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

836 Adding impossible shadows in Illustrator

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

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836 Adding impossible shadows in Illustrator

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- [Instructor] All right now we're going to take our super shaded impossible trident, and we're going to give it equally impossible drop shadows right here so that the positive space on both sides is casting a shadow, while the negative space is not. All right so, I'll go ahead and switch over to my document so far, and we're just going to draw some rough path outlines using the pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. All right so I'm going to start clicking right about there. And I'll click at this location as well. And up here should do it. I'm just clicking around to make sure that we have all of the area covered. I don't think it's going to be very useful to have that white fill. So as you can see, my fill is active here in the swatches panel. And so I'll just click None. Or if you're looking for a keyboard shortcut, you can just press the slash key. All right but as you can see, the path outline remains active, so I'll just go ahead and click to create a few more points. And ultimately I'll close the path outline like so. All right now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And because the appearance panel is up on screen, I actually have no idea what layer I'm working on, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the layers panel. And it's actually the top layer in the stack, which is the one that contains my name. That's not what I want. I want to drag this guy, so I'm going to drag this little purple square all the way down the layers panel to the behind layer back here. And then I'll click on the path outline to make it active, or at least that was my intention. I missed. So I'll go over here and click on this portion, because all I have is a very thin black stroke and no fill. I want the opposite. I don't want a black fill and no stroke, so I'll press Shift + X in order to swap those attributes like so. Looks like we have a problem over here. I will be addressing that momentarily. All right now I'm going to go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian blur. And I'm going to apply a whopping radius value of 20 pixels. At which point I'll turn on the preview checkbox to make sure I like what I see, and then I'll click OK. All right so, a couple of problems here. I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool. And I'll grab this anchor point here. And if I want more shadow at this location, I can drag it out further, like so. But my bigger issue is this little bit of darkness over here, and the fact that we're not shading this portion of the purple shape. And that's because it's trapped inside of that clipping mask. So what I need to do is press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool, click on this guy to select it, and press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac in order to copy the entire thing. And then you can press the A key to switch back to the white arrow tool. And select these points at the very least, and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of em. And that way we don't have that little gray smudge. All right now I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. And I'll click on this little bit of purple right here, which will select the clipping mask. And now I'll double-click on it in order to isolate the mask and its contents. And now I'll go ahead and click on this purple shape to select it, and I'll press Control + F or Command + F on the Mac in order to paste that guy in front, like so. And that's really all there is to it. Now I can just press the Escape key in order to escape out of the isolation mode. And then I'll click off the path outlines to deselect them. All right now I'm going to draw shadows for these cylinders down here. So I'll just go ahead and zoom in by Control + Spacebar clicking. That's Command + Spacebar clicking on the Mac. I'll switch back to the pen tool. Again, you can get it by pressing the P key. And then I'll drag in order to create a smooth point. And I don't want it to be so high. I want it to be down right about here. And so I'll press the Spacebar in order to move it on the fly. And then I'll go ahead and create another smooth point right about there. And now I'll sever off that control handle by Alt or Option clicking, like so. And then I'll go up somewhere around here, I think. I want to make sure that I go up high enough. So right about there should do it. But I want to tuck inward, so in other words, I want to go into the shape a little bit. And then I'll create another anchor point right about here. And I'll return to the first anchor point and just click on it in order to convert it from a smooth point to a cusp. All right now I'll press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool. I'll click on the shape to select it. And I need to drag this guy down to the behind layer as well. So notice this tiny red square. It represents the selection on the trident layer. I'm going to drag it down to the behind layer. And now it appears at the back of the stack. All right I want it to be blurry as well, so I'll go up to the Effect menu and just choose the first command. The one that does not have a dot dot dot. That'll go ahead and replay the 20 pixel radius. And that ends up looking pretty darn good. If you want a little more of a shadow you can drag it out a little farther, like so. And now I'm going to duplicate this shadow by Alt or Option dragging it to about this location should work out nicely. And now I'm going to Alt or Option drag it again, but I missed it, darn it, so I'll press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change. And I'm just going to lock down that trident layer by clicking in the lock column here inside the layers panel. And then I'll try to select that guy again. And this time I'll drag it by its anchor point until I get it right about here. And by the way, I'm pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac in order to create a duplicate of that shadow. Or I meant to. I accidentally had the Spacebar down. That's why it pays to look at the cursor when you're movin things around. So I'll undo that move. I'll drag again, and this time I'll press the Alt key. And notice that I now get a double arrowhead cursor, which is exactly what I'm looking for. All right now I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac in order to zoom out. And if it looks like you have too much darkness right here at this location, we don't want anything just suddenly getting cut off, then go ahead and select the shape once again. Press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool. Select this point independently of the others, and then just drag it up a bit. But perhaps not that far. Maybe I'll drag it just a little bit back downward. And you can always play with these points by the way. You can take them out if you want to in order to create more shadow. Or I might actually drag this guy in if I were to first select it. And so I'll click on the anchor point, and then I'll drag it up, like so in order to make sure my shadows are nice and clean. All right that pretty well takes care of it. So I'll go ahead and click off the artwork to deselect it. And that is how you further enhance your impossible trident with the addition of a few impossible shadows here inside Illustrator.

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