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

837 Drawing an impossible hex object

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

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837 Drawing an impossible hex object

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques". Now last week I got excited about one of the world's most famous impossible objects, sometimes known as the Devil's Tuning Fork, which got me interested in this guy here. Now if it looks a little familiar, it's not. I invented it all by myself. Okay, fine, I based it on some simpler ideas, each of which I'm actually very excited to show you right this second, in a Adobe Illustrator. All right here's the final impossible lattice work opened up inside Illustrator. And just so you have a sense of how I came up with this, I started with this very basic impossible object. It's one of the classics, and the idea is if you scrutinize it you can tell this just isn't something that could possibly exist in real life, but it's not a hex so I can't really easily turn it into a pattern, which is why I elaborated on it in order to turn it into a hexagonal object and then I decided it would be cool if it had holes right here in the center and so I came up with this guy here. Now it does require a fair amount of guidelines, as we're seeing right here, which may seem a little bit daunting, but they're pretty easy to throw together. And so, I'll start inside this file, which has a couple of center guides and some instructional text. Now I'll select my polygon tool from the Shape Tool fly out menu, and then I'll go up to the View menu and make sure my Smart Guides are turned on. In my case, they're not, so I'll go ahead and choose the command, and then I will click right there at the intersection of those two guides and I'll change the radius value to just 30 points. Make sure the sides are set to six, so we're creating a hexagon and click OK. All right, now my shape comes with no fill and a stroke, which is just fine, doesn't really matter, once we convert this guy to a custom guideline the fill and stroke will go away. All right, I'll click again and this time I'm looking for a radius of 30 plus 30, which is 60, and I'll do that again, and this time, I want 30 more which will give me 90, and so I'll click OK, and I'm just going to keep doing that. You could also click inside the radius value and press Shift up arrow one, two, three times, if you prefer, or you could just, of course, do the math in your head, 120 plus 30 is 150, and we have just two more to go. I'll go ahead and Shift, Tab to the radius value and change it to 180, and then I'll click once again in the center there and Shift, Tab to the radius value and take it up to 210. And those are the hexagons that we'll need in order to pull this off. Now press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and go ahead and marquis those shapes, and it looks like my guides are unlocked so I'm going to shift marquis these two guides to turn them off. Now I want the points to be on top where these hexagons are concerned and so I'll go ahead and select my rotate tool and then I'll just press the Enter key, or the Return key on Mac to bring up the Rotate dialog box. I think I want to rotate these guys by 30 degrees, sure enough that's going to work, and I can tell because the Preview checkbox is turned on, at which point I'll click OK. All right now we want to convert these guides to custom guides and you can do that just by right clicking here inside the document window and choosing Make Guides. I don't want to mess them up, so I'm going to go to the View menu, drop down to Guides, and choose Lock Guides so that I don't accidentally drag them around. All right, now you want to get your line segment tool, which is available from the Line Tool flyout menu and go ahead and drag a line like so, from one corner to the opposite corner and then go ahead and press the V key to get your black arrow tool, and drag your line from here to here, like so, and then press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, in order to create a copy. And then duplicate that copy over and over again by pressing Control D, or Command D on the Mac a bunch of times like so. Now go ahead and partially marquis all but the first line and then what I want you to do is switch from the rotate tool to the reflect tool and I want you to click on the top point of this de-selected line and then Alt or Option click on the bottom point and that's going to go ahead and rotate those guides around that axis. All right now you want to press the V key in order to switch to the black arrow tool and you want to marquis all of these lines. Don't select the text, and then go ahead and switch back to the rotate tool, Alt or Option click right there at the intersection of those two center guides and I think we're looking for an angle value of negative 60 degrees, like so. I'm going negative because I don't want to overlap this text, at which point I'll click copy, in order to create a copy of those lines, and then I'll press Control D, or Command D on a Mac, in order to duplicate those lines. All right, so, if nothing else, we've got a lot of lines. Now what I want you to do is press Control A, or Command A on a Mac, in order to select everything, and then press the V key to switch back to your black arrow tool and shift marquis all this text stuff, including that arrow, in order to de-select it. Right click inside the document window and choose Make Guides, and you will have yourself a nice network of custom guidelines. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here a little bit. It appears my guides layer has expanded, that's not necessary, but I do need to create a new layer, so I'll Alt or Option click on the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel to force a display of the Layer Options dialog box and I'll call this guy The Object, and then I'll click OK. All right, now, here's where things are going to get pretty entertaining. You want to select the pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key and then you want to click right there at the center of the document. Then you want to move up and over one, two, three increments, like so, and click, and then move up two increments, and then move down and to the left two increments. Move up and over one increment, like so, then move one, two, three, four up and to the right, and click right there. So it's not complicated stuff. We're just clicking with the pen tool. You just want to make sure that you're moving the proper amount of increments. So now we're going over to this top right corner of the entire structure, so three increments down and to the right, and then we're going to move all the way down, down to this point here and click. Then we're going to move one, two, three, four increments to this location. Now we're moving up, one, two, three, four, like so, and then we'll move over three to this guy right here, and then move up to this location and click. All right and that's going to go ahead and finish off that shape, as we're seeing right here, but we're going to add another one by clicking right here and then moving up to this position, and then you want to go up and over two increments and then go down all the way to here, not quite all the way but one increment up from all the way, and then go ahead and click at this location to create another one of these guys and now we're going to create that hole I was showing you and it's going to be right here. All right, so having done all that, go ahead and press the V key to switch to your black arrow tool and partially marquis these shapes, just to make sure they're selected and now we're going to fill them. So make sure that the fill is active here in the swatches panel and we're going to go with this shade of brown right here. The one that begins R equals 96, and that's going to be our darkest color. Now that doesn't look right at all, and frankly, it's very difficult to even see what's going on. We want to turn those inner shapes into holes and we're going to do that by going to the object menu, choosing Compound Path, and choosing Make, and that will give us this terribly entertaining shape right here. All right, now press Control Shift A, or Command Shift A on a Mac to de-select everything and switch back to the pen tool, which you can get just by pressing the P key and click here. Now we're going to create an inside edge. So I'm just tracing along like so, going over to this location and down, and now we want to change the fill to two browns away. So not this guy, but this guy over here. The one that begins R equals 140, and we'll end up with this effect. So we're just going to use three shades of brown and nothing more. Now press Control Shift A, or Command Shift A on the Mac, to de-select your artwork and click right there, then here. This is going to be the top edge of whatever this thing is and then finish the shape. So that's a closed shape now and we're going to change it to two browns over so this guy here, that begins R equals 198, and we'll end up with the effect you see before you now. All right, now press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and go ahead and marquis what you've made so far. So select all those shapes, and if you're getting kind of confused by the guidelines then you can turn off that guides layer for the moment and then let's switch to the rotate tool by pressing the R key. It's the easiest way to work, and then you want to move your cursor over to this point right here. This is the center of the document, by the way, and Alt or Option click. I'm going to go with an angle value of negative 120 degrees. That'll just go ahead and move this guy over here and then I'll click the copy button and then I'll press Control D, or Command D on the Mac, in order to duplicate that rotation. And you may ask why didn't I just rotate these shapes positive 120 degrees, and I have no answer for you, I'm afraid. I just did it negative instead. All right so I'm going to press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and I'm going to click off the shapes to de-select them, and we're going to re-color these shapes so I'll select this guy and change him to this medium shade of brown, and if you prefer you can just drag and drop the swatches. So I'm going to grab this lighter shade of brown and drag it and drop it onto this guy. I'll grab the darker shade of brown, which is almost the darkest one but just one over and I'll drag it and drop it onto this guy right here and then I will once again grab that guy and drop him onto this shape, and then I'll grab our light brown, the one that begins R equals 198, drag it and drop it right there and then finally I'll grab the one that's sitting here still selected and drag it and drop it to this location. All right, now obviously we're doing pretty good but we're missing some edges. For example there should be an edge right here, and on the inside of this guy there should be a couple of edges. So I'm going to bring back my dreaded guides right here and I'll press the P key to once again switch to the pen tool and I'm going to click here, and there, and at these points, until I go ahead and close the shape like so. And this guy should be filled with the light shade of brown so I'll go ahead and select it. And that goes for this next shape I'm going to create too. I'll just create a triangle right here at this location and it should, and is, filled with that light color. Now I'll press Control Shift A, or Command Shift A, in order to de-select the artwork, so I don't end up messing up my paths, and I'll fill in this remaining white area right here and I'll go ahead and change it to the darkest of the browns that we're using. The one that begins R equals 96. All right now press the V key in order to switch to the black arrow tool. This guy should be selected and if we're worried that we're not getting things lined up exactly right, then you can zoom in and check it out. Well I do have one big problem, and that's that I got a bunch of miter joints. So I'll press Control A, or Command A on a Mac, to select all of my artwork. I don't want to select the text, however, so I'll turn that guides layer off for a moment and I'll click on the word Stroke, and I want the line way to be four points. I also want the corner to be round join. All right, that's better. So now I'll press the Escape key to dismiss that panel and I'll go ahead and zoom out here and I'll click off the shapes to de-select them and then I'll select all the new shapes. So click on one, Shift click on the other two, and I'll press the R key in order to switch to the rotate tool and I'll go ahead and Alt or Option click at this point right here, which again, is the center of the document. And just for the heck of it, I'll rotate it at positive 120 degrees and click copy. Then I'll press Control D or Command D on the Mac to duplicate that operation. All right, now I'll press the V key and click off the shapes to de-select them. Let's just do some dragging and dropping here. I'm going to grab the lightest brown and drag it and drop it right there and then I'll get the medium brown, this guy, and drag it and drop it to this location. I also want to drag it and drop it onto this shape and I want to grab the darkest brown we've been using, the one that begins R equals 96, and I'll drag it and drop it to this position. I also need to drag it and drop it to this position right here and so have we missed one? We missed this guy. And so I'll grab our medium brown, the one that begins R equals 140, and drag it and drop it to this location. All right, now I'll press Control zero, or Command zero on a Mac, in order to center my zoom, and that's it. That's literally all there is to creating this altogether impossible hexagonal object. Okay so this collection of path outlines, clearly it's a hex object. So we could be turning it into a hex pattern in 10 seconds flat. Which is why, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which we do exactly that. And then we'll add a gradient and infuse it with some blend modes in order to achieve this entirely different color scheme here. You want to make it, don't you? Click that little next movie thingy, it's right down there. C'mon, do it, click it. "Deke's Techniques", it comes out each and every week. Keep watching.

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