Build a 1-Point Perspective Grid in Illustrator
In this lesson we're going to build a simple 1-point perspective grid in Illustrator that you can reuse over and over. Having a pre-made perspective grid handy when you're working on an illustration saves you plenty of time, hassle, and headache.
In the end you'll have a symbol saved in Illustrator that you can place into any illustration you're working on. Or easily import it into Photoshop, Procreate, and other programmes.
Instructor: [00:01] Select the pen tool, and make sure your fill color is empty by hitting stroke. Now, change your stroke color to a nice light blue. We're going to create a straight by clicking, holding down shift, and clicking again.
[00:13] Now, select your line, and double-click the rotate tool. Let's type in 10 degrees, and hit copy. As you can see, this just made another copy of our line, but 10 degrees different. If we now hold down command-D, it's going to make a lot of copies of our line.
[00:27] This now creates a nice one-perspective grid for us. Let's now select all our lines, and drop our stroke down to 025. As you can see, this made our grid barely visible, which is what you want for perspective guide lines.
[00:40] To be able to reuse this grid in other Illustrator projects, we're going to save it as a symbol. Select your grids, click right here on the symbols panel, and we're going to hit new symbol. In our symbol options, rename it, perspective grid one.
[00:58] The export type is a graphic, and we're going to make it a static symbol. Hit OK. Now, you can see it's here in our symbols panel. Even if we delete this, we can drag it back in from here.
[01:11] If I want to use my grid in another program, like Photoshop, I first have to unlink it as a symbol. Select it, go to our symbols panel, and hit unlink. Now, you can see it's back to being individual lines.
[01:23] If I select all of these, hit command-C, go over to Photoshop, and hit command-V to paste into my document, hit OK as pixels, size this up, and hit enter, as you can see, it's now just a new layer. I'm going to be able to draw on top of this in my document.