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

833 Drawing an impossible trident in Illustrator

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

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833 Drawing an impossible trident in Illustrator

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Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, I don't know about you, but I've always been fascinated by this thing: the impossible trident, also known as the devil's tuning fork. This thing has a crazy awesome history. The guy who invented it in 1964, D.H. Schuster, called it the three-stick clevis. A year later, Mad Magazine called it the poiuyt. I don't know how you pronounce that. P-O-I-U-Y-T, which is the QWERTY keyboard, Q-W-E-R-T-Y, inverted. Look at an American keyboard and you'll see what I mean. Anyway, this thing, it's such a head-scratcher in Adobe Illustrator, by the way. Here, let me show you exactly how it can't possibly work. All right, so here's our impossible trident. Let's get to drawing it here inside Illustrator. First thing I'm going to do is target this trident layer here inside the Layers panel by clicking on its circular so-called meatball, and then I'll go up to the Opacity value here in the control panel, and I'll reduce it to something like 30% so that we can at least kind of see it, and then I'm going to lock that layer down so I don't mess it up. All right, so step number one is to select the Ellipse Tool, and it's easier if you start with these feet down here, just because that way you can make sure everything aligns properly. I'm not going to be able to work on the trident layer, however, because it's locked down, so I'm going to go ahead and rename that layer template, let's say, and then I'll create a new layer by dropping down to the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll Alt or Option + Click on it in order to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box, and I'll call this new guy trident, and then I'll change its color to light red, and then I'll click OK. All right, now, armed with the Ellipse Tool, I'll just go ahead and click in order to bring up the Ellipse dialog box, and these are the values that I came up with, a width of 74 points and a height of 92 points, after which I will click OK, and then I went ahead and switched to the Rotate Tool, which you can get by pressing the R key, and then I'll just press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, and apply an angle of 30 degrees, and then I'll click OK, and by the way, your fill should be white, as we're seeing up here, your stroke should be black, and I've got the line weight set to 12 points. All right, now press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and move this guy to right about here. You don't have to get everything exactly right, and then I'll create a couple of copies of it, so I'll drag this guy down to here, and then I'll press the Alt, or Option key on the Mac, in order to make a copy, and I'll drag this guy to this location, and then once again press the Alt or Option key to make yet another copy. All right, now go ahead and grab the Pen Tool, which you can get by pressing the P key, and move your cursor over this point. Don't move it over one of the selected point, 'cause you'll end up deleting it, but move it over this guy in order to begin a path outline, and all we're going to have to do is click, so I'm just clicking to lay down points here, and I want to match the points on the ellipses, so just make sure that you're seeing those little points there, and then I'll click up here, and over at this location, and then finally right there in order to create my first shape, and I'll go ahead and press the V key in order to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll click on the shape to select it, and I wanted to fill it with a gradient that's going to cover up the purple stuff but not the orange, especially down here at this location, and I'm going to do that from the gradient panel, by the way, by going up to the Window menu and choosing the Gradient command, and then I'll just go ahead and click on this Gradient Slider in order to apply a predefined gradient, and I want the angle to be 25 degrees, as it just so happens, and if I go ahead and switch to the Gradient Tool I could keep an eye on the annotator, and you can see right there, this white, both of the color stops are white, incidentally, that its location is 33% currently, which looks like it's going to work great. I could move it in a little bit if I wanted to, like for example, I'll take it to 36%, let's say, and then I'll select the other guy, and he's opaque, so the opacity value's 100%, and the location is 40%, which is working out beautifully. All right, now press the A key in order to switch to my white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Direct Selection Tool, but it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow, and now I'll click on this anchor point and Shift + Click on this one in order to select those two guys, and I'll press Control + C, Control + F in order to paste a copy of that shape, and for now I'll just change the fill to white, and as you can see, the fill is active up here in the Swatches panel, and now I need to draw another path, so I'll go ahead and switch to my Pen Tool, and I'll start at this location right here, and then I'll click down here. You want to make sure that you're aligning to the points on either side of this oval right here, and then, oops, I accidentally joined to another path outline. Didn't want to do that, so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, to undo that move, and I'll click right about here, let's say, and then I'll go ahead and close the shape by clicking at the first endpoint. All right, now I'll press the A key to switch to my white array tool, and I'll go ahead and drag this guy until it snaps into the proper alignment. All right, now I'm going to press the P key to switch back to my Pen Tool, and I'll start my path right there, and I'll click at this location, and I guess I did it again. I joined to another path outline, so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, to undo that change, and I'll click right about here, and so I'll come back to that in a moment, and I'll click at this location, and then I'll come down to here, like so, and I'll press the A key in order to switch to the white arrow tool, and then I'll go ahead and drag that guy up like so. All right, now I'll go ahead and click in this Gradient bar once again with the fill active, and we need to move things around a little bit, so I'll go ahead and switch to my gradient tool. We want the angle to be 25 degrees, once again. Just find it easier to enter that as opposed to messing around with the Gradient Annotator. Now I'll drag this guy up. That is the opaque white swatch, as we're seeing right here, and this guy's the transparent one, so I'll move it to right about there, and I just want to make sure I've gone far enough. I want to cover up that purple corner right there, so I'll go ahead and drag it down like so, and then I'll press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, to deselect my artwork, and I'll go ahead and get my pen tool once again. I'll click right there just to make sure I have alignment. I'll click here as well. Is that going to be a problem? Am I going to join to something? I think I might, so I'll just click up here for a moment, and then I'll click at this location. I'll click here. Actually, I'll come back to that, and I'll click there in order to close the path, and now I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool. I'll go ahead and drag that guy down to the proper position. Then I'll go up to the Edit menu, and turn on my Smart Guides, which are currently turned off, and that way I can drag this point, and it will snap into alignment with this segment right here, and then I'll go ahead and change the fill to white. All right, now I'll press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, to deselect my artwork, and I'll draw another path around this foot, but I have to do that thing where I start it in the wrong location, 'cause otherwise I'm going to join to this path right here, so I'll press the P key to switch to my Pen Tool. I'll click here, then go ahead and click at this location, click here, and then just click like so. All right, now I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and drag these points to the desired positions, and I'll click on that Gradient Slider inside the Gradient panel once again, and then I'll go ahead and grab my Gradient Tool. Now, this guy wants to have an angle of 20 degrees in order to make it look right. This is the opaque color swatch right here, so I'll drag it down until I can't see that purple in the background, and this one has an opacity value of 0%, as we can see here inside the Gradient panel, so you may look at this and say, well, what in the world's going on? Why is this color changing here inside of this orange oval? Well, that's because of the template, which has some different colors going on, but at this point you can just turn the template off, and actually this gradient is going the wrong direction. I actually want this region to be white and this region to be exposed, so I'll just go ahead and swap these guys here on the Gradient Annotator, like so, and you can see now the colors stop with an opacity value of zero has a location, let's say, of 62%, whereas the opaque one has a location of, let's say, 50%. Now, there's an obvious problem, and that's that the feet are behind the legs, so I'll press the V key to switch to my white arrow tool, and I'll click on this guy, Shift + Click on this one, and Shift + Click on this one as well, and then right click anywhere in the document window, choose a range, and then choose Bring to Front, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + Right Bracket, or Command + Shift + Right Bracket on the Mac, and that's how you draw an impossible trident, which can't possibly exist in real life, but can here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to shade your impossible trident with gradients, but frankly, we can do better than that. These prongs, the tines, they should be rounded, cylindrical, like this, which is so much cooler. Volume recedes into flatness, which is next week, by the way. Deke's Techniques each and every week. You like this? Keep watching.

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