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

706 Adding a dynamic background, part 2

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

706 Adding a dynamic background, part 2

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to take that dynamic background that we created in the previous movie, and we're going to go ahead and finish off the artwork by adding these red and orange bushes right here in the bottom left and top right region of the artwork. And as you can see they are both based on this green bit of shrubbery up at the top of the artwork, which is actually a roughened version of a lowercase letter e. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the artwork in progress and also switch over to the layers panel, and I'll go ahead and unlock this layer that's called blends. And I'll click anywhere on the e in order to select the entire thing. So notice that I have a small e in the bottom right area right here and I have a larger e toward the top. And I'll go ahead and copy these shapes by pressing control c or command c on a Mac. All right now I'll go ahead and lock off that layer once again, and I'm going to turn these top three layers off. That is to say I'm going to hide them by dragging across their eyeballs. And then I'll click on the sizzle layer to select it and I'll click on the fly-out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and make sure that paste remembers layers is turned off. Then I'll just go ahead and press control f or command f on a Mac in order to paste that big e blend in front. All right, now I'll press the r key to switch to the rotate tool. So as you may recall from the previous movie, I'm trying to rely on keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. And then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac in order to bring up the rotate dialog box, and I'll set the angle value to 75 degrees. And assuming that your preview checkbox is turned on, you'll be able to see that rotation applied in the background, at which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. Now at this point it's not in the right location, and what I'd probably do is turn this eggplant layer back on just so I can get a sense of where these letters should be. And then I would switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the v key, and I'll press the enter key or the return key on a Mac, in order to bring up the move dialog box. And that happens anytime you press enter or return when either of the arrow tools is selected. All right, now I'm going to move this guy to the left by changing the horizontal value to -80 and then I'll move it down by changing the vertical value to 40. And assuming that the preview checkbox is turned on, you'll see that this big e is moving out from behind the roughened ellipses. And then I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that modification. Now we need to move this smaller e in back of these roughened ellipses, this thing that I'm calling the eggplant. And so I'll press the a key to switch to the white arrow tool. I'll click off the shapes to deselect them. And then I'll click on this pale smaller e in order to select it. so you just want to click inside of it to select the entire e, independently of the other one, and then press the enter key or the return key on a Mac to once again bring up the move dialog box. And I'm going to change the horizontal value to -70 this time around, and I'll change the vertical value to 110. It ends up working and as you can see, that moves that e into a better location so it's hidden by the eggplant, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change. Now I want the bush down here to look red not green, so I'm going to click on it to select it. So as long as you click in that green area you'll select the entire large e, and then I'll go ahead and click on the fill swatch on the far left side of the horizontal control panel, and I'll change it to this shade of red which begins r equals 237, and that will give me a blue looking item right there. All right, now I'll press enter or return to hide that panel, and then I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll press control shift a, or command shift a on a Mac to deselect the artwork and then I'll click on this guy to select both of these. So I'll go ahead and turn off the eggplant layer so you can see that a little better. And now you can see that the entire blend is indeed selected. Now I want to rotate a copy of it. So I'll press the r key to switch to the rotate tool, as you can see over here in the toolbox, and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on a Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box, and I'll change this angle value to 160 degrees, which ends up rotating the blend like so. And instead of clicking OK I'll click copy so that I'm creating a copy of those blended e's. All right now, I want to be able to move it into a good location, so that means I need to see the eggplant again. So I'll go ahead and turn on that eggplant layer. It may take a moment to apply because we have so many dynamic effects going on, and then I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box. Obviously these coordinates aren't going to work and so I'll change the first value, the horizontal value, to 160 points, which is going to move the e quite a bit over to the right and now I want to move it upward. A positive vertical value moves things downward in Illustrator. A negative vertical value moves them upward. And so I'll change this guy to -120 should do the trick, at which point this cloned e lands at a nice location, and so I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. And now I'll press the a key to switch to my white arrow tool, click off the artwork to deselect it, and I'll click in this red area to select that e independently of the other one. And then I'll click on a fill swatch, the very first swatch on the far left side of the horizontal control panel, and I'll change it to the shade of orange, which is the next swatch in this document, r equals 241. So I'll just go ahead and select that swatch and we get an orange bush. All right, now press the enter key or the return key on a Mac to hide that panel. And notice right here, I'll go ahead and scroll over a little bit so that you can see that we have a little bit of a drop shadow behind this letter. I don't want that. I want a glow. And so I'll go to the window menu and choose the appearance command once again to bring up the appearance panel. And then notice that I'm not seeing the drop shadow, and that's because I've selected one and only one compound path. But notice that there's an FX icon that's sitting next to the word blend, and so if I click on the blend notice what happens here inside the artwork. And so if I double click on that blend item right there notice here inside the artwork that that goes ahead and selects the other e. It's a little hard to tell because this layer's set to green, but take my word for it. And you'll see the words drop shadow. Go ahead and click on the drop shadow and get rid of it. You can turn it off if you prefer, but I'm just going to get rid of it by clicking on a little trash icon down here in the bottom right corner of the panel. And then I'll go up to the effect menu, choose stylize, and rather than choosing drop shadow, I'll go with outer glow. So I'll go ahead and choose that guy, and notice that my blend mode is set to screen as by default. I've cranked the opacity value up to 100%. I've set the size of the blur to 15 point, and then if I click on this little swatch here you can see that my hue value is 49 degrees. I actually entered 50 degrees, but 49 is the closest equivalent. And then I cranked the saturation and brightness values up to 100% apiece, at which point I would click OK. And then I'll turn on the preview checkbox so that you can see that outer glow. And did you notice how the roughen effect changed ever so slightly, and that's because, again, roughen is a random effect. And it changes every single time regardless of your parameters. All right, now click OK in order to accept that change. I'll press control shift a or command shift a on a Mac in order to deselect the artwork. Press control 0 or command 0 on a Mac in order to center my art, now I'll switch back to the layers panel and turn those top two layers back on. And that is the final version of my artwork created from some very basic shapes indeed. And so if I were to go up to the view menu and choose the outline command, which has an old-time keyboard shortcut of control y or command y on a Mac, you will see that all we have is a bunch of letter forms, ellipses, rectangles, and straight lines and nothing more. But thanks to the power of object blends and dynamic effects, we end up with this deceptively intricate piece of vector-based artwork.

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