Laying in the Flats

Quick reference

• 00:05 At this point, we should have our illustration pretty much all set up.
• 00:08 We've got our sketch layer, our original trace layer,
• 00:11 and then a first, second and third pass layer.
• 00:14 We should also have our custom color palette saved.
• 00:17 So if you come up to the Window menu and
• 00:19 come all the way down here where it says Swatches, bring up your swatches panel.
• 00:24 And if your colors are not loaded, like it appears here,
• 00:28 then we just wanna go ahead and load up our custom color palate that we saved.
• 00:33 So to do that, we'll come up to this menu on the top right, and
• 00:36 then we'll come all the way down to this option that says Open Swatch Library and
• 00:40 we'll choose User Defined.
• 00:42 Now, once you do that, you should see your custom palettes saved here,
• 00:46 which I called mine Mascot Logo Custom Palettes.
• 00:49 So I'm gonna go ahead and click on that to open it up, and
• 00:52 it's going to open in a new palette.
• 00:55 So here you'll see all of the colors that I saved from all of the reference and
• 00:58 inspiration material for the colors.
• 01:01 So the next thing that we wanna do here is to unlock each of our three pass layers.
• 01:07 Now, this is where we can begin laying in some of the flat colors.
• 01:12 So to begin, I'm gonna grab this large shape here in the back,
• 01:16 and I'm just gonna fill it with this orange color.
• 01:19 Now, you'll see as I click some of these different colors around here that it's
• 01:23 covering some of the shapes.
• 01:24 But that's okay because we're gonna be able to modify and
• 01:27 change the order of some of these layers later.
• 01:30 Now, as I begin looking at some of these colors,
• 01:33 I want a nice kind of midtone color that will serve as my base.
• 01:36 Because I don't wanna add shadows and highlights just yet,
• 01:39 I'm only thinking about what the flat color's going to be.
• 01:43 So for now, I'm gonna go with this orange color, it's a nice kinda puppy orange, and
• 01:48 I think it will work well as our base.
• 01:51 So if you notice over here in the colors though, we have a black stroke still.
• 01:55 So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off now that we have this filled with a color
• 01:59 because that's going to make it easier for us to see.
• 02:02 Now, if I were to just press Shift+X to change this to outlines,
• 02:07 you can see that there are some shapes especially in here,
• 02:10 in the nose and the mouth area, that are not visible with our orange fill color.
• 02:15 So to fix that,
• 02:16 I'm actually gonna come up to the Object menu and chose Arrange > Send to Back.
• 02:21 Now you'll see all of our black shapes on top of this.
• 02:25 So if we wanna continue to use this color as our base,
• 02:28 we also wanna make sure that the head is the same color.
• 02:31 So I'm going to select this outline here, which is also on our first pass layer,
• 02:35 press i to get the eyedropper tool, and then just sample that orange color.
• 02:40 Now, for this, I'm going to do pretty much the same thing and
• 02:44 just press Shift+X to make sure that all of my lines are visible.
• 02:49 And it looks like there's a few that we're losing here on the sides of the nose and
• 02:53 also this top line here.
• 02:55 So again, this time I could come up to the Object menu, and
• 02:58 choose Arrange, Send to Back.
• 03:00 But I don't know if I wanna to send it all the way to the back,
• 03:02 I just wanna go one step at the time.
• 03:05 So in order to do that, I can just send this backwards by using the keyboard
• 03:08 shortcut Cmd and the left bracket, until those other lines become visible.
• 03:14 And there we go.
• 03:16 Okay, now I'm just going to repeat this for
• 03:18 both of the ears by holding down the Shift key and selecting both of those outlines,
• 03:23 pressing I to grab my eyedropper, and then sampling that color.
• 03:27 We lost the inside of the ear over here, so to correct that,
• 03:30 because I know that there's a shape there, I'm going to press Cmd and
• 03:33 the left bracket until that area becomes visible.
• 03:37 And there you go. You may have to press it quite a few times
• 03:40 because at this point we've got kind of a lot of shapes happening here.
• 03:44 But that will help to reveal this color.
• 03:48 Now, as for the horns, I'm gonna hold down the Shift key and select both of those.
• 03:53 At the moment, we don't have any fill color, we just have our stroke.
• 03:56 So I wanna think about what kinda colors could work well for our horns.
• 04:00 This will kinda be like our accent color, right?
• 04:03 Because we don't wanna have everything just be orange and
• 04:06 monochromatic, I actually wanna have something else in here too.
• 04:10 I'm thinking maybe a yellow color or
• 04:13 something like that could work really nicely.
• 04:15 But again, I don't really wanna have this stroke around the horns.
• 04:19 So what I'm going to do is press X to toggle between my fill and my stroke, and
• 04:24 then just choose None here for my stroke color.
• 04:27 Okay, and the last thing that I wanna do here is decide on a flat color for
• 04:32 the base of the mouth.
• 04:33 And I'm thinking that for this area, we may just go ahead and
• 04:37 sample the same color that we're using for our horns.
• 04:40 So again, I'm just using the eyedropper and selecting that color.
• 04:44 Now, we've got a few other areas in here that we may wanna change and
• 04:47 play around with.
• 04:48 But these are just the flat colors that we're going to lay down as a base.

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