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

700 Making one object blend cut through another

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

Start my 1-month free trial

700 Making one object blend cut through another

“

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to the 700th edition of Deke's Techniques, in which I'll show you how to take this graphic design that we created last week in Adobe Illustrator, and notice that it's made up of a bunch of object blends. So for example, in the case of the U, we've got a U in the foreground that's blending to this skewed U in the background. But notice that it ends hard at the L. I don't want that, I want the U to go through the L, as we're seeing here. Now, technically, this is impossible. Illustrator does not let you send one blend through another, and yet I'm going to show you exactly how to do it right now. All right, so here's the final version of the artwork with the accordion extrusion for the letter U cutting right through the object blend for the letter L. And we're going to create this effect by adding a couple of additional object blends. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to the artwork from last week, and I'll press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, and then I'll click right about there in order to select that letter U. And so if you end up selecting a lone anchor point instead, just go ahead and click in the shape to select the whole thing, and then press Control C, or Command C on the Mac, to copy the shape. Next you want to click off the paths in order to deselect them, and then press Control F. Now, if you didn't click off the paths, then you're going to end up pasting this U into the existing blend, which is not what we want. So make sure you click off and then press Control F or Command F. And you'll have a new U all by itself. All right, now press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Move dialog box, and I'll change the horizontal value to 154, and then I'll set the vertical value to -37, which is going to move that U up and to the right. And then I'll click the Copy button in order to create a copy of that path outline. Now I'm going to go ahead and select the scale tool, and I'll Alt or Option click on this anchor point right here in order to bring up the Scale dialog box. And notice that I'm assigning a non-uniform horizontal value of 72% and a vertical value of 100%, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, now press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll Shift Click on that other U right there, and I'll go ahead and combine these shapes into a blend by going up to the Object menu, choosing the Blend command, and then choosing Make. Or you've got that keyboard shortcut of Control Alt B or Command Option B on a Mac. And this looks absolutely terrible, and that's because we have too many steps. And so I'll go back to the Object menu, choose Blend, and choose Blend Options, and for whatever reason, Illustrator is trying to assign 170 steps, which is way too many. So we'll turn on the Preview checkbox, make sure that spacing is set to Specified Steps, and then change the number of steps to 36. And we'll end up with a much more palatable effect. It's not exactly right, however, so I'll just go ahead and click OK. Notice that the blend is going in the wrong direction. So I'll press the A key to switch back to my white arrow tool, click off the paths to deselect them, select this guy right here by clicking on it, and then right-clicking inside the document window, choosing a range, and choosing Send To Back. And notice that reverses the direction of the blend. All right, this guy's too far in front, so I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll select the entire blend by clicking on the first U, and then I'll press Control X, or Command X on the Mac, to cut that blend, and then I'll select the blend for the letter L and press Control F, or Command F on the Mac, to paste it in front. All right, now I also want to give this guy a little bit of a drop shadow. So I'll go up to the Effect menu. You may see the word drop shadow followed by a dot dot dot, but if you don't, just go ahead and choose Stylize followed by Drop Shadow. And I'm going to assign the same values I did last week. So the color is black, the mode is Multiply, the opacity value is 75%, the X offset value is -3, and both the Y offset and Blur values are five, at which point if I turn on the preview checkbox you can see that we have a little bit of a drop shadow, at which point I'll click OK. All right, now that ends up creating the effect of this more or less continuous blend that's coming off the letter U, but it's not going through the blend for the letter L, and that's because we need to create yet another blend for the back of the L right here, which is going to take a little bit of work. And so I'm going to go up to the View menu and choose Outline, or you've got that keyboard shortcut of Control Y or Command Y on a Mac, which lets you switch back between the outline and preview modes. And then I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and marquee these anchor points right there at the top of the L and then I'll shift marquee these two anchor points right here. So this guy and this guy should be deselected. Then you want to drop down to the bottom left L, and go ahead and marquee these points, like so. And by the way, I have the shift key down once again. And then shift marquee these points so that this guy and this guy are not selected. And now we want to add one more element. You want to press Shift and Alt, that's going to be Shift and Option on the Mac, and click on this path of the blend right here, which should select the entire thing as we're seeing. And I have made a dreadful mistake, I've accidentally selected some of the stuff on the black letters layer, which I don't want, so I'm going to lock that layer by clicking in the second column here inside the Layers panel. And now I have the effect I'm looking for. All right, now you want to press Control C, or Command C on a Mac, to copy what you've selected, and then go ahead and click off of it in order to deselect those shapes, and then press Control Y or Command Y on a Mac to switch back to the preview mode. All right, now press the V key in order to switch to the black arrow tool, and click somewhere in this first U blend right here in order to select the entire thing, and then you want to press Control B or Command B on a Mac in order to paste those path outlines in back of the U. And to see what things look like, I'm going to turn off the black letters layer, and the thing is we have broken the blend. So these paths are no longer blended together, which means we need to return to the Object menu, choose Blend, and then choose Make in order to restore the blend, at which point it's going to be off kilter, and that's because the path of the blend doesn't really work correctly for these shortened path outlines. And so what I'm going to do is go ahead and zoom in here like so, and I'm going to drag this anchor point right here, and by the way, I should mention that my Smart Guides are turned off, because otherwise they just get in the way. And I'm going to go ahead and drag this anchor point until it snaps into alignment, see that white snap cursor? That's what you want in order to make sure that you're snapping the path outlines into the proper location. All right, now go ahead and zoom out, and I'll zoom in on this path here, which is not in the right place. If I press Control Y or Command Y on a Mac to switch to the outline mode, you can see that it's off, so what you need to do is press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, then click off the paths to deselect them and Alt or Option click on this one to select the entire thing, like so. And then grab this anchor point and drag it until it snaps into alignment like so, and that's going to update the path of the blend, by the way, so that it works a heck of a lot better. All right, now click off the path to deselect them, and I'll press Control Zero or Command Zero on a Mac to zoom out, and I will once again press Control Y or Command Y on a Mac in order to switch back to the preview mode. And with any luck, you should get the effect you're seeing right here, at which point I'll go ahead and turn my black letters back on. Now, the only thing that's bugging me is notice if I zoom in here that part of the Z, part of this blue Z, is slipping in back of itself. I don't want that effect, so what I'm going to do is just make a very slight adjustment to its path of the blend, and so I'll go ahead and press Control Y or Command Y on a Mac to once again switch to the outline mode, and then I'll click on this anchor point right here to select it, and I'm going to press Control Y or Command Y on a Mac to switch back to the preview mode and you have to be very careful here, because if you don't exactly click on a control handle, you'll end up selecting some other part of the blend. And so I'll just go ahead and drag this guy down to this position here. And then I'll click off the path to deselect it. And then finally I have one slight problem here. The accordion extrusion associated with the letter P is in back of the one for the L. That's not what I want. So I'm going to press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and I'll click anywhere on this blue blend to select it, and then I'll right-click in the document window, choose Arrange, and choose Bring Forward. So we just need to nudge this guy slightly forward in order to get the final effect that I'm looking for. And that's how you create an object blend that cuts right through another one, by essentially adding still more blends here inside Illustrator. All right, now, if you're a member of lynda.com slash LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to take our graphic so far in which the U is cutting through the L, and notice the Z right here, how it stopped being kind of above the U? We're going to make it slice right through the U and match the angle of the letter form as well. If you're interested, next week I'm going to show you how to combine dynamic distortions with object blends to create this entirely live, editable piece of artwork, once again inside Adobe Illustrator. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

Contents