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

699 Combining object blends with skews

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

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699 Combining object blends with skews

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- [Narrator] In this movie I'll show you how to combine object blends, which is what we're seeing right here along with skewed shapes in order to add a little more angler action to the artwork. All right, so the first thing I'm going do is click on my U with the black arrow tool, by the way, the one that Illustrator calls the Selection Tool, up here at the top of the tool box. And then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Move Dialog box. And I'll set the horizontal value to 388 and then I'll set the vertical value to negative 300. And I'll go ahead and click the copy button in order to create a copy of that shape. All right, now I want to scale and skew this shape to more or less match the angle of the blend associated with the L and so I'll go ahead and select the Scale Tool, which you can get by pressing the S key, and then you want to Alt or Option click on this bottom right point right here. So this guy right there. And that'll bring up the Scale Dialog box and then I'll tab down to the horizontal value and I'll change it to 62 percent and I'll change the vertical value to 90 percent so we have a squished version of that U. And then I'll click Okay to accept that change. All right, now we want to skew the shape and in Illustrator use skew or slant shapes using the Shear tool. So I'll go ahead and grab that tool from the Scale tool fly out menu and I'll Alt or Option click on that same anchor point. I'll set the axis to vertical and then I'm going to change that shear angle value to 19 degrees which produces this effect here and as you can see, now the angle of the U more or less matches the angle of that accordion extrusion associated with the letter L. Then I'll go ahead and click Okay. All right, now I'm going to once again set the fill color associated with this shape to that pale shade of yellow. And I'll go ahead and right click inside the document window, choose the range and then choose send to back or you've got that keyboard shortcut of Control Shift [ or Command Shift [ on the Mac. Now, that is going to hide the U as we're seeing right here, but it's going to pop back into view in just a moment when you press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and Shift click on the blue U to add it to the selection. And then go up to the Object Menu, choose Blend and choose Make or you've got that shortcut of Control Alt B or Command Option B on the Mac. And what that does is it brings forward the yellow U so it's directly behind the blue one. Now we have way too many steps and so I'll go up to the Object menu, choose Blend and then choose Blend Options. I'll change the spacing value to Specified Steps, I'll turn on the preview checkbox and then I'll set the number of steps to 110 as we've done in the past and I'll click Okay to accept that change. All right, now I'm going to add some curvature to this path of the blend right right here that's going up and to the right. And you can do that by selecting the Anchor Point tool from the Pen Tool fly out menu. And then I'll go ahead and drag this guy upward, like so, so I'm dragging from the bottom left anchor point in order to draw forth the control handle and convert that point from a corner point to a smooth point as you're seeing here. Now remember that I have that diagram if you're at all interested and it's there to help you figure out exactly where the control handles need to be. Right there is the answer. And so, if I were to switch back to my artwork, you can see that my cursor is not where it needs to be so I'll just go ahead and drag this guy up and to the left slightly, like that. Now notice that the blend is starting slowly down left and ending very quickly over here on the right hand side. And so all of these steps over here are smashed together. And that's a function of the fact that we have a control handle associated with the first anchor point while we have no control handle associated with the last one. So I'll go ahead and drag forth the control handle like so and notice as I do, I spread those steps further away from each other. All right, I don't want to move it quite this far so I'm going to drag it back to about this position here. But notice because I'm dragging the control handle with the Anchor Point tool that I am now converting what was formerly a smooth point to a cusp point. It doesn't really matter, however. Those opposing control handles don't need to be aligned with each other. So I'll just go ahead and drag that guide to this position right here. All right, now it dawns on me that this blue U is the wrong color and so I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool. And I'll go ahead and click inside the blue U to select it and then I'll go up to the fill swatch on the far left side of the control panel and I'll change it to this hot pink that begins R equals 2 12. I also want to change the color of this guy right here so I'll go ahead and click in this bottom Z and I'll click on that same fill swatch once again and I'll change it to this shade of orange that begins R equals 247. All right, now I want to make a copy of this guy so I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialogue box and I'll set the horizontal value to negative 252 and I'll set the vertical value to negative 144 and order to move that shape up and to the left and then I'll click the Copy button to create a copy of it and now I want to scale this shape so I'll switch back to the scale tool and I'll alter option click this second point right here which is pretty hard to see at this point because the color I've assigned to this layer is gold. And so I'm going to double click on an empty portion of the blends layer and I'm going to change its color to light red which is going to show up a lot better where this particular shape is concerned and now I'll go ahead and Alt click or Option click on that bottom left point right there in order to bring up the scale dialogue box and I'll set the horizontal value to 50 percent and I'll set the vertical value to 82 percent and then I'll go ahead and click Okay. Now I want to once again skew the shape and so I'll select the Sheer tool from the scale tool fly out menu and I'll alter Option click on that same point and I will set the axis to horizontal this time around and I will also change to Shear angle this time to just eight degrees and I'll click okay. And finally I want to rotate the shape, so I'll grab my rotate tool, which I can get by pressing the R key and I'll alter option click on that very same anchor point once again, that way we have consistency. And I'll change the angle value to 28 degrees and I'll click Okay. All right, now I'll make this guy pale yellow once again, and I will send it to back by pressing control shift [ or command shift [ on the Mac. I'll press the V key to switch to my black error tool, I'll Shift click on the orange Z and I'll combine these shapes into a blend using that keyboard shortcut of control Alt B or Command option B on the Mac. Now again I have too many steps and so this time I'm going to take advantage of the blend tool which is located down here near the bottom of the tool box and it has a keyboard shortcut of W, that's something you have to memorize. And then press the Enter key of the Return Key on the Mac to bring up the blend options dialogue box, turn on the preview check box, select specified steps and change the number of steps to just 50 this time around and press the tab key and you end up with this effect here. Then go ahead and click Okay. All right now we want to once again modify that path of the blend and we'll be doing so using the anchor point tool which itself has a keyboard shortcut of Shift C, for what that's worth. And I'll go ahead and drag from this anchor point until the opposite control handle ends up landing somewhere close to the middle of the blend and now I'll drag from this anchor point up into the left like so to position this control handle inside the top of the letter Z so we have this kind of motion right here. All right, now press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I will select that final Z and I'll go ahead and create a copy of it by pressing the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac. I'll set the move up value to negative 71 this time and I'll set the vertical value to 285 and that's going to move the shape down and slightly to the left at which point I'll click the Copy button in order to create a copy of the shape and now we are going to scale and skew it as well by first selecting the scale tool and then Alter Option clicking on that bottom left point once again in order to bring up the scale dialogue box and I'll set that horizontal value to 88 percent, and then I'll set the vertical value to 120 percent so that we are once again stretching the shape and then I'll click okay. Now we need to skew it by switching back to the Shear tool and I will Alter Option click on that same anchor point again to bring up the shear dialogue box and this time I'm going to take that shear angle value down to seven degrees otherwise all the options are fine as is and then I'll click Okay. And now I'll press the R key to switch to the rotate tool and I'll Alter Option click on that anchor point once again and this time I want the angle value to be negative 28 degrees. And so I will change it and then click Okay in order to accept that change. Now I'll change the fill color to pale yellow and I'll send this guy to the back of the stack by pressing control shift [, that's command shift [ on the Mac. I'll press the V key to once again select my black arrow tool and I'll Shift click on the blue Z and I'll press Control Alt B or Command Option B on the Mac to create a blend and now I'll edit the number of steps by pressing the W key to switch to the blend tool or press the Enter Key or the Return Key on the Mac to bring up the blend options dialogue box, turn on the preview check box, change spacing to specify its steps and set this guy to seventy steps this time around which will produce this effect here at which point I'll click okay in order to accept that change. All right now for the final step where this particular blend is concerned, which is to add some curvature to the command for the blend so I'll go ahead and once again select the anchor point tool and then I'll drag from this top anchor point right there until I've got a control handle that's slightly downward from the bottom right corner of the C and then I'll drag from this anchor point right there in order to draw forth a couple of control handles and I'm looking for that opposing control handle to be located right about here. All right, now I want to give all of my blend drop shadows and I'm going to do that by pressing control A or Command A on the Mac to select everything that's unlocked and visible and then I'll go up to the effect menu, choose stylize and choose drop shadow. And I'm okay with the color being black, the mode set to multiply and the opacity set to 75 percent. I do want to adjust a couple of values here so turn on the preview check box and notice that the shadow is moving down into the right and as a result this U blend right here is casting a heck of a shadow on the L. I don't want that so I'm going to change the X offset value to negative 3 and press the tab key and because my preview checkbox is turned on we can see the change happen on the fly and I'll set the Y offset value to 5. A blur value of 5 points is just point at which point I'll click Okay to accept that change. Now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I'll click off the paths to deselect them and then I'll go ahead and turn the black letters layer back on. And that my friends, is how you create letters with accordion style extrusions, by combining object blends along with scaling, skewing and rotating here inside Illustrator.

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