How to distort bend shapes & type in Adobe Illustrator CC

A free video tutorial from Daniel Walter Scott
Adobe Certified Instructor & Adobe Certified Expert
4.7 instructor rating •
28 courses •
382,423 students
Lecture description
Hi there, in this video we're going to look at distorting, pulling, and pushing using Illustrator's Envelope Distort. We're going to turn our Gradient into some kind of weird looking fish. And we'll even combine the bottom two graphics to turn them into the love heart.
Learn more from the full course
Adobe Illustrator CC – Advanced Training CourseIn this Adobe Illustrator Advanced course we'll learn Advanced techniques for graphic design, logo design & illustration
09:21:06 of on-demand video • Updated December 2020
- You will be able to earn more using these new Illustrator skills.
- You will create multiple images for you to use in your Portfolio.
- You will be able to add 'Advanced Illustrator User' to your CV.
- 53 Lectures 4+ hours of content
- Speed up your productivity & workflow
- Advanced anchor point & pen tool tricks
- You will build your own animated gifs.
- Mastering lines & strokes
- Depth & perspective
- Set permanent defaults for fonts, colours
- Be able to turn hyphenation off once and for all
- Make beautiful charts & graphs.
- You will learn to make quick colour adjustments, gradients meshs & how to blend it all together
- Your creativity will be doubled once you finish the transform, distort & blending section of the course
- Know how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up Illustrator
- Create your own custom icons.
- You'll draw various animals to explore the fastest ways to create them.
- You'll create your own custom lettering using swirls, whips & flourishes.
- Take hand drawn lettering and vectorize it in Illustrator.
- You'll create 3D icons for a website.
- You'll create UI designs for an app & website.
- You'll create paper cut effects inside of text.
- You'll make a pie chart, line chart & bar graph.
- You'll blend real images together to create cool instagram style filters.
- You'll create a post card with advanced color & prepress tricks.
- Adjust all the colors in your illustrator at once, making it easy to re-color & test color combinations.
- Warp text so that if fits inside of shapes.
- Create a 3D style ribbon.
- Make 3D text & logos.
- Create lots of blended lines for exciting linear effects.
- Create linocut flowers.
- Create duotones.
- Build a half tone image.
- Fill shapes with text.
English
Hi there, in this video
we're going to look at... distorting, pulling, and pushing
using Illustrator's Envelope Distort. We're going to turn our Gradient
into some kind of weird looking fish. And we'll even combine
the bottom two graphics... to turn them into the love heart. All right, let's go do that now
in Adobe Illustrator. Oh yes, a little side note. At the beginning of this tutorial... I forgot to tell you to open up
the file called 'Envelope Distort.ai'. It's in your Exercise Files. Do that first.
All right, see you in there. So to make our Envelope Distortions... we're going to start with
this guy at the top here. You can use anything. It has to be vector though,
can't be a picture. That's a Photoshop job. So with all of this selected,
I'm going to go to 'Object'... and I'm going to go down
to 'Envelope Distort'. We're going to look at all of these. We're going to look at this first one
called Make with Warp. Now Warp is kind of like,
just some basic... pre-defined style, so 'Arc',
make sure your Preview's 'on'. 'Arc', I'm not going to go through
every single one of them.. except my favorite, where is he? Fish. And there is some adjustments
you can do with these guys... deciding on what you want to do. It's just like, if I were to draw that
with the Pen Tool, I'd go insane. So there's some cool uses of this fish,
maybe not... but there's some cool stuff in here. So that's how to do that. One thing that will happen though is... if I click out, and click back in,
like, how do I get in there? You can go over here, to 'Warp Options'... which is the newer version of Illustrator. Otherwise you can click on it,
and at the top here... it's going to spread out along here,
where you can say... actually I'd like to go back
to my favorite, fish. Vertical fish, and all the options
along the top there. The next one I want to show you is... is using a shape to distort it.
I'm going to grab some Type. Click once, and I'm going to type
"I Love You." These are heart, and stuff, you know. I'm going to use this font here
called Hubro. I can't even spell it, is that Hubrus? I can't spell it, or say that, anyway... It's a cool font, it's on TypeKit,
free to use... it's commercial, but it's free
as part of your Creative Cloud license. I'm going to use this
because it looks kind of cool. I'm going to use my shortcuts
to play with the Leading. Now the best bet is to play around... with your Tracking, Leading,
everything before it gets into the heart... because it's going to be problematic. I'm holding down the 'Alt' key on a PC,
or 'Option' key on a Mac... and just using my other, to play with
the Leading, or the Line Spacing. I'm happy with that. Now I'm going to get it
kind of roughly to the right shape. Don't worry about it too much because... the first thing that needs to happen
is that... the shape that you want to use... to bend the Text needs to be at the front. Select both of them, and go to 'Object'... 'Envelope Distort'. And that's why it needs to be on top,
'Make with Top Object'. Kind of bins it in there. What I might do before I do that
is copy and paste it, or copy it at least. Do the 'Envelope Distort'. Then I get to paste. 'Command F' to put it straight
where I got it from... or 'Control F' on a PC. I want to send that to the back. And I might do something with it
just to kind of-- I feel like it's been lost
a little bit in there. You can do with any shape on top. The more complex it is, the more
kind of chance of it going a bit crazy... but yes, give it a go. We're going to look at that
last one in the next video... which was Make with Mesh, we'll
do that in the next video... because it's a little bit longer,
and a little bit more detailed. All right, let's check it out
in the next video.