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

675 Skewing your crazy café walls in Illustrator

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

675 Skewing your crazy café walls in Illustrator

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take that cafe wall effect in which these horizontal lines don't necessarily appear to be altogether parallel to each other, and we're going to actually slant those lines, and even though they still remain parallel to each other, they look more catawumpus than ever. And we're going to do so with the help of a tile pattern. And so the first thing I'm going to do is select everything inside this artwork by going into the Select menu and choosing the All command. Or of course you could just press Control + A or Command + A on the Mac. And then we'll go up to the Objects menu, choose Pattern, and choose Make in order to switch over to the pattern editing mode. Now, if you get this alert message that tells you that a new swatch has been added to the swatches panel, all you have to do is click OK. All right, now what we need to do is zoom out a little bit so we can better see what's going on. And notice, as evidenced by the fact that we're seeing three by three copies. And I'm just going to go ahead and move this panel upward so that we can see all these options down here at the bottom. We can see exactly how this pattern is going to repeat, which is to say not well. These squares are way too far away. And so what you want to do is change this width value right here to a multiple of 70 points, because after all, every one of these squares is 70 points wide. And the best multiple for our purposes is going to be 700. So just 70 times 10. Notice that the height is set to 702, in my case, anyway, even though the height of every one of these squares is 70 points, once again. And as a result, notice if you look closely here that this stroke down here at the bottom and up here at the top is getting thicker, and that's because it's getting repeated slightly. And so what you want to do is click on that height value and press the down arrow key a couple of times to take it down to 700 points, as well, at which point everything looks absolutely great. And now I'm going to name this pattern cafe wall, and then what you want to do is press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that name change, and then you just want to save your work by either clicking on the Done button up here at the top of the screen, or you can just press the Escape key is the way it works. And so Escape not only takes you out of the pattern editing mode, it also saves your changes, and you can see that we now have a new pattern here inside the swatches panel. All right, now let's take advantage of that pattern by turning off the mortar and bricks layers. So notice that all of the layers inside the layers panel are now hidden. And that's just fine, because we're going to create a new layer by dropping down to the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and Alt or Option + clicking on it to force the display of the layer options dialog box. And I'm going to call this new layer walls, and I'll change its color to something that contrasts nicely, like violet, and then I'll click OK. All right, now I'm going to bring back the guides layer by turning it on, and then I'll switch to the rectangle tool, which you can select from the shape tools layout menu. And I'm going to click on the View menu and make sure my smart guides are turned on, which they aren't, so I'll go ahead and choose that command, and then I'll drag from the top of the red bleed boundary down to the lower right corner, and notice that I'm starting my drag right there at the vertical center guide. Now notice that I have a white fill and a black stroke, as by default. And so I'm going to click on that white swatch up here in the control panel and change it to cafe wall. And by the way, if you're working in the most recent version of Illustrator and you're not seeing the control panel because Adobe has decided to turn it off by default, then you can go up to the Window menu and choose Control, and that will bring back one of the most essential panels in all of Illustrator. All right, so notice that I filled my rectangle with that tile pattern, and so now I'm going to slant it by clicking and holding on the scale tool over here in the vertical toolbox and selecting the shear tool from the fly-out menu. And then I'll just go ahead and move my cursor to the intersection of those two center guides and I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click in order to force the display of the shear dialog box. And notice that I've set the axis to vertical instead of horizontal, and I've dialed in a shear angle value of negative 12 degrees, which goes ahead and slants the right side of that shape upward. Notice, however, that while it slants the shape, it does not slant the pattern, which is why you need to turn on this checkbox down here, Transform Patterns, in order to make sure that both the shape and the pattern slant together. At which point go ahead and click Copy in order to accept that change. Now we want to tuck in some of these sides here, and I'm going to do that by switching to the white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the direct selection tool, and it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow. And then I'll just go ahead and marquee these top anchor points right here, and I'll press Shift + down arrow a bunch of times in order to take the top side of that shape downward. And I don't want to move it too far down, so I'll press the up arrow key a few times until I expose that stroke right there, and then I'll press the down arrow key until the stroke that I've assigned to the actual path outline and the strokes of the pattern align with each other. All right, now I'll just go ahead and scroll upward by spacebar dragging, and I'll marquee these bottom points right here, like so, and I'll press Shift + up arrow followed by the up arrow key by itself in order to align those strokes as we're seeing right here. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and select this anchor point and Shift + click on this one, and I think I'll just drag this guy inward and over until I end up with this effect, which looks pretty darn good. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll click on the path outline to select the entire thing so I can see my line weight value up here in the control panel, and I'll just go ahead and change it to two points, like so. All right, now I'll press Control + zero, or Command + zero on the Mac, to center my zoom, and I'll click and hold on the rotate tool to bring up its fly-out menu, and I'll switch to the reflect tool. And then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and I will click at this top left point right here in order to bring up the reflect dialog box as well as set the center of my reflection. I'll set the axis to Vertical, as by default, and I'll make sure that Transform Patterns is turned on. So you want both of these checkboxes on. At which point, click the Copy button in order to create a copy of that path outline. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll turn off that guides layer down here at the bottom of the layers panel, and I'll click on this right-hand shape to select it. And in the end, I decided I wanted to shave this shape a little bit, and to make that happen, you want to go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to bring up the appearance panel, wherever it may be, and then just go ahead and click on the fill right there and drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the panel and click on it to make a copy of that fill. Then click on the bottom fill, click on its down pointing arrow head and change the color of that fill to this light shade of gray in which the RGB values all read 204. And then go ahead and select the top fill. Make sure it's twirled open so that you can see its opacity option. Click on it and change the blend mode to multiply, and that way you're darkening the strokes into that light gray background in order to take advantage of that shape. And now at this point I decided that I wanted to make my walls a little narrower, so I'm going to Shift + click on this left-hand wall to add it to the selection, and then I'll click and hold on the shear tool midway down in the toolbox and I'll switch back to the scale tool, which you can also get by pressing the S key. And now you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac so you're seeing that dot dot dot next to the cursor, and you want to click right there on that top anchor point, or at least the intersection of those two top anchor points, to bring up the scale dialog box. Go ahead and drop down to these non-uniform values here and set the horizontal value to 80%, leave the vertical value set to 100%, and make sure that both of the Transform checkboxes are turned on so that you're transforming not only the path outlines but the patterns, as well. At which point go ahead and click OK to accept that change. And then we'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool, and I'll click off the path outlines to deselect them, and I'll zoom in slightly, as well. And that is how you slant your cafe walls in order to create walls, if you will, or to be the cover of a book or a menu or what have you, in which the various skewed but still parallel lines don't look altogether parallel here inside Illustrator.

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