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

679 Decorating your illusion

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

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679 Decorating your illusion

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'm going to take my magic checkerboard illusion and I'm going to decorate it with a ton of wireless gizmos. I'm not doing this to enhance the effect, per se. Notice that the illusion is entirely dependent upon this checkers layer or this dots layer or you could have both turned on if you like. But if you turn them both off, no matter how much other stuff you add, the illusion is dead, as we're seeing right here. Instead, I want to fill out the artwork so that it's a little more interesting than it is currently and I want to add some eye candy for folks who like this kind of thing and make people who don't like this kind of thing run screaming from the room. Alright so, I'm going to switch over to my document so far and I'll turn on the guides layer down here at the bottom of the layers panel and we want to zoom in on this location right here. And so I'm going to press the control and space bar keys, that's command and space bar on a Mac, to get the zoom tool on the fly and then I'll just go ahead and drag to the right to zoom in like so. And I'll go ahead and center these guidelines on screen and then I'll select the rectangle tool from the shape tool fly out menu. And notice that I'm getting a pencil with a universal no icon next to it and that's because the active layer is locked. So what I'm going to do is click on the dots layer which is currently turned off so that's not going to solve anything and then I'll drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll alt or option click on it to force a display of the layer options dialog box and I'll call this layer laptops because that's what the icon I'm about to draw represents. And then I'll change the color to, let's say grass green just to set it off from the other layers and then I'll click OK. At which point I get the cross hairs cursor which shows me that I can now draw inside this document. Alright, now I need my smart guides to be turned on so I'll go up to the view menu and if I'm not seeing a check mark next to smart guides I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then you'll want to align your cursor to the intersection of those two guides, press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click to bring up the rectangle dialog box. And then change both the width and height values to 36 points, which by the way, is half of 72. And so you may remember that we're working in 72 point increments, that's one inch by the way. And so 72 divided by two is 36. At which point I'll click OK and because I alt or option clicked at the outset, I'm creating this square from the center outward. Now, it appears to be deselected. That's because I went and hid my selection edges and that is a saved attribute of a file here inside Illustrator. So I'll press ctrl+h or cmd+h on the Mac to bring back those anchor points and segments. And then, I'll change the stroke to none. And I'll make sure that the fill is selected here inside the swatches panel. It is, and so now I'll just go ahead and make my swatches panel a little taller. And if you're not seeing that panel, by the way, you can go up to the window menu and choose the swatches command. In my case, it's got a check mark in front of it and so if I were to choose the command, I would hide the panel, not what I want to do. So I'll just press the escape key in order to escape out of that menu. And then, once again, with the fill selected I'll click on this swatch right there, the second swatch inside the illusion group. And I want it to look a little different than this so I'll double click on it to bring up the swatch options dialog box and I'll call this guy color two because that way you can change it to anything else you like. And then I'll turn on the global check box so that the color and all of the objects that are filled or stroked with this color are linked together. I'll change the color mode to HSB so that we're seeing the hue, saturation, and brightness values. And I'll change the hue value to 240 degrees, which is blue. I'll take the saturation value up to 100% and I'll set the brightness value to 50%. And then if you turn on the preview check box, you'll see that color assigned to the square. At which point, click OK to apply that change. Alright, now these laptop icons aren't the most articulated things ever, we just have the case and the screen and this little keyboard is the idea. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to my artwork at hand and I will once again align my cursor with the intersection of those two guides and alt or option click to bring up the rectangle dialog box. You want to make sure these two values have not linked to each other and then change the width value to 24 points and the height to 12 points. And by the way, 24 is 72 divided by three, where 12 is 72 divided by six. Just so you can see, I'm trying to remain true to my increments. Alright, now click OK to accept that change and I'm going to change the fill here inside the swatches panel to white and then I'll press and hold the control key or the command key on the Mac to temporarily gain access to my black arrow tool and I'll drag this guy upward while pressing the shift key. So I've got both control and shift down here in the PC, that's command and shift on the Mac, until the bottom of the rectangle snaps into alignment with this horizontal guide. Alright, now let's create the keyboard in quote fingers. And so I'm going to click, not alt or option click, but just click on the bottom right corner of this screen rectangle in order to once again bring up the rectangle dialog box. I still want the width value to be 24 points but this time I'm looking for a height of 72 divided by eight. Which as you may remember from elementary school is nine. Alright, now click OK in order to create that rectangle and I'll change its fill, again inside the swatches panel, to color one. And then you want to press ctrl+k or cmd+k on the Mac to bring up the preferences dialog box just so you can confirm that your keyboard increment is set to one point as by default. In which case, just go ahead and click OK. And then press the down arrow key a total of three times to nudge that shape down like so. Alright, now I'm going to press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll just go ahead and partially marquee these shapes. You don't want to select the checkers, they are unlocked at this point so leave them alone. And then, go up to the object menu and choose the group command in order to group all these shapes together. Now I want to give it a kind of jaunty angle by switching to the rotate tool which you can get by pressing the r key. And then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box and I'm looking for an angle of 45 degrees, just like so. Then, click OK. Now, let's zoom out a little bit so that we can take in the next purple bar down. And then I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool up here at the top of the tool box and I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the move dialog box. I'm looking for a horizontal value of zero and a vertical value of 72 times two, which is 144. At which point I'll click the copy button to create a copy of that laptop. And now I want to rotate it the other direction and so I'll once again grab my rotate tool and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box and I will change the angle value to negative 90 degrees, which is going to rotate those shapes in a clockwise direction. At which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. Now I'll press the v key just to switch back to the black arrow tool. Click off the shape to deselect it. Press ctrl+0 or cmd+0 on the Mac to center my zoom. And I'll turn off the guides layer, we don't need it anymore. And now what we're going to do is duplicate these laptops all over the place by applying a dynamic effect to the entire laptop's layer. So here inside the layers panel, you'll want to target that layer by clicking in the circle on the right side of the layers panel. And then, you want to go up to the effect menu, choose distort and transform, and choose the transform command in order to bring up the transform dialog box, which, if you watched the previous movie, you may recognize as having the same design as the transform each dialog box. The only difference is that transform each is a static modification whereas the transform effect is dynamic. Alright, so I'm going to change this horizontal move value to 72 asterisk two, so 72 times two, which is 144. I'll leave the vertical value set to zero and then I'll turn on the preview check box and you can see that that moves the appearance of the laptops over 144 points but it leaves the original path outlines where you're seeing them in the top left corner of the artwork. Alright, I want to get these guys back, so I'll click in the copies value there and press the up arrow key so that we have one copy as well as one original and then I'll press the up arrow key a few more times until we have a total of five copies, which fills out the width of the artwork. And then I'll click OK. Alright, now we want to duplicate these guys down to the third and fourth rows. And you can do that by going up to the effect menu and choosing the second command, transform, dot, dot, dot. At which point, Illustrator's probably going to ask you if you really want to apply a new effect as opposed to editing the existing one. You do, so click the apply new effect button. Then change the horizontal move value to zero this time around and set the vertical value to 72 times 4 and then press the tab key. Let's go ahead and take the copies value down to zero for the moment and I'll turn on the preview check box and you can see that moves the appearance of that artwork downward but it leaves the originals up here in the top left corner of the art board once again. And so to bring them back I'll click in the copies value and take it up to one. That's all we need. At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And then I'll click off the artwork to deselect it. And that is how you decorate your illusion with a few highly stylized laptops. In the next movie, we will add still more gizmos.

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