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

835 Painting paths with opposing gradients

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

835 Painting paths with opposing gradients

Hey, gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. So wow, last week, in Adobe Illustrator, we made this thing. It goes by a lot of names. The impossible trident, the devil's tuning fork, that one camping utensil they don't sell at REI. Okay, so it's impossible, but what if we made it more credible? What if we rounded the cylinders and polished the flat surfaces to create something that super duper cannot exist? But with the help of overlapping perpendicular gradient fills heaped onto a single path outline from the appearance panel, it can exist in Illustrator. Here, let me show you exactly how to blow your own mind. All right, here's that super shaded version of the impossible trident open inside illustrator. We're going to be starting with the art work from last week and so armed with my black arrow tool up here at the top of the tool box, I'll go ahead and click on this shape right here in order to select it and I want to turn this into a perpendicular gradient in order to trace around this cylinder, and so the first thing I'm going to do is go up to the window menu and choose the gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. You may notice if you worked along with me last week that I've added a couple of colors. Color one b and color two B, both of which are darker versions than one a and two A, respectively, and so what I'm going to do, is first of all, I'm going to click inside this angle value and I'm going to add 90 degrees in order to send it in a perpendicular direction and I actually decided 114 degrees was going to work a little better, and now I'll go ahead and take this light purple color and drag it all the way to the edge so that we have a location value of 0%. I'll drag the white color stop over and give it a location of 70% and then I'll duplicate this purple one a couple of times by Alt or Option + Dragging. So the first time around, I'm going to give it a location value of 50%, and then I'll Alt or Option + Drag it to the very end so it has a location of 100%. Then I'll grab my new, darker purple, color two B, and I'll drag it and drop it to right about there, and I actually want the location value to be 30% so that we have this classic cylindrical shading. So in other words, we have a shadow here. We've got a highlight here, and they're both surrounded by mid tones so we have a little bit of a light bounce over here on the bottom edge. Now I want this whole thing to fade to white as it goes to the top because this area is supposed to be flat. And so I'll go to the window menu and choose the appearance command in order to bring up the appearance panel and then I'll click on that gradient to select it and I'll click on the little page icon here at the bottom of the panel to make a duplicate of it. All right, now we want to get rid of all but the white stop, so I'm going to drag these guys away right here and you've got to have two color stops with any gradient, and so I'll Alt or Option + Drag the white one and then get rid of that other purple one and now I'll select this white color stop right here and I'll confirm that it has a location of 70%. It does, I just created it, so of course, it does. And now I'll drag this guy down and I want its location value to be 30% and now I'll Shift + Tab to the opacity value and set it to zero so that we are fading the gradient, but we're fading in the wrong direction, so I'll go ahead and change the angle value to 25 degrees and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. Now notice this little sliver right here? If you were to zoom into it, you would see that it never gets any thicker, and that's because it's not really there, but we will be taking care of it later. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on this guy in order to select it, and I'll select the eyedropper tool, which you can get by pressing the I key, and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac in order to bring up this big old dialog box. You want to go ahead and turn this appearance check box on and then click okay. And that way, when you click inside this region, you will load both of the gradients, as we're seeing here inside the appearance panel. The big problem is that we should be seeing this purple shape in the background right about here and it's getting covered up by the white. Now we do have transparency in this specific gradient, but because we have another gradient behind it, we would just see through to it, and so what we need to do is creating a clipping mask. So I'll press the v key to switch to my black arrow tool and I'll go ahead and click on this guy to select it. Unfortunately, that layer is locked so I'll switch over to may layers panel, scroll down, unlock this layer. Actually, that hid it. That's not what I want at all. I'll unlock it and then I'll select the shape by clicking on it and I'll press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac to copy it and then I'll lock it back down. And now, I'm going to select this guy and I want to paste that purple shape into it. However, that's going to ruin it so we might as well first make a duplicate of this guy and so I'll go ahead and twirl open the trident layer. I'm running out of room, so I'll switch to the stroke panel for a moment and see this guy? That is the path outline in question. Now normally, I'd copy and paste it in front, but I already have something in the clipboard, so instead, what I'm going to do is Alt + Drag this guy upward, like so. That's an Option + Drag on the Mac, and that'll just make a quick copy of it and then I'll turn the original off. All right, now what I want to do is expand my tool box so that it's two tools wide so that I can see these guys. Notice the draw inside icon. I'll go ahead and select it, and that will give us dashed corners, as we're seeing right here, and then I'll go up to the edit menu and choose paste in place and that'll put the shape inside of there so we can see it, but as I warned you, that also ruins the gradient. That's because we have two gradients inside the shape. It's just too much for Illustrator to handle, I guess, so I'm going to switch back to the draw normal mode and I'm going to switch back to the single column tool box, as well, and then I'll go ahead and turn this guy back on, and that will restore our cylindrical gradient. All right, now I'm going to click this guy in order to select him and I'm going to press the I key to switch back to my eyedropper tool and I'll click on this shape in order to lift all of its attributes. We do need to make some changes, however, so I'm going to switch back to the appearance panel and I'll select this guy right here and I'll switch to the gradient panel, as well, and I'm just going to change the angle value to 110 degrees. That's going to work slightly better, and then I'll select the top fill, the top gradient right there, and we need to make a bunch of changes to it, so for starters, I'll select this white color stop and I'll change its location value to 60% and I'll select this white guy, confirm that he's 30%. He is, and he's got an opacity value of 0% so that's perfect. Now I'll grab the dark color one b and drag it and drop it to the very end so it has a location value of 100%. It comes in with an opacity value of zero. That's not what I want, so I will change it. You can't see 'cause of the tip, but I changed it to 100%. And now, I'll grab the bright shade of orange and I'll drag it and drop it right about here. It comes in with an opacity of 0%. That's so helpful. That makes so much sense, too, because it's sitting between two opaque color stops, so why wouldn't it be transparent? Anyway, I'm going to change it to 100% opacity and I'll change the location value to 80% and we'll end up with this fetching effect right here. All right, now let's work on some of the inside edges. I'll press the v key in order to enter a v into the angle value and I want that, so I'll press the escape key, and then I'll press the v key again in order to switch to the black arrow tool and I'll go ahead and click on this edge to select it and we're looking for one b right there to be at the very end, almost. Oh, boy. I love it when the opacity value is 0%. Change that to 100% and I'll take the location value down slightly to 95%. Then I'll click on this on a color right here. It should be at 80%, that's great. Then white needs to move to 59%, so apparently, it doesn't need to move at all, and this guy right here, which has an opacity value of 0% should have a location of 48%. So all we did was add a darker orange. Now let's grab this inside short shape right here up at the top and I want white this time around, this guy to be at a location of 100%. I want one a, this guy right here, to be at 60% so I'll go ahead and enter that value, and then I want to grab one b and drag it and drop it into the gradient. Yay, the opacity value's 100%, so that's good, and I'll change the location value to 20% this time around. You know, and I did forget one thing, this guy right here. Notice if I switch to the gradient tool that you can see that it's kind of off kilter and so I'm going to click in the angle value and press the down arrow key in order to take it down to 21%, which looks better to me. All right, just a couple or more things to do. I'm going to grab my black arrow tool from the top of the tool box and I'm going to click and Shift + Click on each of these oval feet down here in the lower left region and I'm going to combine them all into a single compound path by going up to the object menu, choosing compound path, followed by make. And now we'll fill these guys with a gradient so make sure that the fill is active inside the gradient panel and then just go ahead and click on the gradient slider right there and I'm going to get rid of some of these extraneous colors and I'm going to grab color two b and drag it down to this position. It should have a location value of 20%. I'm going to get rid of this color right here and I'm going to drag the white color stop all the way to the end and then I'll get color two a and move him about right there, actually looking for a location of 70% this time around and the angle value needs to be 27 degrees in order to produce this effect here. All right, we have just one more thing to do. We still have this little line, this little sliver up here at the top of the artwork and we need to add some shading along this top edge anyway, and so I'm going to go ahead and select this big shape right here, which is already filled with a gradient, as you can see, but I am going to change that gradient so I'll drag white all the way to the edge so that it has a location value of 100%. I'll select this white and change its location to 25%. Notice that it already has an opacity value of zero, which is what I want, and now I'll grab color one a right here and drag it and drop it to about there. The location value should be 70% this time around and notice that the opacity is zero. I'll go ahead and crank it up to 100%, and then I'll grab this one and Alt or Option + Drag it to a location value of 50%. And by this one, I meant the opaque white color stop, that is to say, and then I'll press the g key to switch back to my gradient tool so that I can see that the angle's off a little bit and so I'm going to click in the angle value and press the down arrow key until it looks like I have a good angle at 22 degrees. Now at this point, you may wonder well, you know, we had kind of a seam here a moment ago, but now I think that's a real seam that we're going to be encountering. And so what you need to do is switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the v key then right click inside the document window, choose a range and choose bring to front and that will go ahead and solve that problem so now we have orange where we used to have the seam. The new problem is that the foot is getting cut right here, and so I'm going to select it, right click, choose a range, and then again, choose bring to front, which has a handy keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + ] here in the PC. That's Command + Shift + ] on the Mac. All right, and there's just one more problem here that's bothering me. This guy, this particular leg doesn't look like it has as much shading as the other two. So go ahead and click on a lower region of it here then select this top fill here inside the appearance panel and the culprit is that I misplaced these two white stops. So with the transparent one selected, I'll take the location value up to 40%, then I'll select this guy and take the location value up to 80%, I think is going to look better. You know, I might even take this guy up to 50%, and then I'm going to click on this guy right here which is going to end up selecting the clipping group instead and I'll switch back and forth between edit contents and then back to edit clipping path and I'll select this fill right here, make sure that the transparent color stop is selected and take it up to 50%. Actually, maybe just take it down to 40, and then select this guy right here and take it up to 80%, like so. And then you can go ahead and accept that change and click off the path outlines to deselect them. And that, my friends, is how you super shade your impossible trident by layering multiple opposing gradients inside your path outlines. All right, so don't get me wrong. I think this is good, but I think some shadows would make it even better, which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which we add impossible shadows, like so. If you're waiting for next week, one impossible object deserves another. Only this object can become a seamlessly repeating pattern. After all, even though autumn just started yesterday, we're still celebrating our seamlessly repeating summer. Year after year, season after season, week after week, Deke's Techniques. Keep watching.

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