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

838 Creating impossible latticework

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

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838 Creating impossible latticework

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- [Deke] In this movie, we're going to take our little brown object and we're going to turn it into this seamlessly repeating hex pattern in order to achieve an impossible latticework. All right, so first thing we need to do is measure our hexagon. So go ahead and grab Polygon Tool from the Shape Tool fly out menu, and make sure that that your Smart Guides are turned on here inside the View menu, and then drag from the center of the shape to any one of the corners. And you'll probably see different values. Notice at this point I'm seeing a width of 363.73 and a height of 419.97, but if I move down here, both of my values grow slightly. So we're seeing 363.79 and 420.03. Well, that's pretty close. We're just a few hundredths of a point off. But in any event, it's good to have it, just write those values down. So, I'm going to turn on the guides layer, and I'm going to say that width is 420 points 'cause I'm pretty sure that's what it's suppose to be, and I'll set the height to, let's say, 363.74, something along those lines, and then I'll copy that value by selecting it and pressing Control + C, or Command + C on the Mac, and then I'll press the Escape key in order to return control to the Black Arrow tool. All right, now I'm going to turn the guides layer off. And I'll go ahead and select everything in the object layer. I could have just pressed Control + A, or Command + A on the Mac, and then I'll go up to the Object Menu, choose Pattern, and then choose Make to switch the the Pattern editing mode. And I'm going to go ahead and call this guy impossible lattice, let's say, because it appears I've already created the patter in advanced and given it the simpler name impossible. In any event, I'll change the Tile Type to Hex by Row because its icon in pointy at the top and the bottom just like our hexagon right here. And notice Illustrator wants to automatically give this guy a height of 424 points. That's taking into consideration the four point stroke, which I don't want to do because I want the strokes to overlap each other. So I'll click in Height value and enter minus four, like so, and we get 420, which is what I entered just a moment ago. Let's try that with the Width value, too. I'll go ahead and enter minus four after it, and that takes us down to 363.75, I had said .74, .7582, which is probably going to work out just fine. So, I'll go ahead and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept that change, and I'll click the Done button, or you can just press the Escape key in order to make your brand new patter swatch. All right, now I'm going to create a new layer by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and clicking on the little page icon to bring in the Layer Options dialogue box, and I'll call this guy pattern like usual, and I'll change the color to gold, why not? And I'll click OK. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and zoom out until I can see that redly boundary, and then I'll switch to the Rectangle Tool, which you can pressing the M key, and I'll drag from one corner of the red boundary to the other, to the opposite corner in order to create a ginormous rectangle. I don't need a stroke, so I'll set that to none, the second swatch up here in the control panel. Now I'll click on the first swatch over here in the far left side, and I'll change it to impossible lattice, and we'll end up with this effect here. All right, I want to blend it with a gradient. So, I'm going to go up to Window menu and choose the Appearance command in order to bring up the Appearance panel, and then I'll click on the Fill to make it active, and I'll click on the little page icon at the bottom of the panel to make a copy of it. Then I'll switch to the lower guy, and I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the Gradient panel. And I'll just start with this default gradient right here, which you can see now in the background. I'll change the angle to 90 degrees. And I'm going to turn off my Smart Guides by pressing Control + U, or Command + U on the Mac. And now I'm going to grab this default RGB color right here, the one that begin R equals 46, and I'll drag it and drop it onto the white color stop, and I'll make sure that I don't have multiple color stops. It's easy to accidentally miss. And then I'll grab the light blue that begins R equals 41, and I'll drag it and drop it onto this black swatch. Everything's looking great. And so I'm going to select the Fill, and actually I want a little bit more room in the Appearance panel, so I'm going to switch to the Stroke tab like so, then I'll click on the word Opacity associated with this Fill, so you want to make sure that it's twirled open like so. Click on the word Opacity, and then change the Blend Mode to this guy right here, Hard Light, which will give us this intriguing effect. It's a little dark, though, don't you think? So I'll click on the Fill to make it active, drop down to the little page icon and click on it in order to duplicate that Fill. And then I'll change the color with the Fill active up here in the Swatches panel, I'll change it to white, and that will definitely brighten things up. Well, it was a lot of work, but we ended up getting a white screen after all. Actually, I'm going to change the Blend Mode by clicking on the word Opacity and switching from Hard Light to Soft Light right here, which will just brighten things up slightly. Also, it doesn't affect the black, by the way. And then I'm going to take the Opacity value down to 50% in order to create this final effect here. I'll press Control + Shift + A in order to deselect my artwork. And then, in the most recent version of Illustrator, I'll go up to the View menu and I'll choose Presentation Mode, which also has a keyboard shortcut of Shift + F, and now I'll go ahead and zoom on in. And that's how you take your impossible little hex object and turn it into a seamlessly repeating hex pattern and even blended along with a gradient here inside Illustrator.

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