Transcripts
1. Introduction to Blend Tool Tips & Tricks: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to the Skillshare
class on ten Or Moe Tips for using the Blend tool
in Adobe Illustrator. In this class,
you'll learn to make blends with the blend
tool in Illustrator. You'll also learn a range of ways to put your
new skills to work, making patterns, text effects, and even shadowed shapes. I'll also show you some of the other classes that I
have here on Skillshare that will extend
your use of blends for other practical
applications. I'll teach every one of these tips step by step so
that you can follow along, and your project is to
create one or more of these and post your work
in the class project area. I really hope that you'll
enjoy this class as much as I've enjoyed putting
it together for you.
2. Pt 1 Blend Tool Basics: The blend tool in Illustrator allows you to blend
shapes together, almost like a morph effect. We're going to
start by looking at some of the basics
of using the tool. I'm just using the
Ellipse tool here. I'm holding down the Shift
key to drag out a circle. Now I'm going to fill
the circle with color. So I've got the
fill selected here. I'm just going to
select a color. I'm going to turn off the
stroke on this circle. That's going to be pretty
important at this stage, although we may leave the stroke on later on for a
different purpose. Going to the selection tool, I'll hold down the
lt key on a PC, option on a Mac and
start dragging. Now I'm going to add the
shift key so that I'm dragging in a perfectly
horizontal direction. Let go the left mouse button, let go the other keys. And I'm going to set
the fill color to this particular circle
to something different. The blend tool is accessible
in a couple of places. It's accessible over here on the toolbar as the blend tool. It's also accessible
through the object menu, select Object and then blend. So we're going to
start by blending these two shapes together. So I'm going to use the
menu option first of all. I'll select over both objects to select them to be the
objects I want to blend. I'll choose Object
and then blend and make what we'll get here
is a default blend. Now, your blend might look a bit different to this,
and that's just fine. It depends on what settings you have set up for the blend tool. Now we can edit this blend
at this stage by choosing object and then blend
and then blend options. It's also possible to get to the blend options over
here on the toolbar. We're just going to
double click that tool, and these are the blend options. Have a look at
orientation later, but you will want to
have preview turned on. From the spacing options, you have three smooth color, which is a sort of
smooth color blend. You can also select
specified steps and select the number of steps you want between the end objects. So if we select six, there'll be six objects in here
and one at either end, making eight in total. You can also choose
specified distance where you select the distance
between the objects, and you can see here
that we're going to have a lot more shapes in here
because the specified distance, in this case, is four pixels. Now we can make it
something very different. So I'm just going to
select over this, and I'm going to use shift and up arrow to increase
the spacing. And as I increase the spacing, you can see I'm getting
less and less circles because the spacing between
them has to be bigger. And so you can vary
that as you wish. When you've got something
that you're happy with, you're just going to click
Okay. This is our blend. You can see that I also have
the blend tool selected because that's
what's showing here as I'm hovering over the shape. If I want to get
out of that mode, I can just click
the Selection tool. Now, what's really important when you're using the blend tool is that you keep
an eye on what's going on in the As palette. So I have the Las
palette open here. We have a blend, which is an actual thing. It's an object
inside Illustrator. And inside this
blend is the path, and that's the path along which the circles in this
case are moving. And then we have the two
circles at either end. Now, these objects
are selectable, and probably the easiest way to select them is to have
the as palette open. So let's just go to this
one here and select it. And so I have selected just
this object at the edge. I'm going to hold down
the Shift key and the old key as I just
scale down that object. And as I do, you'll see
that the blend changes because now we're moving from a small object to a large one. Let's just click on the blend. Let's go back to
the blend options, double click on this to
get the blend options. So I still have specified
distance selected. I could move now to, for
example, specified steps, and I could increase the
number of steps to make a smooth transition between this small shape and
the very large one. In this case, I have
100 or more steps so that I've got a sort of
smooth edge to my object. If I had less steps, I'm going to get a bumpier edge. I'll click Okay. Now, once
you have a blend in place, you can just leave
it in your document, and it'll just sit
there and be itself. But in some instances, you may find that
you're not allowed to include blends in documents. For example, if you're
selling on a stock site, you may need to
expand your blend. In that case, you're going to select over the
blend and we'll go to object and then
blend and then expand. And what that's going
to do is expand the blend into its
component parts. So as you can see here, there's lots and lots of
circles in this blend. And as I move from
the pink circles up towards the blue circles, you'll see the color
changes taking place. The shapes are being blended
from small to large, and also the colors
are being blended from this pink color seamlessly
through to this blue color. So that's the basics of creating
a blend in Illustrator. But of course, there's
lots more that we can do with this blend tool, as you're going to see
in the upcoming videos.
3. Pt 2 Blend Shapes with Fills and Strokes and Fills or Strokes: When you're creating
blends in Illustrator, you need to be aware
of whether you have strokes and fills and how they
might impact your blends. So I've got a set
of circles here. The first one obviously
has a fill and a stroke. This set just has fills, and this set is just strokes. So let's blend these together. And this time, I'm going to
use the blental not the menu. So I'm going to click on
the blend tool and click on the first shape to blend and then click on the second shape. You'll see that the cursor actually changes a
little bit as to whether you're clicking on
the first shape or subsequent shapes to
add to your blend. So I'm just going to
click on the second one. And this is our default blend. If I double click
on the tool here, then we can get to
the blend options. And I'm going to just
choose specified steps. I'm going to increase
the number of steps. Now, if I increase the
number of steps too high, you're going to see
that the black lines, the stroke on these shapes is going to start to
become predominant, and the color itself
is going to almost disappear until eventually
it probably will disappear. There is a limit
to how many steps you can have in a blend, and that is 1,000. But you can see here that
we've lost all sense of the colors because we
just have too many steps. Just going to wind
that back down a little bit so that we can get a look at what it looks like with a smaller
number of steps. But I'll just leave that
on the screen here now. Now let's have a look at a
blend with no stroke at all. And again, we're going
to use the blendor. Click on the blentl.
Click on the first shape. You can see the asterisk in the bottom corner of
the mouse cursor here. Click on the second shape. This one has a plus sign in the bottom corner of
the mouse cursor. Here is our blend. Double
click on the blend options. And we're going to do
specified steps as well. And I think I had about
400 on the last one. So let's do 400 here. And you can see here we have a very, very different effect. Here, we can see the color
blend really, really easily. In this one, the black stroke is sort of overtaking
the effect. Let's have a look at
blending these circles. Again, just using the blend tool because it doesn't
matter whether you use the object menu or the
blend tool at this stage, it might a little bit in future as we're
going to have a look. So I'm just going to
click on the first shape, and you can see I'm having
a little bit of trouble picking up that shape,
but here it is there. And then I'm going to
click on the second shape. And here is my blend. Not surprisingly, all we're saying in this blend is lines. I'm going to choose
specified steps again, and let's bump that
up to about 400. And here we're just
saying a blend of lines there is no color behind
this because there was no color in
the blend itself. So just be aware of
the differing effects you're going to get
with your blends. If you blend with a
stroke and a fill, you're going to see the
stroke lines very clearly. If you blend just with a fill, you're going to get this sort
of seamless color effect. And if you blend just lines, then you're going to get a blend that is simply just lines.
4. Pt 3 Create a Blend along a Line: When we created our
very first blend, you might recall that there was a line that was holding
the blend together. The blend was effectively
going along a line. Well, you can make your
own lines for your blends. So what I've got here is,
again, our two circles. I'm going to select over them. And this time, I'm going
back to the menu because I can create my blend
either way at this stage, and it doesn't really
matter which way I choose. I'm just going to choose
object, blend, make. This is my blend. I'm going to double click
here because I can use the menu and the toolbar
interchangeably. I'm going to select
specified steps, and I'm going to
increase the steps here, so I get a sort of
smooth looking blend. I've got 140 steps here, but I think I might need a few more to actually
create a smooth blend. Let's just step that up to 300 at this stage and click Okay. If we go to the as palette, recall that we're going
to have a blend in the as palette
we're going to have the path along which
the blend goes, and then we're going to
have our two circles. Well, let's see how we
could make the blend go along a path of our choice. So I'm going to use
the pencil tool, so let's go and grab
the pencil tool here, and I'm just going to make a line for my blend to go along. So I'm just going to
draw something out that's nice and sort of smooth. Now, this line doesn't
need to have a fill or a stroke because it's going to be sacrificed into the blend. But I'm just going to make
that a stroke because it's going to be a little bit
easier to see where we are. So there is my line, and here is my blend. What I'll do is I'm going to move the blend along the line. And to do that, we're going to select the blend and the line. It doesn't matter in which
order you create these. So you could have created
your line before the blend. Illustrator is smart enough to know that this is a blend
and this is a line. So then we'll go to
object and blend, and we need to do this step through the menu
because there is no option here under this
tool for replacing a spine. And that's what we're doing. It's called replacing a spine. So back to object,
back to blend, and we're going here
to replace spine. As soon as we click on that, the blend is moved
along our spine. And if we have a look
in the as palette, then we've still got a path along which our blend is going, but this time, it's a curved
path, not a straight line. So you can make your
blends go along lines, which is going to
give you a lot of creative options for
using the blend tool to create really
interesting effects such as gradient effects
that blend or twist.
5. Pt 4 Blend Around a Circle: In the previous video, we created a blend along a line. It's also possible to create
a blend along a closed path, for example, a circle. So let me just switch here to having a stroke but no fill, and let's go and grab
the Ellipse tool. I'll hold down the
Shift key as I drag out a circle shape. And now let's create our blend. I've already created the circles that the blend is
going to be based on. I'll select them,
click the blend tool, click on the circles. Double click on the blend tool so that I can change
the blend options. Here I want more steps because I want a smooth sort of circle. Think I'm also
just going to make this 300 and click Okay. And now what I want
to do is to replace the spine on the blend
with this circle. We already know how to do that. We're going to
select both shapes, and then we can only do
it through the menu, so we're going to
choose object and then blend and replace spine. Now, this has been partially successful but not
totally successful. And the reason is
that we need to do something to the circle to
actually make this join up. And what we need to do to
the circle is to cut it. And for that, we'll
need a tool to cut it. So I'm going across here to the eraser tool because there's a tool here called
the scissors tool. I'm going to click on it, and I can now click
on an anchor point to cut the shape at
that anchor point. So I can choose either
of these anchor points, I'm just going to click once. And now you can see that the blend has gone all
the way around the shape. But this mightn't look exactly as you thought
it should look, because what I would like is to have it go through
pink to green and then perhaps back to
pink again so that we had a sort of
seamless gradient. Right now, we've got a gradient with very visible ends on it, but we do have a
circular gradient, so we're halfway to what
it is that we want to do.
6. Pt 5 Blend with Multiple Shapes: In the previous video, we created a blend
around a circle, but we ended up with
a blend that was not a seamless sort of gradient. We're going to look at creating a seamless gradient
now and to do that, we need three
shapes and not two. So what I need is a
blend that goes from pink through blue
back to pink again. So I'm going to take another
copy of this pink circle. So I'm going to
click on it, hold the Alt or option key as
I drag a duplicate away. I'm going to add the
shift key and move it all the way across
to the side here. For reasons that
we're going to talk about a little bit later, it's going to be
important for us to create this blend using the blend tool
because we need to specify the order in
which we're blending. We need to go from pink to
blue and then to pink again. So I'm going to click
on the blend tool, and then I'm going to click on the pink circle and
then the blue circle. Now, we can be sure that
we've already clicked on the pink circle in
case you're a little bit confused as to
whether you did or not. The mouse pointer has changed. It's got that little
plus sign in the corner. So we're going to click on
blue and then click on pink. And as we go, the blend
is created for us. Double click on the blend tool to get access to
the blend options. We're going to do
specified steps. I'm going back to my 300 steps. And now we have a
blend that is going from pink all the way through blue and
back to pink again. Let's apply it to our circle,
selecting both shapes. Doesn't matter in which
order we've created them because Illustrator
knows what's a spine, it knows what's a
blend. Object blend. Then replace spine. We can only do this
using the menu. And of course, we've
got the same situation as we had previously, where we've got a blend that doesn't go all the way
around the circle. We already know what
to do with that. We're going to the
scissors tool, which shares a toolbar
position with the eraser tool. Click on the scissors
tool to select it, and then click on one of these anchor points. I'm
going to click on this one. When I do, that's going to make the pink circle at the
top of this shape. Let me just undo that and let's click over here to
cut it at this point. And in this case, the pink is strong over here, and it's a blend up here
and here's the blue, and here's the transition
between the blue and the pink. So now we've got a
seamless gradient around our circle
because we did it with three circles to blend
between so that we would end up in the same
place as we started.
7. Pt 6 Edit a Blend: Blends are really easy to edit once you know
what to do with them. So I've got the
selection tool here. I'm going to select
over my blend. The easiest way to
work with them, again, is via the Las palette
because it just gives you a look at
where everything is. So again, we've got
our spine here, and then we've got
our two circles. So let's choose the
bluey green circle here. I'm going to change its color. Its fill color is selected here. So I'm going to Swatches panel and I'm going to
change its color. And when I do, the
entire blend is altered. Now we can also change the size. We've already seen
that we can change the size of a shape
and hold Shift and Alt that would be
shift option on the mac and just increase
the size of the circle, you can see that the
blend is easily edited. Let's have a look at
a blend with a spine. Now, I have a spine here
and I've got my blend. I'm going to select
over both of them. We're going to to object and
then blend, replace spine. And here we have a loop that
goes from pink on one side, all the way around to
blue on the other. And the blue end of the blend is over the top of the pink. If we want it round
the other way, we're going to select
over the object here, we're going to object blend, and we're going to choose
reverse front to back. And in this case, the pink
is in front of the blue, so we can switch
the order that way. There's also an option
to reverse the spine, but what that's going to
do is something different, it's going to put the blue over here and the
pink over here. Let's see how that works. Object and then blend, and then reverse spine. And so blues over
here, pinks over here. So just be aware that there's two options here for
working with spines. There's reversing the
order of the colors, but there's also reversing
the spine if you've got a spine that actually goes
over the top of itself.
8. Pt 7 Expand a Blend: Sometimes when you've
created a blend, you don't actually
want the blend, but you want the
shapes themselves. So here I've got a blend again
from my pink to my green, and I want the
circles out of this or the shapes from the
blend, not the blend. So I'm going to select over
the blend before I begin. Now, you may be familiar
with the concept of expanding an object, so expanding the
appearance on an object. In this case, the expand
appearance option or the expand option is not going to work the
way you expect it. So I've got my blend selected
here. I'm going to object. I'm going to have a look here, and only expand
appearance is available. Expand is not even
available here. And if I expand appearance, you'll see that nothing
actually happens to my blend. And that is because
what's happening is that the appearance on the
shapes is being expanded, not the blend itself. Now, I'm just going to
undo that with edit undo quickest and easiest way
to expand a blend into its component pieces is to select it and go to
object and then blend. And there's a special
expand option here for the blend itself. And when I click on that, you'll see that I now
have a group of objects, every one of which is a
circle from the blend.
9. Pt 8 Order of Objects in a Blend: The order in which objects
are placed in the blend, the order in which
you select them is really important for the
way that the blend looks. I have three objects here, and I created this one first, and then the bluey green
one, and then this one here. And that's confirmed
by the order of the objects here in
the Layers panel. So if I select over these objects and create
a blend with them, the blend is going to go from this orange object through
the blue and then to the red. Object, blend, and then make. And we can see very clearly that that's exactly
what's happened. If I undo that and for example, if I wanted my blend to go
in a different direction, say, from this object across to here and
then down to here, I have two options. One of them is to
select the objects in turn using the
blend tool over here, and the other option is to reder these objects in
the last palette so that they're in the order
that I want to blend them. Quite frankly, this
tool is so much easier. So I'm going to click on the
blend tool, and this way, I can specify what's
the first object, and this is my first object,
so I'll click on it. And then my second object
is going to be over here, not in the order in
which they were created, but in the order in which I want them to appear
in the blend, and then here's
the third object. We can see very clearly that this blend is very,
very different. If you ever find that when
you use the object blend make tool to make a blend and it doesn't look the
way you want it to look, just undo it with
Control or Command Z and go and select the objects in order because that's
probably likely to be the problem that
you're encountering.
10. Pt 9 Orientation of Objects in a Blend: For this next blend, we're going to have a look at the actual orientation
of the objects. For this, I've chosen ovals, because it's going
to be very easy to see if these are tipped on
their side, for example. So I'm going to select
over these two objects. Let's go to object and
blend and then make. And this is the standard sort of blend that we've been
creating so far. So there's nothing that
is unexpected here. Go to the pencil tool. I'm going to draw a
sort of curvy line. Now I've got smooth set
on my pencil tool so you see over here in
fidelity, it's set to smooth. So Illustrator is just smoothing out my bumpy line that's
being drawn by the mouse. So just the heads up on that. I'm going to select
my blend and my line. It doesn't matter whether my
line has a stroke or not, whether it's filled or
not, because it's going to be sacrificed to become
a spine for the blend. Object, blend, replace spine. Shapes these oval shapes have now been placed along my spine, and you can see that
they're pointing in the exact same direction as they were when they were on
a horizontal spine. But that doesn't
have to be the case. Let's select over
these shapes again, and let's double click on the blend tool to get
the blend options. And here we have orientation, and it's possible for us to align these shapes to the path. And we get a very
different looking blend. I'm just going to set
this two specified steps so we have more steps again. But you can see
here that this time the objects are twisting as they're progressing
along the path. We have the orientation
straight up and down. It's relative to the page. They're pointing
the same direction as they were previously. And this is an orientation where they're following the
line of the path. Now, let me just go
back to this one because there's something
else that we could do here. We could change
the orientation of either or both of
these end pieces. So let's go into the As palette. I'm just pressing
F seven to get to the As palette. Go
to open this up. I'm going to open my blend up. I'm going for this
shape over here, so I'm just going to click
on this little dot here, and that selects this shape, and doesn't select
anything else. So I'm going to
the selection tool here and I'm just going
to rotate this shape. And as I do, you can see that the blend itself is rotating because the end object has a different rotation to
what it had previously. So it is possible
to twist a blend by twisting one or other
of the end objects, or even the object
in the middle if you had a multiple object blend. So you can see here
that twisting this is having an effect on how
the blend actually looks. Now there is
something else that's handy to know in
terms of blends. I'm going to make a circle here. It has no fill, but it
does have a stroke. Now for this circle, I'm
going to cut it in half, so I'm going to use
the scissors tool. I'm just going to
click on the anchor points at the top and the
bottom of this shape. Now, that's made it into
two separate pieces, and I'm going to
blend those together. And what I'm looking for
here is a series of sort of rotating lines.
Let's see what we get. I'm going to the blend tool, I'm going to click on one line and then click on the second. Now, nothing sort of
visibly happened yet, so let's go and set our
two specified steps, and let's start increasing
the number of steps. And I've got exactly
what I didn't want, but it is worthwhile
knowing that that is a way that you could get a
series of concentric circles. But it does beg the
question as to why I didn't get sort of bent lines like
you might see on a globe. Well, let's go and see if
we can find a solution. I'm going to drag out a
second copy of our circle. I'm going to do exactly
the same thing and cut it into two separate
half circles. And this one I'm
going to remove. Going to reflect this
one over the vertical with object transform
and then reflect. I'm going to reflect it over the vertical and just click copy. So I have an
original and a copy. Going to stick these two
back together again. So my circle looks pretty
much as it did last time, but the results are going
to be very different. Again, let's make
a blend from this, blending from one of these
shapes to the other. Let's double click here, go to specified steps and start increasing
the number of steps. And this time we get what was that I wanted
in the first place, which is these bandy lines. Why has that happened? Well, let's have a quick
look at what we did with the circle when we
cut it into pieces. It's going to cut it
again and let's go and get the selection tool
and just split them. So what happens is that inside Illustrator lines or circles actually have
direction built in. And so this line,
as it went around, the circle would have
potentially gone in this direction and then kept
going in this direction. So when we cut it into pieces, we've got a line that has a direction that's
going this way, and we're trying to blend
it with a line that the directions don't
go the same way. We were to flip this
over, then it would work. Object transform,
and we're going to reflect this simply
over the horizontal. Click Okay. Now the
direction would go notionally this direction
and then this direction. The two shapes should blend
perfectly. And they are. So if you ever find that
when you split a shape or do something with the
blend tool and you don't get the exact
result that you want, think in terms of,
does my line have direction and is that
potentially causing me issues? And if it is, how
can I get a sort of direct duplicate of
the line that I'm trying to blend to get
the result that I want? But you now know how
to get this result. Simply cut your circle
into two pieces, do nothing else with
it, and blend it. But to get this result, you either need to cut
your circle in two pieces, discard one of them, and then just reflect across the Y axis. If you don't need to flip one of the half circles so that it points in
the right direction. Even though you can't
see the direction that the lines are going in, they do have direction, and that's going to affect
your ultimate blending result.
11. Pt 10 Make a Pattern from a Blend: Now that we've covered some of the basics of using blends, it's time to look
at how we might actually use blends
to do something. And we're going to
start with a pattern. So I'm going to the
Ellipse tool over here, and I'm going to set my fill
color to nothing at all, and I'm going to
set my stroke color to one of the colors that
we've been working with. I'm going to use
this pink here now. Going to draw out a oval, so I'm just going
to drag that out. I'm not using the
Shift key or anything. I want a sort of tallish oval. Now, I want to make this
pointee at both ends, so I'm going to the
direct selection tool, and I'm going to click
on this anchor point. So you can see this is selected, and this is not selected, this is not selected,
and neither is this. This is
really important. I just want to
adjust this point. And I'm going to
click this option for converting the selected
anchor points to corner. There's only one selected.
It's now a corner. I'm going to do the same
for this one down here. So we've got this sort of shape. To make it a little
bit more interesting, I'm going to apply what's
called a profile to it. So under the stroke
options here, there is this
option for profile. Now, right now, it's
not accessible. The reason why it's not
accessible is because of my version of
Illustrator, by default, I'm creating shapes where the stroke is aligned
to the inside, and profiles are not
available for that. But if I go to stroke
align to the center, then I can get to profile. So just a heads up if you
can't get to profiles, change the way your
stroke is aligned. I'm going to drop this down.
I'm going to this profile. It's called WIT Profile one. It's going to be a sort
of thick thin profile, but we're not seeing
anything here because our stroke is so small. I'm going to start
winding this up, and I think if I head
to sort of about 15, then things are going to
be a bit more interesting. And what's happening
here is that that width profile is being
applied to this shape, but you can see that it's
sort of beginning over here, coming all the way around
and ending over here. So this is the profile. So
this is the beginning here. And we want it to be a
little bit different. I would like the beginning
to be down here. And to move the
beginning to down here, I need to cut it at this point. So I'm going to
the scissors tool, shares a toolbar position
with the eraser. So just click on
the scissors and just click on this anchor point. And now we get that sort of interesting shape where we're going from
thin lines here, a thin stroke all the way up to a thick stroke and
back down again. Now, I want another
one of these shapes. I'm just going to hold
down the altar or option key as I drag
a duplicate away. This one needs to
be much smaller, so I'm going to
hold Shift and old that shift option on the
mac as I make it smaller. Now, you may notice that
my line has my stroke has got really thin here
because I've scaled it down. Your version of Illustrator
may not work that same way. It's to do with a setting. So if I go to edit and preferences
and general on the Mc, that's Illustrator
preferences and general, then we're looking
at this option here, scale strokes and effects. So what's happening is that
when I make a shape smaller, all the strokes and effects
are getting smaller. If I didn't want
that to be the case, I could just disable that. I can also just
reset this setting. So let's just check and see what my stroke weight was while
it was 14 on this shape, so I can just make it 14 on this shape by just coming in
here and just increasing it. So even though I had
it set to scale, I can sort of unscale
it if I like. So I'm going to make
a blend between these two shapes,
select over them. And I'm going to select
my blend tool here. I'm going to click
on the first one, click on the second
one. There's my blend. Double click on the blend tool. And what I want here
is just four steps. So I've got one at either
end and four in the middle. That's exactly what I
want. I'll click Okay. The next step is to
expand our blend. So I'm going to again
select my blend and choose object
and then blend, and I want to expand it. If we open up the
Las panel here, what we should see is just all the shapes that
go to make up our blend, and they're all selected here, but there is a slight problem. They're also inside a group. And what I want to
do is I want to put all of these on
top of each other. And while they're inside
a group, I can't do that. I need to expand them
out of the groups. I'm going to choose
object and ungroup. So now they're not in a group. So the next steps that I do is going to put them
all on top of each other. And that's this one horizontally
aligned the centers, and now they're all
on top of each other. But what I want to do, too, is to align each of
these bottom edges. I'm also going across here
to vertical align bottom. And now I get this
really interesting shape that I've made with my blend. For my pattern, I want
this shape to be filled. So I want the one at the back. I'm just checking it is
the one at the back. If it wasn't, I would move it, so it's at the very back, and I want it to be
filled with a color. So I'm just going to go
and select my color. So now I have this object that I can use to
make a pattern. At this stage, I'm going to
grab all the pieces and put it back in a group with
object and then group. The reason for this is I want to be able
to pick it up and move it and not have bits and
pieces of it left behind. Now, you can scale it if
you want to at this point. With the grouped
objects selected, we're going to object and
then pattern and make now, this is the basic pattern that
you get with Illustrator, but we want something a
little bit different. I'm going to choose
here brick by row, and that sets it as a sort
of brick pattern where these elements here are set in the middle
of the ones above. Now, with patterns,
you never want to if you can possibly help it, have widths and heights that
are fractional numbers. You want those to
be whole numbers, and ideally you
would also like them to be numbers that
are divisible by two. So I'm just going
to start increasing this actually going
to take it up to 220. And I'm going to take
this one. Down a bit. I'm going to see what
it does when it's sitting at about 260. Your values are going to be
slightly different here. It doesn't really matter
what your values are as long as you're happy
with your pattern. Now, I'd like to
put a background behind this pattern
just for convenience. And this now, because I've settled on this as
being my pattern, this is the size
of the object that we need for the
pattern background. It's 220 by 260. So I'm just going to click
away from everything. I'm going to create a new fill, so I'm just going to choose
this as my fill color, and I do not want
a stroke on this. It's really important
that you do not have a stroke
on this background. So now we need a rectangle
that is this 220 by 260. So let's go and get
the rectangle tool. I'm going to click
approximately in here, and I'm going to
make it 220 by 260. Now, that's exactly
what should happen. Your pattern should disappear because you've got this
rectangle over the top. We're going to put it behind everything, so it's
still selected, I'm going to choose
object arrange, and then sun to ba. And as you can
see, the object is cutting off elements of the pattern, so we
have to move it. So I'm going to the
selection tool, and I'm actually going to
nudge it with the arrow key. So I'm just pressing
the up arrow key. I can move faster if I
press Shift up arrow. And what I need to do is to move this rectangle that I
have selected here, somewhere that results in all these other shapes
being hole shapes. So we don't want
things cut off as in cut off like
this is here now, that's cut off, and
these are all cut off. So you just need to find
the place where you can put that rectangle so nothing is cut off left,
right up or down. Wherever it fits, that's good. Just call it good. That's all you need, and we're
going to click Done. So now let's have a
look at our pattern. I'm just going to put
it into an ellipse because it looks kind of
cool when you do that. So we've got our
fill selected here. Let's go to our swatches
and add our pattern to it. So this here is a
pattern that is made from blended
shapes in Illustrator. So that's using our blending
skills to make these shapes here that we're now using inside a pattern
that we've made.
12. Pt 11 Blends and Text Version 1: For this next blend effect, we're going to apply a
blend to a piece of text. And while the blend
is pretty simple, the actual getting of a piece of text is a little
bit more complex. Now, there is a font
that I use that I like to use for
this kind of effect, and it's called Posita. It's available from 1001 fonts, and I'm going to give you
the download link for it, but you can just
search on Google for the PositaFont That's PEC
ITA. There it is there. And as you can see
here, it's free for commercial use.
That's why I like it. Also, it's a really, really nice little scripty
font that's going to work really well for
this particular process. Once you download
the font, basically, all you're going to do is
double click the font file, and there will be an install
option there for you. You can do that while
you have Photoshop open. It'll be applied immediately
to your font list. So let's go and get
the type tool and let's type the word
Love in lower case. You're going to want to
start with something pretty short to start off with because we are going to do a little bit
of pen work here. I'm going to drop
down the font list here with my font or
my type selected, and let's type pasta. And here is the font. So I'm going to click
on that, and my type is now formatted with
this pasta font. Now, this is the
reason why I like this font is it's
going to give us a fairly nice single
line of type. So you want to be a little bit careful if you've
got the letter I, then you're going to need
to add a dot later on. If you've got the letter T,
you might have to do a slash. So be a little bit careful in what you select
in terms of your word, at least the first
time you do this. I'm going to click
away from this. I'm going to the
Pentl and I want to be drawing with a stroke. So I'm going to click
here on the stroke, and I'm going to make my
stroke a different color just simply because it's going to be easier for me to
see what I'm doing. So let's just clean
up the screen here and go back to my pentle. Now, this is an exercise I'm
working with the pentle, but it's kind of fun exercise. I think it's easily doable. Now I'm going to start
my font over here or my letter over here because I
just like that idea better, clicking and dragging, pointing in the direction
that I'm headed in. So I'm going to
come to about here and I'm going to start turning. So I'm just going to
click and drag and again, point in the direction
I want to head, let go the left mouse button. I'm going to come down to
about here and click and drag. Not worried about accuracy. I just need the word. I'm going to come down to
about here, click and drag. I'm going to come up to here,
and this is where we're going to be in a
bit of a problem, or we're going to hit our first problem
because we need to go in this direction but then come back
in this direction. So I'm going to do is click and drag with the left mount
button still push down. I'm holding down the old key, that would be option on a Mac, and I'm pulling down
because I want to point this handle at the
direction I'm headed in, which is pretty much about here. So now let's come down. I'm just going to
pick up a point here. I'll pick up a point here. I'm not worried that
things look a bit bumpy. I'm going to come
up to here, start pointing in this
direction, Alt or option. Drag the pointer
around and keep going. Now, if you make a mistake, you're just going to undo
things and keep on going. So let's make a mistake here. I've gone somewhere
where I shouldn't have, so I'm just going to
press the backspace key. That takes me back to here. I can click to pick
up my path again, and we're just going
to continue onwards. Head up, Alter
option, turn around. We're going to cross
over the line here. That's just fine. And we're going to
come to the end, and I might just put a little bit more in
just for good measure. When you're finished, just press the escape key because
that turns everything off. Now, we've got our word here, love, and we've got
the actual type. So I'm just going to delete the type because I don't
need that any longer. At this point, I
can come in with the direct selection tool and make some adjustments
if I need to. But again, because we're just
applying a blend to this, we're not going to be too
fussy about how it looks. If I select over it, I can use the smooth tool. So here's the smooth tool here. And by applying the smooth tool, we can just add some
smoothness to the line. Now, you can smooth it
out till it's nonsense, but somewhere in here
might be a better effect. All we want is the
hint of the word love and doesn't have to be really,
really highly accurate. Kind of liking this, but I might bring this point over a bit. With the smooth tool, when
you have it selected, you can also run over
a line if you want to smooth just that
portion of the line. So now I have my line. You can see it has a stroke
applied to it. So I'm just going to
increase the stroke. If you can't increase the stroke because you can't see the
stroke settings up here, just go to Window and then
stroke because there's a stroke panel that
you can use instead. And that will give you access
to all these same tools. Now, I'm a little
bit concerned about this little thing that
keeps popping up. That's why I wanted to make
my stroke a little bit wider, just make sure
everything's looking okay. Want to do is round these ends, and I'd like to round
this element here. So we're going to
the stroke options. We're going to round the caps. So that's taking
care of these ends, and then we're going
to round the corners, and that's taking care of this. So now I have a shape over which I can
now apply my blend. At this point, it's
a really good idea to save your file
because you do not want to lose all the work that you've done in making these words. And if you think you're going to use this word quite a bit, then save it as a separate
file so that you can come back to it and use it
at anytime in the future. Now I've got my
blend circles here. They're 25 pixel circles.
They're really small. We want them to be
really small here. Got them both selected
object, blend, make. Double click on the tool here. I want to go to specified steps, and I'm going to increase my steps because I want
this to be a smooth line. So it's up to about
300 right now, and that's smooth on the blend. But we've got a lot of distance to make
through these letters. So you can probably double
that at this point. So take it up to about 700 because that's
probably more likely what you're going to need to
have in terms of blended objects to make it all the way across
this line smoothly. I'll click Okay. Of course, you can always change
that later on. So if it's bubbly and you
can see the individual dots, you can increase
that blend later on. It's easily done. So let's select over
our blend and our line, go to Object, Blend
and replace spine. And we've got nice
smooth edges on this. If you didn't have
those smooth edges, you're just going to click
on your blended object. You're going to
double click here, and you're going to make it less or more whatever you need there. Now, if you had the
letter T and you needed to not only
create your word, but also the dash, then you'll need a
couple of blends. So instead of just making
one blend, make it, and then make a duplicate of it so that you'll
be able to put it on the letter T or
whatever other element that you need that has to be blended separately
to the main piece of type that you're
working with. Now, the only other thing that I'm thinking of here is I would really like this part of the line that's in
front to be behind, so we come all the
way around with this color and then turn
into the lighter color. Well, that, of course,
is also easily done. Select Ovo type, go to object, and then blend, and down here, you're going to
reverse front to back. And that's going to
make this part of the line in front
instead of behind. Addition, if at this point you see parts of your line
that need smoothing, that can also be attended to. Let's just select
over everything, and I'd like to smooth
this a little bit here. So I'm going back
to the smooth tool just going to drag
over this line. And when I smooth things out, the blend is just being
reapplied to the line.
13. Pt 12 Blends and Text Version 2: So let's have a look now at a completely different kind of text effect that
we can create. And I'm going to
use the same font. I'm going to do
that for a reason. So let's just go
with the type tool. I'm actually going to
use the same word. So I'm typing the word love. I'm selecting the text, and I'm going to use
the font that we have been using, which is pasta. I'm going to take this type and make it quite a bit
larger to start off with. Now, I want this to have
a stroke and a fill, so I'm just going to flip this so that black is the stroke, and here is the problem. It appears that these are separate letters
that are overlapped, which is fine up to a point, but if we're going to
put a fill on this, then the stroke is going to show over
the top of the fill. Oh, let's have a look and see
what we can do about that. So with our text selected, I'm actually going to
select my stroke color because I'm just going
to put that in place, but it's just not going
to work right now because of the
overlapping letters. So with our type selected, I'm going to the
appearance panel. So what is happening
here is if I double click on the
character's area, you'll see that there's
a stroke and a fill, and we already know that the
stroke isn't working for us. The fill looks fine, the stroke doesn't I'm going to click here and I'm going to
remove the stroke. Okay? So now we just have type that has a fill but
no stroke at all. So it's still selected here. So when we come back out
of that character's area, when we come back to
type no appearance, we get the option to
add our own stroke. I'm going to add a
new stroke here. Now, the same things happened, but that's fine because this is a new stroke that we can actually do something
different with. So having applied that stroke, I'm going to move it down
here underneath characters, and now it's not being affected by those
overlapping letters. It's just too small, because now it's over the
edge, it's nearly disappeared. So all I'm going to do
is increase its width. So that's solved the problem
of overlapping letters. If that ever happens too, just know that you can fiddle around in the appearance panel. And actually, instead of making it a character
based stroke, make it a stroke that's based
on the entire type effect. So let's just close that
down because we're good now. Now, I want a duplicate of this. I'm going to put the
original over here. I'm going to Alt
drag I copy away, and I'm going to make
it absolutely tiny. I'm using this shift
key as I scale it because I want it to be
scaled in proportion. I also don't want to twist it. Now, if we want to
change its color, let's just go in here
and have a look at it. If we want to change its color, we need to be strategic
about how we do that. So let's open up the
appearance panel, which I've managed to close. So let's go to window and appearance so
we can get it back. So this is where the stroke is. So if we want a
different color stroke, I'm going to make a blue
stroke for argument's sake. We can just apply the
blue stroke here. If we want to change the fill, we're going to have to go
into the characters area because here's
where our fill is. I'm just going to
leave it as it is, but I just wanted to point
out to you that issue. So let's just go
back to everything. So small text here,
big text here. Let's select these
two text objects, and let's make a
blend out of them. Object, Blend, make. And let's double click on this, and let's go to Specified Steps, and let's make a
whole lot more steps. Now, I have blended from the
little one to the big one, and I'm missing the big
one. I can't see anything. So that happens to you going
to do object and then blend, and we're going to
reverse back to front so that we can actually see the
effect that we've created. So now we've got it
blending from this tiny little blue stroked object all the way down to this same fill but
red outlined object. And obviously, you can play
with the colors all you like. But having made the blend, of course, we already know
that we can replace spine. So let's go to the pencil tool and let's just draw a
sort of curvy spine. Let's select our blend and our spine Object,
Blend, replace spine. And now our text is
moving down that spine. And of course, the spine
itself is editable. If I click in here,
we can get to the anchor points along that
spine, and we can edit them. So I'm just going to make it a bit more twisty
at the beginning, so the text is coming
up and going through. And of course, if we think that we don't have enough objects, then we can just click on
the blend and the spine, double click on
this tool and just give ourselves more
or less objects. You might want a smoother
effect or you may want a more staggered
effect where you have very, very few words that come
down to the bottom here. Let's just try it
with say, about 40. It looks completely different. So there are all these sorts of effects that you can create with words and your blend with a spine and also with
starting and finishing colors and with the number of steps that you're going
to create along the way.
14. Pt 13 Blends and Color Schemes: One of the other things
that you can use a blend for is to sample colors. So at the top row here, I have a series of
colored circles. I'm going to select over them, and we're going to make
a blend from them. Object blend, and then make going to increase the number
of shapes here in my blend. I'm just going to
specified steps. I just like it a lot,
so I tend to use it more than the other
settings. I'll click Okay. I'm going to click away from my blend so
it's not selected. From this blend, I
can sample colors. So I'm going to get my
swatches panel here. I'm going to add a
color group here. I could name it, obviously. Now I don't want white in mine, so I'm just going
to remove that. So with the
eyedropper tool here, I'm going to select on it, and now I can select
on colors in my blend, and you can see that
they're sampled. So I can just drag them
into my new color swatch. So I could build up a series
of colors that are mixes of the colors that are in the blend. Let's
go put that there. So it's also possible
to do that for a more discrete set
of colors such as this purple to
turquoise transition. So I'm going to do
the same thing here, I'm going to make a blend. And again, I'm going to make
it a much smoother blend. Now, of course, I
can sample colors from this blend to put
in my swatches palette. But what if I looked
at this and said, I'd really like
some dark colors, but I'd like some
lighter colors as well? Well, let's go and
get a rectangle. Let's drag a rectangle
over this shape, and let's fill it with white. And reduce the opacity of it. So now I have the same colors, but I've got a much
lighter version of them. So I've got a dark version
here and a light version here. So I want to sample
some of these colors. Let's go back and get
our swatches panel, which I've managed
to close on myself. I'm going to sample this color. That's fine. But when I try
and sample this color here, you can see I'm just
sampling the white. I can do the dark colors, but as soon as I'm over this
white filled rectangle, all I'm getting is white. Well, there's a
solution for this, and it's an unusual solution. So let's go and get
the navigator panel, window and then navigator. I'm going to make
it a bit bigger so I can see things a bit more clearly because we're going to sample from the
navigator panel. So again, I've got
my eyedropper tool, but I can't use my
eyedropper tool in the navigator panel
because it just doesn't work, but it will work in
this main screen. So what I'm going to
do is click here, and with my left bounce
button still selected, I'm coming all the way down here into the navigator panel, and now I can select
these colors. So there's one of my colors. Let's just move it into here. Again, start selecting
somewhere here. It doesn't really
matter what I start selecting on because
all I'm interested in is where that color is
here in the navigator panel. So we could, for example, fill this with a gray. We could fill it with a yellow. We could fill it with
any other color, adjust down the transparency or the opacity until we see the kind of colors that
we want to sample from, and then use the navigator
to do our sampling. And this is a way of
building up colors, either matching the darker
version of the color with a more tinted version
of the color or perhaps different versions
of the color tinted with a yellow or something
a little bit different. Now, there's also a slightly different
method you could use. I'm just going to
close this down. I'm going to get rid of my
white filled rectangle here. I'm going back to these
colors here and this blend. Going to select the blend.
Double click on this, and I'm going to reduce my
steps to, for example, ten. Actually, I'm going
to take it down to five. Let's do that. So these are colors between this purple and this turquoise. And I'd like to sample all of those colors into my swatches. For this, I'm going to
need to expand my blends. I'm going to object
blend and expand. And so now what I
want to do is to sample these colors
into my swatches, because it's now expanded. All I need to do is click
here on new color group, and I'll just click Okay. And the colors are now
added to my swatches panel. Now, these are added
as just normal colors. If you wanted them
to be global colors, there's an option here in the new color group dialogue for converting process
to global colors, and then you would
have a color group of all the colors from this color here all
the way through to your dark purple
as global colors. Unfortunately, because
we've expanded our blend, we don't get the ability to
change the colors because this blend is now expanded
into the component shapes. So if you wanted to do it with
a different set of colors, you're going to need to recreate your blend to do that with
15. Pt 14 Adjusting Spacing for Blended Objects: One of the things to be
aware of when you're making blends is that spacing can
sometimes be an issue. I'm going to make a blend
out of these two shapes. I'll go to object and
then blend and make. Now, I want these circles
to be spaced evenly. So let's go to the blend options and see if that's even possible. If I bring down the
number of steps, you'll see that while I've
got separate objects here, the spacing between
them isn't equal. There's a smaller spacing
for the larger objects and a larger spacing
for the smaller ones. Even if I go to
specified distance, this is not going to help. I need to wind this
figure up quite large, so I'm taking it up
to a 100 pixels. Actually, probably
130 would be better. And again, you can see that I've got exactly
the same problem, small spaces here,
big spaces over here. So what if I wanted
this kind of blend, but if I wanted the
objects evenly spaced? Well, for starters, we're
going to take what we can get. Right now, this is
what we can get, so we'll just click Okay. Let's expand this blend. And we already know to do that, we're going to choose Object
blend and then expand. Now we also already
know that what we're going to have here is a group
with the objects in it. And when you have a group
with objects in it, you can't do any of
the align options because the objects
are in a group. When they're in a
group, they're going to behave as one object. When we're changing the spacing of these and using the
alignment options, then we need them to
be treated separately. So we're going to need to
break them out of the group. Object ungroup. Now we've got them all selected. Let me just close
down the LAS panel. They're already selected, but we could select
them if they weren't. And we're going to
the Align panel. Of course, you can
get to that by choosing Window and then Align. So what I'm going to do is
choose this option here, a line to key object, and I'm going to set my spacing. I'm going to start
with 20 not really 100% sure what this is going to look like,
but let's start there. And I've got a key object. When you align to a key object, then you need to make
something the key object. The one that is not going
to move everything else is. You'll see here, if I
choose these other options, then distribute spacing
just isn't a choice. So I'm going to have to
choose align to key object. And right now, this
is the key object. In this instance,
it really doesn't matter what is my key object. Let's go and adjust the spacing. I'm just going to click here on horizontal distribute space. In other words, distribute these so that the
amount of space between each successive
pair is 20 pixels. That's what we've got
here. At this point, we can say, is this enough? Is it too much?
Is it too little? Well, I'm just
going to wind this up to 50 for argument's sake and click back here on
horizontal distribute space. And my objects are
now spaced out so that there are 50 pixels
in between each set. And we can check that
using the measure tool. Here's the measure tool here. I'm going to click over one
of these anchor points and click over this one, and you can see that we've got 50 pixels. So these objects are
being spaced apart by whatever it is that we have asked for them to
be spaced apart. And so we've got the
best of both worlds. We've been able to use our
blend to get the objects, and then the align options
to get the spacing correct.
16. Pt 15 Blends For Shading: Another use for blends is
to add shading to objects. I'm going to start
with a large circle. Now, it's filled with
one of our colors. It has no stroke on it at all. I'm going to add
a second circle, but before I do that because
I want to a different color. I'm just going to click
away from the first. I'm going to select
another color from the swatches that
we've been using. I can get to them here through the color picker because
there are so few of them. It's going to be really easy to find the color that I want. Going back to my
Ellipse tool hold down the Shift key as I drag
out a small circle. Now we can blend from one
shape to the other here. So I'm going to select
over both these circles. We'll go to the blend tool. I'll click on the outer green one and then the
inner lighter one. And then we'll just
double click on the blend options to see
what it is that we've got. Well, smooth color for me right now on my machine is going
to give me this look. It may not be the same for
you. That's just fine. Go to specified steps and then increase the number of
steps that you've got, and you'll get a
different effect. So this is what it would
look like with one step. That might be your
current settings. You can just start
increasing them until you get what it is
that you're looking for. Now, some people might be looking for something
more like this where you've got really obvious
steps in your gradient, but other people
might be looking for something more seamless and 50 or 60 in this situation is
going to give me just that. Now, you can move the objects
around in this blend. So what we're looking at
here is the inner circle. And if I pick it up here with
the direct selection tool, then I can go and move it. And when I move it, the blend is remapping itself to
the new circumstances, and I can even pull it outside. So you can see here
that we're pulling it out to make a different
shape with this blend. So there are all sorts
of things that you can do or investigate, if you like, in terms of shading
objects with blends, and this is one of the effects
that we're able to create
17. Pt 16 Blend Between Shapes: In addition to blending
a single shape, such as a circle into itself, you can also blend shapes
into other shapes. So I have a circle
and a star here. We're going to blend these,
selecting over them, and choosing object,
blend, and then make. And you can see here that
we've got some sort of morph effect where the circle
is starting to distort, and it distorts more and more
as we go towards a star. So that's useful in
a couple of things. One, if you want something that goes from a circle all
the way to a star, you can see here that there are some interesting puffy
star shapes in the middle. So you might actually
choose to expand this blend and then grab one
of these shapes out of here to do
something different with. It's a way of creating shapes differently to actually
drawing them yourself, but getting them out of a blend. Now, when you have a blend between two different shapes
and two different colors, you're going to get
the same effect, but as well as getting the transformation from
a circle to a star, we're also going to get
a color transformation. Let's just dial
down the number of steps here so that we can
see the transformation. And here we've got something
similar to before. We're going from a
circle to a star, and we've got sort
of puffy stars here in the middle
as the shape is being distorted along its way to being turned
into a proper star. But we've also got
this transformation of color from this deep sort of crimson all the way through to this sort of yellowy color. And these blends are
going to work like just regular circular blends,
so you can expand them. You can grab shapes from them. You can bend them
across a spine.
18. Pt 17 Recolor Artwork and Blends: I don't think any of my
Illustrator classes would ever be complete if I didn't
have a look at the recolor artwork dialogue. You can use the recolor artwork
dialog to recolor blends. So I'm going to
select over my blend, and up here on the Toba is the recolor artwork dialog icon. Now, if you ever don't
see it or can't find it, then you can always go
to edit and Edit colors, and it should be available
here Recolor Artwork. They're both the
exact same option. They open the Recolor
Artwork dialogue. Now, in this panel here, we've got the colors locked. So the colors are locked in terms of their relationship
to each other. So when I drag on
one, the other one comes with me, of course, we can make them more pastel or darker by dragging outwards, but the colors
themselves are set. If we disable that, then we can select the colors individually and do
different things with them. It's also possible to go
into advanced options. Here you can change the
colors in this dialog here, but you can also go to Edit, and we have a similar
selector here. Again, these can be
linked or separated. So in this case, they're
separated from each other. But if you find a spatial
relationship that you like, you can link them together,
and then just start dragging around to find
something that you like. When you're done,
you'll just click Okay. Now, unlike for patterns, when you make changes to the colors in your
shape, that's permanent. You can't get it back
without undoing it or reapplying the original
colors to your design. But the recolor artwork
dialog does give you access to experimenting with
colors within your designs.
19. Pt 18 More Classes that Use Blends: Before we finish up this class, I want to introduce you to some other classes that
I have available here on Skillshare that utilize blends in different and
very practical ways. You're going to find
links to all four of these classes in the
description below. Now, one of them is this
vintage bird cage class. In this class, I have used a blend to create the top
part of the birdcage. The second class I want
to introduce you to is the abstract Ombre design. In this case, I've
used a blend to actually create
this ombre effect. Also this class here that is specifically on using
blends and bended shapes. And finally, probably one
of my most favorite classes that I ever created is
this radiolarians class. You'll get to create these
amazing radiolarians shapes that are created using blends, even though it mightn't look at first glance as if they
are created with blends. So I hope that if you've
enjoyed this class, you'll go ahead and investigate one or more of
these other classes that are going to help you extend your skills using blends
in Adobe Illustrator.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
