Transcripts
1. Graphic Design for Lunch Creating with Bends and Blends Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley, welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create with Bends and Blends in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teaches a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we'll look at a series of bend and blend effects. You're going to learn techniques for taming the bend and blend tools to get the results that you want. Some of these are tricks that you possibly don't even realize you want or need, but by the end of this course, you should have added a range of techniques to your Illustrator skill set, techniques that you will be using as you work in Illustrator. Now, as you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which will ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations really help other students. They help them to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started having some fun with bends and blends in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Create circles of shapes: We're going to start our exploration of bends and blends using the blend tool. I'll click on the Ellipse tool and drag out a small circle. I'm going to fill this with a color and leave no stroke on it at all. Let's go and find a color to use. I'm going to make a blend, so I need two shapes to make my blend with. I'll go to the selection tool, select this shape and Alt or Option Drag a duplicate away. I'm going to line these two up by selecting over them. I'll click here on vertical aligned center that just aligns the two shapes. We'll go to the blend tool, click on one of the shapes. You'll see that there is a little asterisk in the bottom right corner of the mouse pointer when you click on it. Then the second shape, you'll see that there's a plus sign indicating that you're adding to the blend. Now your blend may not look like this. It just depends on what blend settings are already in place. Because I've been fiddling with this tool today, my settings are probably different to yours. To change the settings for the blend, you'll simply double-click on the Blend tool, turn Preview on so you can see what's happening. You'll want to select Specified Steps. At this point, I'll just decrease the number of steps so that I have less dots going through my blend. I'll click okay. My blend right now is a straight line, but I'd like my dots to go around the circle. To do this, I'll re-select the Ellipse tool and hold the Shift key as I drag out a large circle. It doesn't matter too much what my circle looks like in terms of formatting because it's going to disappear in just a minute. What we'll do is we'll replace this spine through our blend. You can see when I select on the Blend, there's a spine which is a straight line through it. Well, we'll replace this straight line spine with a circular spine. Select over both of the shapes, the blend, and what spine you're going to use. It doesn't matter in which order these are in the last panel because Illustrator recognizes which ones are blend and which ones are spine. You'll choose Object and then Blend and choose Replace Spine. Now you need to do this through the menus. It's not an option for the Blend tool. This is our blend around a spine and it might look as if you would need to increase the number of dots to just fill in the rest of the circle. Let's try that. I'll double-click on the Blend tool, go on and select, Preview and start increasing the number of dots. Well, that's spectacularly unsuccessful because that's not how you do it. The problem with this is our spine because the circle is a complete shape, it's a joined up shape, we get this result. What we need to do is to cut our circle. I'll go to the Scissors tool, which shares a toolbar position with the Eraser tool. I'll simply with the Scissors tool, click somewhere on the path to cut it. As soon as I do that, the circles jump around to evenly space around our spine. Let's see what happens when we try to create this with a rectangular shape. Let's go and create a small square. I'll fill it with a color. Of course, to make a square, all you'll do is hold the Shift key as you drag out to create your rectangle and that becomes a square. I'll Alt or Option Drag a duplicate away. Make sure that these are nicely lined up by selecting over them and click here on vertical aligned center. Again, we'll make our Blend. Go to Blend tool. Click on one shape, click on the second one. Here is our blend and this time it just looks like a big rectangle, but it is a blend. Double-click on the Blend, choose Preview go to specified steps, and decrease the number of steps so that we can actually see our squares. We'll go again and put these around the circle and draw out a nice size Ellipse. Select over both the blend and the Ellipse and choose Object blend, Replace Spine. Again, we'll need to cut this circle, so I'll go to the Scissors tool, click once on the path. Let's look and see what difference we have when we create a shape that actually is not a circle, so it's got like pointy ends if you like. As we click away, you'll see that every one of these squares is upright. They've all got their base that's horizontal. Well, we can change the look of it for a blend. Select over the blend, double-click the blend tool, turn Preview on. This option here of orientation allows us to change the way the squares are positioned relative to the circle. In this case, the squares all point into the circle, so we're getting a different effect. Now you can use this Blend and Replace Spine option to create all sorts of blends. You could blend a shape that you've created yourself. You could blend stars, for example, that you create, or polygons that you create with a polygon tool. You could also get stripes from the symbols collection and blend those. There's lots of potential to use this effect in Illustrator.
3. Pt 2 Create a Sci fi shape: One of the really handy tools in Illustrator for creating bendy things is this transformed tool. We're going to start by creating a circle and just going to be a filled circle, that has no stroke. We're going to click away from the circle. If I was to do, I transform with this circle right now when you go to the distort and transform dialogue, you'll say the only rotation points are actually these nine rotation points. Which doesn't give us a lot of scope for creating a larger circle of circles. I'm going to cancel out of there. I'm going to click away from my shape and that is critical. You don't want this shape selected because you're about to turn off, the fill and strokes, and we've got no fill, no stroke. Go to the pen tool and I'm just going to locate a position immediately under the center of this circle. The position I want my rotation point to be in and I'll click just once. This is added a point that has no fill and no strike, but unfortunately I'm still attached to it. To stop this rubber band effect and to detach myself from this single point, I'll press the escape key. Now I have a circle and a point. I'm going to select either both of these, and I'm going to group them, now this is critical. You have to crop them or else they won't transform as a single shape, we'll choose object group. Now that we've grouped our shapes together, our circle and our point, they're going to travel together. It also gives us an alternate rotation point, so we can use this point as a rotation point, so we can swing our circle, to create a larger circle of dots effect, distort and transform, and then transform, turn on previous so we can see what we're doing. We're going to locate the bottom middle of those nine boxes that indicating that this will be our rotation point. Exactly where they are no fill, no stroke dot is. Now we can determine how many copies we want and the angle we want to use. Let's start with 20, and just say how that looks , that's going to be the movement. If we're happy with 20, then click here in the copies and start increasing the number of copies, until you rotate a full circle around your rotation point. If you adjust your angle, you're going to need to adjust your number of copies. It's best to choose a value for your angle, that will divide into 360 which is the number of degrees in a circle without leaving any remainder. Twenty will go into 360, 18 times. We've got one original and 17 copies, which is why this is going perfectly around the circle. I'll click ''okay'', I have a circle here now, but everything is attached to just this circle here. Can say that it's a transform on a circle. We're going to expand this so that we can get all these circles out, to do that object expand appearance. Next we'll choose object ungroup and continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. At this point, let's look at the last pallet because it's very important to say what we've done and why the choices we made earlier, are actually having a positive effect. These are all the shapes I have here. All of the circles. Note that in the last pallet there are no single points because we made our single point it with the pen tool, when it had no fill and no stroke. In the process of expanding and ungrouping those shapes have been discarded, because they have no value. That's really helpful to us because it means we don't have to go and get rid of them, and that's going to be apparent why that's important in just a minute. I'm going to group these back together again with object group. I am going to look at the possibility for creating a different shape with my circles. I'm going to skew it horizontally by just dragging on it, and I'd like to share it a little bit, so I'll choose object and then transform, and shear. Now I've already been playing around with some shear angles, but let's just zero this out. You can adjust the shear angle by just dragging on this option here, this angle option, and then you can also adjust the axis, should you wish to do so just to get a result that you like. I'm looking here at creating something that's a bit Sci Fi, a little bit flying saucer shape, if you like. I'm liking this shape, I'll click "okay". I have the overall rotation that I want here, but you can see that in skewing and shearing this shape, I've lost my circles. If the circles were important to me, I now need to do something about getting my circles back, but what I've got is a series of ovals. You can see them here in the Layers palette. There is a trick to turning things into circles, and let's save that now I am going to select either all of these shapes. I've all of them selected. This is where it was important not to have those single points because they would also be converted to circles in this process or we'd have to find some way of removing them from our documents. Having them disappear automatically was of value to us. We'll go to the appearance panel because that allows us to get access to the ovals. I'm going to double-click on contents because we were looking at the group earlier, now we're looking at the contents, and I'm going to target this fill, because this will allow me to reshape my shapes here. I'll choose effect, convert to shape, and then choose ellipse. At first instance it looks like this has been a spectacular failure. If I click absolute as the size, then you can say that it hasn't been [inaudible] What we've got is a series of circles to replace our ovals, but they're in that same arrangements, so we've got our Sci Fi arrangement, but this time instead of ovals, we've been able to reconvert them back to circles. The circles are coming because the width and height are identical and we're using absolute. If you want bigger circles, you can just increase the width and height to make bigger circles. If you want smaller circles, decrease them, but make sure that the two are the same. The width and height are identical, because that's what makes a circle. I'll click "Okay", click away from the shapes, and here we have our Sci Fi arrangement of circles, but you'll see that at their heart, they are still ovals. It's just that the ovals have been replaced using that appearance panel trick. Now we've got our Sci Fi shape here. Let's have a look and say what we might do to enhance it. Going to the Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag out an oval, going to convert this to having a stroke and no fill, and just increase the stroke so I can see it clearly. I can rotate this around and place it over the shape that I'm working with. Let's just go and do that. They'll be a little bit of guessing in terms of trying to get it into the right position, so you'll need to experiment with reforming the shape, and rotating it, to get it perfect. I want the shape to go pretty much halfway through each of these circles. That sort of look that I'm going for here. Once I achieve that, I'm going to the last panel, I'm going to show mine with Windows Layers because it has disappeared from my collection down here. Here is the ellipse and here is my group, I'll drag the ellipse into the group. It's just part of the group just makes life a little bit easier. Now let's go back and rotate the whole thing, effect, distort and transform and then transform tone preview on. We'll use a 60 degree rotation now because this is a classic look if you like, and add two copies, and click "Okay". I'll just zoom out so we can say the effect that we've created, I could enlarge the artboard or resize the shape. I'll select over the shape, I'm going to expand it with object expand appearance, and that will just expanded at this point with it selected to make the artboard now the right size for my shape. I'll double click on the artboard tool, from the preset drop down list, at the very top of it is fit to artwork bounds. It's also the same as choosing fit to selected art in this case, because I have my art selected, so I choose either of them and click ''Okay''. Now your artboard will be perfectly sized to the size of your art, and there's a fun effect that's quite easy to create once you know how.
4. Pt 3 Design a bent series of squares: Before we start on this next effect, let's have a look and say what it is that we're trying to achieve because that will help as you go along because there are a lot of steps in this process. What we want is a series of boxes that go from large to small. They have a gradient on them, which is why you're seeing that change of color. Then they are repeated and rotated to create a decreasing size series of boxes. We'll start in just a regular document, I'll go to the line segment tool, click once in the document and create a line that is 20 pixels in length. It has a three pixel stroke so that we can see it. I'll click away from the line quite a distance and then create a second line that is six pixels, it has the exact same stroke and fill. I'll select over both shapes and then use the horizontal align center option to make sure that they're perfectly aligned. We'll go to the blend tool, we'll click on the smaller of the shapes and then click on this larger of the shapes to create our blend. Double-click on the Blend tool to bring up the blend options. Turn preview on, of course, so that we can see what we're doing. We'll go to specified steps and we're going to decrease the number of steps to something like about 20. I'll click Okay, and let's see what we've got so far. We've got a series of decreasing length lines and we've spaced them out. Now the only spacing option that we've got in the blend tool is to space the middle of each of these shapes evenly apart. We get a bigger space here than we have down here. It's not the look that I want, but we're going to deal with that in just a minute. Let's go and get our blend and let's break our shapes out of here with object blend, expand. If we go to the last panel, we'll see that we've got a group with a series of lines in it. We'll choose object ungroup. Now we just got individual lines, we'll rotate them around. I want the bigger ones on the right and the smaller ones on the left. Now it's important to ungroup these shapes because this next option we're going to use won't work properly if they still grouped. We're going to the align tool, I'm going to click the flyout menu, choose Show Options and select Align to key object. This is what you won't be able to do if they're still in a group. I'll click Align to key object, one of these objects has been specified as the key object and it doesn't matter which one. Just ignore that for now. We're just going to click here on horizontal distribute space. I've got a spacing of 15 pixels, which means that the space between each of these objects will be 15 pixels, not the space between the middle of them. Let's click here. That's just closing up lines a little bit, but this space here is exactly the same as this space here. That's the look I'm going for. Now, the choice I had when I created this shape was I could have made a bend in this line, so I could have made it a semicircular shape, if I'd used the blend tool, because we learned in the first video that you can replace the spine. The problem is that if I've made my bend with the blend tool, I couldn't then rearrange these lines so that they were evenly spaced the way I want them to be. We're left in a catch 22. The blend tool here would have left us bend things, but it wouldn't have left us spacings, so it wouldn't have left us with something that we could have spaced evenly. Taking the space option, I've now got the things evenly spaced, the problem is I now have to bend everything. Let's see how we would bend it. At this point, it's critical that we regroup everything because if we try and bend things right now, each of these lines is going to be bent, not the whole object. Let's go to object Group. The tool that we're going to use to bend this is a warp. I'll choose object, envelope, distort, make with Warp. Now, I'm just going to show you what things might look like when you get into this dialogue. There are a whole series of styles here. The style you want to use is this arc. It's the first style in the list. Obviously, the difference between vertical and horizontal is significant. Vertical is not giving us what we want, horizontal is giving us what we want. Now, my bend right now is set to 88 percent because I've been playing around with this. I know it's a pretty good value. This is a 100 percent, I think it's too much of a bend. I think for this effect, I want things a little bit less so I'm choosing somewhere between 85 and 90. That's a nice little bend. Everything else is zero. I'll just click Okay. Now I have my lines, they're nicely spaced apart and they're bent. The problem is if we have a look in the last pallet that all we've got is an envelope. These are not individual lines, so we're going to have to break them out of that. We do that by choosing object, expand. Now we don't want to expand the fill, we just want to expand the object and again, this is critical, I'm sorry, in this class there is so much in this particular effect that is critical that you get right. This is critical, choose object, don't choose Fill. Click Okay. Now if we have a look in the last panel, we've got again heaps and heaps of groups but inside these groups, some individual paths, so little individual lines that have strokes on them. You can see by just clicking on a line that's got a stroke and no fill, that's telling me it's a line because if it were a shape, a filled shape, then it would have a fill and no stroke. It's supposed to look exactly like this. Now everything's in lots of groups, so let's select over it and let start ungrouping it. Just like the case in my layers panel, really, really tidy because it's very easy for it to get away from you. Now we have a series of lines, but some of these are bent. You can see this one here, it's got like a bend in the last panel here you can see the bend. Well, I'd like them to be straight. There is a way that we can make each of these individual lines a straight line and we do it by choosing object path, simplify. We will turn preview on so that we can see what we're doing. I want to go to straight line, so I'm going to click here on straight lines and we get an angle threshold option. I'm going to set it all the way out so that I'm reducing the points. It might be a bit difficult to say exactly what's happening here but if you have a look at the points, it becomes pretty obvious. There are 44 points now whether we're a 116, which means that since we have about 22 shapes here, each one of these shapes now probably has two anchor points and since they are straight lines, then that's going to make each of these lines a straight line. They're still arranged in a bending shape, but they're straight lines, not bent lines. That's exactly what we want, I'll click Okay. Now, each of these paths here is a straight line. Again, it's critical that they are straight lines. To make the effect that we want, we want to replace these straight lines with boxes and the box needs to be the size of the line. Let's go and get the rectangle tool and let's drag out a small rectangle. I'm going to fill it with black and give it no stroke at all. Now the default with the new versions of illustrator is that in here are all little handles that you can use to drag in and reshape the corners, we don't need any of that. We're just going to simplify this rectangle by choosing object and then shape, expand shape and now it's just a regular square. We'll open up the brushes panel. If you don't see it, just choose window and then brushes, and we're going to drag and drop this square into the brushes panel and we're going to use it to make an art brush. An art brush is different to a pattern brush, a pattern brush repeats itself along a path, an art brush only paints once. When we apply a square to a line, we're only going to get one square per line. Let's click Okay. We want this to paint across so it's going in the right direction. If it is not going in the right direction, just click to make it go in the right direction. We want it to be colorization method tints so that we can re-color it and we'll just click Okay. At this point, we don't need this square any longer, so we can delete it. The next step is to select either all of these lines, so we've got every single one of them selected, and we'll click here to apply our brush to the lines. So far so good, we've got something that approximates the look of a square on each of the lines, except that it's a rectangle at one end and a bit more square at the other. We would like them to size with the lines, which is what they're not doing right now. Let's click here on options of selected object, make sure Preview is enabled so you can see the result and click Proportional. Now we have a big square, and each of these squares is a little bit smaller all the way down to the little square, we'll click Okay. We're now well on the way to creating what it is that we came here to create. In the next video, we're going to add some color and fix the rotations.
5. Pt 4 Make the Rainbow rotated shape: At this point we have a number of lines, every one of which has a brush applied to it. If we're ready to go ahead and add a gradient, we're going to need to expand this. So we'll choose object, expand appearance. This turns these from lines with brushes applied to them into the actual rectangle. Here in the last panel they are all in groups and let's choose object Ungroup to just break them out of there. Now let's go and apply our gradients. We're working with a film now, not a stroke because we've got actual filled shapes. Let's go to the swatches panel, click the Flyout, choose Open Swatch Library, and then go to gradients. I'll choose spectrums. It's this middle spectrum gradient here that I want, I'll click on it once. That adds it automatically to the swatches panel and you can see this is also added it to our shapes. It's just not been added the way that we want it to look. Well, we can fix that. Let's just select over all of these shapes because they've got a gradient fill. We can now go to the gradient tool here. We'll click on the gradient tool and then drag from right to left across our shapes. That applies the darker blue in here at the beginning of the gradient all the way through to the lighter ones at the end. That's much more what we want. Because the next thing we're going to do is rotate and resize these shapes. We're going to put them back into a group. We'll make sure they're all selected and then choose object, and then group. Will also rotate them slightly because I want my final effect not to start as a semicircle, nor a very obvious semicircle. I think this is a good starting point. Select over the shape and choose Effect, distort and transform and then transform. Turn preview on so that we can say what we're doing. Let's start by rotating this shape around. We'll make some extra copies, maybe two or three for now. The rotation and the increase of copies is getting some way towards where we're headed. But right now these shapes are not resizing as they go. Well, we can do that with the scale tool. I'll set the scale to 90 on both axes, the horizontal and vertical. Now we're getting an inside shape that is considerably smaller than the outside shape. We can start increasing the copies and you can see that they're getting smaller every time. The problem now is that, the spacing is not right. Well, the spacing can be solved by starting to move them horizontally and vertically. You'll just need to experiment with what's going to make the best sense for the shapes that you're working with. You're also going to be a little bit different size to mine, so something that is working for me may not work for you. I also think that I've got too many copies. I'm going to back off a little bit here. I think my angle is not steep enough, because they're not actually kicking off into a really nice rotation. Well, as soon as I do that, I realized I could probably go a little bit heavier on the number of copies. You could also experiment with reducing them at a faster rate. So you might want to go for 85 or 87, just make sure that the vertical and the horizontal are the same because you absolutely need to be re-sizing the same proportions both vertically and horizontally. But you can see that there's a little bit of experimentation to take place here. In terms of the final result that you want, you'll be experimenting with increasing or decreasing the angle, increasing or decreasing or horizontal space and also the vertical space. This token [inaudible] be totally independent of each other. So you won't necessarily want the same vertical space as you do horizontal space and probably won't be the same. Then experiment with the scale and the number of copies when you've got what you want, just click Okay. You now have the element that we came here to create. A series of squares that all gets smaller as they bend around. They rotated around their scaling as they go and they have a gradient applied to them. I know that this effect that involves a lot of steps, but it is really worthwhile doing, and I hope you enjoy making yours. Now before we leave this effect, there are a couple of things. If you want it to be a solid color, you can do so. Just select over the shape, target they fill, and just make it a solid color by selecting the solid color to use. You may also consider making a gradient from dark to light of a color, and you could use that as well. I happen to like the spectrum, so I'm just going to undo that. You'll also see that we have everything inside a group and we can edit that. So if you want to edit the transformation, you just open up the appearance panel and click on the transform. Now you could make changes to the transformation, obviously tone preview on so you can see the result, but this would allow you to edit things if you are having a look at it and deciding that you want it to be a little bit different.
6. Pt 5 Decreasing Circle of Dots: The next bend shape that we'll create is going to be based on a circle, so, I've created a square document just to start off with. I'll select the Ellipse Tool, click once in the document, make a circle 20 by 20. It's going to be filled with black with no stroke at all. I'll apply a transformation to it with Effect, Distort, and Transform, and then Transform. I want a series of declining size shapes. I'll start by decreasing them by 95 percent of the previous size. Click "Preview" to turn this on, and let's move them so we can start seeing them. We'll add a few more copies, I'd like 22 shapes in total, so, I'm making 21 copies. It's going a little bit too far, so, I'll just back off the horizontal movement. This is looking pretty good for me. What we're going to do is swing this around to create a circle of shapes. But we're going to do it with a bit of care and attention so that it evenly filled all the way around. There's a trick to it. I'll click "Okay". At this point we'll expand and ungroup these objects with Object Expand Appearance and then Object Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option, which means that when we go to the last panel, we should save just a series of circles. That's exactly what we've got. I'll zoom in so that I can see just the end of the shapes here. Deselect everything, go to the pen tool, make sure that I'm working with a no fill, no stroke, and just locate a rotation point that I'll use here, so, I'll just click once. Now if your pen is still is attached to that, you can just press the Escape key, mine is not. I'll take this path and I'm going to make multiple copies of it. I'll drag and drop it onto the new icon and then select the two that I have, drag them onto the new icon to make four and I'll do that again. This gives me eight and I need a nine, so, just drag that onto the new icon. If you don't get the exact number that you need, you can create them later on. Let's zoom back out. I have 22 shapes, so, I'm going to start by selecting just a few of them. I'll select five. I've got the five outside circles selected, and I'll Shift click on one of these just anchor points and Click "Object Group". At this point I have a group here, I can lock it down, I can even hide it so that I don't see it, so, it makes it easier to select things from here on in. The next group I want, is the next four and I'll Shift click on one of these points and group those Object Group, hide them and block them. Next we'll choose three. Shift click on the next anchor point that's loose here, Object Group, lock it and hide it. We'll do another set of three, and then a set of two, another set of two, and then each of these will be just one dot and one anchor point. Once you've created all your shapes, you can run down the lock icons. Just hold the left mouse button and drag down to remove the locks, and then hold the left mouse button and drag down to make everything visible again. So everything is inside groups. The reason why we've taken the time to do that right now, is that we're going to rotate all of these groups at the same time just to get a transform that we can and use. I'll select over everything and choose effect to distort and transform, and then transform. I'll turn Preview on and we want to rotate everything relative to this position here, which is the middle square on the right-hand side. We'll rotate them at least for a start 2 degrees, which means that we need 179 copies to go all the way around 360 degrees. We got one original, 179 copies makes 180, you divide 180 into 360, you get 2 degrees. I'm just looking at this, I think 2 degrees is not enough, so, let's crank that up to three. The multiple for this means that this needs to be 119 copies. The spacing is looking pretty good. All I'm concerned about is the spacing on the outer dots. We're not going to worry about the inner dot spacing, so, we going to fix that in a minute. If you are happy with the spacing with the outer five dot, click "Okay". These are the outer five dots that have been rotated and they're looking just fine. I'll zoom in a little bit so I can see how the spacing is looking because we need to keep an eye on it from here on in. We'll go to the next set of dots, which is this set here, and the spacing is probably a little bit tight. Once we select it, we can go to the Appearance panel and here is the Transform. This is the transform that we apply to all of these groups, but we can now access it for one particular set of shapes. It just saves us from having to do a whole lot of work like making a selection of the rotation point and at least starting off with our angle. I'm going to increase the angle here just a little bit. Let's try 4, and 4 into 360 goes 90, so, we would need 89 shapes. I'm going to look here and see if this looks pretty even, I think it's probably a little bit high, so, I think four was too big a step from three. Now, I happen to know that if I use 3.75, then that would give me 96 shapes, so, let's make that 95 and see if that's a little bit tighter. I think that's better, so, I'll click "Okay". This is the next set that we need to make adjustments to. Place three in here. Again, with the group selected, we'll go ahead and click the "Transform". We obviously need a larger angle for these. We could try four and see how that looks. I think it works pretty well, so, I would just select that. The multiplier for 4 is that we would get 90, so, I'm going to type 89 and I'll click "Okay". Then we'll go to the next set, which is this here. Target them and click the "Transform Options" so that we can get access to the values that we're going to use. Let's try five for this. If we're using five, then the multiplier would be 72, so that means we need 71 copies. Just look and see how that's looking. I'm pretty happy with that, so, I'll click "Okay". Now, if you think I'm plucking values out of thin air, I am and I'm not. I have a PDF of these values which I'm going to give to you so that you can see which values you could use for the angles that just make things a little bit easier. I'll try 6 degrees at this point, so, let's try six and see how it looks. I'm pretty happy with that. If I'm using 6 degrees, then I need 59 copies. I'll click "Okay". Then we'll go to the next one, click the "Transform", click "Preview On" and see what we would try and use. Let's try 8 degrees here. Perhaps a little bit more, we could try nine. I think nine is a little more generous. That would give us 40 around the circle, so, we'll need 39 copies plus our one original. Let's go to the next one. Last time we used nine, we could try 12. I'm pretty happy with that. If we're using 12, we would get 30 copies around so that's 29 copies plus 1 original. Now we're working on these last two and we're doing them individually because we need a bigger movement for these and they need to be dealt with individually. We could try 15 degrees, that's a nice even value. If that doesn't work, the next one that would make sense would be 18 degrees. I think 18 degrees is actually little more general, so, I'm going to use that, it just looks a little bit more balanced. If we're using 18 degrees then we have 20 shapes around, so, I need 19 copies plus my one original. Then I'll target this last one click "Transform". We went up quite a large amount last time, so, I'll test 24 degrees. Think it's way too small let's try 30, much better, and 30 gives us a number of shapes around a circle of 12, so, I need 11 copies plus my original, I'll click "Okay". Let's zoom back out with Control or Command zero. Creating a shape like this that spirals in woods with less numbers of circles on each rotation is a little bit more cumbersome to do. But if you approach it the way that we've done it, you'll find that it's much easier to do. Start out by creating a fixed number of circles of decreasing size. Make your center point a little bit off the end of the set of shapes and then bundle up your groups. I used five shapes and then four, I used, 2 sets of 3, 2 sets of 2, and three individuals. You'll find that bundling them with 5 and then 4, and 33, 22, 111 allows you to create transformations a little bit more easily than having to do every single shape individually and you still get a good result. I'll give you the PDF that has the values so you know what degrees you can type in and exactly how many shapes you can fit around. What I was looking for, was a number of shapes that was a whole number obviously. We have to create 12 we can't create 12.5 shapes. But I've prepared a PDF for you that allows you to say, if you're going to use 32 shapes, then you need to be using a degree of 11.25 or whatever. I've used whole values for my angles as well as things like 14.4, 11.25, 3.75. There are some fractional angles which Illustrator can use that will give you whole numbers of shapes so I'll give you that PDF that you can use. Once you've created this, you can go ahead and expand your shapes with Object, Expand, Appearance. That will break everything out into individual shapes. That gives you the potential for changing the color. Here, let's go and select a different color for our circles. You can also select over the shapes and apply a gradient to them. I'll go to the Flyout menu on the Switches panel, Open Switch Library, go to Gradients, and I'll go back to the Spectrums, click on a "Spectrum Gradient". As before, it's been applied to every single shape individually, it doesn't have to be done that way. Let's go to the Gradient, and let's switch to a radial gradient, and now go to the Gradient tool and we'll drag our gradient out from the middle outwards. I'll just click away so that we can see the result. You could of course apply a linear gradient should you wish to do so. There's another Bindi shape effect that you can create here in Illustrator.
7. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the effects that I've shown here and post an image of your completed effect as your class project. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
