I will give you a detailed analysis of the Illustrator software to share with you the tutorial on creating a simple Valley Creek vector map.
Tutorial sharing:
Final effect:
Bottoming
You can find a picture of the scenery you want to copy in advance, or you have a proper blueprint in your mind. Open AI and create a 1200px * 1000px document. Use the rectangle tool to draw a rectangle of the same size as the document. This is a "bottoming" process, that is, to give the image a background color or a background color. Close the stroke of the rectangle and fill in the linear gradient. The gradient changes from blue to light blue. For specific color values, see the following figure.
Find the gradient tool in the left-side toolbar and change the direction control bar of the gradient tool, as shown in the following figure.
This is the most common way to draw the blue sky, that is, to use gradient color to show the even transition of the blue sky.
Cloud rendering
Next let's add clouds to the sky. You 'd better use a hand-painted board to draw smooth and natural lines. Of course, there is no error with the mouse.
First, use the pencil tool in the left-side toolbar and double-click the pencil tool icon. The pencil tool option panel is displayed and set in the panel. You can refer to my settings. Here, the Fidelity slider will vary with fidelity and smoothness as you adjust it. Because of the hand-drawn features, the draw line is usually not smooth enough, so the software adds smoothness to help you on this basis, but if the characteristics of your painting do not need to be smooth, then try to be close to Fidelity.
Keep white and black, draw the first cloud. Enter the appearance panel, turn off the stroke of the painted clouds, and change the white fill to gradient fill. The gradient changes from white to light blue, and the gradient angle is changed to-90 degrees.
Draw other clouds. Do not copy or paste each cloud as much as possible. Every time you draw a cloud image, adjust the gradient angle accordingly. Imagine that sunlight is shining from the clouds, so clouds in different positions have different shadows and highlights. Make these clouds cover almost half of the canvas.
Place background texture
Go to File> placement, open texture 1 in the three textures we have downloaded, and stretch texture 1 to the same width as the canvas, click "place" in the tool property bar. The selected texture. Open the opacity panel, change the layer blending mode to "overlay" on the panel, and the opacity is reduced to 60%.
Group Hill and Canyon Painting
After the clouds are painted, we will continue painting. Next we will draw on the continuous mountains. The painting of mountains should adopt abstract methods as much as possible, so that they will not go deep into details, just draw a rough outline, follow the basic perspective principle, and place the disappearing point on the right. Set the color value to #6D5E25.
Draw a canyon under the hill. The canyon is lighter in color than the mountains in the distance. Here I set it to # 8A7A3F. This image should be placed above the image drawn in the previous step.
The edge of the canyon is a deeper color, and the view shows the height of the canyon. Set my color value to #4C3B21. This image needs to be placed below the canyon.
Let me add deeper shadows to the edge of the canyon. The color blocks of these shadows are distributed above the canyon and below the canyon surface.
At this time, the ground color is painted at the last step of the group Hill and Canyon. At the bottom.
Select all the images (mountains + Canyon + ground) drawn in this step, copy (Ctrl + C), and paste them to the front (Ctrl + F ). When selecting the copy layer, press Ctrl + Shift + F9 to open the path finder and click "union set" in the path finder, that is, the first icon on the left of the shape mode.
As we mentioned before, place texture 3 again. The scaling size of the texture pattern is roughly the same as that of the group Hill and Canyon. Then, move the copy image of the previous layer to the surface, select the texture and copy the image, and go to [OBJECT> cut mask> create]. Then, change the layer blending mode of the cut mask, change to overlay. The effect is shown in the following figure.
While operating, I try to understand what a cut mask is. As the name implies, the above image is a new image combined with the lower image as a mask. The new image inherits the shape of the above image, it also has the attributes of the image below (such as color and texture). It can be said that it is an inherited image. It is often used for texture pattern creation. When we draw a graph, we only need to take the shape of the image we want, and then overlay the texture to present the texture characteristics of any image we show.
River Painting
You can create a new layer and draw a river in the middle of the canyon. The river uses three different blue colors to enrich the visual depth.
Copy the River image, place texture 2, paste the copy layer above the texture, and create a cut mask with the texture. Change the shear mask to the overlay and hybrid mode.
Landscape painting of green plants
Here we use abstract circles to represent the green plants. The method of drawing is slightly the same as described above. The only difference is that when we draw and copy these independent circles, we need to change the copied circle into a composite path. In this case, we need to go to [OBJECT> composite path> build ], then place the texture further. Here, only a few closed circles must form a cut mask with the texture in a composite path. Then, change the composite mask to the overlay hybrid mode to reduce the transparency to 50%. The effect is as follows.
Add a border to the graph
Now we have finished the entire image and texture. Does it look good? Add a border for the graph. Here, I use a rounded rectangle to add a border for the image.
First, we merge the layers we have drawn into a layer in the layer panel. Use the rounded rectangle tool to draw your favorite shape. The rounded rectangle can close the stroke and fill. On the layers panel, select the merged layer, right-click the layer, and select "create cut mask ". By the way, we have used the principle of cutting masks again. Do you still remember? The final output result is as follows.
All right, the above information is all the content shared by the simple Valley Creek vector graph tutorial for the users of this software of Illustrator, I believe that you have clearly understood the method of drawing the small series of users here. Then, you can follow the small series of tutorials to draw a simple Valley Creek vector map by yourself.
