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

829 Adding color to your triangle tunnels

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

829 Adding color to your triangle tunnels

Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Okay, we're still in Illustrator, and so far we've got this, which is either hypnotic or just begging you to look away. The solution, how about a little bit of depth and color in the form of a handful of opposing gradients? Now these are some tunnels that make me want to go spelunking. Here, let me show you exactly how they work. All right here are those awesome looking blue triangles, just so you have a chance to see them on screen. And here's our hex pattern from last week. I'm going to go ahead and turn the pattern layer off for the moment, and I'll turn on the hexangles layer and I'll go ahead and zoom in on it as well. And what we want to do is select the largest triangle in each one of the blends and so the easiest with to make them out is to go up to the View menu and choose Outline in order to switch to the Outline mode, and that way all of the blended steps will disappear. Then you want to switch to the White Arrow Tool, which you can get by pressing the A key, A for Arrow. And then what I recommend you do is press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, so that you're selecting an entire shape at a time, and then just go ahead and marquee this guy like so. And that'll select the outermost triangle. Now, you want to press the Shift key as well as the Alt key, that's going to be Shift and Option on the Mac, and then just partially marquee this guy right here to select it. So this is the outermost triangle in the smaller blend. All right now I want to duplicate these shapes to an independent layer that's going to appear in back of the hexangles layer. So I'll click on the layer below, like so, and then I'll drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll Alt or Option-click on it to force a display of the Layer Options dialog box. Then I'll just call this layer blues, and I'll change its color to Gold, and I'll click OK. All right now as you may know, this little purple square over on the far right side of the Layers panel represents the selected objects. If you were to drag them to the blues layer then you would move them. If you want to duplicate them, then press and hold the Alt key at which point you'll see a little plus sign next to your cursor and then release. And that way you duplicate those triangles. So just to make things perfectly clear, I'll turn off the blues layer. We're still seeing the original triangles, so we have copied them. All right now I'm going to turn the blues layer on and turn off that hexangles layer. And then I'll go back to the View menu and choose this first command, GPU Preview, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac. All right now I'll go ahead and press the V key to switch to the Black Arrow Tool, and select the innermost triangle. And then you want to make sure that the Fill is active up here in the Swatches panel, and then go up to the Window menu and choose Gradient in order to bring up the Gradient panel like so. And then I'm just going to go ahead and click on this gradient slider in order to apply a gradient. Now this is not the gradient I want. I want it to be filled with these two colors right here, color 5a and color 5b. And so I'm going to grab color 5a and I'm going to drag it and drop it onto that white swatch and with any luck that'll replace it. In my case it worked. And then I'll go ahead and grab color 5b, and I'll drag it and drop it onto the black color swatch and I happened to have nailed that one as well. So we want a light blue to dark blue gradient and it should be set to an angle of 30 degrees so that it's going up and to the right. Now I don't want that stroke, so I'll go up here to the second swatch on the far left side of the Control panel, click on it and I will change it to None. All right now we want to use that same gradient for the larger shape so I'll go ahead and click on the larger shape to select it. And then I'll grab my Eyedropper Tool, which you can get by pressing the I key, and I'll go ahead and click on that smaller triangle like so. Now the only problem is that it's traveling at the wrong angle and as you can see here suddenly the angle's zero, I don't know why that is, but what we need to do is change this value to 30 minus 180 degrees. And that'll set it in exactly the opposite direction. So notice when I press the Tab key, Illustrator does the math for me and comes up with negative 150 degrees. All right now I'll just escape out of that opacity value right there, and I'll press the V key to switch back to the Black Arrow Tool, and I'll marquee both of the shapes like so, and then I'll grab my Rotate Tool, which you can get by pressing the R key, and I'll Alt or Option-click on this bottom left point right there, and you'll probably see an angle value of 60 degrees which is exactly what we want. So I'll click the Copy button to accept that change, and then I'll repeat that rotation and duplication process by pressing Control + D or Command + D on the Mac for duplicate. And obviously it did so several times in a row. All right now I'll press the V key to switch back to my Black Arrow Tool. Go ahead and click off the shapes to deselect them. Click on the Rotate tab in order to dismiss the Gradient panel. All right now I'll turn back on that hexangles layer, and I want to select all the lines on the layer, and the easiest way to do that is to click in the top right corner of the layer here inside the Layers panel. And then notice the Stroke panel right there. It's offering me a line weight and nothing more. I'm going to change that weight to four points, so that all of those lines are uniformly thick. All right now I'll press Control + A or Command + A on the Mac, in order to select everything. And then I'll go to the Object menu, choose Pattern, and choose Make, in order to switch to the Pattern Editing mode. And now I'll go ahead and click on the word Name in order to highlight that name and I'll just call it blue triangles or something obvious like that, that's what I want. And then I'll change the Tile Type to Hex by Column, the one with the icon that's flat on the top and the bottom, just like our hexagon. And as you may recall, Illustrator is taking into account the thickness of the stroke. That's why the strokes aren't lining up around the edges. And so what you want to do is click in the Height value and press the down arrow key a total of four times. And then I'll click after the Width value and I'll just enter minus four like so and press the Tab key. And that gets me the results I want. So you have to subtract four because our line weights are four point thick and so 1/2 the line weight is extending in one direction and the other half's extending in the other direction. In any event these values ensure seamless transitions. All right now you can click the Done button in order to accept your changes or you can just press the Escape key. Either way you will have a new pattern swatch here inside the Swatches panel. All right now I'll go ahead and turn the pattern layer back on and I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac to zoom out. I'll go ahead and click somewhere on that big rectangle to select it and with the Fill active here in the Swatches panel, I'll go ahead and switch to the blue triangles pattern. And then I'll deselect my artwork by pressing Control + Shift + A, that's Command + Shift + A on the Mac, and then, assuming you're using the most recent version of Illustrator, you can fill your screen with the pattern by going to the View menu and choosing Presentation Mode or you've got a keyboard shortcut of Shift + F, and that's going to fill the screen like so. And that is at least one way to assign colors to your triangle tunnels here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie in which we take our blue triangles and because we're using global swatches we can switch the blues to anything we like, such as what is objectively the best color there is, green. If you're looking forward to next week, the next logical step, triangular rainbows. I love celebrating life. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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