Simple Shadow Effect in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Hey, guys. My name is Andrew Brooks, and I'm a graphic designer and illustrator in this class. I'm going to show you some quick, simple ways to add a shadow effect to your text in Adobe Illustrator. Well, look at things like Offset path and blend modes and Pathfinder tool work with pinto brush to a couple of things. So you guys jump right on in with me and we'll tackle this effect together. You another side? 2. Step 1: Choose, Edit, and Outline Font: guys, Thanks for joining me in this shadow effect class. We're gonna go ahead, jump right in, so let's create us a new document. If you see this window, then you can go ahead and hit new here. Or you can go to file and new. That brings up the new document window and we're going to make this document at 1000 by 1000 pixels. I have a custom one here already made, and, um, and it so it already shows up over over to the right with 1000 by 1000. If yours doesn't say this than just type in 1000 by thousands and if you plan on printing this, then you may want to set your document up a little different. You may want to choose, like a standard paper poster size or um, you can you can certainly figured out, figure that out and set that up. But you need to change it to see him. Why que color And you just make it however big you want to print it. But I'm not going to print this one and someone to set this up and rgb and it's gonna be a 72 d p I and you can change your GPS settings right here by clicking into the more settings . And we're gonna title this shadow effect and we'll jump right in. Okay, So step one is to choose your father. Super hard step. I know we're going to use the word type just for this class that you can use whatever word you'd like. Um, have fun with this. And so I want to choose our fun. And I know that I'm going to use a phone called Number seven regular. All right, so here's the fun part of playing with type. I love his script fonts because they come with so many options. Not all of them, but somebody that designed to fault well, offers plenty of different options for a single letter and want to show you how to edit that. And so you can get to your go to your windows menu. You got under the type, and there is There are all these, um, different windows that you can open up. You can see that I have all these open over here over to the right in this work area. And, um, glitz and open type are two different ways that you can edit the character, the specific character that you see. And so if you don't see these windows, go ahead and click on those and open him up. I'm gonna show you how to quickly edit both of these. So just select selected one of your one of your characters within the font, and I'll show you how to do the open type first. Um, I don't exactly know the order these. I just I really just play with it and, um, and figure out what I like. And so a lot of times you can change these. Just click on this. Oh, and with, uh, a little arm appear. Click that and it starts to change and see that didn't do anything. Click The Big A. It's a little crazier. Another swash swoosh option. There's just there's a lot of options. I don't actually use the open type window that often. So what? I use Google ifs, and a lot of times, when you when you pull the glitz went up, it actually looks like this. You see the entire fun and there so many options, depending on which fought that that you're using you may see a ton and you may not see that many, and that's totally okay. So the way that you changed a certain character here is go up to this drop down menu here and select this alternates for current selection, and that will bring up just the ones that the designer chose for this character and designed for this character. And so it brings up all the wise and so I actually want to leave it at that. But say it, say it started with that, or with that you just really just go through it. All I'm doing is double clicking there, and I like the one that it originally came with. I think we actually changed it there in the open type. But anyway, glitz. You can go straight to the letter that you're looking for by selecting the character and going to alternates for current selection. It's a great tool. Now I want to move this e in just a little bit. I want to move it towards that P. I don't quite like that spacing. Actually, you know what? I think there's a character here. I'll show you how to do that. Either way, I think I'm gonna change that. But either way to move that e back so you don't like the spacing you hold click or actually click right between the P and the E and what you're gonna you're gonna edit the spacing between the P and the E, actually editing the character reading spacing. So I want to close that gap a little bit and so I'm gonna hold option. And I'm gonna use my left arrow key and move it back and use my right key if I want to bump it back out. And I like, I like it right there. So we'll leave it right there, and that was option. And then you're left or right Eroski, depending on which way you want to move it. I actually want to take this P and I wanna give it a little a little tail here a little more. I guess it's not a tale, but I wanted to connect to that, So I'm happy with that. And so from here we needed we need to make this type. Um, we need to turn it from edible type into a shape that we can work with. So we do that by going appear to your little black air of selection tool and then we're going toe outline this type this font, we're gonna turn it into a shape. The way they were going to do that is by hitting command shift. Oh, and what that does is it turns it into a shape that's your outline. Option turns a fun or a type. Whatever you wanna call it, it turns it into a shape. And so that leads us into our next step, where we will begin to work this and tweak it into into our shadow. 3. Step 2: Unite Font using Pathfinder: Step two is super easy. I mean, it is super easy. Italy going take you about 10 seconds. So what you do is you select. Select your type. Select your word. After you've outlined it, select it and we're gonna go right. Appear to our Pathfinder window. Now, if you don't see this window up in, up in the right or wherever you've laid it out, then go over here to window go to your menu bar hit window. You go down to Pathfinder and there should be a little check mark here, and that's how you know it's open. So if there's not a check mark there and you don't have that window open and go ahead and click that. And if you do have the check, weren't any click it, It'll make it disappear, will take it away. So all we're gonna do is we want to unite all this together. We want it to be one shape right now. They're individual shapes like you could move the e don't want to do that. We can move. P don't don't want to do that. Not at this point. We are ready to make this one big shape. So we hit outlined. It made those into individual shapes. Now we want to turn this into one big shape. And so the way we're gonna do that select at all and then Pathfinder and unite, and that is done. 4. Step 3: Offset Path: heart. So now this is where the type really starts to come together. We really start to see this thing come to life, and it really starts to look pretty cool. So we're going to We're gonna put a It's like a stroke around this, but it's not sure I don't really actually know what you call it, but it's you make it happen by the offset path, and it took me forever to figure this out. I would try to do it so many different ways. I try to use the pin tool trying perfectly go around it cause I just didn't the stroke just didn't work the same. I don't I don't know. I don't know how to explain that. I haven't figured that out myself. If somebody knows the difference, please feel free to explain that to me. So what we're going to do here is we're going to basic like expand this whole word out, and we're going to do that by offsetting the path. And so what we can do is go to object, go down to path an off set path. Now you see here there's a keyboard shortcut here, and that's command option shift. Oh, now that is something that I have set up because there's no default. There's no default shortcut for this Now. I use it all the time. And so I went and set one up. And you can do that by going into your, um, your keyboard shortcut settings. And you can do that by hitting, I believe. Sorry. That's Ah, Plug in. I could tell you about that later. Ignore that. I'm sorry, guys. I believe it's, um command shift. Que? No, that's wrong. Command option shift K. That's it. Command option shift, Kate, we'll bring up your shortcuts. Most of you will probably see illustrator defaults And to get to offset path of your menu commands that go the same way. We just got their object and just go down until you see offset path or no path, and then offset path. And, um, this is not set up because this is illustrated defaults. That's the one I'm in. And so this is where I set it up. And then I saved it as my shortcuts. And so now you will see You will see will go into it. Path offset path There this its command shift option. Oh, command option shift. Oh, it's all the same. And so the way that you do that is you actually click in there and recorded when it hits your 80 like that, you're in recording mode. And so then you set it up the way that you want whatever keyboard shortcut you have that was free. Not charging you for that one. So anyway, we're gonna go. I'm gonna show you how to do it, cause a lot of you probably don't have a keyboard shortcut set up. So we goto path both set path. I was going turn preview on. And now that is crazy. So we're gonna bump this way down. That's weird. I must have done something wrong. Oh, well, that still works. So, um, we're gonna one pixel right here, which normally I'm sitting at 10. So I might have set this up weird. Anyway, that still looks good. And that still works. That's exactly what we need. And so we're gonna hit, okay? And actually so the way that I jumped from 2030 40 is I'm just holding shift and hitting my up and down arrow keys. So I go down and it's jumping by 10 and I just bump it up. When? For one. Excuse me. So we're gonna hit, Okay? And now we're going. Teoh, we're going to unite this. Go to your Pathfinder, hit Unite! And then we want to move this to the back. So we're going to hit command shift left bracket that's gonna move to back. It doesn't look like it did, but it did. So now we have our text on top. You see, Now it automatically groups it together. When you do this when you offset the path groups us together. So what we're gonna do is you can either double click into it goingto isolation mode and you can edit these or you can just select it all and on group, And then we're going to select these individually right here, and we're just gonna change the white. That's all we're gonna do. And so now you see this thing start coming alive. And so now we're going to select all this black and we're going. It's actually all united. We united it just a second ago and now we're going to select the white we're going to go to select go to same and fill color, and that will select all the same field color. So we have everything that is that has the fill color. White has been selected and we're going to unite that together now. It may not look like it united, but it did so now we can move it all together. This takes us to our next step. This is really where the shadow starts to come together. This is the fun stuff. 5. Step 4: Blend Tool: Here we go. Our next step is where it really starts to come to life. This is the fun part. I get excited about this. I don't know why I was just a shadow, but to me, they look so cool. And I just like making these. So, what we're gonna do, we're gonna take this the black part, the back, and we're gonna hold shift an option. We're gonna drag this hope. Sorry. So hold click. Click it first and then shift an option. We're gonna drag it down. Now all that is is making a duplicate. So you just hold shift and that will hold it. Shift allows you when you're moving things, it allows you to move it left and right. So in your horizontal axis or your vertical. And if you move away, you know, down at an angle, it only lets you do it at a 45 degree angle, which is pretty cool. So I want to move it. I'm still holding shift right there because I've already copied it with option. I wanted to be. Let's see. Let's put it right in. Let's put it right in there. Okay, So now we have like the end of our shadow, and we have the top of our shadow here. So now we gotta we gotta feel all this in in between. So the way that we're gonna do that I used to do this would depend toll because of Kindle is awesome. But, um, I had a guy tell me one time that anything that you're doing that has taken more than two minutes, you're doing it wrong. There's a faster way. And so I'm always trying to figure out a faster way. And I suggest that you do that, too. And so this is awesome. I'm telling this Awesome. This is we're gonna blend these two shapes together. The way they were gonna do that, select both of them. We're gonna go up here to object. Blend, make. All right. So you see that it put some that puts him in there the way that yours looks. It might not show up like this. Like you might see some edges here. It might not look as seamless as this. I just got lucky this time. So what we're gonna do just to be on the safe side? We want to go appear to object. Go back to blend and go to blend options. See, now, this is This is why I've already done this before. And so this is why it shows up at 150 steps now, it may only show it at, like, two steps I see here. You can see there ridges. So maybe if once maybe you have it at one step and see you see here. So basically, it's just taking it like an average almost. And it's you have one here, one here, one here. So I put one in the middle, so we want to actually make that as smooth as possible. So I'm gonna jack that back up to 150 and you see, now it's like, That's smooth. Smooth line hit. Okay, now we want to expand this. We want to turn all this in Lewis shape because right now, it's just like Justin effect on this, and it doesn't see this as one shape. And so the way they were gonna do that, we're going to select it, and we're gonna go back up to object and then expand. Yeah, you nor that object and feel just that's both. Okay. Okay. and see, then it's so That's like a ton of shapes stacked together. That's all. 150 of those things stacked in together. And so then we're gonna go back to our Pathfinder tool, and we're going to unite all those shapes. Let it do its magic. It'll take. It'll take a minute sometimes, especially depending on how much you're running, how much rain you have. Sometimes it takes a little bit. Formally, it does not take it this long for me. Okay, so now we have this nice, clean shadow. 6. Step 5: Final Touch: Okay, so this is looking pretty sweet. I like it already. I like it black and white, but why stop there? Why not make it look even cooler? We're gonna do that, and we're gonna do a couple things to it to make it look pretty sweet. So we're gonna do is we're gonna give this a nice little color. A little color feel, Um, not a color Feel. I'm sorry. A color. Another little, like secondary shadow down here. It's gonna look pretty sweet. And so the way they were gonna do that is we're gonna select the white and we're gonna hit command, See? And we're going. So that's copies it. And then all we're gonna do is drag this down. We're not gonna do anything with that command. See yet I'm gonna drag it down just a tad. You go as far you want. I'm gonna put mine right there. I want to choose a nice color. That was disgusting, You know that. Let's go to swatches like that. Lime green. So now that we have that color selected, we're going to paste are copied shape back into place where it waas. So if you just hit command V. It just throws it in there somewhere commands You take that away. We wanted to go right back where we copied it from. So you do that by heading command? If, um, that was an automatic, automated thing that I have set up. Ignore that command f and that puts that type right back in the place where you copied it from. So now we wanna kind of we want toe put a little black stroke around here, cover some of this up just to give it a just to give it another little little taste of flavor. We're gonna do that by adding a stroke to this, but I don't want to add it to this white When I want to add to another when someone hit command ethic in, I'm going to switch these down here from Phil to stroke. Bring that stroke up front and, um, I want it to be black, the same color as the background. And so I'm going to hit command. I mean, I'm gonna hit, shift and click. If you just click it, it's going to switch it to a field because that's what this shape is back here to feel it, not a stroke. And so that's what that's what happened. See, that's what happens. And so that's why I hit, shift and selected the color. So now you see that it gives it a nice um It kind of cuts into this green back here, but then it makes this look nasty. And I'll, I'll tell you why. That's because it's the stroke is hugging the line. So it cuts into that white. We want that stroke to be outside the white to not even be in the white. So we're gonna go, We're gonna click stroke right here. We're gonna go outside, and so that that takes it to the outside. Then I want to bring that white layer that we caught that our original white layer. I want to bring it back to the front. What I'm gonna do is that one hit command shift, right bracket, and that brings it back to the front. And that took away this little stuff right here, Command Z to show you, let's do it again. So we want to get rid of all this, these little overlaps and stuff. And so we're gonna hit. We're going to select the white type player and it command shift right bracket that brings it back up to the front. Then from here, we want to be able to edit all our colors. And, um, I want to make it easy to edit. And right now, you could go in and it'd be pretty easy, but I want to make it even easier. So right now, you'd have to go in. You know, if you wanted to select the white, actually that nothing's gonna change their But if you wanted to get in and you wanted toe select that black, you got a click. Just the right spot. You got to go in. You had a chain, you know, you got a change it find your color. Now you want that black to be the same. And now, so you have to go in, get your eyedropper switch This it gets to see it just gets to be really, really tedious. And something like you can You can't do it easily. So let's just back up a little bit. So the easy way to do this is to select it all. Go to your path. Honor and hit divide. Oh, no, I missed a step. I'm sorry. First we have to outlaw on that stroke, we have toe expand that stroke. I'm sorry. So we'll go to object and expand appearance now we can do that. That stroke is now a shape. I'm failed to mention that. And so now we'll go to our Pathfinder, selected all go to your pathfinder and hit divide. So now that has divided all those little overlaps. You see everything here. All these little overlaps are all their own shapes now. So now we're gonna go back in, and we're gonna unite these colors again. And remember, anytime you hit divide, it's gonna group everything that you divided into it. It's gonna put in that group, so we need a double click to go in isolation mode. Well, it's like the white F one. That's my That is my, uh, action that I set up. You don't hit everyone. I'm sorry. Go to click on your wife, go to select same fill color, and then we're going to unite those that turns all all those little shapes. Those individual shapes that were white. It puts them all back together. Then we're gonna go to black and we're going to select all the black same go to select same feel color, and we're going to Pathfinder and unite. And then we'll go to go into our green. We want to select all that's gonna select same fill color. Select all the lime green hit unite. And now we have ourselves creditable colors so we can go in and see here. Let's add a nice blue deep blue. It was my favorite color. You see, that changed it all, all with one click. And so now you could make 100 of these and drag him over and select each one of them individually. Um, and be good to go and be good to change colors without going into the stroke without going into the background. It just it makes things a little easier, and we can go in here to the screen and change the green. Go to like a like braves colors. You go read. See, that looks good. You can. I mean, there's hundreds of color options so that we're still in isolation modem, a double click to get out. And so now you're looking at a nice edit herbal shadow here, and you can mess with 100 different colors. And so now we have this really cool looking shadow. You could totally take this and use it just like it is. It looks awesome, but I'm gonna show you two more things that will just add extra bit. Ah, flavor to your design. 7. Bonus - Extra Flavor: All right. So we've got a working shadow here. It looks it looks pretty good, but there's still a couple things that we could we could do to this thing. To really make it stand out. And first off, if you're like me, you notice these little these little imperfections here and one of those air. Totally. Okay, It makes it. You're worse. Um, nobody can tell you that. It sucks. It's yours. That looks good. But you could go in and close these little these little guys off. We just hit that and then id it. Oh, I didn't go. I didn't select. I'm not in isolation, but I'm gonna hit X Select. Just my go in the isolation mode. I'm sorry, command. If pace that right back there, select your So what's your background and unite? And that makes that a shape. We're going to the same thing right here at this little guy. Unite. See, I want to fix this little dude right here. I don't like I don't like the way that that came about. Where'd Ugo Here we go. So that a couple ways you can do this. You can You could go in. You could take your could select this guy right here. You could take your pen tool and you could go to this delete anchor point right there. You know what? You can't do that. We're gonna do it the easy way. Take your pen tool. We're gonna hit command shift A Because I don't want it to be selected. Take this anchor point in this anchor point. I wonder. Ahram family Unite these with my Pathfinder tool. So now that looks a lot better. See what happened back in here. That color change on me. Let's see here. Uh, sucker did not a big deal. I fixed it. Okay, so now I have that ready. I'm ready to make the next step. So it made those couple little edits. There's that automated thing again. I keep forgetting Turn it off. I'm sorry. So now we want to add just a little bit of extra flair and I want to add some, like brush marks to this. Now, if you used a different fine, you may not want to do this. You may want to do your own thing and added it. I'm just gonna take the pencil and I'm gonna add a couple. Little, um, flares here with your pinto. You see what I'm talking about? I just It just looks pretty cool. I like it. Do it down here. And all I'm doing is making this look like it was brushed and it kind of went into each other. Just pick that look pretty cool. I like it. And that's what matters. You don't have to like it. You can hate it and make your own and love it. It's cool to be consistent with what you're doing. Um, I'm just showing you different options here. I might go back in and changes later from not happy with the way that I set it up. And so you see, Now back out of there and not No, I don't like that. I don't like the way that happened. I don't like the way that happened. I like these two. I'm gonna try that again. I didn't quite get the angle that I want it on that click in here. We'll try to match that up a little bit better. It may just be that I don't end up putting one here or may take it up. Put it up there we'll see. All we're doing is just This is the fun part. Let's do it right here. Actually, you know what I wanted to? Since it's coming around like this, I wanna I wanna add it right here. We'll try to get that one for the follow that curve. We'll see how it looks back out. Oh, yeah, it looks better. And you see, it kind of it will make that gives it, but it just looks like it flows right and to each other. So you could really get crazy with those. Really? It just It just brings it together. I really like it. And so another thing we're gonna do is we're just gonna We're gonna add some highlights here and these. You don't have to do these. I think that's right. Now it's it's usable. You could you could send that off, you could use it, whatever you're gonna use it and it looks good. So I wanted to just add just a little bit of a shadow. I'm not shadow of a highlight. I'm just gonna select a I want to select a blue that works with this blue. Actually, you know what? Let's just let's just select that one and go, Teoh Really like version of it. It does it. At this point, it's gonna look, It's gonna look good. So we're gonna do is we're gonna take our direct selection tool. It was select the right anchor point. No, they want to do that. And then I'm just gonna hit my right air over three times. Almost like the let left anchor point do the same thing, and then I'm going to turn this into a brush. You do that by going to your brush window so mine is right here, or you go to the window and oh, where yet? Brushes. See? Comes out right here. So they were going to make a new brush. So just go down to your little looks like a little folded over peace paper and hit new gonna goto arte brush hit. Okay, stick with the default settings. And now we have us a little art. Breast year might be a little hard to see because of how it made it. Then we're gonna tuck that away. We're gonna come back to that in just a second. So grab your pencil and we're just gonna We're gonna add some quick highlights here. For Tom's sake, I'm not going to be super perfect. Go. I don't like that. I say I'm not gonna be super perfect. And then so we're doing here is just add some little highlights. Okay? Now it shows that I'm working in a shape, and so I won't do is switch that to a stroke. And now we're good to go. So there's a couple of ways that you can get rid of. You can stop using the pinto because it like to just keep going. So if I were to go click this thing going, keep going. And so the way that I like to end what I'm doing is I like to just hit V and V takes you to your selection tool. Now, you don't have to do it that way. You could Oh, I'm sorry. I'll show you how you could do. And then I'm just gonna go back to my mentor, my p, and I'll show you how The other way of getting rid of of the pencil or making it stop It's a couple different ways and one at a little We'll have a shed. O r I keep saying shadow. Ah, highlight. Right here. Now you can hit command and quick, But then it clicks into the other thing if you accidentally click. And I don't like doing that, um And so that's why I v And then I just hit p again to get back into my pen tool. So I'm gonna hit command ship eight diesel like that. Go back to my pen tool. It's actually already there because I never left it. And then I'm just going to finish this up pro fit real fast. I'm just gonna add some quick ones here and see now when you do that, if you do it the other way that I showed you the command, just command click. You click out of it. If you accidentally select this feel later, it's gonna it's gonna make the next pin move. It's going to make that your wife you later and that's not what we want. We want to continue with this stroke, I feel, and so that's why I click it the way that I do. That's why I used the V V toe get out of the pencil and then pee right back into the pencil . and to me, it just it takes less time and I'm all about saving time. So go back to our pencil. We're gonna do this here, and I know that shadow is not perfect, but I am just trying to show you what this is going to be like. But I wanted to be somewhat completed. So, P, bring your pin tool back it v to get out of it. P for pin tool. You can see that I am not taking my time here. The all right. So now here's where we apply the brush. So select. Um, Now you only have to select one, and then you go to select same and go to stroke color, and it's gonna select the same strip. So then you go to your brush back to your brush window, and we're going to select that brush that we made, and it just gives it that tapered look. But we can also now we can edit the thickness of it. And so I'm going to go down a little bit. That's good. 0.25 may be different for you, just depending on how you set your document up to 1.5 And now you see that we have this nice little shadow here, and we have a very customized shadow with some nice little accent, shadows and accent highlights. And you can take this and apply it to several several several finds a lot of script fonts. You could do it. I mess around with future of bold all the time with this and just it's really great. So, guys, I hope that you enjoy this class. I really look forward to seeing the words that you come up with. You take your take your name, your favorite letter, your favorite town, whatever, whatever word you want to use and just have fun with this. Appreciate it, guys, and I will see you later.