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

694 Creating shimmering cells in Illustrator

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

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694 Creating shimmering cells in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, over the past couple of weeks, we've been having all kinds of fun creating gradient molecules in the form of random and regular Voronoi diagrams in Photoshop. Well this week, we're going to have even more fun in Illustrator, where our molecules become shimmering cells. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's that bright red cell pattern open inside Illustrator. We're going to be creating this guy absolutely from scratch, so I'll go to the file menu and choose the new command, or you can press that keyboard shortcut of control n, or command n on the Mac. Now, you can work inside this galumphing dialog box if you want to, but I'm going to click more settings, in order to bring up the older streamlined version of the dialog box, and then I'll set the profile to art and illustration. If you're working in an older version of Illustrator, then that'll read basic RGB. Notice the units are set to points, and if you want to get the same results as me, you want to set your document to points well. I'm going to dial in a width value of 1,076 points, and set the height to 670 points, and these are just values that I came up with through trial and error. Now I'll tab down to the bleed values, and notice that they're all linked together, so if I change any one of them to 12 points, the others will change in kind. Now, the color mode is set to RGB, very important, at which point I'll click the create document button, or the okay button, or what have you. Alright, now you want to go up to the view menu, and make sure that your smart guides are turned on, I'm not seeing a check mark, so I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then, I'll go ahead and grab the rectangle tool from the shape tool flyout menu. And, I will create a rectangle as big as the red bleed boundary. So, I'll drag from one corner to the other, like so. Now, I don't need this rectangle to have a stroke, so I'll click on the second color swatch, and set it to none. We do, however, need the rectangle to have a black fill, so I'll click in the first color swatch, and change it to black, like so. Alright now, notice my layers panel is up on screen, I'm going to rename this layer black, because this black rectangle is all that it's going to have, and then I'm going to lock it down, so I don't mess up that rectangle in the future. Now, I don't like having these tiny little thumbnails, so I'm going to click on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, and choose panel options, then I'll select other, and take this guy up to 60 pixels, and click okay. Alright, now we need a new layer, and I'll make one 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. I'll call this guy circles, now, all of the circles are going to be red, so it doesn't make sense for the color of the layer to be red as well, so I'm going to change it to something that's more contrast-y, like gold, and then click okay. Alright now, we need to create our circles, and so, go ahead and select the ellipse tool this time, from the shape tool flyout menu, and then position your cursor over the top left corner of that rectangle, and alt or option click to bring up the ellipse dialog box. I'm going to take the width value up to 120 points, same for the height value, so 120 points for it as well, and then I'll click okay, and because I alt or option clicked, I created that circle from the center out. Alright, now we want to fill this guy with the gradient, and so, I'm going to go up to the window menu and choose the gradient command to bring up the gradient panel, and then I'm going to grab RGB red here inside the swatches panel, and incidentally, if you're not seeing that panel, go to the window menu, and choose the swatches command. Alright, so as I was saying, I'll go ahead and grab RGB red, and drag it and drop it to the beginning of that gradient strip right there, and then notice if I double-click on this dark color stop over here on the far right side of the strip, that we have a k value that's set to 100%. That is a weak black, by the way. What we want is a rich black, which you can get by clicking on this flyout menu icon right there, and choosing RGB, and then, make sure the red, green, and blue values are dialed in at zero, at which point you can press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac to accept that change. Then, expand the gradient panel if necessary, by clicking on this double arrow icon, and change the type to radial. Now, we need one more change, if we're going to make these molecules interact with each other, and that's to click on the word opacity up here in the control panel, and by the way, if you're not seeing that horizontal control panel up at the top of the screen, then go to the window menu and choose the control command. Alright, I'm going to click on the word opacity, and change the blend mode to lighten, and then, I'll just go ahead and zoom in on my circle, and I'm doing this by control spacebar clicking, and then, I'll switch back to the black arrow tool, up here at the top of the toolbox, which you can get by pressing the v key, and then press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac to bring up the move dialog box, and set the horizontal value to 100 points, I'm going to leave the vertical value set to zero, and then if you turn on the preview checkbox, you can see that that is going to move the circle 100 points to the right. I want to copy it however, so I'll click on the copy button, and, notice now, if I click off the shape for a moment, that you can see a kind of line between the molecules, and that is a result of having set the blend mode to lighten. Alright, I'll go ahead and select that second circle once again, and I'll press control zero, or command zero on the Mac to zoom out, and I actually want to zoom out just a little bit farther. And now, I'm going to duplicate the circle a bunch of times, by pressing control d, or command d on the Mac, the d being for duplicate. And, once you get all the way to the right side of the artboard, go just a little bit farther, you want to press control d, or command d, one more time, in order to move it over to the right, and then just go ahead and marquee all of these shapes, and you can just partially marquee them if you like, in order to select them, and then go up to the object menu, and choose the group command, to group them together. Now, it's probably a good idea to save these gradients as we create them, and so I'm going to click on the little page icon at the bottom of the swatches panel, to bring up the new swatch dialog box, and I'll call this guy dark red, and click okay. Now, I'm running out of room here, and I have a very small screen, so I'm going to do a little housekeeping by clicking off the shapes to deselect them, and then I'll select this group right here, the one called cold, and I'll control or command click on each one of these predefined gradients, as well as this jive pattern here, and by the way, your swatches may vary, and then I'm going to move down to the little trashcan icon, and alt or option click it, in order to bypass any warning. Alright, now what we need to do is select these guys once again, and now that they're a group, you can do so just by clicking on any one of the circles. We want to move 'em down and to the left. Now, we're going to create a kind of hexagon pattern, and when you're trying to emulate a hexagon, you have to bear in mind that you're taking a 360 degree circle, and dividing it by six sides. And so, when you divide 360 by six, you get 60, 60 degrees that is to say, and we're going to take that into consideration, by pressing the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to once again bring up the move dialog box. This time we're going to bypass the horizontal and vertical values, and drop down to the distance value, it should be 100 points, but we want to different angle, and so because we want to move these circles to the left, I'll enter 180 degrees, which is due left, as you can see indicated in this little angle widget, but we want to add 60 degrees to go down, and so I'll just enter plus 60 like so, and then press the tab key, and Illustrator does the math and calculates 240 degrees, at which point, I'll click the copy button to accept that change. Alright, now I want to duplicate both of these rows by shift clicking in the top one, and I'll press the enter key, or the return on a Mac, to once again bring up the move dialog box. This time you want to move the row straight down, so I'll change the horizontal value to zero, and then I'll click after the vertical value right there, which Illustrator is automatically calculated for me, and I'll enter asterisk two, in order to multiply that value times two, and I end up getting 173.205 points. Now, what you want to do, with that same value selected, down here in the distance option, is press control c, or command c on the Mac, to copy that value, and then, click on the copy button. Alright, now press control d or command d on the Mac, a couple of times, in order to create those additional rows, and then I'll click off the shapes to deselect them, and I'll select this row right there by itself, and I'll press control d, or command d on a Mac, to create a copy of it. Alright, now, you want to select everything, by pressing control a, or command a on the Mac, and now, we're going to turn all of these shapes into a pattern by going up to the object menu, choosing pattern, and choosing make. And that will take you into the pattern creation mode, now if you get this alert message right here, just click the okay button, you really don't need to worry about it. And now notice, if I zoom out, that my pattern is not repeating correctly at all, and that's because I need to modify the width and height values. Now, you need to set the width value to two horizontal increments. And as you may recall, we moved each circle 100 points to the right, and so 100 times two is 200, pretty easy math. We also need to replicate two vertical repetitions of the rows, and you can do that by setting the height value to the value you just copied from the move dialog box, so just go ahead and press control v, or command v on the Mac, to copy that value, which should read 173.205 points. At which point, press the tab key, in order to create this tiny little rectangle. Now at this point, it's hard to tell if things are duplicating correctly or not, which is why, in this case, you want to turn dim copies to off, so just turn off that checkbox, and you'll see that everything is replicating just fine. Alright, I'm going to change the name of this pattern to dark cells, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac to accept the name, and then I'll accept the pattern, either by clicking on the done button, or you can just tap the escape key, and you will end up with a new pattern swatch, here inside the swatches panel. Now, to see if it works, just go ahead and turn off the circles layer, and then, let's create a new layer by alt or option clicking on the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel, and I'm going to call this guy patterns, and I'll leave the color set to green, that's fine, and then I'll click okay. And now, I'll press control zero, or command zero on a Mac, to fit the artboard on screen, and I will once again select the rectangle tool, and I'll drag from one corner of that red bleed boundary to the opposite corner, in order to create the huge rectangle that we're seeing here, and then I'll click on this fill swatch, which is the first swatch up here in the control panel, and I'll set it to dark cells, and we end up with this perfectly repeating pattern. And by the way, just in case you're wondering, I'm going to go ahead and double click on this dark cell swatch, here inside the swatches panel, in order to return to the pattern editing mode, and you'll notice that I never changed the tile type, it's still set to grid, as opposed to hex by row, which seems like it might be the right thing to do, because after all, each one of our cells is appearing as an upright hex. Thing is, that's just not necessary, and it complicates the math. So, that's why I went with grid. Alright, so, I'll just go ahead and press the escape key, in order to escape out of the pattern editing mode. Alright so, none too shabby, that is how you create a regular hexoganal molecule pattern, that we will eventually repeat to create this effect here inside Adobe Illustrator. If you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have two, count them two, follow-up movies. In the first one we'll take our regular hex pattern, and we'll duplicate, modify, and layer it, in order to create this organic community of happy cells. In the second movie, we'll enhance the effect in Photoshop, so we can better distinguish each cell from its neighbors. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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