How to Use the Blend Tool in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hey, guys. My name is Andrew Brooks. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator. And in this class, I'm going to teach you how to use the blend tool to add some cool effect to your time. Hope you join me. I'll see you there. 2. Trace Your Type: I asked. Thanks for joining me. Go ahead and open up, Illustrator. Opening up a new document. I've already named mine blend tool type, and I believe this is 1000 by 1000. Yeah, 1000 picks about Doc's 1000 picks. Um, and basically what you want to do you can import anything you that you want Here, as's faras type goes I like this script just because it flows easy and it's Ah, it's easy to trace now You could certainly sketch out anything that you wanted to, but as far as using this effect, this blend tal effect over type it's easy. Just Teoh follow lines. This works best this way. So that's what I would do this one. This find is called Beloved Script. All right here and you can. There's plenty of fonts that are similar to this. This is one that I purchased through a design cuts package, I believe which if you guys don't know about those, you should check him out. I think it's designed cuts dot com pretty cool anyway, so choose your type here. I'm going to zoom in. I hit command Plus to zoom McMahon minus. Zoom out and, um, then just grab your pencil switch to a color that, uh, maybe magenta or something like that. That's not quite something like that. And we're here. We are. We're just gonna We're just gonna trace this out, so just get it where it Ah, get it where it's close. You could always go back. And just these Gasol later. There we go. And so here you you need to you need to disconnect. So what you can do, You go out here and click. It's just gonna keep going. Eso if you hit command, why you have the pencil selected? If you have yet to command told and click, it's done and it frees up. How are you gonna bump this up a little bit so that we could see it. Also, I wanna mento lock this. Type them so it's locked that down. You just click on the click on the object and hit command to that locks it out. And if you want to unlock it, you hit command option to, and that unlocks it. So command two lakhs command option to unlocks and that will unlock everything that is locked. So command to will lock that only what is selected. So go back to our pin tool. Well, we will go over here. Let's redo that. It had the right color selected pinto. Just Tracy's out. Remember? You can always come back later and ah, and adjust these and it doesn't have to be perfect. We don't have. We don't have to have the same. Um, we don't have to have the same exact lines that this fall has. Let's see, Click that gets rid of one. Do the do the P command click. We'll start right back in here somewhere. There we go again. These do not have to be perfect. And what I like to do is I like to extend up into that letter a little bit. So you wanna pull up in here and then the you'll trace over that, um, command click, so we'll start right here, e and finish it off. Command click. That gets rid of it. Now, you can go back in here and, um, adjust any of these that you want to. So if you wanted Teoh, bring that down a little bit. I'm going to trace as good as best as I can, just for the sake of this video. And for the sake of speed, I'm not looking for perfection here. I'm more of just looking to show you the effect was that Spend a lot more time on this. If I was doing it for real, Just all you do is grab these thinker points or their handles to move them. The handles will move the curve. The anchor point will move where the curve is located. That's pretty good. All right, So next I will show you how Teoh to make some Grady INTs. 3. Gradients: Alright, guys. So we're about to add the Grady into our type now. I wanted to show you this first. This is called grabby in dot com. Maybe it's great being dot com. I think it's a grabbing either way. Right here. Grab it dot com Do you are a b ie anti dot com and it's got a lot of great aunt Ear. It's pretty cool. Saw this feature on dribble a few weeks ago, maybe, and it's really cool. Now, I'm not going to use one of these. I have used some of these before. I just wanted to show you this while we're talking about great and so a lot of cool options . This is sort of kind of what we're gonna go with over here, but I'll show you. So you know, I check that out, use that Grady INTs or are pretty awesome. So back to our document. What we're gonna do now is just grab. Just grab a circle and want to feel it. Give it feel Take the stroke away. Now we're going to give this a Grady in, So go over here to your radiant windows right here. So if you don't see this over here in your tool panel, you can go appear to window. You go to Grady in right here. See, that made mine disappear. Was already showing. So anyway, I'm gonna just drag this out here while we have it, and then I'm also going to pull up. Must watches. Actually, I'm gonna put that right back down in there. I'll just open that window. So we're gonna add a linear. Great. And I got a select ma GIC. First, we're gonna add a linear. Great it, Grady. And not to the stroke. You see it put the stroking because I had this add this up front. So we're going to switch that and we're going to kill the stroke. So you see, now that it has a linear graded and Grady in there Sorry. Can't talk all of a sudden, and we're gonna gov We're gonna give this like, uh, Let's go. Negative 1 35 Have the lighter end up top. Um, actually, you know what? Let's see. Let's go. Yes, but negative 45. I like that. You can certainly do whatever angry that you want, and then all I'm going to do now is you can do tons of different colors. Obviously, whatever you want, I'm going to go with a with this deep blue here, the Navy blue, um, actually wanna go this navy blue, and then I'm just gonna add in this magenta. And so then obviously you can You can adjust your little slaughter here in the Grady int window. You can adjust that toe. How you want this, Grady in tow. Look, um, I like it about 50% there. And then what you're gonna do is I'm gonna make these smaller. And, um, you'll see why here in this second of shape, But just just when you do that, the way that I did that to scale is just grab a corner here, hold shift, and it keeps it. It keeps it in scale in proportion. What have you say? That if you just If you don't hold shift, you lose risk squashing it like that. It's stretching it. Someone undo that. Um, And if you hold Ault while you shift, it sizes from the center. That's just a little extra nugget there. So if you hold shift, it'll take it from the corner. The opposite corners where it will scale from. And then if you hold all, it was a little scale from the middle from the center. So then what we're gonna do is we're going, Teoh, hold all and click shift and drag it. So all and all is copying it. Shift is keeping it straight. So you just have two copies here. Now, this is where we get into the blend tool. So select both of those. Go up here to object, down to blend and make. All right. So you see, now it's it. It's made a blend of these of these two object. Now they're the same. And so it looks like the same thing over and over and over again. Now, I want you to go back up here to object and blend the blend. Tal is so cool. So go to blend options. This is where it gets fun. Turn your preview on right here, and you can do specified distance specified steps. Smooth color. I use specified steps and special about distance the most. And in this one, I'm gonna use specified distance. Now you see you're seeing here. If you look closely, you can see the lines through here so I'm gonna go Teoh one pixel. Smooth it out A little bit. Hit. Okay, now I want to make a I'm actually gonna make these a little bit smaller. That won't change anything right here. It just makes it smaller. Then I'm gonna make several copies because we're gonna be using this several times and you'll see. 4. Blend Effect: I guess so. Now we are about to apply this these Grady in these blended Grady INTs to our text. And so this is really easy. And it makes a really cool effect. So we're gonna dio, um, just drag when he's down, you don't have to drag it down. Just makes a little easy. So I want you to select both of these. Then you're gonna go up here back to object back to the blend, tal, and you're going to replace Spahn. When you do that, you're blend now replaces you're outlined. Type now, your outline type there, your lines that they have to be passed. They have to be live past. You can't do this off of a with You can't do this with, um, like, just regular shapes. Not this effect. Obviously. The blend Tulcan work a tone of voice, and we'll show you a few ways here later. But you got to make sure that you're using ah, path a stroke path to do this. Um, so we're just gonna repeat this process a couple of times that one selected, I'm gonna hold shift and select the why I'm going to go back. I'm gonna do the same thing to blend. Replace spine. We're going to do it to pee right here. Object blend. Replace spot. Grow appearing. Grab a couple more. Click the P quick your blend. Object bland. Replace Spahn and you go to your e. Click your blend Goto object blend. Replace Spahn. Now you see? Hit this really cool type effect. It's got this, like three D bubble. You could do some balloon kind of effects with this. It's really cool. Now, a couple of things. If you could rearrange some of these, um, I want to show you how you can adjust your color and how the the Grady it lays out there, here. So basically, with your blend you have. Remember, back when we took the two circles that regret it, that had radiance in them. They were the same thing way took a copy of one and drug it over. And so that is here and here. So if you double click and go into isolation mode, you can select these two guys and this whole thing right here this whole tea is a blend of these two circles. So what you can do is you go in here and twist one of these, and it immediately changes the way that these blended together. So if you didn't quite want the the peak, that magenta up here and you could totally wrap it, you know, and put it on top. So you just work with a little bit. Get how you want it actually like how this one did with the first time. Um, sometimes I have to go in there and change it. But you can do that with all of these. Something else, too, if you want to move. If you wanted this to kind of go the end of this why you wanted it to go behind the P. Well, then just bring this p up to the front. Oh, the senate to the back. The way that I did that was I clicked. Both of those I did. Command shift, right bracket left bracket sends it to the back. Right bracket, sends it to the front. That's command shift right bracket to bring it to the front. So I want to e to do the same thing. Um and so I'm gonna bring that to the front command shift. Right bracket that looks kind of funny right here. And I could certainly go in and fix that. Um, but honestly, I kind of like it, so that is simple. That's how you that's how you add blend to type or to anything. Um, you could This doesn't have to be typed. This could be anything to get this effect. This could be swirls or, um, scribble. I mean, it could be anything that you apply this effect too. 5. Bonus: so, guys, Thanks for thanks for going through that class with me. I wanted to show you a few more blend tool tricks that I personally have figured out. I had to learn these on my own. You conduce. You can use the blend tool for a lot of different things. Um, I'm gonna just, uh We'll turn this back into a regular color. Know what? Let's grab its drive me crazy. So we're gonna grab saying colder over here. Um, that complements with that type up there. So I had a circle here. Now I'm gonna go over here and I'm going to, uh, longer have a star. I'm not trying to make anything pretty here. I am simply just showing you how this works. Do you could drag these over here. Let's do the same thing we did before. So select both of them, go to object, blend and make. And you see you have, like, this progression. Are this weird, weird couple stars. But if you if you wanted, if you wanted to maybe around these off. But you didn't. You didn't want to use the, um, like the life corners tool. And you you couldn't quite can't quite your all. What? You wanted to use this for a rounded off star? Like a childish looking star? Um, that's what I would have done. Um, let's do something else. So maybe you want, um Let's see. Let's do two rectangles. I'm experimenting here as we go. So you wanted to blend these two jokers right here? You know what? Let's even make this a different color, just like we have appear. Just like both of goto object Blend, mate, check that out. That's pretty cool. Um, so you can You can do a lot of different things there. And now remember, that is also see here. Oh, blend. My mind went blank for second. So you go to your blend tool and then blend options and play with that a little bit. So you had this its own smooth color. We may want some specified steps. It's at 1 97 right now. You started bumping that down, you'll start seeing check that out. So it's starting to give you some swatches and different shapes. You can also turn these in. If you had a circle, let me show you that this was unplanned. I just wanted to show you guess and different options. We're going to turn this into a stroke, and then let's bring the star back out. You could do a cool badge with this. Um, So what's let's make that blue Make that the Blue Star? Turn that stroke off? Let's drag it over. Blend these together, make. All right. So now we have this blended stars a bunch of different stars. We're going to replace the spine on this circle to better blend replaced spine. And now you have this cool star effect going around here. Now, you see that it doesn't go all the way around. We need to clip this circle. Honestly, I don't really know why. Um just had to figure this out. And so what we're gonna do right here is to grab your scissors tool and that lives under the eraser. Eso just if right here. Oh, if we said if you see eraser, just click and hold and grab your scissors tool. And then you were just click this top point up here and I usually get filled It it filled it in again. I don't know. Why does that? Um, that's just I guess my lack of knowledge when it comes to illustrator and not knowing everything. But, yeah, that's what you got to do to make it go around. So now say you wanted all these stars to point towards the centre, we'll go back to object, blend, blend options and right here, or it has specified steps, which is what you're currently only You have 35 just hit this aligned to path and all of a sudden these yes, point pointed. So you get this nice, just nice effect that you could easily put around a badge. I mean, we could easily just go and third this joker up there put it in the back. Now, I'm not saying that looks good, but you see what I mean You can add you could easily add stuff to it. Now, the very last thing that I want to show you is creating your custom. Your own Grady INTs. You saw that there a second ago, but a lot of times I'll go over here and argue, I'll use this color God, and it just doesn't quite have the colors that I want. And so what I'll do is I will grab. I'll grab a circle and just give it a give a fill. Oh, I don't know Why Didn't give it a feel? There we go. Dragged us over and say I wanted something. I wanted something in between. Why is that? Not working every house clicking their own thing. I wanted a color somewhere in between these two. Or you know what? This is driving me crazy. Let's do that. So I wanted to color to complement this up here, so I'm gonna go toe bland object blend make. Now, you see, it's given this radiant so we could do this one of two ways. I'll leave this one here. Would option shift dragged down. And I'm gonna edit this one to show you multiple steps, So blend blend options. Right now, this one here is on smooth color. Both of these really smooth color. I want this one to give me certain steps. 1 97 That's a lot. So we're just gonna bump this down? Say you wanted 10 different options. We'll just throw 10 in there. Now you see it? Now it's giving me. It has giving me a Grady in. Broken down in the swatches of saying was aiming for this color right here. Boil. Let me Let me just grab my eyedropper tool and I'll go down here and I'll sample this color . And look there. Now you have your own custom color that you that you picked out of this. You created this? It wasn't a swatch, it wasn't anything. You created your own color. Now you could have gone and found that. But if you wanted something that that would work with these two colors make a blend making Grady int make specified steps that followed that blend. And there you have you your own color. I use the blend tool mostly for this. I get all my custom colors from this I love using that. Um there may be some other methods to doing that, but this is I have found that this is very effective for May. So if you guys enjoyed this class and I really hope that you learned some blend tool tips, you can go a lot further in depth with the blend tool. But you guys have some fun and I can't see you. I can't wait to see what you create. Thanks fast