Subtitles of the Movie

As you can see I've been a little busy putting stripes and stars in my balloons, I put the people int heir baskets and now we're ready to add the last bit of detail. But before I do I want to show you a little trick I use to kind of hide things that overlap like this. I usually create a layer and I just call it white boxes and I literally draw white boxes right along the edge of my artwork like this and I get rid of the stroke and I fill it in with white. I like to have things neat when I work and it's important so I'm not distracted. So I like to see exactly the clean edges of the artwork and I usually do that wherever there is an overlap of some type, like over here as well and it just tells me to think. Then I take that layer and I lock it, so that's one way of cleaning things up. I'm going to zoom in now and talk about the last bit of detail that I'm going to add in this project but of course feel free to take it to the next level on your own add gradients and all kinds of gradients that background and some light beams or whatever you want to do. Don't forget you can use your Effect, Stylize, Feather and your glows to soften a lot these things up, especially your clouds, you might want to feather those guys up a little bit. And just in case you don't know exactly what I'm talking about I'll go ahead and show you. I'll go ahead and get rid of the stroke on this particular cloud, I'll go to Effect, Stylize, Feather do a Preview and I'll increase my radius a little bit as well. So let me just ahead and make that about .25 and look at how nice and soft that is. As a matter of fact I'm not going stop, I'm going to keep going. That makes me happy. So I'm going to get rid of the stroke, go back to Effect and apply Feather and now you have some very, very nice soft, clouds that you might need to resize to really see the effect. And that really helps to make the scene look a little more pleasant to the eye. Feel free to do that in any other region as well that you might want to have a nice billowing affect. Alright I'm going to lock my clouds and I'm going to create one more layer and I'm going to call this lines. Now what I like to do when I do stuff like this is save the very last layer for my detailing. So I don't want a fill color but I don't want a stroke and I think I'll choose something like, like a gray, a nice light gray and on one of my balloons I'm simply going to go ahead and pull out some of those nice soft lines that will give the balloon some definition. And of course you don't have to do this everywhere and you can even do it partially like so instead of going all the way down. Just to make the balloon look a little bit more alive. Don't forget by the way when you want to temporarily turn off the Pen Tool you can use the keyboard shortcut I showed you earlier so when you have your Pen Tool selected on your keyboard hit Command or Control, click and then you can continue drawing. Now I can come over here and draw some more of those lines just to once again follow the ribbing of the balloon, make it look nice and more detailed. Now gray might not very well be the color you want to use here. So of course use your discretion and experiment. You might want to use something darker, like black to see how that looks or something like blue. So just play around and see what's going to fit best on artwork that you're creating. Once again it's a part of the creative process so you won't know until you actually play around and apply your lines. So I hope you guys had a good time with this project, it was light, it was fun and it was airy, pun intended. Take this to the next level on your own, experiment and details and most of all use your layers to your advantage. They are there for you to experiment with so you can hide things you're not happy with; you can also use the Transparency Panel to knock down some of these effects as well. So if these lines are a little too strong for you, don't forget you can knock those down if you're on that layer. So once again guys I hope you had fun, take care.