Creating Film Noir Styled Artwork in Illustrator
While Illustrator does excel at creating logos, icons, and other vector graphics, it is an illustration program at its heart.
What you'll learn
While Illustrator does excel at creating logos, icons, and other vector graphics, it is an illustration program at its heart. So, to begin this Illustrator tutorial, after preparing our file to work in, we will start by learning a number of ways to block in the shadows or black shapes of our image. While adding to the darkest values, we will learn about important tools like the pen tool, blob brush and pencil tool, and see the strengths of each. After simplifying our sketch to only black and white values, we will begin to soften some of the transitions between the two by using a powerful feature in Illustrator known as blends. If this is your first time working with blends, this will serve as a great introduction because we'll focus on using them to create simple hatching and cross hatching patterns. After going through this tutorial, you will have a great idea of how to execute a film noir styled illustration inside of Adobe Illustrator.
Table of contents
- Setting up Our File with a Matte 9m
- Beginning to Block in Areas of Black 11m
- Continuing to Block in Areas of Black 12m
- Stroking Paths for Areas of Detail 12m
- Creating the Feather Boa on the Model 12m
- Creating Basic Blends for Tonal Variation 13m
- Working with a Blends Spine 7m
- Masking out Blends 12m
- Layering Blends Together 8m
- Creating the Blends for the Face 12m
- Using Scroll Pens 7m
- Creating a Background Blend 7m
About the author
Eddie began teaching creative professionals over ten years ago for Digital Tutors. In 2014 Digital Tutors was acquired by Pluralsight and he continued his focus on creating high quality training for artists in both the film and games industries. With a background in graphic design and illustration Eddie has always been focused on visual appeal. This can be seen through his courses in which he shares secrets for achieving production level quality for concept art, illustrations, textures, mater... more