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

704 Dynamic warp distortions: Fish and Twist

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

704 Dynamic warp distortions: Fish and Twist

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, we're going to take that incomplete artwork that we've been creating right along inside Adobe Illustrator. And notice that we're missing the two z's in the word puzzle. And so we're going to bring back those z's and integrate them into the other letter forms using a couple of dynamic warp distortions, once again inside Illustrator, specifically fish and twist, believe it or not. And you get to these features by going to the effect menu, choosing warp, and then choosing any command. It doesn't matter which one. So I could start by choosing flag, and then I could switch to fish or twist inside the dialog box. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's that final version of the artwork, opened up inside Illustrator. The good news is we're more than halfway there. And so here inside the layers panel, I'll go ahead and twirl open the blends layer, that is to say, expand it. And I'll turn on this third blend down, which is actually the second z in the word puzzle. And now I'll press the a key to switch from my white arrow tool, and I'll click inside this purple z, the one that's at an angle here, in order to select it. And then, you want to go out to the effect menu, and I'm going to start with the twist filter, which actually exists in different forms in two locations. Here, under the distort and transform submenu, as well as at the bottom of the warp submenu. I'm going to start things off by choosing this version of twist right here, and I just want to show you how it works. If I were to enter an angle value of 100 degrees, let's say, and turn on the preview checkbox, then that guy will start twisting, virtually of course. And the reason we're not seeing any twisting beyond this edge right here, is because it's hidden by the letter u. But if I were to go ahead and click okay, and then turn off that u, which is right there at the top of the list, then you can see this twisting occurring. And it's happening where positive values are concerned in a clockwise direction. If you wanted a counter-clockwise twist instead, then you would go to the window menu and choose the appearance command, to bring up the appearance panel, and then you'd click on the word twist right there to revisit its settings. You change the angle to negative, and then turn on the preview checkbox, and you can see it now twists in a counter-clockwise direction. So that's one way to work. I'll just go ahead and click okay to accept that change. And, because I'm not going to use this twist effect, I can either turn it off, which is a saved attribute, by the way, or if you just totally wanted to get rid of it, you would make sure it's selected, as it is, and then you click on the little trash can icon in the bottom right corner of the appearance panel. All right, now that effect is interesting, but I prefer the one under the warp submenu, if for only the reason that warp is a very powerful effect that allows you to change between any of these distortions on the fly. And so, if I wasn't sure what kind of effect I wanted, then I could select flag, for example, and set it to 60%, which is actually what I'm looking for, but you can play with that value as much as you like, and you can also switch between horizontal and vertical, and see what kind of different results you get. And if you decide you don't like this specific warp, then you could switch from flag to, in our case, twist, down here at the bottom of the list, and then you will see the twist applied. So if I were to crank this value down, then I'm going to twist the artwork in a clockwise direction, so we're getting the opposite effect of the other twist filter. But actually, that's happening because I haven't selected horizontal. So vertical was giving me that behavior, but what i really want is horizontal, and I'm going to set this blend value to 60%, which actually does twist the artwork in a clockwise direction. All right, so this is the effect I'm looking for, at which point I'll click okay to apply that change, and then I'll switch back to the layers panel, and I will turn on this top layer, which is the u in the foreground, which, as you can see, is zig-zagging back-and-forth in front of that round contour associated with the purple z. And because this is a dynamic blend, the dynamic effect is tapering over the course of the many steps. All right, now let's take a look at a different warp distortion in the form of fish. And so I'll go ahead and turn on this last z, and so this is the only blend that has not so far been visible. And then, I'll click down here, with the white arrow tool once again, to select this blue z, which is at an angle. Then, you want to go up to the effect menu, choose warp, and choose literally anything to get started. Now what you're going to find is that some of these distortions produce interesting effects. And some of 'em, under certain situations, don't do anything. And so I'll just choose squeeze, for the heck of it. And so notice I've got the preview checkbox turned on. And so if you want to compare the original, unmodified letter, you could turn preview off, and that would be nice if you could see things the way they looked before, but in my case, it's not working. So if that happens to you, go ahead and turn preview back on, and set the bend value to zero. And that way, with all these values zeroed out, nothing is happening. And then you could try a negative value, and see what you come up with there, or a positive value, or what have you. Or you can just switch to a different style. And the great thing about this pop-up menu, versus the warp submenu that we saw a moment ago, is that it includes little icons that give you a sense for what would happen if you were to apply this distortion to a square. And so shell lower is going to bolds the effect down, whereas shell upper is going to bend it upward. In any event, you can play with those, but I came up with, as I said, fish, this guy right here, not fish eye, by the way, but rather fish. And then, I just fooled around with this value until I came up with something I liked. But, turned out, I didn't really like anything when horizontal was selected, so I went ahead and switched to vertical, and I took the bend value up to its default setting of 50%, in order to produce this effect here. And so notice, if i were to click okay, how we've turned the bottom of the accordion extrusion into a kind of blue cape. Problem of course, is that we're infringing on a space otherwise occupied by the yellow z, and here's how we're going to take care of that. I'll go ahead and press the v key, to switch back to the black arrow tool, and I'll click on this blend, to select the entire thing, so this is the yellow to purple z, and then I'll press control c, or command c on a Mac, to copy it, then I'll click off the paths, to deselect all of them, and I'll press control f, or command f on a Mac, to paste this guy in front. All right, now what you want to do is go up to the object menu, choose blend, and expand, in order to convert all those steps to actual path outlines. They're currently inside of a group. Believe it or not, this time I want to keep it that way, so I'm going to double-click on the z, in order to enter the group isolation mode, and you can tell that you're isolated inside the group, for one thing, because everything outside is dimmed, but also you can now select individual path outlines, using the black arrow tool. All right, what we want to do is get rid of all but the first four, the frontmost four of these z's. And so I'm going to start dragging at this point right to here, with my black arrow tool, and continue dragging over to the left until I partially marquee all these guys, and then, if I press the backspace key, or the delete key on a Mac, you can see that I get rid of everything but the front four, so these four guys right here. That's what you want. And now you can see, that way, we're not cutting past the blue cape here, we're not cutting into this portion of the upper z. All right, now press the escape key, in order to escape out of the group isolation mode, and notice now, if I were to click on any of the z's, I select all of them, because they're still inside of a group, also notice that we have this kind of strange drop shadow, right here, and down here as well. We don't need it. The drop shadow's totally taken care of by the blend in the background, and so I'll just go ahead and select this guy, and I'll return to the appearance panel, which in my case, is next door to the layers panel, it might be elsewhere for you, and then select the drop shadow, and then drop down to the little trash can icon, in the bottom right corner of the appearance panel, and click on it, in order to get rid of that dynamic effect. All right, now I'll click off the paths to deselect them. I'll switch back to the layers panel. I'll go ahead and tidy up by twirling the blends layer closed, and then I will turn on the black letters in the foreground. And that's how you combine a couple of dynamic warp distortions, namely fish and twist, along with dynamic object blends here inside Illustrator. Now if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a followup movie, in which we take this piece of artwork that we've created so far, and we are going to finally finish it, by adding in this entirely dynamic background. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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