Learn the process of creating a new digital file for a city reflection project, starting from scratch and building up elements such as background, moon, cityscape, and stars. The article provides a step-by-step guide on using various tools effectively to create elements like clouds using multiple ellipses and blending them using the pathfinder tool.
Key Insights
- The first step in creating a digital city reflection involves setting up a new file with suitable dimensions and saving it with an appropriate title such as 'city reflection'.
- Elements like background, clouds, and city elements are added incrementally. The background is created using the rectangle tool, choosing a dark blue color, while clouds are created by drawing multiple ellipses and merging them using the pathfinder tool.
- The clouds are created in different shapes and sizes, and each cloud layer is renamed and locked before creating the next one. The article highlights the importance of saving work periodically and making effective use of transparency and masks for creating intricate designs.
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In this video we'll be creating a new file for our city reflection. Let's begin by creating a new file and from our web templates let's select web large 1920 × 1080.
We'll give our new file the title city reflection and we'll maintain pixels for our width and height making sure that we have one artboard and click create. Right away we'll want to save our file go into file save as and we'll be saving this as city reflection clicking save and okay. Next let's zoom out and discuss how we're going to be building our city reflection.
Feel free to reference the preview files for our image but essentially within this artboard we'll be creating our background, a moon, our city, stars, and a reflection of our city below. So let's get started. We'll start by renaming layer one and let's title this background and hit ENTER.
From here we'll create our background. We'll utilize the rectangle tool dragging from one intersect all the way to the other and for our fill and stroke we'll select no stroke and for the fill let's double click and we'll select from our darker blues. Using the color picker we can select a color that's dark blue and feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer.
I'll be utilizing 191 F3A. We'll then select okay and we now have our background. Next let's create our clouds.
To do this we'll create a new layer and let's retitle this clouds and hit ENTER. We'll then lock our background layer and making sure that we're working within clouds we can utilize our ellipse tool from our toolbar. With the ellipse tool selected let's select our fill and make sure that we have white chosen from our color panel.
From here we can simply begin drawing our clouds with multiple ellipses. While this doesn't have to be perfect we can continue clicking and dragging to create the image of a cloud and feel free to create your cloud with whatever shape you'd prefer. For me I'm going to extend my clouds to be a little bit longer on the front right hand side and we'll add a couple small ellipses to add a little more dimension to our cloud.
Hitting v on the keyboard we can get a look at our cloud and you might need to drag some of the ellipses around just to modify it a bit. Once you've completed your cloud let's hit CTRL A to select all and again rather than using our shape builder tool let's utilize the pathfinder tool going to window pathfinder and we'll select merge. We now have our first cloud.
Let's create a second cloud we utilize the ellipse tool again and we'll begin creating our cloud. We'll want to make them roughly the same size however we can obviously change the size of them in the future by transforming the entire object. Add a couple small ellipses here just to give it a little more dimension and feel free to use the selection tool to modify your cloud.
When you've completed it let's drag a selection box over our cloud and again within our pathfinder we'll select merge. We now have our first two clouds. Let's lock these in place for now toggling our lock to the left of our clouds and from here we're going to create two additional clouds.
We'll do them right below and for these clouds they're going to be a little bit smaller they're going to be a little more simple so we'll utilize fewer shapes for them and for these clouds we're just going to leave it right like this. We'll drag a selection box and hit merge and we're going to do the same thing on the right hand side create another very simple cloud. When we have it looking like we want it to let's drag another selection box merge and we now have our four clouds as well as four paths.
Let's rename these paths for our clouds starting with the bottom right hand and we'll type bottom right cloud and hit ENTER bottom left cloud and hit ENTER and unlocking these we can select them and retype top right cloud and top left cloud and hit ENTER. With our clouds completed let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be working with transparency as well as a mask for our cloud. See you there!