How does Yoga Perdana colorize his illustrations?

Question

If you haven't heard of him or seen any of his work, Yoga Perdana is a digital artist who, in my opinion, creates some really awesome illustrations with a very soft feel to them.

I believe I understand how he lays out his illustrations using circles, but I'm unsure of how he gives his art such a soft feel to it. There are definitely gradients involved, but his come out so different looking compared to mine.

Any ideas on the process Yoga takes in order to colorize his images while maintaining a very soft feel to them? Are there any tutorials available?

This is what I have so far:

I went off of Yoga's initial construction design, creating circles, using minus front to create the initial ring shape, and then using the outline pathfinder to create anchor points where the rings intersected. From there I deleted curves correspondingly to look like the original logo.

How do I connect all of the points to become a singular shape so I can add a gradient?

UPDATE (11:15pm): Just got the gradient working. I ended up joining the disconnected paths to create singular shapes in which I could insert a fill into. From there I selected all of my new shapes and filled them with a gradient.

This brings me to my next question, how do I create the shadows within the logo to create a sense of depth? I'm thinking about duplicating the shapes, creating a shadow gradient for each one, and altering their opacity to around 40%.

UPDATE (1/9/15): I was able to add some shadows to give the logo depth. All I did was duplicate pieces of the logo so that they were overlaid right on top of each other, and added some fade gradients to them.

However, I think there's still something that differentiates Yoga's logo from mine. Is he using some sort of grain or blur technique? I can't put my finger on it, but I definitely feel like something's different.

UPDATE (1/9/15 @ 5:01pm): I exported my logo as a png and loaded it up in Photoshop. Added some very fine grain (0.5 gaussian noise) and gave it a dark background to accompany it. Here is how it came out, Yoga's is on the left, mine on the right:

I realize the shape of the logo is not exactly the same as Yoga's, but I'd say it looks very similar design wise. Please give me any tips on how I can improve.

Til next time. -Chris

Answer 1

The way you can achieve the soft shading similar to the examples you've showed is to create a new shape that has a gradient fade from black to black with 0% transparency on one end.

Create a duplicate of the shape you want to add the shadow to, and use it as a clipping mask for your "shadow"(cmd/ctrl+7).

Then drag that over the main shape (or you could have pasted the clipping mask in place and it would already be overlayed) to achieve each shadow.

Answer 2

There is a tutorial imitating his style here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it8jF089HA4 that you might find helpful. The person in the video is using Sketch.

Answer 3

Maybe you can brush the shadow instead of relying on the software default?As you are the one who can control the depth of the image, like which should be on top of which shape.

Answer 4

Gradient: Move it a bit to give it more blue, notice bottom right quarter

Shadows are the thing that need most work, for start add overlay of 7% black to all shapes that are in the back, later when you add gradient make it much smoother, your transition now is too aggressive at some places, also use radial gradient