From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

671 Coffer illusion and the hidden circles

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

671 Coffer illusion and the hidden circles

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, I'm going to share with you how to create an absolutely mind-bending optical illusion; and it's this guy right here, originally created by a guy named Anthony Norcia. It's spelled Norcia, but I think it's pronounced Norcia. And he called it the Coffer Illusion, coffer being an architectural term for inset panels. And even though it looks like we're seeing a bunch of rectangles, we're actually looking at a total, get this, of 16 circles. Now it might seem like we should be using Illustrator for this artwork, but we're actually going to be using Photoshop because that way we can express the circles as big pixels. Now some of you might be looking at this and thinking, I got news for you, Deke, those are what's known as rectangles. There's as many circles in that thing you're holding up as there are triangles. Well, does this help? And the thing is, once you see those 16 circles, you can't unsee them; they're absolutely obvious. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are zoomed in to the final version of the hidden circles pattern, just so you have a chance to see it onscreen. We are going to be creating this artwork absolutely from scratch here inside Photoshop; and so if you're working along with me, go up to the File menu and choose the New command or you can press Ctrl + N, or Cmd + N on the Mac. And regardless of the appearance of your new document dialogue box, make sure that you're working in pixels. And then we want a very small document; so dial in a width value of just 25 pixels, that's it, and a height value of 25 pixels as well. And that's just going to help to make the artwork a little bit simpler to create. All right, now the resolution value doesn't matter; but we do want the color mode to be set to Bitmap. So we have just two colors: black and white, and nothing more. Make sure that our background contents are set to white, and then click the Create button in order to make this extremely tiny document. Now I'm going to zoom in to 1600% just so I can better see what I'm doing; and then I'll drop down to the shape tool fly-out menu, and I'll select the ellipse tool. Then you want to drag from one corner to the opposite corner inside of the canvas. And so notice in my heads up display that both the width and height values are 25 pixels; and if you want to just make sure that you're drawing a perfect circle, you can press and hold the Shift key; and then when you release, you should go ahead and fill up the entire canvas with that circular shape. Now it is going to be extremely jagged as we're seeing right here, but notice that it tapers evenly. So this outside edge right here is five pixels, then we have three pixels right here, then two pixels, then one, one, two going horizontally, three, and again five. So everything is tapering the way it should. All right, now we want to blow up this circle by going up to the image menu and choosing the image size command; and you want to make sure the Resample check box is turned on. Then you want to change either width or height to percent, and that's going to change both of those values as we're seeing here; and now notice the two values are linked together, and so I'm going to increase the width value to 800% and that will increase the height value as well. Again, we don't care about the resolution. Because we're working inside of a Bitmap document, automatic, which is selected by default, is the same as nearest neighbors. And so, in other words, you don't have to mess with this option. Just go ahead and click Okay, and you will expand the size of your circle as we're seeing here. All right, now we need to convert this document to RGB just so that we can add some colors; and you do that by going to the Image menu, choosing Mode, and first you have to choose Grayscale. It's a necessary intermediate step. So go ahead and choose that command. Size ratio should be set to one; then click Okay. Return to the Image menu, choose Mode, and then choose RGB color; and while that will not introduce any new color into the image, you can now add as much color as you like. All right, now we want to pop this guy onto a new layer; and the easiest way to do that is to go up to the Window menu and choose the Channels command, which will bring up the Channels panel as we're seeing right here. And then just go ahead and press the Ctrl key, or the Cmd key on the Mac, and click anywhere on this IGB item right there, in order to select all the white pixel, we really want to select the black ones. So go up to the Select menu and choose the inverse command in order to swap the selection from the white pixels to the black ones; and now go ahead and switch back to the Layers panel and make sure that your background color is white. If it's not, you can just tap the D, D for default colors, that is; and then press mash your fist J; so Ctrl + Shift + Alt + J on the PC or Cmd + Shift + Opt + J on the Mac. And what that's going to do is jump the selection to a new layer; and because you have the Shift key down, it's going to remove the circle from the background. And because you have the Alt or Opt key down, it's going to bring up the new layer dialogue box at which point, just go ahead and call this guy circle, and then click Okay and notice you now have an independent circle layer right here. And notice if I turn it off, then I reveal an absolutely white background. All right, I'll turn that layer back on; and now I want to create a second circle that's offset from the first so that we can draw a bunch of rectangles inside the two. And so the first thing I need to do is go up to the Image menu and choose the Canvas Size command, and this is going to allow me to make the canvas wider so I have more room to work. Notice that my unit of measure is once again set to pixels. The relative check box is turned off. I'm going to go ahead and increase the width value to 500 pixels. I don't really know what I want, but that seems like it should work. And the I'll select on of these left-hand anchor points, so that I'm adding pixels to the right; and then I'll click okay. And you can see that goes ahead and expands my canvas like so. All right, now I want to create a copy of the circle; and I'm going to do that using a keyboard shortcut that allows me to move a copy of a layer, and that's Ctrl + Alt + T, the T being for transform. That's Cmd + Opt + T on the Mac, at which point you'll see this transformation boundary. Next, I'll just go ahead and drag this guy over to the right, while pressing the Shift key so that I'm performing an absolutely horizontal move. And I'm going to zoom in just a little bit here. Notice that I have a little bit of a gap. I'm going to press the left arrow key to get rid of it. And then I'm going to press the left arrow key one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times so that we have just this little block right there in the middle. It doesn't really matter that much how these circles fit together, but I do want to make this as easy to follow along with as possible. All right, now I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept that change; and now I want to duplicate that maneuver using that same keyboard shortcut, but along with the Shift key. So, in other words, here on a PC, I'll press Ctrl + Shift + Alt, T. That would be Cmd + Shift + Opt + T on the Mac, and notice that goes ahead and repeats that transformation. I don't need the middle one here inside the layers panel, so I'll click on it to select it and press the backspace key or the deleted key on the Mac to get rid of it. Now notice that my canvas is not quite wide enough; and to fix that problem, I'll go up the the Image menu and choose Reveal All, which will go ahead and expand the canvas ever so slightly, so that it includes both of the circles. All right, now I'll press Ctrl + 0 or Cmd + 0 on the Mac to fit the image onscreen; and the next step is to turn on the grid, and you can do that by going to the View menu, choosing Show, and then choosing Grid, right here. Notice that it has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl quote mark; that's Cmd + quote mark on the Mac; and that is worth remembering because is useful to turn the grid on and off as you work. Notice, however, the grid is not fitting our circles at all; and so we need to modify the grid, and you do that by going to the Edit menu here on the PC. That's going to be the Photoshop menu on the Mac. Then drop down to the Preferences command, which is a lot higher in the menu on the Mac; and then go ahead and choose this command: Guides, Grid, and Slices, to bring up this very busy panel right here. Now we're looking for a grid line every eight, but not inches, rather pixels; so I'll go ahead and choose pixels. So eight pixels, as we're seeing right here; and notice that's doing quite the number here in the background. Now I don't need all these subdivisions, and so I'm going to crank this value down as low as it goes, which is one; and you'll see the grid update in the background. Now I don't really want the grid to be gray, and so I'll go ahead and click on this gray swatch; and I'll change the view value, let's say to 60 for yellow. And I'll crank the saturation value up to 100%, and I'll take the brightness value up to 100% as well; and then I'll click Okay a couple of times to accept that change. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on the top circle right there, the one on the right; and we're going to start drawing some rectangles using the rectangle tool. So I'll go ahead and select the rectangle tool from the Shape Tool Fly-Out menu, and we'll start by dragging a rectangle right here. And notice that it is snapping into alignment with the grid, and I'm starting at this top pixel on the far right side of the left-hand circle; and I'm dragging to the bottom of that left edge of the right-hand circle in order to draw a rectangle like so. Now it's pretty hard to see at this point, which is why I'm going to click on the fill swatch up here in the Options bar and change it to none. And then I'll click on a stroke, and notice that I'm seeing all of my default swatches here; but I'm making my panel wide enough so that the colors line up with each other. And then I'll go ahead and select this shade of pink right here, pure magenta red. But it doesn't matter what colors you use; you can go your own way. And then I'll increase the line weight value to eight pixels in order to produce this effect here. Now, by default, if you click on this little line icon here, you should see that the line is set to inside, which is exactly what we want. Now I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept that change. And I also decided to tuck a shadow inside of this stroke, and you could do that by clicking on the Effects icon and choosing inner shadow; and these are the settings I came up with. Notice that the color's set to black, the blend mode is multiplied; but it could just as well be normal. The opacity is 100%, the distance and size values are five pixels, choke is 0%; and I'm going to change the angle value to 135 degrees and then click Okay to accept that change, and we end up with this effect here. And, by the way, the whole reason for the inner shadow effect is that it helps to differentiate the circles a little bit better against the rectangles. All right, now we're going to draw another rectangle starting at the top of the right edge of the left-hand circle down to the bottom of the left edge of the right-hand circle, like so. And I'll go ahead and change its color, let's say, to this shade of blue; but, again, you can do whatever you want. And then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to hide that panel. And I'll draw another rectangle from the top of this right edge of the left-hand circle down to the bottom of the left edge of the right-hand circle to produce this effect; and I'll change the color of the strobe to orange. All right, now I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to dismiss that panel; and I'll draw another rectangle, like so. And I'm going to change its color to, let's say something like purple. Now something to bear in mind is you don't just want to move your cursor away from the panel and click thinking that that's going to dismiss the panel. It will; the panel will go away, but you'll also bring up the Create Rectangle dialogue box. And if you accidentally click Okay or press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, you're going to draw another rectangle in a weird place. That's not what we want, so we'll press Ctrl + Z, or Cmd + Z on the Mac, to undo that rectangle; and then I'll draw another one right here. So notice these rectangles are tied against each other, and I'll change this stroke, once again, to that bright shade of pink; and I'll press the Enter key to hide the panel, and then I'll draw a new guy right there and I'll change its color, once again, to a shade of blue. Can be anything though, totally up to you. Press the Enter key, Return key on the Mac, to hide that panel. Now we're moving up to this pixel right there, and we're dragging down to this one in order to create a rectangle that's a little bit separated horizontally, so it's a little bit wider than the rectangle before it. And I'll change its color, once again, to orange. So I'm repeating some colors here. And press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac; and then I'll draw this guy, and this one's quite a bit larger horizontally, as you can see, although it is tied vertically. And now I'll change its color once again to a shade of purple, perhaps this one right here. All right, now I want to assign inner shadows to all those rectangles that I just drew. Unfortunately, you can't just click on one, shift click on another, and assign an inner shadow effect because, as you can see, the FX icon is dimmed down here at bottom of the layers panel. So instead what you have to do is right-click on rectangle one in order to bring up this pop-up menu and choose Copy Layer Style from the middle of the list; and then click on rectangle two and Shift click on rectangle eight and right-click on any one of them, and then choose paste layer style, and that will go ahead and give them all inner shadows, as we're seeing right here. Now I don't want all of these effects to be expanded, so I'll press the Alt key, or the Opt key on the Mac, and click this up pointing arrowhead in order to collapse all of the layer effects like so. And then I'll go ahead and press the Ctrl key, or the Cmd key on the Mac, and click on an empty portion of rectangle one. You don't want to click on this thumbnail; click on an empty region right there to add it to the selection. So, once again, that's a Ctrl or Cmd click, and then click on the Fly-Out menu icon in the top right corner of the Layers panel and choose New Group from Layers. And let's go ahead and call this guy edges because these are the rectangles that define the edges of the circles, at which point you can click Okay to create that new group. All right, now at this point, we've drawn a bunch of rectangles; but they don't look like much, and so notice if I go up to the View menu, choose Show, and turn off grid. Or, again, I can press Ctrl + quote mark, that'd be Cmd + quote mark on a Mac, to turn off the grid. This doesn't look like we're creating anything resembling hidden circles, but we actually are; and let me show you what that looks like. I'll bring back the grid by pressing Ctrl + quote mark, that's Cmd + quote on the Mac, and then I'll grab my rectangular marquee tool, which you can get by pressing the M key. I want you to notice that this pixel right here is the top center point of the left-hand circle, so I'm going to drag to select it, like so, down to the bottom of the canvas. And then I won't drag all the way over to include its commensurate pixel down here at the bottom center of the right-hand circle. Instead, I'll move over a pixel like so. And by pixel, I mean a full grid increment because if I were to include this center column of pixels, I would be repeating them where the pattern is concerned. All right, so I'll move over like so; and notice in my heads up display that the width of my selection is 320 pixels, and the height is 200 pixels. All right, now what you want to do with that selection active is to go up to the Edit menu and choose Define Pattern; and then I'll go ahead and name this pattern Fragile Circles, and I'll click Okay. All right, now to see what that looks like; I'll go to the File menu and, once again, choose the New command. And this time I'm going to dial in a width value, as you can see right here, of 1600 pixels, and a height value of 1,000 pixels; and the reason is, I'm going with a width of five times that selection outline that we saw just a moment ago. And so five times 320 is 1600, and I'm also going with a height value that's five times the height of that rectangular marquis. Five time 200 is a thousand. At which point, I'll click the Create button in order to make this massive document. Now I don't want to see the grid, so I'm going to press Ctrl + quote mark here in the PC; that's Cmd + quote on the Mac, to hide it. And then I'll go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and then choose Pattern; and I'll once again call this guy Fragile Circles, and I'll click Okay. And then inside the pattern filled dialogue box, I'll just make sure that that last pattern I created is selected, which it should be by default; and then I'll once again click Okay. And now notice if I zoom in, that we are indeed seeing our circles even though I haven't all together finished the artwork. And that's how you at least begin the creation of a work of op art, in which a whole bunch of rectangles are converging to create a series of hidden circles here inside Photoshop. All right, so things are looking pretty good; but we need to fill out the effect, as we're seeing here. And so if you remember at lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a follow-up movie in which we do just that. Next week, we're going to take this flat art and we're going to give it some depth so it looks like we're actually seeing recessed coffers. And in case you're looking at that thinking, well, it makes the circles more obvious. No, it doesn't actually; that's because you know where the circles are. I couldn't begin to hide the circles from you now, but everybody I've shown this to first, when I show this to them before this one, they do not see the circles; so don't feel bad if you didn't see the circles. I saw them, but that's because I had extremely well-developed circle detection skills. And, by the way, deke.com; come, it's advertisement free. You can also become a member for free and comment, ask questions, post images as well. It's going to be a community site. It's for the kids or really the child in you. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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