From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

674 Drawing a classic “café wall” illusion

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

674 Drawing a classic “café wall” illusion

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, we're in Illustrator by the way, wherein I am going to show you how to create a classic cafe wall illusion, so-called, because a couple of guys noticed this illusion in the tiles of a cafe wall in at the bottom of St. Michael's Hill in Bristol, England. How's that for trivia? And before that it was known as the kindergarten illusion, but whatever you want to call it, even though the lines appear to be slanting in one direction or other, they're absolutely horizontal and parallel to each other. And I know you look at this and go, no that's not true. It is. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's our final cafe wall effect, opened up inside Illustrator. We're going to start off inside this document which contains center guides and nothing more, one vertical guide and one horizontal guide right through the center of the document. Alright, I'm going to create a new layer in which to draw by switching over to the layers panel, and if you're not seeing that panel, you can go up to the window menu and choose the layers command. Do not choose the command however, if it has a check mark in front of it, because that will hide it. Then you want to drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the panel, and press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, and click on it to force the display of the layer options dialog box. And I'm going to go ahead and call this layer mortar, because it's going to serve as the mortar lines between the bricks. Alright, now I'll zoom out a little bit here, by pressing control minus or command minus on the Mac, and I'll go up to the view menu, and make sure my smart guides are turned on. In my case they're not, so I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then I'll select the line segment tool from the line tool fly out menu, and I'll go ahead and draw a horizontal line along the horizontal guide, all the way across not only the art board, but I want to draw the line from one bleed boundary to the other. Just for the sake of demonstration here, I'll crank the line weight value up here in the control panel, up to six points like so. So, notice that I have no fill associated with my line and I've got a black stroke that is six points thick. Alright, now we want to duplicate the line a few times by switching back to the black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the v key, and then you want to press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac, and because an arrow tool is selected, that brings up the move dialog box. We're looking for a horizontal value of zero, so leave that guy alone, but we want the vertical value to be set to 70 points, happens to work quite nicely, and then I'll click the copy button, in order to duplicate that line. Alright now we want to duplicate it a couple of more times, and the easiest way to do that is to press control d, or command d on the Mac, The d of course, being for duplicate, and I'm going to go ahead and create a total of five copies of this line as we're seeing here. Alright now I'll select the original line, the one through the center of the document, and I'll press the enter key again, to once again visit the move dialog box, and this time I'll change the vertical value to negative, which ironically moves the line upward, and then I will once again click on the copy button, and I'll press control d or command d on the mac, a total of five times to create five more duplicates of that horizontal line. Alright now click off the artwork to deselect it. Now we need to create some bricks, and we want them to be underneath the mortar lines, so go ahead and click on the guides layer to make it active. And then, once again, alt or option click on the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel to bring up the layer options dialog box. I'm going to go ahead and call this layer bricks, and change its color, just for the sake of contrast to gold. And then I'll click OK. Alright, now you want to grab the rectangle tool. Now just go ahead and click at the intersection of the top horizontal line and the vertical guideline in order to bring up the rectangle dialog box, and we're looking for width and height values of 70 points a piece. And then I'll click OK in order to create that rectangle. Now notice that it comes in with the stroke and no fill. I want the opposite effect, so I'll press shift x to swap the fill and stroke like so, and I end up with a black square. Now, it's kind of in the wrong location, so I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool. Notice that I've turned off my bounding box, and you want to do so as well, so go to the view menu and make sure this command right here reads show bounding box. If it says hide bounding box, then go ahead and choose it, otherwise, you can just press the escape key. And now, I'll drag this guy by his bottom right corner until it snaps into alignment with the vertical guide. So I just want to move the square to the other side of the guide, and now I want to create a bunch of copies of it by pressing the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box, and I'm going to change the horizontal value to twice the size of the square. So, 70 times two is 140 points. We want the vertical value to be zero, at which point I'll click the copy button in order to make a copy of that square, and then I'll press control d or command d on the Mac a couple of times to create some more duplicates like so. Alright, now I'll select that first guy and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the move dialog box, and I'll change the horizontal value to negative 140 this time around. The vertical value still needs to be zero, and then I'll click the copy button to create a copy of the square in the other direction, and then I'll press control d or command d on the Mac a couple more times, to create two more duplicates of that square. Alright, now I'm just going to partially marquis through the centers of all the squares like so, and I'm going to combine them together by going to the object menu and not choosing group, that's not necessary in this case, rather, I'm going to drop down to compound path and choose make in order to combine all of these squares into one big, compound path. Alright, now let's duplicate these squares by row by once again pressing the enter key or the return key on a Mac, to bring up the move dialog box. I'll change the horizontal value for now to zero points, and I'll change the vertical value to 70 points in order to knock those squares down to the next line. Now I also want to offset them to the right, and so I'm going to return to that horizontal value by pressing shift tab a couple of times, and I'll enter 70 slash two, which is going to divide 70 by two, and I'll press the tab key and that's going to knock these guys over 35 points, at which point I'll click the copy button in order to create a copy of those squares. Now we want to do that again, by pressing control d or command d on the Mac. Alright now we want to offset these guys back and forth and there's a bunch of different ways you can approach that process, but what I'm going to do is just go ahead shift click on this row of squares, and this one as well, to add them to the selection, and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the move dialog box, I'll change the horizontal value to zero, and I'll take the vertical value up to 70 times so asterisk four, and I'll press the tab key to force Illustrator to do the math, and so it figures out automatically that 70 times four is 280 points, at which point I'll click copy in order to create a copy of those squares. And now I'll just go ahead and do that again, by pressing control do or command d on the Mac. Now I don't need this last row, so I'll just go ahead and click off the shapes to deselect them, and then I'll click on any one of the squares in the bottom row to select all of them, and I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of them. And now I'll select this middle row right here and I want to duplicate it down to this position, and so I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box, I'll tab to the vertical value and enter 70 asterisk two this time around, and notice that puts the square in the right location, at which point I'll click the copy button, and now I need to do that again by pressing the enter key or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the move dialog box, and this time I'll click after the vertical value right there, and I'll enter asterisk two again, in order to multiply that value times two, and then I'll click the copy button, and you can see that that fills things out quite nicely. And in case you're wondering how I came up with those move values, all I'm doing is counting the rows and multiplying them times 70, which is both the height and the width of the squares. Alright now I'll click off the squares to deselect them, and I'll press control plus or command plus on the Mac to zoom in, and I'm going to hide the guides layer by turning off the eyeball in front of that layer here inside the layers panel. Now notice at this point, that our cafe wall effect is not working at all. All of the horizontal lines look like they are parallel, and so here's what you do to mess things up. You want to select all the lines on the mortar layer by clicking in the top right corner of that layer here inside the layers panel. You notice all the lines are now selected. And so the first thing you want to do is brighten the strokes by clicking on the stroke swatch right here and either switching to half strength so if you go from black to medium gray in which the RGB values all read 128, then you're going to get a better effect. You can even go lighter if you want to, so I'm going to switch to that swatch where all the values equal 153, and that will brighten things up, and then what you want to do is reduce the line weight from, in our case six point, to something much thinner, such as two points like so. And then if you click off the path outlines, you will see that they look much less parallel than they did before. And for what it's worth, the effect becomes even more pronounced if you zoom out slightly. So in other words, you're going to have better luck with your artwork, if it's not taking up your entire field of view. And that is how you create a classic cafe wall effect in which the horizontal lines don't appear to be exactly parallel to each other, although it's anyone's guess exactly what's going on here inside Illustrator. Now if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning I have a follow up movie, in which I show you how to skew your cafe walls, to create this kind of corner or menu, or what have you, and once again just have to trust me on this, all of the lines in the right-hand and left-hand sides of the art work are parallel to each other. Now if you like this stuff, you are going to love next week when I show you how to create what I'm calling the magical checkers illusion, which is this one right here, which just boggles the mind. All the lines, of course, are horizontal but they look like they're going down to the left at the top and then down and down and down, right? So back and forth, unless you turn the artwork upside down, in which case the whole thing flips. So now, the line is going down and to the right, and then back and forth like so. So totally different effect if the artwork is right-side up verses upside down. Deek's Techniques, each and every week! It's going to make your brain hurt.

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