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

680 Adding more and more gizmos

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

680 Adding more and more gizmos

- In this movie, we're going to decorate our magical checker solution with still more gizmos to create what is essentially a feast for the eyes. I'm going to start with these slanted white objects, which I am calling frames. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to the document so far, turn on the guides layer down here at the bottom of the layers panel, press and hold the control key along with the space bar, that's command and space bar on the Mac. In order to get the zoom tool on the fly, I'll just go ahead and drag in on the top left corner of the artwork so that we're seeing the intersection of the first vertical guide and the second horizontal one. And then I'll select the rectangle tool from the shape tool fly out menu, and I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, and I'll click at the intersection of those two guidelines to bring up the rectangle dialogue box. And I'll set both the width and height values to 24 points and I'll click okay. You can see over here in the far left side of the control panel that the rectangle is filled with white, and it has no stroke, which is exactly what I want. But because I'm working on a laptop's layer, it appears below the film layer, which is multiplying in this pale violet, which is not what I want. So I'll click on the film layer to make it active. Then I'll drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll alt or option click on it to force a display of the layer options dialogue box. I'll call this guy frames. And I'll change its color to gold, just for the sake of variety. And then I'll click okay. And now notice that little green square over here on the far right side of the layers panel. I'm going to drag it and drop it onto the frames layer and that brightens up that rectangle so it looks absolutely white. All right, now I'll alt or option click at the intersection of those two guides once again to force a display of the new layer dialogue box. And I'll set both the width and height values to 12 points and click okay. And because I press the alt or option key, I'm creating this square from the center outward. All right, now press the v key in order to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll shift click on the larger square so that they're both selected. And then I'll go up to the object menu, choose compound path, and choose make, in order to turn the central square into a hole. All right, now I want to skew this path in the opposite direction that I rotated this laptop. And so I'll click and hold on the scale tool here inside the vertical tool box, and I'll select the shear tool, which allows you to skew things in Illustrator. And then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the shear dialogue box. And I'll make sure that the axis option is set to horizontal. And then I'll turn on the preview check box so I can see what I'm doing, and I'll dial in an angle value of 20 degrees. And that slants the top of the shape to the right. And it turns out the bottom of the shape to the left. Because we are skewing with respect to the center point. After which I'll click okay to apply that change. All right, now I'm going to zoom out a little bit so I can see the second row. And I'll press the v key to switch to the black arrow tool up here at the top of the toolbox. And I'll drag this guy by its center point. Notice that right there. And I'll drop it down here. So you can press the shift key if you want to to constrain the angle of your drag to exactly vertical. You definitely want to press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac before you release. And so notice I'm seeing a double arrow head cursor, which tells me that I'm gonnna create a copy of this shape as soon as I release. So again, I had the shift and alt keys down on a PC. That would be shift and option on a Mac. And now I'll switch back to my shear tool and I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the shear dialogue box and I will change the shear angle to negative 20 minus 20. So the first negative 20 is just going to undo the previous slant as we're seeing here. And then if I subtract 20 again, I will skew the shape in the opposite direction. In which case you can see I end up with an angle value of negative 40 degrees, at which point I'll click okay. Now I want to press control zero, or command zero on a Mac in order to fit the art board on screen. And I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool. Go ahead and click off the path to deselect it. And I'll zoom in a little bit, and I'll turn off the guides for the moment just so I can better see what I'm doing. And I want to duplicate these guys just like I duplicated the laptops. And so notice this circular so-called meatball over here on the far right side of the layers panel. The one at the top for the frames layer is empty. But the one for the laptops layer is filled in. And that shows us that we have some dynamic effects that are assigned to the entire layer. I can duplicate those effects by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac, and dragging that filled-in meatball right there, the one associated with the laptops layer, and dropping it up here in the frames target. And so notice my cursor has a little plus sign next to it, which shows that I"m going to duplicate those effects. And that goes ahead and creates a bunch of duplicates of my frames. That's not quite enough. Notice that we need some more in this far right-hand column. And to make that happen, I'll target the frames layer by clicking on its meatball right there. And then I'll go up to the window menu and choose the appearance command to bring up the appearance panel. And then you want to click on the first of the two transforms. So dynamic effects in Illustrator are shown from the top down. In other words, the top transform is the first one you assign. The bottom one is the second. So click on that first one, turn on the preview check box, move this guy out of the way a little bit, and then click into copies value and press the up arrow key. And that's going to give me another column of frames. After which I'll click okay to assign that change. Now I also want to make these frames glow. And I'm going to achieve that effect by going up to the effect menu, choosing stylize, and then choosing outer glow. I don't want the color to be black, so I'll click on that color swatch and dial in white. And then click okay. A blend mode of screen is just fine. I'll crank the opacity value up to its maximum of 100%. A blur of five points is great. And so I'll turn on the check box and you can see that each and every one of these frames is now glowing. At which point I'll click okay. All right, now I want to add these warp screens right here. These guys say warp in one direction and then another, alternating from one row to the next. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to my document in progress, and let's zoom in on this top left region right here by pressing the control and space bar keys. That's command and the space bar on a Mac. And dragging like so with the zoom bool on the fly. And now I'll switch back to the layers panel, and I'll go ahead and turn on my guides layer once again. And I'm going to make a new layer at the top of the stack by dropping down to the tiny page icon at the bottom of the panel, and alter option clicking on it to force the display of the layer options dialogue box. And I'll call this guy warped, and I'll set the color to teal, and then I'll click okay. Now I'll grab my rectangle tool once again, and I'm going to alt or option click at the intersection of these two guides up here in the top left corner of the screen. That's going to bring up the rectangle dialogue box. And I'll set both the width and height values to 24 points, and I'll click okay. And actually, I want to zoom in a little bit here, like so, and now with the fill active here in the swatches panel, I'll select color too in order to assign that dark shade of blue. All right, now to warp the square, by going up to the effect menu, choosing warp, and choosing this very first command, arc. And notice that I have the preview check box on so that I can see that this thing is warping in the wrong direction. I don't want it to arc horizontally, I want to do so vertically. So I'll select the vertical option there. And I want it to go in the other direction, so I'm going to change the bend value to negative, like so, specifically I'm looking for a bend of negative 33%. After which I'll click okay to accept that change. All right, now I want to create another rectangle by alt or option clicking at the intersection of those two guides. And I'll set the width value to 10 points and the height to 16 so that we end up with a fairly skinny rectangle like so. Now I'll click on this very first swatch on the far left side of the control panel and change the fill to white. And then I will return to the effect menu and choose the second command, arc dot dot dot, which is going to repeat my last settings. Notice that the preview is turned on. And so I'm going to take the bend value down to negative 20% this time around, and I'm going to set the horizontal distortion value to 10%, just so that we're more or less mimicking the dark blue shape. At which point I'll click okay, and then I'll return to the effect menu, choose stylize, and choose outer glow. And as you can see, I'm looking at the last settings I applied. So if I turn on the preview check box, I'm going to end up with this nice glow right here. It's looking a little bit pixelated, and that's because the document raster effect settings are set to 72 pixels per inch. If you wanted to get smoother results, then you would choose this command and up the resolution. But I figure this is good enough. Because after all, we're going to be zoomed out pretty darn far. All right, speaking of which, I am going to zoom out by pressing control minus, or command minus on the Mac. And then I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool. I'll shift click on the blue shape in an attempt to select it. But it doesn't look like I'm having much success. So what I'm going to do is marquis these shapes like so to select both of them. And then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, and because my black arrow is active, that brings up the move dialogue box, at which point I'll change the horizontal value to zero and the vertical value to 144 to move that guy down to the next row, and then I'll click the copy button in order to apply that effect. All right, now I need to shift click on the white shape right there to turn it off. And that's because I need to change my warp settings by returning to the window menu and once again choosing the appearance command. And then notice there's my warp arc effect. I'll click on it to bring up my previously applied settings, and I'll just change the bend value to positive 33 and click okay. And now I'll click off the shape to de-select it and I'll click on that white shape to select it, and I'll click warp arc once again, and I'll change the bend value to positive 20%, and then I'll tab down to the horizontal distortion value and change it to negative 10% like so, and then I'll click okay. So in other words, I'm just reversing the values. All right, now I'll click off the shapes to de-select them, I'll switch back to the layers panel, turn off my guides layer, press control zero or command zero on the Mac, to fit the art board in the window. And then you want to drop down to the laptop layer once again, press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, and drag its meatball up and onto the warped meatball right there. At which point you'll see a little plus sign next to your cursor which tells you that you are going to duplicate those effects. Now while everything's working out nicely horizontally, we are missing a row down here at the bottom. And so I'm going to switch back to the appearance panel, which happens to be here on my screen. It might be elsewhere on yours. And actually, I made a mistake here. I'm going to switch back to the layers panel. I have to target this layer. So I'll go ahead and target the warped layer by clicking on its circular meatball, switch back to the appearance panel, click on the bottom transform effect, which is the second one applied, and that's going to bring up this vertical move right here. Just one copy, I need two. So I'm going to turn on the preview check box, click into copies value, and press the up arrow key, and as you can see, that fills out the artwork, at which point I'll click okay. Now that does go a little bit too far. Notice that we have some warp screens down here. But because they're out in the pace board, it doesn't matter. They're not really going to be treated as part of the artwork. All right, so I'll click off the art to de-select it, and I will once again center my zoom. All right, and that leaves us with just two more elements, which are these guys right here, the Bluetooth and wifi icons. And what the heck? I'll show you how those work in the next movie.

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