Layered Paper Style Collage in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Dimensional Paper Collage Effect Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create a Layered Paper-style Collage in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at Creating a Layered Paper Collage Effect in Illustrator. We'll start by drawing our shapes, then we'll apply a range of effects to the shapes to give it the impression of being layered elements. We'll use the Appearance panel and our own graphic styles. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now let's get started creating a layered paper collage effect in Illustrator. 2. Dimensional Paper Collage Effect - Part 1: To get started on App Hyper Collage, I'm going to create a new document and it's going to be 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, just a large square document, RGB color mode. I'll click "Okay". Now, I'm going to add a background to my documents. I have some colors to work with. I'm going to click on the "Rectangle Tool", and I'm going to click once on "My Document" and make a rectangle that's 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. In other words, it's the exact same size as my out board. I'm going to the Align Tools. Anytime you don't see your tools in this panel, here just choose Window and then the tool name, in this case that would be Window and then align. When you've got the panel open, I'm clicking to show options. I want to align to the out board. I'm going to click to align this rectangle to the out board. Now, I'm going to fill it with a color, got my default colors here. I'm going to double-click on the "Fill color" I have a color I really want to use. Now, I don't normally use specific colors, but I've tried this a few times and I really just loved this color and I want to be able to use it rather than going for something that's almost it but not quite. The color I'm using is 00A79D. Anything in that color range looks pretty good with the color paper that we are using, so this is our color. I'm also going to take the stroke off this rectangle. Here in the layers panel, I'm just going to open this layer up and I'm going to lock the background down. That means we can work around this and we're not going to move it by accident. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to build my clouds up on this new layer. I'm going to the Circle Tool or the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle to move it, I'm just holding the space bar as I draw it out, and then continue to size it, let it go. Now, I've got my color here, so I'm just going to change that to white. I need three copies of this so I'm going to the selection tool, going to Alt, drag a duplicate away, hold the Shift key as I scale it down, and this one's going over here. I'll drag again, hold the Shift key to scale it down a little bit. I think I went too far there. This one's going here and Alt drag again for one final circle shape. If you ever want to make a cloud, that's the simplest way to make a recognizable cloud. Four circles each one smaller than the one before, and just arrange them with the largest, second largest, third largest, fourth largest and you've got yourself a cloud. We're going to apply a bent paper effect to the shade. I'm going to start with the biggest one because it's nice and big. I'm going to fill it with a gradient. I'm just clicking here on the gradient and my gradient panels opened up automatically if yours doesn't just go and get it. We've got a white to black gradient. It's a linear, it's running across this shape. I'm going to turn it around. It's running at something like to I think 45 degrees for this one. It's running in on this angle. White on this side, and black on this side. Now, I want it to be lighter on this side, so what I'm going to do is double-click on the "Black Gradient Slider" so I can change the color. If you're not seeing the black slider here just open up this panel here and choose Grayscale, it's just easiest to pick a shade of gray when you've only got one slider to work with. I'm going to bring this across and just test it. Because I'd like it, get it pretty near right at this point. Darker gray here, white here. Just going to click back in a panel withing the white over the top here because the shapes are on top of this one. Now, let's go to the stroke and I'm going to apply a gradient to the stroke. However, if you happen to be using Illustrator CS4 or earlier, you can't put a gradient on a stroke, it's just not a feature of Illustrator CS4. We're going to add a video at the very end that will show you a workaround for this, but just be aware of that limitation. If you're using Illustrator CS5 or later, then you're all right, you can put a gradient on a stroke. What we've got with this gradient now is we've got a linear gradient on our stroke around the edge of this shape and it's running white on this side, or mid gray on the other side. While the colors are pretty good, the angle of the gradient is not. I want it to be dark here and light here, so what I need to do is to turn it around, and so I'm going to rotate it to minus 135 so that it works in the opposite way to the other gradient. It's light where the other gradient was dark and it's dark where the other gradient was light. Also going back to this shape because I want to make the stroke a little bit less intense. So let's open up at the appearance panel. I'm going to make sure I've got my shapes selected. I'm going to kick up my stroke to around two or three pixels because I want it to be a little bit wider, a little bit more obvious. I'm having a little bit of difficulty seeing it because of the red line around this shape, we can temporarily get rid of that by choosing View and then Hide Edges. We still go to our handles, but we've hidden the edges. At this point I'm going to open up the stroke area here. This is a little triangle, it just flips open and this is the opacity setting for the stroke, has nothing to do with the fill. We just want to adjust the opacity of the stroke, so I'm just going to reduce that opacity just to blend that in a little bit. Just to be clear, this is the opacity that goes with the stroke. The fill has its own opacity as well and then there is an opacity for the entire shape, the combination of fill and stroke. Now, before we go further, we're going to put a drop shadow on this. To do this, we'll choose Effect and then Stylize, and then Drop Shadow. I'll turn preview on so I can see what it looks like. At the moment the drop shadow is out over the bottom right of the shape. I want to put it here over the bottom left, which means I need to just the x-offset and I need to reduce it, and that will move it over to this other side of the shape. I also want to slightly increase the y-offset and I'm just using minus 12 and 12 and that's just putting it down here in the bottom corner of the shape. I think the opacity is a little bit too much, so I'm going to wind down the opacity. I'm taking mine down to around 40 percent and I'll just click "Okay". There is the first of our shapes. If you want to work a little bit on the gradients, perhaps get a little bit more intense a gradient, you can do so, all you need to do is to select the shapes, select the gradient you want to effect. I'm actually going to tweak this one here, the fill one, open up the gradient panel and then tweak it. I'm just going to make it a slightly darker color here. You can continue to work until you've got the shape that you want the effect attached to the shape that you want to use. Now, we want to put this exact same effect on these other shapes, and the easiest and quickest way to do that is to create, this as a graphic style. I'm going over here to the graphic styles panel. Again, choose Window graphic styles if you're not seeing it. I can just pick up this shape and drag and drop it into the graphic styles panel. Of course, the shape doesn't end up in the panel, but what ends up in the panel is the style, the definition of what we just applied to this circle. Now, we can go and select these other circles. I'm just clicking on one and then shift clicking on the other two, and then I'm going to click here on the "Graphic Style" and they immediately have that same graphic style applied to them. Now, I want to second set of cloud, so I'm going to select over all of these shapes and I'll drag a second set of clouds out of the way. Now, they're going to be placed in a little bit differently later on, but for now, I'm just going to take them up in the top corner. We've created our clouds. I'm going to add a new layer so that we can continue in the next video and put together our sailing ship. 3. Dimensional Paper Collage Effect - Part 2: For small sailing boat or yacht we're going to start off with an ellipse. I'm also going to raise it to the default. So I'm just going to press the letter 'D' to go back to our default colors and I'm going to the Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag out a long, shallow ellipse. This is going to be the hull of the sailing boat. I'm going back to the shapes tool this time I'm going to drag out a rectangle, it's going to be larger than the ellipse, and it's just going to cover the top part of the ellipse, I'm going to move it down because what I'm trying to eyeball at this point is the portion of the ellipse that is not covered by the rectangle, because what I'm going to do is use the rectangle to cut off the top of the ellipse. I'll do that by selecting either both of the shapes and I'm going to the Pathfinder again, window, Pathfinder if it's not visible. I'm going to choose minus front, and that just cuts the rectangle away and the portion of the ellipse was under the rectangle is gone too. So there's the sailing boat hull, I can apply a style to it by going to the Styles Panel and just click on this, this might need a little bit of tweaking later on but I'm just going to leave it as it is for now and I'm going to start with the sails. The sails are triangles, so I'm clicking on the polygon tool, clicking on the document, setting the sides to three, just ignore and use whatever radius value you have because you're going to need to make changes to it. I'm going to make it a lot longer here and a lot wider. Right now what I've got is what's called an isosceles triangle, this side and this side are identical. What I want is a right angled triangle so I only want half of this triangle effectively. There are a few ways of getting rid of the half I don't want, but let's look at this way. I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm just going to select either this point here. I can't see the points clearly because I have show edges disabled, so I'm just going to click on show edges. I'm also saying a pale green here which is not really helping me visualize what's happening. The reason why the surrounds to this shape are green is because the layer is colored green, I'll double-click on it here, I can choose a different color like brick red for it. Now all of these points and all of these lines of brick red. Of course this has nothing to do with the final document, it's just all about making it easy for me to see what I'm working with. I have the direct selection tool I've selected on this point here, I'm holding the shift key to constrain the movement in the horizontal direction and I am just taking this back until I see that intersect icon. Now I have a right angle triangle and that's going to be my sail, now I can make it a little bit longer and it wants to be attached to this yacht somewhere a little bit forward of the mid point. For those people who are yachts people, they will know that that's pretty good and they will also know that probably needs to be a bit taller and a bit longer. Let's give it a really big sail here, there is our sail. Again, we're going to need to do some work on the gradient and everything but we've got the first sail. Going back to create a second one, so again, I'm just going to make a three-sided figure, I don't mind how big it is because I'm going to be pushing it out of alignment. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to make it a lot taller and a lot wider. Again, I just want half of this shape so again, I'm going through the direct selection tool, select either this anchor point here, just make sure you've got it and start dragging it in, hold down the Shift key to constrain its movement, then you can go ahead and re-size it to make it this front sail. Now as a front sail, it would be good if we rotated at slightly because we wanted to just touch this back sail about here but we also want to below at the front to give us a, some feeling that this boat is actually traveling along and not stationary. So I'm going through direct selection tool, I'm going to click on this point here. Right now it's a sharp point, I'm going to click up here to convert it to a smooth point, then I'm just going to adjust this slide as to just below it out but not have it below down. Now it's perfectly acceptable for this sail to be over the hull of the yacht or you can leave it so it's not over the hull of the yacht, whatever suits you. At this point the shapes have inherited some of the characteristics of the clouds but not all of them. What I'm going to do is select all the shapes and let's go to the graphic styles panel and click on this graphic style. So we're saying what our starting point is for the shapes, I think that they are going to look better if the arrangement of the gradient is a little bit different. So I'm going to select this shape, I'm going to its appearance panel, I'm going to click on the fill here and then I'm going to its gradient, and this is independent of the gradients up here. So I'm going to swing this gradient round to probably 60 to graze and I'm going to dark and just a little bit. I'm also a little bit concerned about the stroke outline, I'm going to go to the stroke. I'm just going to check where it is on the shape, the moment that it's aligned to the center, I think I'll align it to the inside and just see how that looks. Well that wasn't very happy at all so let's put it back on the center, let's reduce the widths of it and perhaps also reduce the opacity so it blends in a little bit more. I don't want to see the line quiet is obviously here as I saw it on the clouds. I think that's a little bit better. Now, I can take this now and create this as a style. I'm going to open the graphic styles panel and a drag and drop this up and if I wanted to, I could also double-click on this and I could call this yacht. So that we've been clear that this graphic style belongs to the yacht, you can double-click on this one and make this clouds. I just applied it to the yacht at the same time so let's go and re-select the yacht and let's apply the yacht effects to the yacht itself. I think I'm just going to shorten this a little bit, I think it will look better a little bit shorter. Now we've got our clouds and our boat, if you want to tweak it, you can do so. You just pick up any of these elements, just go and tweak whatever it is that you want to do and then re-save it as a graphic style, you want to remove the old one and then you can just go ahead and apply it to your shapes. I think I'm going to lighten this one a little bit, but I'm going to do that and then come back in the last video and I'm going to show you how to make the wonderful sea. 4. Dimensional Paper Collage Effect - Part 3: Now at the end of the last video, I suggested to you that I was going to do a little bit of work on the yacht. I'm just going to show you what I ended up doing. So I have the yacht selected, I've got its fill gradient selected. It's going to open up the gradient panel here. What I did was I double clicked on this and just lighten this a little bit, I thought it was a little bit dark. But the other thing that I did was this little indicator here is typically set at a location of 50 percent. Let's go and put it back where it belongs. What this does is, it tells you the point at which the gradient transitions from white to this color here, and it's typically in the very middle of the gradient. So it's white here and dark gray there, and at this point it's 50 percent transformed from one to the other. Well, what I did was I pulled this back. What I wanted was a little bit more coal in the top of the sails here. I wanted the transition from dark to 50 percent of the distance between these two colors to be steeper. So I've got a bit more bend in the top of the sails by just adjusting this here. Now I'm just going to cancel out of that because I went ahead then and styled that as a graphic style, so, that's the only change that I made in the interval between recording the last video and this one. Now we're going to make the waves, and this is really fun, so, I'm just going to move this up board out of the way, which I do by holding the space bar as I just drag it out of the way. I'm going to the Pencil Tool, going to select "Day For My Default Colors" as well, and I'm going to turn off the fill, so, I just have a stroke. Double click the Pencil Tool, and I'm going to adjust the fidelity up to smooth. We want Illustrator to smooth everything out, and I'm just going to leave on Keep Selected and click ''Okay''. What I'm going to do next is, I'm going to draw three waves. Waves are going to come up, they're going to curl over at the top and come back down. I'm going to make three of them all in a row. Now, I'm drawing with a mouse just to prove that you can do these by drawing with the mouse. You don't want to be too critical of the shapes that you're making, as much as that one was pretty awful. The reason why I suggest that you make three shapes is that, one of them is probably going to be fine. I'm going to work with the middle one here. I'm going to get the Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to take out everything that belongs to these others. I'm just going to take out this piece. I'm going to leave in this anchor point because that's going to be my starting anchor point. I'm going to leave in this anchor point, but I'm going to work on it in a minute, so, let's just take out this. Now if you want to draw this using the pen tool or something else, go right ahead, but for those people who absolutely hate the pen tool, this is the quickest way of getting awesome waves. I want it pointing here. I think I want to get rid of the very end once I'm going to the Pen Tool, and then add Anchor Point part of the Pen Tool, so, that's here, Add Anchor Point, I've just added an anchor point on that line, which allows me to get rid of the one at the very tip. Let's zoom in and see what we've got. We've got a wave. I'm looking at this and I'm thinking I probably don't even need that endpoint, so, I'm just going to get rid of that and I'm just going to leave myself this point as the starting one and this at the end. I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool, I'm going to click on that "Anchor Point" to select it, I'm going to shift Click on this one to select it. So the only things that are selected are these two end anchor points, Object, Path, Average, and I'm going to click ''Horizontal'' and then click ''Okay''. What Illustrator does is, moves these two anchor points so that they're in the average of their previous position, so, now they're on the exact same line. This one is going to need to be just a little bit tweaked to keep up the curve of my wave, but this one, and this one, are on the exact same line. Next up, I just want to extend this shapes. I want to give it a base and I'm going to do that using the pen tool because it's really easy to do. I'm going to click over the starting point of this line. When I say the word anchor, I'm just going to click once, and hold the Shift key as I just drag down, and I'm going to click and hold the Shift key as I drag across. Now, I can come in under this point here, I can come in short of it, or I can come in long of it, and [inaudible] do long of it. I'm going to click there and then click back here. What I've got now is a closed shape, and this is going to be our wave. I'm actually going to apply our graphic style to it. I'm going to select the wave and let's just go and get the graphic style. Now, I'm going to use the one that we used on the art side. Now let's move this back onto our art board. Control zero to bring back the art board. Let's just go and get our shape and put it down here. At this point we can scale it because it might be too big or too small. I'm just going to position it so it is over the edge of the art board here. So this is pretty good. Now with the shape selected, I'm going to repeat it all the way across. I'm going to choose "Effect", "Distort" and "Transform", and then Transform. I'm going to click on ''Preview'' and I'm going to move it across, so, I'm going to increase the horizontal value. Next up, I'm going to increase the number of copies. So I want my copies to go all the way across my document and a little bit further. At this point, I'm just checking to see what the gaps are like, they're a little bit wide, so, I'm just going to bring them back, and I'll click ''Okay''. I want two rows of waves. All the waves are associated with this single wave here,so, any changes we make to this wave, will affect all of them. By selecting on this one, we can also make a second row. To do that, we'll choose "Effect", "Distort" and "Transform", and then "Transform". We are going to apply a brand new effect, we're not altering the one we already have. Turn preview on. I want one copy this time, and I want it to be up above the last one. So I'm just going to decrease the vertical value, and when I do that, you can see it's moved above the last log of waves. I'm going to increase the horizontal value, so, we move it across so that these waves fill in the gap between the previous set of waves. Then if I'm happy, I can just click ''Okay''. But everything is still associated with this one wave, so, if I want my waves to be a little bit wider, I can do so. All I do is adjust this wave and then all the other waves become a little bit wider. With this wave selected, if we go to the appearance panel, we can also change the transformations. The bottom one is the last one that we did, so, that's the creation of this back row. I want to just decrease the vertical a little bit more, but I want to do that with the preview turned on, so, I can see what's happening. I actually quite like that and I'm not worried about the base showing through at this stage. I'm thinking that's pretty good, so, I'll click ''Okay''. If I want to change the original transformation, well I just click on ''Turn Preview On'', and then I can increase or decrease the horizontal if I wish. Just going to increase it a little bit, so, I get to tweak the shapes. But again, this is still a single shape, so, if I want to close in these gaps, all I have to do, is change the base on this shape. To do that, I'm going to the Direct Selection tool, click ''Away From This Shape'' and then I'm going to select over just the bottom portion of it, and I need to make sure that I've got that selected, so that when I drag it, only the bottom portion moves. If the whole shape moves, just start over again until you get it right. I'm just going to pull this down holding the Shift key, so that I'm constraining the movement, and when I do that, you can say that, this shape is bigger, or [inaudible] shapes the biggest, so, two are the ones behind, and so, everything now looks a whole lot better. I'm going to work a little bit on the gradient on the shapes, and I'm going to go ahead and show you how to put the boat between the waves. 5. Dimensional Paper Collage Effect Part 4: If I want to adjust the look of the waves, I'm just going to select this one shape because it's controlling all the other waves. I can look at its fill and I can adjust, for example, the gradient fill on this particular shape. I may want to rotate it. I might want to try say, 45 degrees on that and see if that's giving me a better effect, and perhaps lighten it just a little bit. But you won't want to go on to the next step until you're happy with your waves. You really want to look at your waves and say, "Okay, that's the way I want them to look," because the next step we're going to actually break them apart. With this shape selected, I'm going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance. What that does, if we have a look in the last panel, is that it just does exactly what we would want it to do and nothing more. I'm just opening up the last panel here, and this is this group of waves. If I open up the group inside it are two subgroups. One of them is edge bank of waves. There's the front waves and here the back waves. They're in groups, so they're all kept together. All I need to do is to break these two groups out of this group here. I'm going to select this group, click on it, so that I've got all the objects in it selected. I'm going to choose Object, Ungroup. But I'm going to do it once, because I want these two panels of waves to be kept separate. Because they're separate, I can put my boat in between them. Here are the paths for my boat. Three paths here. I seem to have one path that I didn't think I had. Let's just take these three and let's put the boat between the waves. I've got an extra path which is a nothing, so I'm just going to trash it. Now if we wanted to, we could move our waves up. Let's go and get our two groups of waves. Choose one group and shift-click on the second group of waves and we can just move them up further into the image. We can also go and grab the boat. Grab all three pieces of the boat, select all three of them, but not the waves, and we can move our boat into the waves. To finish off our illustration, I'm going to go out and grab this set of clouds. I'm just going to grab over them and I'm going to move them down a little bit ahead of the boat. I'm going to grab this set of clouds and just move them over here a little bit. Now we want to clean up the art board and we're going to do that very simply with a clipping mask. I'm going to grab the Rectangle Tool click once, make a rectangle, that is a 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels because that's how big my art board is. It looks like it's appeared here on layer 2. Let's go and move it all the way up to the top of layer 3. Let's make it centered on the art board so it's in front of everything. I'm going to select everything on layer 3, which are all the elements that are over the edge of the art board. I don't need to do anything with the clouds because they were within the art board. I don't need to do anything with the background because it was already limited to the art board. It's these elements that need to be clipped. With all of them selected, I'm going to right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask. The filled shape disappears because all it was doing was being a clipping mask. This is my final illustration. Your project for this class is going to be to create something like this, a sort paper collage. Feel free to use the exact same elements as I've used here and go ahead and make your waves and your clouds and your yacht. Post your finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about graphic styles, about dimensional shapes, and also about using Repeat and Transform in Illustrator. As you're working through these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying this class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 6. Backgrounds for Your Art CS4 Extra: This is an additional video for anybody who is using illustrated CS4 or earlier. The reason for this is that an illustrator CS4 you're not able to apply a gradient fill to a stroke, so you'll need to use a workaround. I've just got my clouds here. These are just four circles, each of which has the default appearance on them. So they just have a black stroke and a white fill. I'm going to concentrate on this larger circle, first of all. I'm going to give it a larger stroke. We won't be able to adjust this very much later on. So you probably will need to get a fairly good grip on how big a stroke you need before you start. I'm not going to apply the gradients to this at this stage, I'm just selecting my white filled black stroked circle, and I'll choose object and then expand and then click "Okay", and then I'll choose object ungroup. Let's go to the last panel which has taken a walk. So let's just go and get it. In the last panel I've got here a black stroke outline and the white filled circle and the black stroke outline, if I just select on that, you'll see that it's actually a filled shape. What we've done is we've taken the black stroke and made it a shape which is like a really thin doughnut. It's got a hole in the middle. This is all a hole in the middle and it's got a little outside edge. In fact, let me just drag it away so you can see what it looks like, just like that. Going to press undo twice to put it back where it came from. Now in the last panel we can select this shape, and because it is a filled shape, we can apply a gradient to it. I'm going to rotate this gradient to minus 135. Now I'm going into the ellipse, which is the central portion, and I'm going to apply a gradient to eat, and we want that gradient to be at about 45 degrees. That we want to apply it to the inside, not the outside. In fact, we don't want it to have any stroke at all. Now let me just make sure that I applied this correctly to this one which I didn't. So no stroke, but it does have a gradient fill. In fact, if you were in Illustrated says, for you wouldn't have been able to do what I just did by mistake. So what you'll need to do for each of these shapes that you'll need to break them apart and then fill the center part with your gradient and then the outer part with the gradient that you would have applied otherwise on the stroke. Now, this gradient, the one on the outside shape will probably need to be reduced and opacity. So you want to come into the appearance panel and just knock down the capacity on that fill, otherwise it's going to be too much. Then you'll go back to your large shape, which is this large ellipse here, and you're going to apply your drop shadow effect to it. Effect stylized drop shadow. We're going to turn that on. Here is our minus 12 plus 12, 40 percent drop shadow. So you're able to get a similar look to your shapes, but you're going to need to deal with each individual shape as two shapes. Now for the waves down the bottom, you possibly could fudge it and not even use a stroke, but you'll need to make a decision about that yourselves. So there is your workaround for Illustrated CS4 and earlier, which is to basically take a shape and split it into two actual objects so that you can fill those with your gradients. If you encounter any problems, just let me know in the community area and I'll try and help. 7. Recoloring the Paper - Bonus Video: This is an add on video because one of my students asked me, how they would go ahead with making these pieces of paper of solid color rather than white, for example. Let's see how we do that. I'm going to select either this shape, and I want to be able to say my appearance panel because that's where we're going to be working. If you don't see your appearance panel, choose Window and then select Appearance and what we're going to do in here is we're going to add another filter to the shapes, so you are going to select your shape and I'm going to click on Add New Fill and then you're going to select a color for your fill. In this case, I'm going to go for a darker version of the color that we're using here. I'm going to use this color here and I'm just going to double-click on it and make it even a little bit darker. This is going to be my color, but right now it is a solid color, it doesn't have any dimensionality to it. Well, with the shape still selected, I'm going to drag this fill below the other fill. Now I have my white to gray gradient on top and my blue fill on the bottom and now we don't see the fill. So we've gone from being able to say a flat color to now saying the dimensions but no color. At this point we're going to select on this fill here. This is the one that contains that gradient and it contains the secret to what we're going to do next. With it turned on, you're going to open its little triangles off. It's closed up like this, just click to open it and click on the word Opacity and turn the opacity from normal into multiply and now you get this darkening effect. Now there's a couple of opacities here well actually, there's more than a couple dozen opacity for every single one of these fills and strokes and then there's an overall opacity for the shape. The one you want is the one that belongs to this fill because you just want to change the opacity. Well, in actual fact, they blend mode for the gradient fill, not for all of them and so let's go and do it that again, we're going to select this shape. It's got just the gradient applied to, we're going to add a new fill. I'm going to select a fill color to use. So we're going back to this sort of color that we're using here, I'm going to dark in it a little bit. Now we're going to move the fill below the gradient fill so that now always saying is a gradient fill. We're going back to the gradient fill, we're going to open up its little disclosure triangle here we're going to click on the word Opacity for this gradient fill and we're just going to set it to multiply and then we are getting the dimensionality on days individual shapes. That's how I would go ahead and apply color to my shape so that you can get a color paper effect should you wish to do so. I hope that this has been of some help to not only the person who asked the question, but also to anybody else who's interested.