To open the Glyphs Palette, goto Text > Glyphs on your Illustrator menu.  The palette will open and display the glyphs available in the selected font.  Simply change the font on your Character Toolbar or Palette to change the glyphs being displayed.  To insert a glyph, place your text cursor somewhere on the artboard or with a line of text and then double click the appropriate glyph within the palette.

Before we can begin our urban scene, we’ll need to go grab some texture images to use. The images I will be using are shown below and include images of bricks, corrigated metal, some rusty drips and a few different grungy papers.

Open Illustrator and start with a rectangular artboard.

Let’s begin by creating a brick wall that will serve as our backdrop. Place the image of bricks onto the artboard (File > Place), select the image and make a Live Trace (Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand). Select the white portions (Select > Same > Fill Color) and fill with a reddish brick color, and fill the black portions with a much darker shade of that brick color. ( For more information on these steps, refer back to PART ONE.

Now let’s create some grungy pipes to run up the side of our wall. First, Place and Live Trace your rusty drips image, but this time open the Trace Options window (Object > Live Trace > Trace Options) and select the Grayscale mode. The Trace Options window is shown below. When you have the settings as you want them, hit the Trace burron. Select bits and pieces of your grayscale trace and delete, so that we will be able to see our pipe through the texture.

Once you have your rust drips texture to your liking, we’ll need to create our pipe. Make a long vertical rectangle and give it a gray/white gradient like below. Then place the texture on top of the rectangle, select both the shape and the texture, and Group them together (Object > Group).

Next, let’s use our corrugated metal photo to create the effect of some shadows thrown by buildings against our brick wall. Place and Live Trace the image, again using the Grayscale mode to give added depth. Hopefully, the trace of your image will provide a texture with notable hills and valleys, like the one I am using which can be seen below. Delete the lower portions of the texture and then select the upper most portion and fill it with white. I have filled it with black in the example below just so you can see the general shape we are going for.

We are now ready to begin compiling our urban scene. Position the brick textured object in the back center. Now take your grungy pipe and place it vertically on top of the brick wall to either side. You may want to duplicate your pipe, resize the duplicate to be noticeably thinner, and place it a few clicks over from the first pipe. Now take your shadow object (which in reality will be the negative space of our shadows) and place it along the top edge of the brick wall, making sure that your hills and valleys are pointing down. Select the shadow shadow shape and give it Transparency of 20%. Your scene should look something like this:

Our brick wall looks empty, so let’s make some signs/posters to slap on there like you would see in the city. Start by creating some distressed sheets of paper using the Pen Tool. Make sure to give them some bent corners and tears along the edges. Then put some writing/design on the papers - personal ads, music posters, event announcements, whatever.

Now we need to grunge up our posters, so grab some images of distressed or stained paper. Place and Live Trace the images, as we have done all the others. I am tracing these in Grayscale Mode, as well. Select the areas of the traces that you want to overlay onto your posters and delete the rest. Play with the transparency of the paper textures, so that we are still able to see the design behind, even if faintly.

Next, simply overlay your paper textures on top of your posters.

And place them on our wall.

Now let’s take one final step to really drive it home.  We are going use the brick texture we created at the very beginning, to bring the textured feeling and depth forward and pull things together.  First, select only the dark red portion of the brick texture, copy it (Edit > Copy) and paste it in front (Edit > Paste in Front).

Next, bring the pasted texture to the front (Object > Arrange > Bring to Front) and change the fill color to black.

Knock back the transparency of this new top object to 10%.

And there it is.  An Urban Grunge Scene - made quick and easy by creating our own vector textures using Illustrator’s Live Trace Tool.  

To pull up the tool options for a given tool simply select the tool and hit Return (Mac) or Enter (PC).

Example ~ the options for the Warp tool is shown below:
 

Create an ellipse and  fill it with a multicolored gradient.  Use the Convert Anchor Point Tool  to remove the curve from the anchor point on either end of the ellipse, as seen below.  This will create the feather shape for our peacocks tail feathers.

Now use your Rotate Tool  to fan out the feathers in a half circle like below.  For more info on how to do this see the tutorial, Quick and Easy Flowers in Illustrator.

Apply a thin stroke to the feathers to distinguish them from each other.

You will see that the fan of feather still looks a bit one dimensional.  Let’s use our transparency palette to change that!  Select all of your feathers and set them to 50% transparency.
You will see that instantly our feathers seem to have much more layering and depth.  Now play a bit with your transparency blend modes and check out all the cool ways the transparency palette can change the look of your feathers.  You can see a few examples below.





Now with the use of some very simple shapes, we can create the body of our peacock.

Now choose your favorite blend mode for your fan of feathers, color up your body to match and put them together for your 3 minute peacock.
   

First, create you shape.  I am using a plain black rectangle as seen below.

 Next, place your text on top of your shape.  

Once you have it positioned where you want to cut it out, with the text selected, create outlines of the text by going to the Type menu and choosing Create Outlines.  The text will no longer be editable once you do this - so be sure it reads correctly.

 Now you have two options on how to proceed in cutting or knocking the text out.

OPTION ONE

With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Pathfinder palette and click on the Divide icon.  This will divide the overlapping areas into separate shapes.  Then select any of the letter shapes and delete.  this will remove the overlapping area and leave a “hole” through the shape.

Delete all of the divided letter shapes, and you are left with your orginal shape with “holes” where all of the letters used to be.

 OPTION TWO

 With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Shape menu and make a Compound Path.  This will make the two shapes into a single shape, leaving any overlapping areas as negative space. 

Now you can take your shape with cutouts and place it on top of other layers and what is behind it will show through!

Today we’ll be drawing fire in Photoshop. You can draw this on a blank canvas, but to get the full effect, I suggest you start with a photo. I am using this picture:

Step 1. Fireball
Add a New Layer.
Select a soft paintbrush in a medium size (I startd with 40).
Using a brick-orange color, make a dot.
Make another dot with a slightly lighter color and slighty smaller brush size (30).
Make another dot with a slightly lighter color and slighty smaller brush size (20).
Last time: Make another dot with a slightly lighter color (peachy/yellow now) and slighty smaller brush size (10).

Using the Smudge Tool in a small, soft size, click somewhere inside your dot, hold and drag it up. Repeat this to make fire tongues coming up out of your dots. Try making them “S” shaped. You can also change the Strength of the smudge tool to vary the effect. (Mine is about 65% and I avoid the lightest color area in this step.) Here are my settings:

Step 2: Fire’s Glow
Now we’ll add a soft glow around the fire.
Go into Quick Mask Mode (Q), select a big, soft brush (I used 80), and click. The brush selection should be aligned with the bottom-middle of your fire, going up and out from there.

Leave Quick Mask Mode (Q), and you will have a circular selection on your canvas. Right click and Select Inverse. Select your photo layer, and a Color Balance Adjustment Layer.

Adjust the midtones and highlights as shown:

Step 3: Making Sparks Fly
Now we’ll prepare our brush to add some sparks to the fire.

With those settings, add a new layer, choose a medium orange from your fireball with the eyedropper and draw some sparks over the fire. Lower the Opacity of this layer (in my case it is 60%). Then drag the layer down so it overlays the top 1/3 of your fireball.

Step 4: Finishing touches
Change again to regular soft brush, use #ffff66 color (or similar light yellow), select a new layer, and make a bright dot inside of it.
Again, I lowered the opacity of this layer to 60%.
Right click on this layer for your blending option and select Outer Glow.

Now use your smudge tool just a bit to give this layer a teardrop shape. Here is my final image:

http://www.shutterstock.com/newsletter/100/article3.html

Go to your symbol libraries (if you need help with this refer back to PART ONE: “A Quick Introduction to Illustrator Symbols”), choose the Fashion Library and add the desired pieces of clothing to your Symbols Palette.

Drag and drop the symbol(s) to your artboard. For this quick exercise I am going to add our logo to a hat and a t-shirt, so I have dragged one of each symbol into the document.

I am using a single instance of each symbol here, so I can simply Expand (Object > Expand) the shape if I want to update the color or add a stroke. (I will go over how to edit the actual Symbol in a subsequent part of this series.) Then just add the art or text that you want to appear on your clothing item and you are done!