Creative Half tone Effects in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Creative Half Tone Effects Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, creative halftones in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at halftones in Illustrator. We're going to make color halftones and black and white halftones. I've also got a range of really cool tips in this video that will help you with all projects in Illustrator as well as working with halftones. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, 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. If you're ready now let's get started getting creative with halftones in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Make a Black and White Half Tone: To get started with our color half tones, let's create a new document. Now, I'm working with Illustrator 2017 so I'm just going to make a letter size document by selecting this, and I'm going to make sure it's in landscape orientation, and I do want to be working in RGB color mode. Now, if you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, you're going to have a dialogue, something like this. So just make your document however big you want it to be, just make sure you're working in RGB color. So I'm just going to create a document. Now, we're going to start with a couple of circles. So I'm just going to start by creating a circle. This is just so that we can have a look and see how the half tone tools work in Illustrator. So about half the size of your document is a good size. We're going to fill it with a gradient and we don't want it to have a stroke. Now let's have a look at the gradient, let's open up the gradient panel here. We want to tone it into a radial gradient. We want it to be the other way around. So I'm just going to click here to reverse it. So the dark bit's in the middle and the light bit's on the outside. So now that we've got a gradient filled circle, let's make a duplicate of it. So I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to hold Alt on a PC, that would be Option on a Mac, as I drag a duplicate shape away. So these two are identical. Let's go and select this one and we're going to choose Effect, Pixelate, Color Halftone, and the settings that you get in your Color Halftone dialogue are going to be different to mine, but what we're going to do is start out by setting a maximum radius of say, something like 50 pixels. That's going to be the size of the biggest start, and then we're going to make these channels all exactly equal. I'm typing 45, so I'm typing 45 for each of channel 1, 2, 3, and four, and these are what are called screen angles. I'm just going to click okay. The result that we have here is that we have lines on an angle and that's because I used a 45 degree angle. These lines through this illustration are at 45 degrees. Let's select this shape and let's go and do a different half tone effect. Pixelate, Color Halftone. This time, let's set this to the same 50, but we're going to set all our channels to zero. The half tone in this case is made up of a grid, so there's series of vertical and horizontal lines. So that's the difference in terms of your screen angle. Now, you can edit these effects once you've created them. So I've got my circle ray selected here, I'm going to the appearance panel. If you don't see the appearance panel here, choose window and then appearance. With this selected, I can click on "Color Halftone" to open up the dialogue again. Now, very unhelpfully, Illustrator just blocks out everything that I had, so you can't actually affect this live, but you are just applying the same effect back with a different set of settings. So this time let's type in 30, then click "Okay", and now we get a screen where our screen angles are 30 degrees. So you've learned here how to apply a color half tone to a shape using a gradient and how to edit it. In the next video, we're going to have a look at adding some color to our half-tones. 3. Pt 2 - Color the Half Tone: So far we've managed to create a couple of black-and-white halftone effects, it's time to look at a way of coloring them. Now, right now we have a shape that has an effect applied to it. So if we want to make this into a vector object, we're going to have to do something with it. First of all, we'll choose Object, Expand, Appearance. We have a look at this then in the Layers palette. We'll say that we've actually got an image here. What we've done is create this as a bitmap image. Something you might get out of Photoshop. This is not vector art. To create it as vector art, we're going to need to trace it. Because it is a bitmap image, Illustrator has already recognized that and it's saying, "Would you like to trace this?" Because this is typically what you would do with a bitmap image. We we'll then click "Image Trace". Once we do that, we're going to click here on the Image Trace dialogue because we need to make some choices about how we're tracing. The first thing you want to do is turn preview off so that you can make settings here without the tracing being updated every time you shift one of these sliders. To get a really high-quality tracing, we're going to set paths to high, and corners to more, and noise to very low. Most of the time you're in this dialogue, setting paths and corners to the same value and noise to the completely opposite value is what you want. Generally, if you go low on paths and corners, you'll go high on noise. It's just a rule of thumb if you like. Now we also want to ignore white because we don't want to scan the white elements here. Otherwise, we'll just have to clean them up so it's much easier not trace them in the first place. The other thing you want to do is make sure that your mode is black and white because we actually want scan this as black or white. When you've got all your settings selected, click the "Preview" and Illustrator will go ahead and complete the trace. If you're happy with the way it looks here, just click "Expand". Now we can get rid of the Image Trace menu. In the last palette here, you'll see that we have a group, and inside the group are a whole series of black filled paths. If you get some white-filled paths or little boxes here that are just white, that's because you didn't select the ignore white thing and you'll probably need to get rid of them, or it might be better just to press Control or Command Z to undo the expansion and go back and trace it without the white. We can just close this down and just talk this out of the way for now. Because we now have a series of vector shapes, I can select over this group of shapes. Right now they're filled with black, but we can fill them with any color that we like. It's also possible to put a stroke on the shapes. If we wanted to, we could put an orange stroke and just increase the stroke value. We can get interesting appearances over our halftones. Of course, the stroke is on top of the fill, so if we go to the Appearance panel and click "Contents", then we can get to the stroke and fill here. If we bring the stroke behind the fill, just drop it in behind the fill, then we're going to get more of the blue color, the fill color, and less of the stroke color. That's just something that happens with any shape that you select. If you bring the stroke behind the fill, you're going to get more fill and less stroke. There's one option for creating halftone effects and coloring those halftone effects. We're going to have a look in the next videos to how we could use a Gradient Mesh to create a gradient that we can use for a halftone. 4. Pt 3 - Gradient Mesh and Color Halftone: I'm starting off with this same size document as I created last time, and it is in RGB color mode. I'm going to set the Stroke to none, I'm going to set the Fill Color to white, and I'm going to drag out a rectangle. Now, we can't see that rectangle because it's filled with white and it has no stroke, but with it selected, I'm going over here to the Mesh Tool. Now, the Mesh Tool allows us to divide up this shape. What I'm going to do is just click about here and you can see that it divides it up with a vertical and a horizontal line. I can continue through this shape and just add a few lines. Having done that, I want to fill some of these areas with a gradient, but I don't have a gradient to use and it's going to be a little difficult for me to be able to select colors each time, so I'm going to make my own gradient first. I'm going to the Rectangle Tool and just of the side of the document here, I'm going to drag out a really small rectangle and it's filled with white. I'm going to the Selection Tool, I'm going to hold the Alt key or the Option key as I drag a duplicate out of the way, and I'm going to fill this one with black. Now, I'm going to the Blend Tool. I'm going to click on my first shape and then I'm going to go and pick up my second shape. Now, you can see that you've picked up the second little square shape because the Blend Tool has this little plus sign next to it, and that tells you or something that you can use. Don't want to use this big shape over here, just a little square that you made that was filled with white, so just click on it. That creates a blend. If you don't see a blend that looks smooth like this with it all still selected, double-click the Blend Tool here, turn on Preview and just make sure you select Smooth Color. What this is going to give me as just a gradient swatch that I can use to sample some colors with. Now, I'm going back to my gradient mesh shape and I'm going to this tool here, it's the Lasso Tool. What I'm going to do is lasso a few of these intersections. I've just grabbed these three points and I'm going to tap the letter I on the keyboard because that gives me this eyedropper and I'm going to click on a color in my gradient, and you can see that those points in this mesh have been colored with the color that I selected. If it's not dark enough, I can just go and select another color. I'm going back to the Lasso Tool. I'm going to select a few more of these points, tap the letter I, and then go and sample a gray, and then back to the Lasso Tool. Now, I don't have to color all of these points, but I do want to color quite a few of them so that I have some colors to work with in my gradient. I want to make sure that the outside edge is pretty much white. I'm going to leave that being a very light color, but I'm going to add some black bits in here as I work. I've got a good mix of colors here from white through to gray. The Gradient Measure is a really great tool when you want to apply gradient effects to an image or to a shape, and you can also adjust this. I've got the Direct Selection Tool selected here and what I can do is I can come in here and I can select on an anchor point and bend this. There's a lot of potential for creating really, really interesting effects here. I'm going to leave you to experiment with that yourselves but just be aware that in addition to actually applying gradients to these shapes, you can also bend them as you wish. Now, I'm going to select over this shape and I am going to apply my halftone to that, Effect, Pixelate, and then just Color Halftone. Now, this time I'm going to apply a different color halftone effect. I'm going to leave my maximum radius at 50 but last time we set all the channels to be the same value. This time we're going to set them to be different values. I'm going to make one at 15 degrees, one at 30, one at 45, and it doesn't really matter in my experience what I do for Channel 4, so I'm just going to leave it where it is and click "OK". This time we get a very different effect. What we've done is that when we entered the screen angles the first time we used all equal values, so all the dots are on top of each other. This time we've offset the colored dots from each other and so they're at different places and where they overlap and where all three of them overlap, we're getting black areas. But where there's just one dot by itself, we're seeing the color and where two dots overlap, we're seeing the result of those two colors being mixed, but it's not black because you need the three colors for black. Now this is a live effect. If we select this object and go back here to our Direct Selection Tool, we can select on any of these points and move this around. What we're doing is we're moving the underlying gray scale gradient and because there's a halftone effect on top of it, the halftone effect is changing every time we change the gradient that it's being applied to. So it's possible to edit this and drag these points into a different position to get a different effect. Now, the halftone effect as well is editable. I'm going with my shape selected to the Appearance panel and you'll see here I've got a Mesh, and Mesh Points, and here's the Color Halftone. I can turn it on and off. I can also click it and bring up the Color Halftone dialogue. Again, Illustrator, very unhelpfully just removes everything so I can't see a thing. But at this point I could come in and change some of these angles if I wanted to and click "OK". The Color Halftone effect is reapplied this time using those new values. 5. Pt 4 - Faux Halftone: This next half-time effect, I'm going to create a same-sized document as I've been working with and again, RGB color, so I'll click "Create". This time we're going to create a full half-time effect. It's going to be a very regular half-time. It's going to look like one, but it's not a real half-time. I'm going to start out with the Ellipse tool and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle here. It's going to be filled with black and it's going to have no stroke at all. So with it selected, I'm going to hold the Alt key on the PC, the Option key on the Mac, and I'm just going to drag a duplicate up here. I'm going to hold the Shift key again as I size this down, and I want it to be really small. You almost can't see it here. I'm going to select over these two shapes here, and I just want to align them. I'm going to make sure that the Align to setting is set to selection, which it is. I'm just going to click here to center them. If you don't see these align options, you might find a line over here. You certainly will find it under Window and then Align. I've got a big shape and a little shape. I'm going to make a blend out of this. I'm going to select both of them and choose Object, Blend, Make. If your blend doesn't look like this, double-click on the "Blend" tool and you can select an option. Now I'm using smooth color, and that's giving me a pretty good result. But you could also go and select specified steps. You could reduce the number of steps, for example, so that you can get a bit more separation out of your shapes. But this is basically the look that you're going for, so I'm going to select "OK". Next up, I want to duplicate this across the document. To do that, I'm going to use a transform effect. I'm going to re-select my Blend and I'm going to choose Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. I'm going to turn Preview on. I'm going to set my copies to probably 30 just to start off with. Then I'm going to start moving the horizontal value. I want to increase that. As I do, you can see that the shapes are now being duplicated across the document. We're getting what we know to be or recognize as being a half tone effect. What I do want is I want these bottom circles to be joined. I may or may not want this set of dots. So you can just adjust the value of the horizontal move until you get the effect that you're looking for. If you've got too many copies, you can just reduce size. I'm going to click "OK". Now, right now we've got a blend and a transformation, and it's all attached to these two circles here. If we go into the last panel, we'll see that we've got a blend here and here are two circles. The blend itself has got a transformation on it, so we can turn that on or off. To do anything realistic with this, we're probably going to need to expand it. I'm going to select over the object this blend, which is controlling everything and choose Object, Expand Appearance. I'm going to keep an eye on my layers panel because I want to see what's happening here. At this stage, I've just got a series of groups which are each of these vertical sets of dots. I'm going to choose Object, Ungroup, and then Object, Ungroup, until it's ungrouped so it's just a series of dots. There should be nothing here except the black filled shapes. At this point, if you want to recolor this, you can just select the shape and click the "Fill" and you can change the color of these shapes. Now the same effect could be created using shapes other than a circle, so you could, for example, create a half tone of diamonds or squares, or hearts, or stars, whatever you want to use. You're just going to do the exact same thing; start with one of the shapes, create a very smaller version of that shape, do a blend between the two, and then use the transform tool to transform it across repeatedly, across your document. 6. Pt 5 - Half Tone Pattern: In the previous video, we created this faux half tone effect. I now want to show you something that you could do to use it. I've saved this as a faux because I'm about to destroy it. So just in case I want this design, I've saved it away. Next up, I'm going to go ahead and delete everything but the first row of dots. So I've selected everything else and I'm just deleting it. I'm going to take a couple of dots off the top here, and I'm going to peel a few dots away from the bottom here, just to lighten it a little bit, maybe a few more. I'm going to take this slot and I am going to group them with Object, Group. I'm going to scale them down a little bit holding the Shift key as I do so that they are scaled in proportion. I'm going to make a duplicate of this with "Object", "Transform". I'm going to use "Reflect". I'm going to reflect this over the horizontal and I'm going to make a copy. So I'm just going to click "Copy". Then I can just move my second copy down to line up with the first. I want to align both of these. I'm going to select them and horizontally align their centers so I make sure that they're aligned over each other. I want to check this middle one where they are intersecting and they're not perfectly aligned. So I'm just going to move them up so they are nicely aligned. Now that I've got two groups here, I'm going to choose "Object", "Groups". I'm actually grouping them into another object. Next up, I want a rectangle that is the same size as this. So I'm just going to draw over it with a rectangle. I'm going to make the rectangle, no fill, no stroke. I'm just going to make sure that it just touches the edge of the shapes. Now, it can be a little bit taller than the shapes are themselves, but I do want it to be centered. So I'm going to grab my rectangle and my set of group shapes and I'm going to make sure that they're centered vertically and horizontally. So the no fill no stroke rectangle is as far above this dot here as it is below this dot here. We're going to the last panel and I'm just going to check and see what I've got here. Here is my rectangle and here is my group that has two groups inside it. I'm going to drag the rectangle below the group, I'm going to select everything, and I'm going to make a pattern out of it. So I'm going to open up the Swatches panel. I'm just going to drag and drop it into the Swatches panel and that creates it as a pattern. Let's just move it out of the way, and let's go and create a rectangle that is the size of my art board here. I have my fill targeted here, so I'm just going to click on my "New Pattern Swatch" and that fills my shape with my pattern. Now with my shape still selected, I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I don't want to transform the object, but I do want to transform the scale of the pattern. I've got it saved here to 60 percent, that's fine. I just want you to see what it looks like as a pattern. I'm just going to click, "OK". So that's a way of turning your faux half tone dot effect into something that is a scaleable half tone pattern. It's very easily done by just adapting the design that we created earlier. 7. Pt 6 - Multi Gradient Heart halftone: For our final half-tone effect, we're going start again with the same size document we've been working with. Again, RGB color. Let me click click "Create". Now for this one I want to create a heart so I'm going to use the pen tool. Even if you don't use the pen tool very much, you'll find that this is really easy to do if you just follow along. First of all, we're going to click and drag upwards. That's a single movement and I'm going to hold the Shift key because I want to drag in a perfectly upward direction. I'm going to let go the left mouse button and then let go the Shift key. I'm going to come over here to approximately opposite where the first pen stroke was or the first anchor point is and I'm going to click and drag again all in one motion and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do. So I'm heading in a downwards direction here, I can let go the left mouse button, let go the Shift key. Then I'm going to come back around here to pick up this point immediately below my starting point. I've got smart guides turned on and I just want to click when I see that smart guide appear. Now I'm going to press the Escape key to turn off my drawing. At this stage, my heart has both a stroke and a fill and that's just fine. With it selected, I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform", "Reflect", I'm going to reflect it over the vertical and I want to make a copy so I'm going to click "Copy". I'm going to drag the second one, so it intersects with the first. If you're not sure that they are perfectly aligned, select both of them. First of all, click "Vertical aligned center". Then go to this drop down Panel, which you'll find in the Alignment panel. Here, click this option here and make sure it's set to align to key object. Then doesn't matter which side is your key object, you want to make sure that the spacing here is zero and you're going to click on "Horizontal distribute space". What that does is it makes sure that these two shapes are perfectly butted up against each other. I'm going to select over both the shapes and choose "Object", "Path", "Join". That makes one path of my two shapes and it's a perfectly reflected heart. At this point, I'm going to flip my fill and stroke and I'm going to turn off my stroke. For the Fill, I want to apply a gradient. I'm just going to click on "Gradient". I'm going to come up here and I'm going to make it a radial gradient and I'm going to reverse it so it's dark in the middle and light on the outside. I'm now going to my Gradient tool. You can see here that it's a radial gradient. Well, I'm going to pull this darker area up into the top corner of the heart here. Then I'm going to expand the gradient so that the gray stretches all the way across the heart. It's just lighter over here than it is over here. Now what I want to do with this heart is I want to apply that same gradient over here as well but it might at first glance appear that you can't create two gradients in a shape. Well, you can, with the shapes selected, I'm going to the "Appearance" panel. Let's just open that up for this shape. Here is the fill that is this gradient. So what I'm going to do is select that and I'm going to drop it onto the new icon. I now have two gradients on this shape. I'm going back to my Gradient tool and I'm going to take this second gradient and I'm going to move it right over here. The problem with this is that I've still got this gradient over here, but I can't see it because this is a black to white gradient and it's covering everything up. So on this topmost gradient, I am going to open up the "Opacity" panel and I'm going to set its Blend Mode to multiply. So this is multiplying the effect. I've got my two gradients on my shape. Now I'm going to apply a half-tone filter to this so I'm going to select the shape "Effect", "Pixelate", "Color half-tone". I can make this a black and white or a colored half-tone. I'm going to make mine a black and white, which means that all of these channel values need to be the same because that's going to give me a black and white half-tone. If you want your half-tone to be more multicolored, then set your channels, each to different values. The screen angles are all different, I'm just going to click "Okay". Now at this stage, what I've done is I've applied my color half-tone to just this fill and not the second fill so let's re-select the shape and let's pull this color half-tone down below the second fill. Now the color half-tone is affecting the entire shape and not just one of these fills. You'll find when you're working with shapes like this with multiple gradients and all sorts of things going on having the appearance panel open will help you troubleshoot things when things go wrong. Now I have my heart with its half-tone pattern. I'm going to expand it, "Object", "Expand Appearance". I'm going to trace it with image trace. I'm going to open up the Image trace panel and just make sure the settings are what I want them to be. I want paths and corners to be high values, noise on low value. I want to ignore white. I'm going to click "Preview". If I'm happy with the trace then I'm going to click "Expand", to expand this to a series of filled shapes. If we go to our layers palette, we've got a layer with a group, and inside that group are just a series of objects. 8. Pt 7 - Make a Pattern CS6 and later: Now that we've created our heart as a halftone, it's all in it's own group so we can select it and scale it should we wish. I'm going to make mine a little bit smaller. At this point, I could recolor it too. I'm going to make this a red color. I'm going to make a pattern out of this. The first time I make this pattern, I'm going to show you how to make a pattern if you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, the version of Illustrator that has a pattern make tool in it. If you're not using Illustrator CS6 or latest, skip forward at this point to the next video because I'm going to show you how to do it in your version of Illustrator. First up, we're going to make a duplicate of this heart so I'm just going to drag it out of the way. So that we can have a multi-colored effect, I'm going to set this one back to black, and I'm going to rotate it. So I've got one upside down and one up the right way heart. I'm going to select my upside down heart, and I'm going to choose Edit, Cut. I've cut it to the Windows clipboard, on the Mac that cuts it to the Mac clipboard. Now, last time I said that somebody got a little bit confused. Whenever you cut or copy something on Windows or on a Mac, it is stored in a clipboard, and the machine takes care of that for you. The operating system takes care of that for you, but it's sitting there so that we can paste it again in a minute. What we're going to do is select over our heart and choose Object, Pattern, Make. Click "Okay." Here's my Pattern options dialog. I'm going to click this option here so that the link is made so that I can increase the spacing a little bit. I'm just going to increase it so that this heart has a bit of spacing around it. I'm going to select over this heart here, and I'm just going to move it down to the bottom corner of this box. Now I'm going to paste in the shape that I have stored in the clipboard. I am going to choose Edit, Paste. Now I have a black heart that I can work with. I'm going to start dragging it so that it appears over the top corner of this shape, and I want to get a bit more space in here, I think, so I have a bit more room for it. Now this is the heart that when I move it, it's having effect on the pattern. None of these hearts are selectable. The only two hearts I can select and do anything with is this red one here and this black one up here. I'm just looking at adjusting the spacing until I'm relatively happy with that spacing. When I'm done, I'm just going to click Done. I'm going to move my heart out of the way. I'm going to go back and make a rectangle the size of the art board. The fill color is selected, and so I'm just going to click on my pattern, and I can scale it with object transform scale. Let's scale the pattern, but not the object itself. Now I've got some fracture lines that's not unusual in Illustrator. I'm just going to size this and hope I can get rid of those fracture lines. It seems to be pretty good for me at 78 percent and I'll click "Okay." Now the fracture lines have reappeared, so I'm just going to go to Edit, Preferences, General. That would be Illustrator, Preferences, General on the Mac, and I'm going to disable Anti-aliased Artwork. That will get rid of those fracture lines for me. There's an interesting way of creating a shape that has two gradients in it, turning that into a halftone effect and then creating it as a very simple pattern in Illustrator. Now if you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, you can skip the next video and go to the end where we have the project and the wrap-up. 9. Pt 8 - Make a Pattern CS5 and earlier: If you're using Illustrator say it's five or earlier, you don't have a patent make tool. We're going to see how we would go ahead and create this as a pattern. I'm going to select on my shape and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just scale it down inside that I don't want my heart to be quite as big as it was. Next up, I'm going to create a rectangle. I'm going to make it a stroke rectangle but no fill. I'm just going to drag a rectangle over my heart shape. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do it. I want it to be constrained to around these proportions around the heart. That looks pretty good to me. But it's not quite a whole number, so it's set to about 290 and a few pixels, I'm actually going to round it up to 300. This is going to make the math a little bit easier. I'm going to select either my rectangle and my heart and just click on the center option. The heart is now centered inside the rectangle. In the Layers palette, I have my heart here as a group, so I'm going to drag and drop that onto the New Layer icon to just duplicate the group. I've got one of these selected. It's the topmost one, I'm just going to fill it with a red color and then just drag it out of the way. I'm going to rotate this upside down by holding the Shift key as I do it. It's rotated exactly 180 degrees. Next up, I'm going to come down to the heart here, and I'm just going to align it. What I want to do is have the middle of the heart pretty much over the bottom corner of this rectangle. I'm going to select over my heart and I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Move. Now my rectangle was 300 pixels by 300 pixels. First of all, I'm going to zero out these values, so I'm not confused, and I'm going to move this up 300 pixels. I'm going to go in a minus 300 pixel vertical direction. Because I've got Preview turned on, I can see what it looks like. I'm going to click "Copy". Now, I'm going to select both of these hearts, and I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Move. This time, I'm going in a minus 300 pixel horizontal direction. Again I'm going to click "Copy." Now, I've got my hearts neatly arranged. I'm just not really happy with the middle heart. I'm going to select it and I'm just going to move it down. I want it to be pretty much equidistant away from the other parts. Now that I've got this looking the way it is, I'm going to take this rectangle and put it behind everything else because it's going to become the no fill no stroke rectangle, it's going to mark out my pattern. I want to select it and I want to give it no fill and no stroke. I'm going to select over everything, so that is all five hearts and a no fill no stroke rectangle and open up the Swatches palette, and with the selection tool, just drag and drop this into the swatches panel. I'm pretty much done with this. If I want to save it, I can just shrink it down and move it out of the way, and let's make a rectangle that is the size of the artboard. Target its fill, and let's fill it with our pattern. I can choose Object, Transform, Scale, turn off Transform Objects, leave on Transform Patterns, have it set to a uniform scale of about 50 percent, I'll click "Okay". Now, when I created this pattern in Illustrator, CS6 and later, I did these settings. I selected Edit, Preferences, General, and I disabled anti-aliased Artwork, which is why this is a little bit pixelated. If you're on a Mac, you'll find that by selecting Illustrator, Preferences, General, and just deselect Anti-alias Artwork, if you're finding that you're getting those white fracture lines through your pattern that will eliminate them. There's how to create a similar pattern to the one we created with the pattern make tool. This time we've created it in Illustrator CS5 and earlier. 10. Pt 9 Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the halftone effects that we've created in this class. You may want to just create some circles with halftime patterns. You may want to use the gradient mesh. You may want to create a far half tone effect or the multi gradient heart that we created in the last video. When you've completed your halftime project, post an image of it as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Illustrator that you didn't know before. As you're watching this class, you will have been asked if you would recommend this to others, please, if you enjoyed the class and learnt something from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. 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. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 11. Bonus Video - More Techniques to Try: This is a bonus video for the halftone effect class, because there are some other things that I wanted to show you that you can practice with yourself once you've got the basic skills. Here, I have a cloud, I'm just going to go to the Appearance panel and get into the cloud itself. You can see that the halftone effect here is predominantly cyan, it doesn't have a lot of black in it at all, and not a lot of the other colors. Well, this is why. Inside this shape, let's just remove the color halftone for now, you can see that instead of using a grayscale gradient, I used a cyan to white gradient. There are two of them here; there's one on one side, and there's one on the other side of the cloud shape. That one at the very top has its blend mode set to multiply, so that's exactly the same as we did when we were using grayscale gradients, but here, I'm using a cyan to white gradient. The result is that when I apply a color halftone to this, even though the color halftone has been created with all the channels offset from each other, so all the channels have got different values, the result is that the halftone itself is predominantly cyan in color. I have a heart here that I did a similar way. In this case, the heart has a red to white gradient, then there are two gradients in it. Let's just go into the contents here. You can see the gradients that were inside that shape, that then when I apply the color halftone to it, the color halftone itself is predominantly the color that those gradients were. If you want to force a color into your color halftone, you can do that by using a color gradient. Now, I also wanted to show you the issue with the stroke around this shape. You can't actually apply a stroke to the original shape. If you've got a heart or a circle or something, you can't apply a stroke around that shape because it just doesn't work, it gets absorbed into the halftone. What you need to do is to put your shape once you finished it inside a group. If you have a look here in the last palette here, I have a group that's only got one thing in it. All it's got in it is the cloud shape, but then I'm able to go to the group itself and I can apply a stroke to the group. You can see here, I've got a stroke that's applied to the whole group. There's no fill on it, just a stroke. The issue with that is that if you just apply a stroke, that doesn't work either, you have to actually use the outline object effect to get it to work. I'm just going to trash that for a minute so I can show you what you're going to do. Once you've applied your stroke and prove that it doesn't work even to the group, you're going to select the group and choose Effect, Path, and then Outline Object. When you outline the object, you get the outline around the object that is filled with your color halftone. I did exact the same thing here with the heart. If we have a look in the group here, there is a single path and a group. If we have a look at the appearances for the group, you'll see that there's a stroke with an outline object on it, and inside that group, is the heart with all of its halftone effect. Now, another thing that you can do is when you're creating your full halftone, as I suggested in the class, you could use different shapes. Well, here, I've not only used different shapes, but I've also colored them differently. This one down here, the first shape is colored in a dark blue, and the one at the top is colored in a light blue. My blend not only goes from one shape to another, but it's also got a color change applied throughout that blend. I thought that was something that you might like to experiment with as well. Finally, I just took one of these blends and I took it into a new document, and what I've done is applied a transformation to it. Just took a single blend and I shrunk it down in size, and the transformation that I applied to it, was to rotate it 10 degrees and to make 36 copies. I've rotated it from the bottom point here, but you can also rotate it from other places. If you rotate it from the top, you're going to get a different effect to what you get if you click on the bottom. There are other rotation points that you can potentially use that might give you interesting effects as well. Now, this could be expanded, for example, and used as a brush. There are all sort of things that you can do with these full halftone effects that you can create in Illustrator. Also, you might like a little bit of extension exercise a few things that you could also work on.