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

918 Creating a blend inside a blend

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

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918 Creating a blend inside a blend

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take this blended object created inside Illustrator, incidentally, which includes a starter shape up here at the top and ending shape down at the bottom and four steps in between. We'll expand that blend, we'll assign these various stroke colors that are available to us here inside the swatches panel, and then we will rebrand the shapes in order to create this colorful effect here, that we will ultimately express as a seamlessly repeating tile pattern. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to this guy. Now, as things stand, I could blend between different colors here by double-clicking on either of these path outlines, and I'm doing so with the black arrow tool. That takes me into the isolation mode, where I can select the top shape, for example, and then I'll go over to the swatches panel. And if you're not seeing that panel, you can choose the swatches command from the window menu, and then I would click on the stroke option right there to select it. And then I would change it to any color that I liked, and Illustrator would automatically blend between those colors. The thing is right now, I can only control the color of the starter object, which is the one I just selected, or the ending object. So I could select it, and change it to let's say the shade of blue right here. However, I do not have control over the colors in between, and that's because Illustrator is coloring those shapes on the fly. So what I'm going to do is press the escape key in order to get out of the isolation mode, then I'll go ahead and click on this first guy once again in order to select it so that the entire blend is selected, in other words, and now I'm going to break it apart, and you can do that in one of two ways. You could go to the object menu, drop down to the blend command and choose expand. So that's easy enough, happens automatically, or if you don't want to deal with a submenu, and I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but the object menu has tons and tons of these submenus and they get quite confusing at times. So if you'd rather not venture into this particular submenu, then all you have to do is choose the Expand... command, that'll bring up a dialog box that you can totally ignore. All you have to do is click OK, and you will expand that blend. Illustrator goes ahead and groups the blend, and you can see that's the case by the word group over here on the far left side of the horizontal control panel. If you're not seeing the control panel, if you're seeing the big galumphing properties panel instead, then just go to the window menu and choose control. Such an elegant old school panel. Why mess with it? Anyway, did I change the opacity value at some point? I guess I did. I'll just go ahead and return it to 100%, and then I'll go to the object menu and choose ungroup in order to break up those shapes. All right, now I'll click off those shapes to deselect them, and I'll click on this guy to select it independently of all of the others. So notice once you expand the blend, it's no longer a dynamic object, which suits our purposes just fine. I'll go ahead and press CTRL + Z or CMD + Z on the Mac to undo that move. Make sure the stroke is active here inside the swatches panel and change it to color one. And then I'll click on the next guy and change it to color two, and the reason these swatches don't have real color names, notice I select that guy and change it to color three, is because that way I can change the colors anytime I like. And I'll show you what I mean in just a moment. I'll click on this guy, the fourth path outline down, and I'll assign color four, and then I'll select the fifth path outline and I'll change it to color five. And I'll select the sixth path outline, the final one, and change it to color six. Now, just to make things perfectly clear, I'm going to click off the paths to deselect all of them. I want you to notice that these are all global swatches here inside this pond colors group, and you can tell that's the case because we're seeing these little white corner wedges. And so what that means is if nothing in the document is selected, I can double-click on color three, for example, the one that looks like it's black. It's actually a little bit brighter than black, and to show you what I mean, I'll go ahead and switch the color mode to HSB, that is hue, saturation, and brightness, and then I'll increase the brightness of this particular color, and then if I were to now turn on the preview checkbox, you could see that object update inside the illustration. And that is a function of having created this color with the global checkbox on. All right, that's not what I want, however, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. What I want to do is now take all of these objects, which I'm going to select by dragging around them with the black arrow tool in order to marquee the shapes like so, and then I'll return to the object menu, choose blend, and then choose make, or you have that keyboard shortcut of CTRL + ALT + B or CMD + OPT + B on the Mac, which in my case, ends up creating this very smooth gradient. The thing is we're probably looking at an awful lot of steps, which makes for a very complex document. And so to simplify things, we want to change the number of steps. And as I showed you in the previous movie, the easiest way to do that is to tap the w key in order to switch to the blend tool over here inside the vertical toolbox, and then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the blend options dialog box, and now, I'll switch the spacing from smooth color to specified steps, and you can see that we have a ton of steps. So 127 steps between each pair of actual path outlines means that we have hundreds upon hundreds of steps in all. So what I'm going to do is turn on the preview checkbox, just so I can see what I'm doing, and I'll change the steps value to something more reasonable, such as 10 steps. At which case you will see some stair stepping between the various colors. Now, you might like that, that might be look you're going for, but if not, then just go ahead and click in that value and press the up arrow key in order to incrementally increase the number of steps, and notice as you do, you will achieve a smoother effect with less stair stepping. And I found that at about 20 steps, things look good. Now, I'm not saying there's no stair stepping whatsoever, but I can live with what I'm seeing on screen, and it's a heck of a lot simpler than what Illustrator came up with by default. At which point I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change. Now, the big problem with this blend is that it starts at the top shape and ends at the bottom shape, so that the bottom shape is in front. As you can see in the final version of the pattern, that's not what we want. We want that last shape, the one that's a pale yellow, to be all the way in back. And so what we need to do is change the stacking order. And so I'll go ahead and select that black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the v key, and then I'll double-click on any one of these path outlines in order to enter the blend isolation mode, and you can tell up here in the top left corner of the document window that we're working inside of a blend that happens to be on the blend layer. But what that means is I can click on any one of these shapes and move it around if I like to. I don't want to do that, so I'll undo that change. What I want to do is take this guy right here and send it to the back of the stack. And so I'll just go ahead and click on it, then right-click anywhere inside the document window, choose a range, and then choose send to back. At which point, Illustrator gets mad at me, and says objects in the interior of a blend cannot be moved in the paint order, whatever the paint order is. I've never heard of that before. It's called the stacking order, by the way. You can use reverse front to back on the entire blend, at which point I think, okay. So now I'll right-click and go back to the arrange menu and choose, well, that command doesn't exist. What in the world do I do? Well, I'm going to show you exactly what you do in the very next movie.

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