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

930 Painting with gradients and translucency

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

930 Painting with gradients and translucency

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, we remain engrossed in the process of grading this floating triangle face man, that comprises a series of very basic polygons set against a photographic background, all within the vector base confines of Adobe Illustrator. What's on the docket today? Gradients, linear gradients, based on some of Illustrator's default RGB swatches, combined with a few custom opacity values. And while plenty of meticulous craftsmanship eagerly awaits you, it all begins as you're about to see with a rookie mistake. All right, so here's the latest and greatest version of the artwork open inside Illustrator. And here are those primitive shapes that we created last week. But I want you to see a kind of flaw here. Notice inside the Layers panel, we have two layers, shapes and guides. And then we have this right hand column that contains a couple of circles. One of those circles is hollow, the one for the guides layer, the other is filled. That's a mistake. That means I have some sort of appearance attribute assigned to this entire layer. And so if I were to click on that circle right there, in order to target the layer, you can see up here in the Control panel, that the opacity of that layer is set to 80%. I don't want that. And so I'm going to go ahead and drag this little circle down to the trashcan icon in the bottom right corner of the Layers panel and notice that makes the circle hollow and it also restores an opacity of 100% so that we have these nice vivid shapes. And the reason I'm showing you this is for one thing, it was a flaw in last week's exercise file. And secondly, you may see this kind of stuff pop up in your own artwork. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and switch over to this kind of cheat version of the file. It's just going to help us keep track of what's going on. So notice that I've duplicated the shapes layer in order to create a new fills layer. And that's just to protect the original shapes. I also have a layer called legend that's telling us every single one of the fills that we'll be assigning. And so notice that I've gone ahead and numbered the shapes in the order that we created them. So this is the first shape we created, this is the second one and so forth. And so you'll also notice that I'm assigning the same gradient to shapes two, five, seven, and 11. And so I could cheat by selecting shapes two, five 11, right there and seven, and then switching to the eyedropper tool, which you can get by pressing the I key, and then clicking on this little guy right here. And that would automatically assign those gradients. But that's no fun. So I'll press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac in order to undo that change. And then I'll go to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command to bring it the gradient panel, but now if mess things up. If I were to click on that gradient slider right there, then I would again be cheating. So here's a little trick by the way. If you want to switch back to the default gradient, you can just switch to a different open document like so, and then that gradient slider will reset. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to my document at hand. And before we start building this gradient, there's one thing I want to do. I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'm going to click off the shapes to deselect them. And notice these default colors right here, these default swatches inside the Swatches panel. These are the ones that are assigned, I'll just go ahead and show you, as default swatches when you create a generic art in illustration document. And so you're going to see these swatches a lot when you create new artwork inside Illustrator. What I want to do is take a handful of these guys and convert them to global swatches. And that way, I could update them later if I want to do and update the artwork automatically as well. So I'll start with this guy, the one that begins R equals 158. And I'll double click on it to bring up the Swatch Options dialogue box. I'll rename this guy Color 1, and I'll turn on the Global checkbox. And the reason I'm renaming it is that way it can be any color I like. And now I'll click OK. I'll go ahead and do the same thing with the next two color swatches. So I'll double click on that guy, call it Color 2 this time around. And then turn on Global and click OK. And then I'll do the same with this guy. That is to say, I'll rename it Color 3 this time around, turn on the Global checkbox and click OK. All right, now at this point, we're finally ready to begin building some gradients. So I'll select shapes two, five, 11, and seven, like so with the black arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and click on that gradient slider right there in order to assign the default gradient. And now I'll modify it. We want it to be linear by the way, so that's just fine. And the angle value should be zero degrees. And incidentally, I forgot to mention this, but you want to make sure that the fill is active here inside the Gradient panel. And now I'll grab this color right here, Color 1, and drag it and drop it onto this first color stop in order to switch it out, and I'll change the opacity by the way to 50%, I'll leave the location set to 0%. And now I'll grab Color 3 this time around and drag it and drop it onto the final color stop. I'll leave both the opacity and location values of it set to 100%. And now I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac, and I'll drag this color stop in order to duplicate it. I'm looking for a location value this time of 72% is what I came up with. And now I'll grab Color 2 and drag it and drop it onto that stop like so. And that way, we have a gradient that starts off opaque over here on the right hand side, and gradually becomes more translucent on the left hand side of each and every one of these selected shapes. All right, now what you want to do is select shape eight down here, the one that represents the chin, and just go ahead and click on that gradient slider in order to reapply that last applied gradient. And now I'm going to change the opacity of this entire shape by going up to the Control panel, and incidentally, I like to use the horizontal Control panel. Other people may prefer to use the Properties panel, which is the panel that Adobe is trying to push these days. The thing is, it's so ginormous compared to this little Control panel up here, which you can get by going to the Window menu and choosing Control in case you're not seeing it on screen. Notice that it includes a bunch of quick actions down here that aren't in the Control panel, but otherwise it's just Control panel stuff. And frankly, I don't see any need for this quick junk, some of which is actually represented in the Control panel. Anyway, I digress. I'm just going to close that guy and click on the word Opacity up here in the Control panel and change that opacity value to 80% so that the entirety of the shape is to some extent translucent. All right, now let's move on to shapes 13 and 12 right here. So I'll click on one and Shift + click on the other. Then I'll go over to the Swatches panel, notice that my fill is active, and so I'll just click on black. That's all we're doing for those guys. And then I'll click on shape 10 right here to which we are also going to assign a solid fill, but it's going to be a new color. And so I'll go over to the Swatches panel and click on Color 3. And then I'll click on this little plus sign here, if you're using an older version of Illustrator, it'll appear as a little page icon. And then I'll go ahead and call this new guy Color 4 of course. And I'll change my RGB values, is what I'm looking for here, to 119, 15 and 61. Frankly, I have no idea how I arrived at those values, but they work beautifully. I do not want to add this swatch to my library, so I'll just go ahead and click OK. All right, now I want to take this guy and I want to send it in back of shape nine right there. And so I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Cut command, or you can press Control + X or Command + X on a Mac. Then I'll select shape nine and I'll return to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Back, or you can press Control + B or Command + B on a Mac. Now, the problem with what I did is I sent shape 10 in back of shape 12, which is not what I want. So I'll select shape 12, and then I'll right click any old place inside the document window, choose Arrange, and then choose Send to Back, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + left bracket or Command + Shift + left bracket on a Mac, which I find to be useful so it's up to you whether you want to memorize that one. Anyway, I'm now going to select shape nine, and I'm going to change it's fill two Color 3 right here. And now what you need to do is switch away from the Gradient panel for just a moment so we have a little more room to work, at least I need to do that the way my panels are arranged. And then go to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to bring up the Appearance panel right here. Go ahead and twirl open the fill, click on its opacity, and take it down to 30% like so. And then click on the final opacity item right here, which affects the entire shape and change it's blend mode to screen so that we have this bright interaction between shapes nine and 10. And then you can click off the panel in order to dismiss it. All right, now I'm going to select both shapes three and four right here, and I'm going to change their fills to Color 1. And then I'll go up to this opacity value up here in the Control panel, and I'll press Shift + down arrow a couple of times in order to take the opacity value down to 80%. And now I'll Shift + click on shape three in order to turn it off so it's no longer selected. In other words, only shape four is selected now. And I'll click inside the opacity value once again. And I'll press Shift + down arrow another two times in a row to take that value down to 60%. And now I'll click off the shape in order to deselect it. All right, now that still leaves two shapes, one and six, both of which have more intense gradient fills, which is why I'm going to reserve them for a followup movie. Did I just say follow up movie? I meant followup movies plural. In the first, we'll create more complex gradients, in the second, we'll combine translucent gradients with a black and white photograph. I'm looking forward to next week, I don't blame you, because that's when we're going to take our various gradient triangles and turn them into shifting forms in 2D space, using an old school dynamic effect known as free distort. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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