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

939 Adding dynamic highlights to your cat’s eye

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

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939 Adding dynamic highlights to your cat’s eye

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- In this movie, I'm going to show you how to add these translucent highlights to the cat eye. We're using a combination of still more gradient fills combined with still more dynamic effects. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to my artwork in progress and I'll click on the eye with the black arrow tool in order to select it. And I'm going to start things off by adding a stroke. And so notice this stroke option up here at the top of the stack inside the appearance panel, where we last left off. And so if you're not seeing that panel, you go up to the window menu and choose the appearance command. All right, so, I'm going to click on that stroke in order to select it. Then I'm going to click on the swatch right here in order to bring up swatches panel and I'll select black. Now I'm going to select the line weight, which Illustrator calls a stroke weight for what it's concerned and I'll change it to 40 points like so, and we end up with this stroke on top of the fills. Now, notice that it's not centered on the path outline even though if you click on the word stroke right here you can see that a line stroke is set to center. And so what's going on with that? Well, that is a function of the fact that we have an opacity mask. And so if you click on the word opacity you can see that we've got this mask right here. And so wherever we're seeing white we're revealing the contents of this path outline and wherever we're seeing black, we're concealing it. And that's why we're cutting the stroke halfway off. So we're just seeing the 20 points on the inside of the path outline. The 20 points on the outside are hidden in other words, by that opacity mask. All right, so I'll just press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss that panel. And now with the stroke selected, I'll click on the FX icon down here in the bottom left corner of the panel. And I will choose blur all by Gaussian blur. And now I'll go ahead and set the radius value to six points like so, so that we end up with this soft stroke around the eye, in which point I'll click okay in order to accept that change. All right, now we're going to add the highlights by dropping down to the add new fill icon in the bottom left corner of the panel and clicking on it. And that creates a fill on top of the stroke. And so fills in strokes can be arranged in any order you like. In my case, I want this new fill to be under this stroke. So I want of the fills to be under this stroke in other words. This fill is set to black by default. I want it to be a gradient. And so I'll go up to the window menu and choose gradient in order to bring up the gradient panel right here. And I'll set the type two linear gradient this time around. And notice we end up by default with a white to black gradient running horizontally. All right, I want to change the colors, of course. And so I'm going to go up to the swatches panel. If you're not seeing that panel you can choose swatches from the window menu. And then I'll grab this swatch right here Dodger blue, that I've included inside the cat eye colors group, and I'll drag it and drop it onto the first color swatch like so. And if you want to that you replaced the white color swatch scroll and drag this colour around. Ultimately you want to drag it to a location value of 50% which is going to be easier to dial in as opposed to get it exactly right by dragging. And so we've got an opacity value of 100%. We want that to be 50% too, so that we have a little bit of translucency where this highlight is concerned. All right, now I want to grab the white color swatch right here and drag it and drop it onto this final color stop on the right hand side of the gradient. And then you want to click in the location value and press shift down arrow a couple of times in order to take that value down to 80%, we want the opacity value to remain set at 100%. An angle value of zero degrees as by default is just fine. All right, now I'll click on the stroke tab in order to hide the gradient panel so that we have a little more room to work and I'll click on that fill to select it. Now, currently the fill is taking up the entire eye. We want it to just take up this sliver right here, which is based on a rectangle. And so go ahead and switch back to the document in progress and I'll click on the FX icon choose convert to shape, and this time choose rectangle in order to bring up the buy now familiar shape options dialogue box. I'll set size to absolute once again and then I'll dial in a width value of 70 points and I'll set the height value to 250 points in order to create this gradient rectangle right here at which point I'll click okay. All right now, if you twirl open that top fill you'll see that we have a dynamic rectangle effect. All right, now, click on the field once again to select it. And now what I want to do is warp this fill that is twisted in a way. And so I'll click on the FX icon once again, choose warp and then I'll choose arc from the top of the list In order to bring up the warp options dialog box. Now notice that I've switched from horizontal as by default to vertical. Now I'm not seeing any difference between the two even when the preview checkbox is turned on, and that's because at least in this version of Illustrator preview is broken where warp options are concerned. I'm sure they'll fix that at some point, but in the meantime I just want you to do this, select the vertical option and set the blend value to negative 50% like so. Then tab your way down to the vertical distortion value and set it to negative 30%. So again, style is set to arc. This option right here is set to vertical. The bend value is set to negative 50% and the distortion vertical value is set to negative 30% in which point I'll click okay, and we end up with this effect right here. All right, now I need to take this effect and move it upward and rotate it into place, which is a job for the transform effect. So click on the fill, once again it's selected. I'll click on FX, choose distort and transform, and then choose the transform effect which allows you scale, move and rotate the Fill absolutely dynamically. And so I'm going to select the horizontal move value and change it to negative 50 points. And then we'll tab to the vertical value and I'll change it to negative 160 points. And because the preview checkbox is on I can see what I'm doing in real time. And finally, I'm going to change the angle value to 70 degrees in order to produce this effect right here at which point I'll click okay. All right, now I click on the fill once again I select it. That's very important because I want to apply these dynamic effects to the fills independently, and then I'll click FX choose blur and choose Gaussian blur. And that will allow me to blur the effect as I'm seeing right here. That's way too much blur. And so I'm going to take that value down to one pixel like so, and click Okay. And finally I'll click on the word of Passy below Gaussian blur incidentally and I'll change the blend mode from normal to screen in order to produce this bright highlight effect. All right, now press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss that panel. All right, now we're going to create an elliptical highlight based on the existing rectangular one. And so what I'm going to do is select that most recent fill right there and I'm going to make a copy of it by dropping down to the little plus icon, which in previous versions of Illustrator appears as a tiny page and click on it. And that will duplicate that feel like so. And so notice here's the original one, twirled closed and here's the new one twirled open. All right, now I'm going to start by clicking on the word rectangle right here in order to bring up the shape option style lock box and I'll change the shape setting from rectangle to ellipse. And now I'll dial in a width value of 60 points this time around I'll tab to the height value and take it all the way down to 80 points in order to produce this little effect here then I'll click Okay. All right, now you want to click on this next option warp arc in order to bring up those warp settings and I'm going to take this bend value up to negative 20%, and then I'll tap my way to that vertical distortion value right there and set it to 0%. Once again preview is not working in this version of the software. And so I'll go ahead and click okay in order to apply that effect like so. All right, now we need to move this into a better position, so click on the word transform in order to bring up this dialog box and I'll take it up to negative 40 points, and then I'll tap to the vertical move value and I'll take it up to negative 90 points like so, and I'll tab to the angle value and take it down to 50 degrees in order to move the circle into this position right here. And so I'll go ahead and click okay. And just to see what a difference we've made I'll press control Z or command Z on the Mac. This is before, and if I press control shift C or command shift C on the Mac, this is after. All right, that gradient is a little tight notice that we have a pretty sharp edge right there inside of the highlight. And so what I'm going to do is switch back to the gradient panel and I'll select this blue color stuff right here and I'll change its location value to 20%. So I'm moving that color stop over to the left, which is providing us with a little more room and now I'll select the white color stuff clicking it's location value and take it all the way up to a 100%. And by the way, I'm doing this by pressing shift down arrow or in this case shift up arrow in order to decrease or increase the value in 10% increments at which point I'll press the enter key to accept that change and click on the stroke tab to hide the gradient pal. Now, our Gaussian blur is fine as is. However, I'm going to make a modification to the opacity by clicking on a word opacity notice that it's still set to the screen blend mode but I want the opacity value to be just 50% at which point I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. I thought in order to apply that value, but instead what I did here on windows is I unmade the mask. And so what I need to do is press the escape key in order to hide that panel and then press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change. And now I'll truly close to fill just to tidy up the appearance panel and I'll click off the path outline in order to de-select it. And then go ahead and zoom on in as well. And those are at least a couple of ways to apply translucent highlights as linear gradients subject to dynamic effects here inside Illustrator.

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