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

815 Aligning your many gobstoppers

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

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815 Aligning your many gobstoppers

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our seamlessly repeating pattern of cubical gobstoppers and we're going to align it to the original piece of artwork in order to create this effect here. And so the first thing you need to do is switch over to the layers panel and turn on the guides layer so that you can see the exact center of the art board. Now if you were to also turn on the drawing layer and turn off that pattern layer, you would see that the original cubicle artwork exactly centers with the center of the art board whereas the pattern does not. And so we need to bring it down and to the right a little bit, and the best way to make that happen is to click someplace inside that pattern in order to select the big rectangle that we created in the previous movie. And then switch over to the appearance panel and go ahead and click on the word transform. And if you're not seeing it, it's because the fill is collapsed, you need to twirl it open and then click on the word transform in order to bring up that dynamic transform effect. Now turn on the preview checkbox and click in the horizontal value and press shift up arrow, let's say three times in a row, and it looks like I'm going a little bit too far right there, so I'll press the down arrow key in order to move the artwork back to the left a little bit and it looks like at a horizontal value of 27 points, that I'm getting the alignment I'm looking for. But you know what, I'm going to click okay to accept that change and then I'm going to zoom way in so that I can see how the pattern aligns with those center guides once again. Don't worry about that center point, that's a little bit deceptive, it just represents the center of the selected rectangle and so it is not going to move, nor is it useful for alignment purposes. All right now click on the word transform in order to bring back that effect and I'll click inside the vertical value and I'll turn on the preview checkbox, very important 'cause otherwise I can't see what I'm doing. Then I'll click in the vertical value and notice as I press shift up arrow in order to increase that value, I'm actually moving the pattern downward and at about 40 points, I've gone too far, so I'll take the value down by pressing the down arrow key a couple of times. Notice that the pattern's a little bit high which is why I ultimately set this value to 38.1 points like so and then we get better alignment, at which point you can go ahead and click okay. All right now I'll press control zero or command zero on a Mac to zoom out and I'll switch back over to the layers panel and I'll turn off that guides layer. Now if I want to be able to see the drawing layer in front of the pattern, then I need to move the pattern layer down like so, so that it's appearing in the background and at this point it looks like we have some very nice alignment. However, I want to set apart the big gobstopper so I'm going to do a couple of things here. First of all, I am going to target the entire pattern layer by clicking on its circular so-called meatball, that's what it's known as inside Adobe anyway, and that is going to select the entire layer, then I'll switch back over to the appearance panel which you can also get to by choosing the appearance command from the window menu, and you want to drop down to this icon right here, add new fill and click on it. Now I'm going to change that fill right there to that shade of blue, dull blue, that I created a couple of movies ago, and then, notice the word opacity below the fill, not this guy, but this guy right here, so you'll have to have the fill twirled open like so, then click on the word opacity and change its blend mode to color and that'll go ahead and colorize the pattern as we're seeing here. Then you want to click on the final occurrence of opacity down here at the bottom of the stack, and change the opacity value to 66% in order to fade it like so. Alright now I'm going to switch back to the layers panel and this time, I'm going to target the drawing layer by clicking on its meatball and then I'll go up to the effect menu choose stylize and choose outer glow. And I went ahead and set the color right here to white, so notice that the hue value's zero degrees, the saturation is 0% and the brightness is 100% at which point I'll click okay. I set the mode to screen, I crank the opacity value up to its maximum of 100%, and I set the blur to 50 points. At which point I'll turn on the preview checkbox and you can see that that creates a surprisingly subtle glow effect. And so I'll accept that change by clicking okay, and now I want to thicken up the stroke around the outline of this guy, and so I'll switch back over to the appearance panel once again and this time instead of clicking add new fill, I'll click on add new stroke, and I will go ahead and change the line weight to eight points in order to thicken up that stroke like so. And notice that it's got a bunch of mitered corners, so click on the word stroke right there and change the corner to round join. Still have a problem though, I don't want to trace each and every shape, I just want to trace the big block and to make that happen, you need to have the stroke selected here in the appearance panel, then go ahead and click on the FX icon down here at the bottom of the appearance panel and choose pathfinder, followed by add. And that is going to dynamically unite all of the shapes so that we have a single thick stroke. Now I don't want the stroke to go into the shapes, I just want it to go outward, and so I'm going to grab that stroke and drag it to below the word contents. So that the contents of this layer are sitting on top of the stroke and we end up with this effect here. At which point I'll press control shift A or command shift A on the Mac in order to deselect my artwork and then I'll go up to the view menu and choose presentation mode in order to hide the interface here inside the most recent version of Illustrator. And that is how you use the dynamic transform effect to precisely align your pattern with the original cubical gobstopper.

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