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

770 Coloring your mandala pattern

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

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770 Coloring your mandala pattern

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we're going to take that black-and-white mandala pattern that we created last week, which is not only very tiny, but it's also kind of hard to differentiate what's going on, and we're going to render it in full beautiful living color, so that it blows everybody's mind, and that's correct, by the way, everybody is singular. Everybody you meet, every single day, is singular. And now back to my artwork. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's that mandala pattern that I created last week, and here's another variation that I'll be using instead because I like it better and finally, we have the ultimate, full-color version of the artwork. So you can start with any file you like, including one that you created on your own, and then, just to simplify things, I'm going to turn off the more dots layer, up here at the top of the Layers Panel, and then I'll click on the mandala Layer to select it. Now I want to fill this layer with a Gradient, and you can make that happen in a couple of different ways. One is to click on the Effects icon, down here at the bottom of the Layers Panel, and choose Gradient Overlay, that's going to work just fine, however, I'm going to want to duplicate this gradient a couple of times, and so the easier way to work is to click on this black and white icon right there, and then choose Gradient in order to create an independent Gradient Layer. And that'll bring up the Gradient Fill dialog box, at which point, I'll click inside this Gradient bar to bring up the Gradient Editor and I'll select this default preset, Violet to Orange, which is going to serve as a decent starting point. Now that's going to end up filling up your entire artwork, which is not what we want, so I'm just going to click OK for now a couple of times to back out here, and then I'll Rename this layer color, and I'll drop down to this horizontal division between the color and mandala Layers, and I'll press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac and click on it in order to clip the gradient inside the Layer so that we're coloring the brush strokes and nothing more. All right, now, because this is a Dynamic Fill Layer, I can still edit it by double-clicking on its thumbnail, which is going to bring up the Gradient Fill dialog box. I want the style to be Radial, so that the Gradient is starting from the center and emitting outwards. Now these aren't the right colors, so I'll go ahead and click on this Gradient bar to once again visit the Gradient Editor dialog box, and then, I'll take this orange Color Stop right here, and I'll drag it down until we have a Location value here at the bottom of the dialog box of 30%. It's almost the right color, by the way, it's just slightly off so I'll double-click on the Color Stop, click in the Hue value right there, and press the up-arrow key to take it up to 30 degrees, the Saturation and Brightness values of 100% each are just fine, so I'll click OK. All right, now I want to take this guy, the purple Color Stop right there, and I want to make a duplicate of it. You do that by pressing the alt key, or the option key on the Mac and dragging it, in my case, all the way over to the right-hand side, so that the Location now reads 100% and now I'll double-click on it to bring up the Color Picker dialog box. I'll select the Hue value, and take it down to 250 degrees, and then I'll set both the Saturation and Brightness Values to 100% and I'll click OK, and we end up with this very colorful effect here. All right, now it's not quite what I'm looking for. In fact, I want the center to be white and so the center of a Radial Gradient is represented by this first Color Stop, over here on the left hand side, so I'll double-click on it, and then I'll just drag the circle all the way to the top left corner of the color field, so that the Saturation value is zero, and the brightness is 100%. Hue value does not matter, so I'll just go ahead and click OK, and you can see that we end up with white. Now I want to create one more Color Stop, so I'm going to grab this guy right here, the orange one, and I'm going to make a duplicate of it, by alt or option, dragging it until I see a location value of 60%. Then I'll double-click on it, and I'll set the Hue Value to zero degrees which is red, the Saturation and Brightness values of 100% each are just fine, and so I'll click OK, and then I'll click OK again, in order to back up to the Gradient Fill dialog box. Now what what you want to do is just make sure the Angle value is 90 degrees, which it should be by default, and then click in the Scale Value and press Shift+up-arrow in order to move those colors outward, as you're seeing in the Image Window. And ultimately, I took that scale Value up to 180%, so that we're still seeing some blue in the far corners of the artwork, at which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. Now I want to assign a Gradient to the background as well, and so I'm going to duplicate this color layer, by pressing the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and dragging it down to this position right here, and notice, because I'm pressing the alt or option key, that I'm seeing a double-arrow cursor, which tells me that Photoshop is going to Duplicate the layer, as it has done right here. Now at this point we've lost the brush strokes because both of the Gradients are identical to each other. And so I'll modify the bottom Gradient by double-clicking on this thumbnail, and then, I'll go ahead and click on the Gradient bar, to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box. You want to grab that white Color Stop and get rid of it, just by dragging it down like so. And then I'll drag this orange Color Stop all the way over to the left-hand side, so that the center of the Gradient is orange. Now I'll go ahead and double-click on this red Color Stop in order to once again bring up the Color Picker dialog box, I will change the Hue Value this time to 340 degrees, which as you can see makes the red a little bit more pink. And then, I'll tab down to the Brightness Value and take it down to 50 percent, which is going to darken up that color considerably, and then I'll click OK. Now I want to take this Location Value down to 50%, which I could do by clicking in it and pressing Shift+down-arrow. Now we want to edit the final Color Stop by double-clicking on it. I'll click in the Hue value and press Shift+up-arrow a couple of times in order to raise the Hue Value to 270 degrees, which is Violet, and then I'll tab down to the Brightness Value and take it way down to just 10%, which is very nearly black, but not quite. It also affects all of the colors in the Gradient in between, at which point I click OK. So can see that we have a lot of rich colors over here on the right side of the Gradient, at which point I'll click OK and then I'll click in that Scale Value and I'll take it down this time around by pressing Shift+down-arrow, until I arrive at a Scale Value of 130%, at which point I'll click OK. Now, I'll press Shift+F in order to fill the screen with the artwork, and I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well, and just so you can see what we've been able to achieve, I'll reverse the artwork. This is the original black-and-white version of the mandala artwork, and this is the way it looks in color, thanks to the addition of a couple of dynamic Gradient layers, here inside Photoshop. Now if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to take our artwork so far, which notice, it's missing some of the larger dotted brush-strokes, and we're going to bring those brush-strokes back, and assign some color and a little bit of Radial blur, in order to create this final version of the artwork. It's terribly exciting stuff, so don't you dare miss it. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you a new feature in Illustrator CC 2019 that you cannot live without. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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