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

900 Drawing a gradient sphere as a 2D shape

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

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900 Drawing a gradient sphere as a 2D shape

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week I'm going to show you how to create a simple sphere as a 2D object inside Illustrator. We'll start with a perfect circle, fill it with a radial gradient, offset that gradient with the help of Illustrator's Gradient Annotator, switch out the colors for shades of ivory, and add a super-smooth drop shadow set against a green cloth background. Okay so 2D sphere, simple trick, but you got to know how to do it, especially if you're designing the perfect vector-based pool hall clock, which we are. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right so here we are looking at the final version of the pool hall clock open inside Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the starter document here which contains a couple of center guides, one vertical and one horizontal. Both of which exist on the Guides layer, which we can see here inside the Layers panel. I've also got this Table layer which contains this big, huge rectangle that fills up the entire red bleed boundary so that we're ready for borderless printing if need be. And we also have here inside the Swatches panel, a bunch of pre-defined swatches. That is to say, I've created them in advance. And I've arranged them into three folders, or groups, if you prefer. And the fact that we're seeing these white wedges in the bottom-right corners of each one of these swatches tells you that it's a global swatch. In other words, if you modify the color of any one of these swatches, you'll modify the colors of the objects as well. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom on in. And here inside the Layers panel, I'm going to create a new layer by dropping down to what used to be the little page icon. Now it's a little plus sign as you can see. When you hover over it, it reads Create new layer. What you want to do is Alt or Option + click on that guy to force a display of the Layer Options dialog box. And I'm going to call this layer Balls, because it's going to contain all the pool balls. And I'll change this color to, let's say gold. And then I'll click OK. All right now we want to draw the cue ball by going over here to the vertical toolbox, click and hold on the Rectangle tool, or whatever shape tool you may see at this location, and then choose the Ellipse tool from that flyout menu. All right we also want to make sure that the Smart Guides are turned on. So go up to the View menu and make sure you see a check mark next to Smart Guides. If you don't, as I don't, then just go ahead and choose the command. All right now, move your cursor to the intersection of those two guidelines, and then Alt or Option + click in order to force the display of the Ellipse dialog box. So in Illustrator, clicking with that tool brings up the dialog box. The fact that we Alt or Option + clicked is going to create the shape from the center outward. Notice that both my width and height values are set to 80 points? At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK. And we end up with a perfect circle with an 80 point diameter. All right I'm going to go ahead and zoom in just by pressing Control + Plus or Command + Plus on the Mac. Now, in order to render this as a sphere we need to get rid of the stroke. And the easiest way to do that is to go up here to this horizontal control panel. And if you're not seeing that panel, then go to the Window menu and choose the Control command. And then click on the second swatch right here, which represents the stroke, and set it to None. All right now, we want to fill the shape with a gradient. And the easiest way to do that is to go to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the Gradient panel. Make sure the fill is active here inside the panel. And then also make sure that your Swatches panel is on-screen just as it is for me. And then go to this second color group, the one called cue ball, move two swatches in, to this guy, cue shadow, and go ahead and drag it and drop it to any location on this gradient slider. And that will do two things. It'll fill the shape with a gradient, and add that color to the gradient as well. So currently we have a gradient that goes from white over here at the beginning, to this custom color that we just dropped into place. And ends with a weak black. That is to say, it's a 100% black ink as opposed to a dense RGB black. Doesn't really matter, though, because we'll be replacing that color in just a moment. All right I'm going to switch the type from linear to radial just like so, so that the colors are going in concentric circles from the middle outward. And then I'm going to adjust how the gradient resides inside this shape. And you can do that either by switching to the Gradient tool, which you can get by pressing the G key, or in the most recent versions of Illustrator, you can click on the Edit Gradient button. So I'll go ahead and click on it. All that does however, is switch me to the Gradient tool. All right now I want to rotate the angle of this gradient. And you do that by moving your cursor very close to the so-called Gradient Annotator right here. And notice that my cursor changes to a little rotate cursor. At which point, I'll drag in a clockwise direction as you see me doing here. And I'm also going to press the Shift key in order to constrain the angle of that gradient to the nearest multiple of 45 degrees. And as you can see here inside the Gradient panel, the angle is now negative 45 degrees. A positive value would move the gradient in a counterclockwise direction. Negative values move it clockwise. All right now I want to move this guy just by dragging the entire Gradient Annotator right there. And I'll drag it to about this point right here. So the gradient begins in the upper-left quadrant of the circle. And now I'm going to increase the size of the radial gradient by dragging on this little square. And this is a little bit tricky, by the way, because, notice if I move my cursor a little farther in and I try to drag, nothing happens. If I move it even farther in, I end up moving the location of that final color stop. What you want to do is move your cursor so that you're seeing that little arrow, which only happens within a couple of pixels I've found, couple of screen pixels, that is, and then drag this guy outward so that the gradient is at least as big as the circle. So you can see it now ends on this bottom-right side. All right now at this point we don't need that annotator anymore. And so I'll just go ahead and switch back to the Black Arrow tool, which I can get by pressing the V key. And then I'll focus my energies on the Gradient panel here. Notice these other swatches here inside the cue ball group. We've got this guy right here, cue highlight. You want to drag it and drop it onto the white circle right there inside the Gradient panel. And that's going to make that first color a very pale shade of yellow. And now I want to select this next color swatch in, and I want to change its location to 80%, which is going to move it to the right as we're seeing here. So it's actually shoving it toward the outside of the gradient. And then finally, as opposed to ending the gradient with black, this black edge right here, I want to create a kind of bright bounce as if the light is bouncing off a surface, back onto the sphere. And I'm going to do that by grabbing this swatch, cue bounce, and dragging it and dropping it onto that final color stop. At which point, we get this effect right here. All right now the Gradient panel is taking up a lot of my screen, so I'm going to switch over to the Stroke panel so I have a little more room to work here inside the Layers panel. And I'm going to assign a drop shadow to this entire layer. So as opposed to applying it to just this cue ball, I want to apply that drop shadow to all of the balls as we're seeing in the final version of the illustration. And to make that happen, I'm going to assign the drop shadow to the entire layer by targeting the layer, which you do by clicking on the circle right here. And notice it now appears as a double circle. And now I'll go up to the Effect menu, choose Stylize, and then choose Drop Shadow. And these are the settings I came up with. So notice that the Mode is set to Multiply as by default. And I've cranked up the Opacity value to 100%. Now, I don't want black to be my color, so I'll click on this color swatch right here, and I'll go ahead and click on the color swatch's button in order to switch to the swatches like so. The swatch I'm interested in is this dark shade of green right here, which I've called felt shadow. Which, as you can see here, is a very dark shade of green. At which point, I'll click OK. And then I came up with an X Offset value of two points, a Y Offset of four points, and a Blur value of four points as well. At which point, I'll click OK. Now, the obvious problem is that this is a very bitmap-looking shadow, and that's because it's set to set to a low resolution. To increase the resolution of that shadow effect, go up to the Effect menu and choose Document Raster Effect Settings. And then set the resolution from 72 as by default to 300 ppi like so, and then click OK. And you'll end up with a very smooth shadow. And now from this point on, any other shapes that you draw on this layer, for example, I'll just go ahead and grab the Ellipse tool once again and draw any old shape. Notice that every single one of them ends up with a drop shadow. But where they intersect each other we see no shadow. And that's because the shadow is assigned to the entire layer as opposed to the individual components. All right but I don't want all these other shapes, so I'll just go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac as many times as it takes to get rid of them. Then I'll deselect my current circle by pressing Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, and I'll turn off my Guides layer. And that's how you create an old school gradient sphere as a 2D shape that will serve us well as the central cue ball in our final pool hall clock. Looking forward to next week? Well, that's when we're going to take our pristine, ivory-colored cue ball and turn it into a vibrant green six ball. It's like a gradient inside of a gradient. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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