From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Using blends - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Using blends

- [Instructor] Blends are versatile function of Illustrator. And they can create things as simple as something like a gradient style blend, right the way through to far more complex things involving effects and so much more. Let's get a feel for what it's like to work with blends and some of the things that we can do with them. So here, I'm going to create a blend to start off with between these two rectangles at the back of this document, and I'm going to tap W to get the blend tool to do it. So I'll click on the magenta rectangle first, and then come across and click on the kind of dark blue rectangle on the right hand side. And you'll see that it creates a blend between the two. Now, I have in all honesty used blends, sometimes in the place of gradient because you might have a little bit more control on some documents. So they're useful to keep in mind for that if you're wrestling with the gradient tools. One of the features you'll notice with all blends is a line like this one, it's called the blend spine and all blends have one. And we can manipulate the spine and do other things with it, as you'll see, momentarily. So the next blend I want to make is between three shapes here. So this yellow circle, on the left hand side, I'm going to click on that. And as I have connected still, it's actually activated that as part of the blend, so Undo, and hold the Select here. So go to select and deselect. Now, try again and click on the yellow shape here, and then across to the blue shape on the right hand side, and then up to the star. Now just before I do that, notice that the bottom two shapes do not have a stroke, but the star does. And if I click on that, you can see it becomes the overriding thing there as it tries to build very quickly a stroke, from nothing up to full on yellow, just there. Again, sometimes an effect that you may well actually want. I'm just going to undo that. So we go back to just having the shapes here down at the bottom. And we'll examine some of the blend options. Now, we can actually do that by double clicking on the blend tool in the toolbox, or by going to the Object menu, choosing blend and blend options from there. Now the default is usually smooth color, so it will try and do a smooth blend between objects, but you can set it to a specified number of steps. So let's just say I wanted to do this in four steps just here and I'll hit the Tab key to move through, you can see that it gives me 1, 2, 3, 4 steps in between, I could also choose a specified distance, let's just say I wanted that to be 12 millimeters, just there. And if I tab through, it will do exactly that. You can set the orientation so it orients to the actual documents or to the path itself, which may work with a couple of things. We'll possibly give that a try in just a moment. And something else we can do here with the spine is to go to the Object menu, blend and reverse spine. And you'll see how it changes that around. It actually moves the objects. But additionally, if you want to, with the blend, you could reverse front to back and that would change the priority between the two. Let's go back to our selection tool. Tap V to pick up the selection tool. And this time click on the first of these gradient circles here. And then hold down Shift and click on the other gradient circle down towards the bottom right. And this time we'll make a blend using a shortcut, option Command B or Alt Control B. We'll use the Make Blend command. And if we go here to the Blend menu, you can see Blend Make at the top there and also release if you wanted to go back to opening them up and expand if you wanted to keep the results of the blend. So I'm going to change the blend here by double clicking on the blend tool to access the options. And I'm going to change the number of specified steps here. Let's increase that to maybe something in the hundreds I think would be pretty good. Actually, getting very close to exactly what I want with around about 70 somewhat, but we'll try, we'll go for 80. Let's try that. There we are. So we've got a blend with 80 steps in it and it looks kind of funky because it's got the different blends between the gradients. I know what will make it look slightly funky though. If we tap V to get our selection tool, hold down Shift so we can additionally select the path that we have here. We can then go to the Object menu, down to blend, and we can choose replace spine, you can see how it changes that over. And now our blend goes along the path that was drawn just there. And again, if you wanted to tune that, you could go ahead select it, go for the blend options. Increase the number of steps, you can end up with some really interesting results. So there you are. That's the basics of how to use blends. They are great fun, and you can make some really cool stuff with them.

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