Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to make
kind of a fake low poly effect.
It's not a real one, but kind of a lookalike effect in Illustrator.
And this is something I just learned this week in our Adobe Illustrator Users Facebook
group.
Thank you to Rory Davenport and Ludo Vicus.
Alright, let's get started.
I've opened Illustrator and I'm going to Create New.
We'll go over to Print and grab a Letter and say Create.
And next, I'm just going to draw a circle with the L tool.
You can also get to that right here if you click and hold and drag down to the Ellipse
tool, which is L on your keyboard.
I'm going to click and drag holding SHIFT, and if you hit the letter D, you'll have the
same thing I have, which is a white fill and a black stroke.
First we are going to increase this stroke so hit CMD F10, or go to Window > Stroke.
This is probably CTRL F10 on a PC.
I'm going to highlight the weight here, and then hit SHIFT and use my up arrows and get
it pretty thick, maybe 80 points.
Then we'll go to our swatches and click the little drop down.
Open Swatch Library > Gradients, and then Spectrums.
We’ll want the third one, so I'm just going to click that.
And as you can see, it's turned it to a linear rainbow gradient.
Let's go to our Gradient panel, or you can go to Window > Gradient.
OK, within your Gradient panel, you have some different options for the stroke, we want
the stroke to follow the path instead of being linear like this.
So let's click that second one.
And now you can see this stroke.
It goes from red, orange, yellow, green like this.
I'm going to close this and let's go to Effect > Pixelate and Crystallize.
This preview might be a little weird.
You can zoom out a little bit to see what you're going to get, but it's not actually
accurate.
Let's put the cell size right about 100.
Just right in there somewhere, it doesn't really matter.
Then we'll say OK.
You might have an uneven edge like this, that sometimes happens.
It doesn't happen every time.
I'm not 100% sure why it sometimes happens and it doesn't, but it's fine, we can always
mask it later.
So now we'll go to Object > Expand Appearance.
And when we do this, it changes this to a raster image.
So now we have to Image Trace it.
So let's go up here to Image Trace and click once.
This will change it to black and white, which is just fine for now.
And if you come up here and click this icon, you'll get the Image Trace panel.
Let's go ahead and turn off our Preview because we're going to have so many colors that it's
going to take a long time.
So first, let's go to the Mode and change it to Color and then the Palette will be Full
Tone.
We're going to have 100 colors.
We also want to ignore white.
And now let's trace.
This could take a while depending on your computer settings.
Here's our result.
Make sure you have it selected, and then you can come up here to Expand.
And now we have all these little pieces within here that are actually colored different colors.
I'm going to use my V tool, which is the Selection Tool and click on the shape.
Then I'll hit CMD R to get my rulers.
And I'm going to pull a ruler right to this handle and pull a ruler from the top to this
handle.
And then we have a place where we can start drawing another circle.
So hit l on your keyboard to get to the circle tool, click in the middle and then hold SHIFT
and OPT and make a circle.
Because this outer edge has actually been image traced, and it's not perfect, I'm going
to go ahead and copy this circle and then paste it in front with CMD F
and I'll click & drag on this to get really close to that edge and release.
I'm going to hit CMD Y.
And now I'm going to hit V to get to my selection.
I already have the outer circle selected, and I want to select the inner circle.
Going to CMD Y or CTRL Y on a PC is a really good way to select things that you can't really
see otherwise.
Alright, let's CMD Y again or CTRL Y to get out of that.
As you can see, we only have the two circles selected.
And let's go to SHIFT M which is your Shape Builder tool.
It's right down here.
And we'll OPT click this center one.
So now this is all one shape - up here it says Compound Path, and usually that's what
you want if you want to create a mask with another bunch of objects.
We will select this and then hold SHIFT and select the shapes in the background.
And now we'll hit CMD 7.
You can also go up to Object > Clipping mask > Make.
Now if we hit CMD Y, you can see that those shapes still exist inside there and outside
this circle, which is fine.
But you can also get rid of those pretty easily by just selecting it and clicking on the Divide
pathfinder.
Now if we hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, all those extra shapes out there are gone.
We'll hit CMD Y to go back.
If you want to adjust some of the colors in here, you can do that with the Recolor Artwork
tool.
So I'm going to hit Q, which is the Lasso tool, and I want to draw a circle around the
parts that I want to change the colors of.
And we'll go up here to recolor artwork.
Now there are a lot of colors in here.
Let's just go straight to Edit.
And now we can kind of change some of these by just pulling them out.
And you can see the colors changing over there.
And you have to kind of be careful with this because you don't want to go a lot different
or it starts looking just wrong.
So maybe a fewer amount of colors is the way to go.
If you don't like what you're seeing, there's no way to undo in here.
So you can just come up here to the Eyedropper, and this will reset at the beginning.
So whenever you have it the way you want it, you can say OK.
So this kind of gives you a fake low poly look.
And each of these pieces you can move around if you want to, so you can almost like ‘explode’
it in a way.
And that's it.
I hope you can find some really cool uses for this.
Alright, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please click on the ‘Like’ button.
Oh, and I wanted to say - one of the people who showed me this technique, Rory Davenport,
he has his own graphic design YouTube channel, and you can check that out in the description
below.
Alright, I'll see you next week.
Thank you!!!