a sketch in Adobe Illustrator using some shape tools, and strokes, and
really some colors, all simple drawing techniques... that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.