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

698 Creating letters with accordion extrusions

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

698 Creating letters with accordion extrusions

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week I'm going to show you how to create letters with freeform, and kind of interwoven accordion style extrusions using object blends in Illustrator. And just to make things crystal clear, I also include this overwhelming diagram. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so here's the final version of the artwork, open inside Illustrator. I also have open this fairly imposing diagram right here. As you'll see, it can come in helpful, but ultimately I created it for myself, and we're going to run through all of these steps. Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my starter file right here, and what we have is a bunch of letters that I've converted to path outlines. You can work with live text if you want to, but this just makes things a little easier. Alright, I'm going to make a copy of this entire layer here inside the Layers panel, by clicking on the flyout menu icon in the top-right corner of the panel, and choosing Duplicate "black letters". Then I'll go ahead and double click on an empty portion of this new layer, in order to bring up the Layer Options dialogue box, and I'll change the name of this layer to blends, and I'll change its color to Gold, should show up well. And then I'll click OK, and now I'll go ahead and move the blends layer behind the black letters layers, and I'll turn off the black letters for now. Alright, now you want to press Control + A, or Command + A on the Mac, to select everything, specifically on this layer, because the other layers are locked or hidden, and then I'm going to press Shift + X, in order to swap the fill and the stroke, so that we have a one point black stroke, and no fill. And then I'll click on that first swatch, which represents the fill, and I'll change it to this default shade of blue, that begins R=41. And we'll end up with a bunch of blue letters, with black fills. Alright, now we're going to start at the bottom of the stack, and move our way upward, which means we're going to start with the E. And so I'll go ahead and click on the E in order to select it, with my black arrow tool, notice it's selected up here at the top of the toolbox. And next you want to press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Move dialogue box. Now normally, I would just drag things around in order to move them, but in this case I've reverse-engineered the project. So I'm going to work by the numbers. And so I'll change the Horizontal value to -446, which is going to move the object to the left as soon as I turn on the Preview checkbox. And then I'll go ahead and select the Vertical value, and I'll change it to -230. And negative Vertical values, by the way, represent in upward movements. Where as positive values move objects down. Alright, now I want to create a copy of the E, so I'll click the Copy button, and I now have a duplicate, as you can see right here. Now I want to fill this guy with a pale yellow, that I've created in advance, which happens to be this swatch right here. And if you don't have access to this exercise file, and you're wondering exactly what's going on with this pale yellow, I'll just go ahead and double-click on it here in the swatches panel, to bring up the Swatch Options dialogue box. And I'll change the Color Mode to HSB, and you can see that we have a hue value of 50 degrees, a saturation value of 33 percent, is what you would enter, and then a brightness value of 100 percent. But I've already done this in advance, so I'll just cancel out. Alright, now I want to make this E much bigger, and I'm going to do that using the scale tool. Which you can get by pressing the S key. Now I want you to notice that my bounding box is turned off. Which is going to be the easier way to work where this project is concerned. And so you want to go to the View menu, and if this command reads Hide Bounding Box, go ahead and choose it, if it reads Show Bounding Box, leave it alone. Alright, now I'll Alt or Option + click on this bottommost anchor point to bring up the Scale dialogue box, and I'll change the Uniform value to 158 percent, in order to make the E much larger on screen. And then I'll click OK. Alright, now I'll press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool, and I'll Shift + click on the blue E to add it to the selection. And then I'll go up to the Object menu, drop down to the Blend command, and choose Make. Which has a shortcut of Control + Alt + B, or Command + Option + B on the Mac, which I will be using in the future. Alright, so I'll go ahead and choose that command, and notice I automatically get this blend. But it's in the wrong direction. The pale E is on top, and the blue E is on the bottom, which is exactly the opposite of what I want. So I'll just go ahead and double-click on the blend, in order to enter the Isolation mode, and I'll select that yellow E, like so, and then I'll right-click anywhere in the document window, choose Arrange, and choose Send to Back. Or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + [, that's Command + Shift + [ on the Mac, which I will also be using in the future. Alright, so notice as soon as I choose the command, that the blend switches directions. So this is before, notice that the ribbing, this accordion effect right here, is moving down and to the right. Whereas now, it's moving up and to the left. Alright, but I have way too many steps, and so I'll go ahead and press the Escape key in order to escape the Isolation mode. And then I'll go to the Object menu, and choose Blend Options, to bring up this dialogue box. I'll turn on the Preview checkbox, I'll change Spacing to Specified Steps, and then I will enter a value of 110 steps, like so, which results in fewer steps, in my accordion style extrusion. Alright, now I'll click OK to accept that change. Now, I do have one issue here. And that's that I don't want this particular E to be blue, and so I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, and I'll click inside the blue E to select it. And then I'll click on the first swatch on the far-left side of the control panel, and I'll change the fill color to the shade of green that begins R=57. Alright now I'm going to select the L by clicking inside of it, and I'm going to change its fill to this shade of hot pink, right here, which begins R=212, in order to produce this effect. Alright, now I want to make a copy of this letter, and I'll do so by pressing the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, and I'll dial in a Horizontal value of -608, which is going to move the letter to the opposite side of the art board. And then I'll set the Vertical value to 215, like so, and then I'll click the Copy button, or if you really like keyboard shortcuts, you can press Alt + Enter here on the PC, or Option + Return on the Mac. Alright, now we need to scale this guy as well, so I'll grab my Scale tool, and then I'll drop down to this anchor point, which is very near to the bottom-left corner of the shape, and I'll Alt, or Option + click on it to bring up the Scale dialogue box, and I'll change that Uniform value to 70 percent, and I'll click OK. Now we want to lean the letter back a little bit by rotating it, so I'll select the Rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key, and I'll Alt, or Option + click on that point once again, and I'll change the Angle value to 20 degrees, which is going to lean the letter back like so, and then I'll click OK. Alright, now I want to change its fill to that same pale shade of yellow. And then I'll go ahead and press Control + Shift [, or Command + Shift + [ on the Mac. And on an American keyboard, the [ key is the one to the right of the P as in Paul key. Alright, now I'll press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll Shift + click on the Paint gel, to add it to the selection, and I'll press that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + B, or Command + Option + B for blend, in order to automatically blend between the two shapes. Alright, now I want to change the number of steps once again, and I can do that by going to the Object menu, choosing Blend, and then choosing Blend Options. But in my opinion, that's a lot of work, digging through that menu. And so what I prefer to do, and I know this requires a little rote memorization, but you can switch to the blend tool. Which you get by pressing the W key. Why, I don't know, but anyway that works. And then you just want to press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Blend Options dialogue box, change Spacing to Specified Steps, turn on the Preview checkbox, and then click in this value and press Shift + down arrow a bunch of times until you end up with a value of 170, and then click OK. Now at this point, you might figure that the spacing of the steps, where the L is concerned, is much narrower than that of the E. And that's because we are going to change the path of the blend, which is this orange line right here. That's going at an angle. Currently it's a straight line because both of the anchor points, at either end, are corner points. We need to change them to smooth points, and you can do that by clicking and holding on the pen tool, and selecting the anchor point tool from the flyout menu. And then I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit, so that I can see that red bleed boundary. And I'll drag from this point, like so, and notice right now I'm bending things in the wrong direction, and so I'll drag upward until the control handle is slightly outside of that red bleed boundary, as well as above the big letter E. Alright, I also want to add some curvature down here, so I'll go ahead and drag this guy, once again, in the wrong direction, I really wanted to go this way. And I keep getting an auto-scroll, so we got a little bit of herky-jerkiness here. But I'm looking for my control handle to be right about there, just outside of the U. And so notice, in both cases, we've converted these corner points to smooth points. Alright, now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. I'll click off the shapes, and then I'll center my zoom by pressing Control + 0, or Command + 0 on the Mac. Alright, now we're going to move up to the P. So we're just advancing in stacking order here, notice the E is at the bottom of the stack, the L is next, then comes the P, and now, with my black arrow tool active, I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up my Move dialogue box. I'll change the Horizontal value to 410 points, and I'll change the Vertical value to 340. That's going to move the P down here, and then I'll click the copy button, in order to create a copy of it. Then I'll change its fill color, on the far left side of the control panel, to that pale shade of yellow, and now we want to rotate the letter. And of course you could go your own way, by the way, but if you want to get the same results as me, this is what you do. I'll go ahead and select the Rotate tool, once again, and then I'll move down to this bottom point right here, and I'll Alt, or Option + click on it to bring up the Rotate dialogue box. And I will change the angle value to -18, happens to work nicely, and I'll click OK. And then I want to select the counter, which is this inside ring, and I'll do that by pressing the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, then I'll click off the shape to deselect it, and I'll Alt, or Option + click on the outline of this counter, like so. And then I'll press the R key to switch back to the rotate tool. I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Rotate dialogue box, and I'll change this Angle value to 34 degrees. And then I'll click OK. And now I want to nudge this guy to the left a little bit, and so I'll press Control + K, or Command + K on the Mac, to make sure my Keyboard Increment is set to one point, as it is by default, then I'll Cancel out. And I'll press the left arrow key, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times in a row, to move that path outline seven points to the left. Alright now, I'll press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool. I'll click on this guy to select him, and I'll press Control + Shift, or Command + Shift [ in order to send it to the bottom of the stack, and then I'll shift click on the blue P, and I'll press Control + Alt + B, or Command + Option + B on the Mac, in order to create that blend. And now I'll press the W key, to switch to the Blend tool, and I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Blend Options dialogue box. I'll change the Spacing value to Specified Steps, and then I'll once again change the Steps value to 110. At which point, if I turn on the Preview checkbox, you can see that we get much looser spacing. Alright, now click OK, in order to accept that change. Alright now I'm going to switch back to that anchor point tool, and I'm going to drag down and to the right from this left-hand anchor point, until I move the control handle to right about there. And next I'll go ahead and drag upward from this anchor point, but I don't really want to drag upward I want to move the control handle upward. And so I need to drag down, like so. And this by the way is where that diagram can come in handy. Notice the position of my control handles right now, as compared to their positions inside the diagram. So this guy's much higher, and this guy's down a little bit I believe. And so I'll go ahead and switch over here, and I will move this guy down, but I'm going to do so by pressing the A key to switch back to the white arrow tool, because otherwise, I will change this anchor point from a smooth point, to a cuss point, which is not something I want to do, and then I'll just go ahead and drag this guy upward like so, and now it looks to me that we have a better match between the diagram, and our current version of the artwork. And that is at least how you start the process of creating an accordion style extrusion here inside Illustrator. Now if you're a member of lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to combine object blends with skewed path outlines. And so if you take a look at the diagram, you can plainly see that I scaled the E, I scaled and rotated the L, and I rotated the two pieces of the P independently of each other. You also know that happened because I just did it. But if you take a look at the Z's, you might be able to perceive they're at an angle, so they're slanted, and I've also slanted the U to better match the angle of the accordion extrusion associated with the L. Now, we aren't going to do this using the Skew tool, because there is no Skew tool in Illustrator. Adobe calls it the Shear tool, shear they do. If after all that, you still want to watch next week, I'm going to show you how to violate all known laws of physics, and we're going to burst the U through the L, and the Z through the U, which is technically impossible, by the way. Blends can't go through each other, they're not ghosts. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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