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

811 Making one pattern fade into another

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

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811 Making one pattern fade into another

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- [Deke] All right, in the last movie I alluded to the idea that you can fade a pattern to white by adding a gradient, as we're seeing here. But what if you want to fade one pattern into a totally different pattern? Well, that's going to be a little more work because we'll need to create the alternate pattern. And the technique itself is going to involve an opacity mask. So starting with our shaded star pattern, I'm going to go to the Swatches panel, and I'm going to grab this simple star pattern right here. You don't want anything selected, by the way. Just go ahead and grab it. And then click on the little page icon in order to create a copy of that swatch. And let's call this one fan blade because the stars are going to look more like fan blades by the time we're done. And then I'll click OK. And I'll go ahead and drag that guy to the end of the list, and then I'll double-click on it in order to open it up in the pattern editor mode. All right, I'm going to start by clicking on any one of these light blue shapes. And then I'll go up to the control panel and click Select Similar Objects. And assuming that this guy is set to All, you'll select all the blue shapes as we're seeing here. Then you want to make sure your fill is active here inside the Swatches panel. And we're looking for this shade of gray, the ones where all of the RGB values equal 128. So I'll just go ahead and apply that, and that will change all of those shapes like so. Then I'll click in this dark blue shape right here. Then I'll once again click on the Select Similar Objects icon up here in the control panel. And this time around, I'm going to select a very light shade of gray in which the RGB values equal 230. And that way we're really changing things up because one would think you'd want a big change, not something super subtle that people wouldn't see. All right, now I'm going to select one of the orange shapes by clicking on it. And then I'll click on Select Similar Objects once again in order to select all the orange shapes. And I'm going to set them to this very drab pale brown that begins R equals 199. And as you can see, they all change in kind. All right, now I need to change up the strokes, and so I'll click on this down pointing arrowhead that's labeled Select Similar Options, and I'll select Stroke Color from the list. And that's going to go ahead and select all of the shapes, incidentally. And now I'll click on a stroke icon here in the Swatches panel, and I'll select a darker shade of gray in which all of the RGB values equal 77. And we'll end up with this effect here. All right, now I'll go ahead and click Done in order to accept that change. All right, now what you want to do is click on the big rectangle in order to select it, and then go ahead and copy it to the clipboard by pressing Control + C or Command + C on the Mac. And now you want to switch back to the fill up here in the Swatches panel, like so. And go ahead and select that most recent pattern, fan blade. And you will change the fill accordingly. All right, now press Control + F or Command + F on a Mac in order to paste a rectangle you just copied. After all, this is the rectangle that's going to fade, and it's going to fade with the help of an opacity mask. And to take advantage of that, you go to the Window menu, drop all the way down to Transparency in order to bring up the Transparency panel. Notice this guy right here. That is the opacity mask. And to create a mask, just go ahead and click on the Make Mask button, like so. And by default, the mask is going to be entirely black, meaning that we can no longer see the active rectangle. Go ahead and click on that opacity mask icon right there in order to make it active, and then go ahead and zoom out so that you can take in the entire art board. Grab the Rectangle Tool from the shape tool fly-out menu. And go to the View menu and make sure your Smart Guides are turned on. Mine aren't, so I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then drag from one corner of the red bleed boundary to the other in order to create a huge rectangle that happens to be filled with a pattern, so you can kind of see through one pattern to the other now. That's not what we want. I want a gradient. And so go up to the Window menu and choose Gradient to bring up the Gradient panel right here. And click on a Gradient slider in order to make it active. And just like that, you will create a fade. This isn't the fade I'm looking for, however. I want a radial gradient, so I'm going to switch to the radial icon. In older versions of the software, this works a little differently, but you'll figure it out. All right, I'm going to take this guy right here, white, and I'm going to change its location to 50%, like so. And that black is not looking like a rich black to me. It's looking like a weak black. I want it to be nice and rich, so I'll grab the black swatch and drag it and drop it onto it. Sure enough, that darkened it up. And that way we can truly see all the way through to the new pattern. All right, I want to change the shape of this gradient, however, so I'll go ahead and select the Gradient Tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of G. And then when you hover over this area, you will see the gradient annotator. I want to make this guy as wide as the art board, so I'm going to drag this particular doohickey to about there, let's say. And I also want this gradient to be elliptical, so I'm going to space bar drag down a little bit so I can see this control. And I will drag it down until it aligns to the top of the art board. And notice that went ahead and moved the other side so it aligns to the bottom of the art board, which is exactly what I'm looking for. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll click off the paths to deselect 'em. Notice here in the Layers panel that we're just see the opacity mask. We're not really seeing any of our layers. And you won't until you return to the Transparency panel and click on the image thumbnail right there. And that will bring back all of your layers. And notice that the rectangle is once again selected. All right, I'm going to click off it to deselect it, and I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. And in fact, I'm going to go up to the View menu and choose Presentation Mode in order to hide the interface, and then I'll zoom on in. And that is how you fade from one pattern to another using a very basic gradient opacity mask here inside Illustrator.

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