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

827 Op art experiment 4: Triangle tunnels

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

827 Op art experiment 4: Triangle tunnels

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques." In the eight years I've been making this thing, I've recorded three sets of what I call op art experiments. In 2013, you can check out episodes 190, as well as 201. In 2017, look to episode 655. Why do I mention them? Because I want you to go back and look at them right now. There are seriously 826 previous episodes in this series. So instead of eating and sleeping and taking care of the people who are so every important to you, why don't you do the world a big giant favor and just binge watch "Deke's Techniques"? Okay, I admit, that was me thinking of me, which is why today I want to give back to you with my fourth op art experiment, triangle tunnels. They're vectors, they live in Illustrator, and they love you very much. Here, let me show you exactly how they work. All right, here's the final version of the effect just so you know exactly where we're going. I'm going to be starting inside this mostly empty document. It contains a couple of center guides and some placeholder text, nothing more. What we're going to do is add a bunch of triangles to it. And we want them to be on an independent layer, so over here in the Layers panel, I'll drop down to the little page icon, and I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click in order to force a display of the Layer Options dialog box. And I'll call this layer 200/100/80/10 for reasons that will become obvious in just a moment. And then I'll click OK. All right, now arguably the best way to draw triangles in Illustrator is to use this guy right here, the Polygon Tool, which you'll find in the Shape Tool fly-out menu. Next, you want to make sure your Smart Guides are turned on by going up to the View menu. Notice my Smart Guides are off, so I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then you want to click at the intersection of those two guidelines. And I'm going to set the number of sides to three because, after all, we're drawing a triangle. And then I'll set the radius to 200, which is the first of those numbers that I assigned to the layer name. And then I'll click OK. All right, now I'll click on the word Stroke up here on the left slide of the control panel. I'll take the line weight up to two points, and I'll go ahead and set the cap and the corner to round, like so, and then I'll press the Escape key in order to hide that panel. All right, now I'm going to click at the intersection of those two guides once again, and this time I'll set the radius to 100. And then I'll do it again, and I'll set the radius to 80 this time around. And finally, I'll click and set the radius to 10. All right, now I want to move that last tiny triangle, but I want to move it to a very specific location, and so I'm going to create a custom guide by first zooming way in so that I'm getting the results I'm looking for. And then I'll go ahead and grab the Line Segment Tool, which is available in this Line Tool fly-out menu. And I'll go ahead and drag from the intersection of those two guides to the center of this segment right here. And it needs to be a little higher. And so those are the values you should see, by the way, a distance value of 40 points and an angle of 30 degrees. And if you want to confirm you got it right, you can just press the Backspace key or the Delete key on a Mac to get rid of that line. And click once again just to make sure that you have exactly the right values. So notice my angle value is slightly off. I want it to be exactly 30 degrees. So length, 40 point, angle, 30 degrees, then click OK. And now I want to move this guy to the guides layer, and so I'll drag this tiny red square over here on the right side of the Layers panel down, like so, until it turns blue. And now it appears to be covered up by the other triangles, but I'll be able to see it once again if I convert it to a guideline by going up to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Make Guides, like so. All right, now I'll go ahead and press the v key to switch to the black arrow tool. And I'll click on this guy to select it, and then I'll drag it by this point right here, so the point at which this segment intersects the custom guideline, until it snaps into alignment with the larger triangle, like so. All right, now we'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac to zoom out a bit. And I'll go ahead and marquee all of these triangles here. It appears they have a fill. I don't want that, so I'm going to click on the first swatch over here on the far left side of the control panel, and I'll select None in order to get rid of those fills, like so. All right, now we need to blend between these triangles. And so I'm going to click off of them to deselect them, and then I'll select this big buy and the next guy in. And I'll go up to the Object menu, choose Blend, and then choose Make. Or you have that keyboard shortcut of ctrl + alt + b or cmd + opt + b on a Mac. And I do indeed want four steps, but just to confirm that's what I've got, I'm going to go to the Object menu, choose Blend, and then choose Blend Options right here. And I'll make sure Spacing is set to Specified Steps and that the number of steps is four, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change. Now I'll select this next triangle in, and I'll Shift + Click on this little guy to select them. And I'll go to the Object menu, choose Blend, and choose Make. And then I'll return to the Object menu, choose Blend, and then choose Blend Options. Make sure Specified Steps is still active. This time, however, I want five steps, which is going to look like this. And then I'll go ahead and click OK. All right, I'm going to zoom in a little farther here. Now, the great thing about blends is even though they're old as the hills. They were first introduced in Illustrator 88 back in 1988. However, even so, they are absolutely dynamic. So if I were to switch to the white arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the A key, and I were to, let's say, Alt + Click on this triangle right here, which is the one with a diameter of a hundred points, and then I'll Shift + Alt + Click on this guy. So in other words, I'm selecting two path outlines that are in different blends. And now I'll go up to the line weight option here, and I'll change it to six points, and Illustrator automatically updates those blends on the fly. All right, now I'm going to click off the triangles to deselect them, and I'll turn off that guides layer. And that's how you create the first of what will be many more triangle tunnels here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to take your triangle tunnels and express them as a seamlessly repeating hex pattern. If you're waiting for something that's less unpleasant to look at, then keep your eyes peeled for next week when I serve up this. Aw, gee, this one's my favorite (sniffs) because I smell the ink. "Deke's Techniques" each and every week. Keep watching.

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