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

901 Turning a sphere into a colorful pool ball

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

901 Turning a sphere into a colorful pool ball

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. The it's finally summer episodes. Okay, so last week I showed you how to create a cue ball as a perfect ivory sphere using nothing more than a circle filled with an offset radial gradient. Well this week we're going to transform that pool ball into a verdant green six ball set against an infinite background of continuous green cloth. Modeled after, and this is true by the way, the traditional surface for outdoor stick and ball games, grass. And what, I ask you, could be more summer than that? All right so here's the final version of the six ball inside Adobe Illustrator. We're going to be starting off with this lone cue ball right here. And I'm going to zoom out by pressing Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac, and then I'll go ahead and click on that ball to select it. Now with the black arrow tool active up here at the top of the tool box, you'll want to press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in order to bring up the Move dialog box. Set the horizontal value to zero, and then set the vertical value to 250 points, which is going to move the ball downward as we're seeing right here. And by the way, to see what you're doing, just go ahead and turn on the Preview checkbox. Now I want to create a copy of this ball, so I'll either click the copy button, or if you like, you can press Alt + Enter here on the PC or Option + Return on the Mac. And notice, because I've assigned a drop shadow to this entire layer, this new ball gets a drop shadow as well. All right, now I'm going to zoom in on it like so by pressing Control + Plus or Command + Plus on the Mac. And the fact that we're zooming in on the selection by the way, is one of the more recent additions to Illustrator. And if it's not working for you by the way, you can press Control + K or Command + K on the Mac to bring up the Preferences dialog box, then switch to Selection and Anchor Display in this left-hand list, and turn on this checkbox right here, Zoom to Selection. For me, it's already on, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out of this dialog box. All right now we want to change the colors inside this gradient. And so I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command to bring up the Gradient panel, which is showing me the three color stops that we assigned to the cue ball. But I'm going to change all of those colors out, starting with the very first color here. Instead of having it be a very pale yellow, I want to switch it to bright white. And so I'll grab the white swatch here inside the Swatches panel. And so if you're not seeing the Swatches panel by the way, you can go to the Window menu and choose the Swatches command. And then I'll grab that white swatch right there and I'll drag it and drop it onto the very first color stop on the left side of this gradient slider. And then I'll grab this color right here, six green, which I've created inside this billiards group. And so I'll grab that color and I'll drag it and drop it onto that second to last color right there. And then finally, I'll go ahead and repeat that operation for the last color stop. So I'll grab six green and drag it and drop it onto that final color stop like so. Now you may figure, what in the world is the purpose of having two identical color stops? Well, we're going to change that last one by double-clicking on it in order to bring up this popup panel, and I'm going to change this T value, where T stands for tint, by the way. I'm going to go ahead and select that value, and I'm going to change it to 50% like so. And that's going to give us a little bit of a bounce as we're seeing here. All right now the six ball needs a number of course, inside of a bright circle. And so I'm going to create that circle using the Ellipse tool once again. And I'll go ahead and position my cursor at the center of the existing circle. And by the way, for the best result, you'll want to go up to the View menu and make sure your Smart Guides are turned on. I'll go ahead and choose the command to turn mine on. And now notice I'm seeing the word center above my cursor. At which point, I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and click in order to bring up the Ellipse dialog box. And I'll change both the width and the height values to 40 points, and click OK in order to create this smaller circle right here. All right now I don't want the circle to be filled with a gradient, so I'll go over here to the Swatches panel, make sure my fill is active, and then click on the white swatch like so. All right now I want to blend this circle with the one behind it. And so I'll go up here to the horizontal control panel. And if you can't see it, you want to go to the Window menu and choose the Control command. And then change this opacity value to 70%, which, if you prefer, you can do inside the Properties panel as well. All right now I'll go ahead and deselect that circle by pressing Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac. At which point, we need to create the number six, which we're going to do using the Type tool. Which you can get by pressing the T key. All right now I want to establish a few formatting attributes right up front. And so notice up here in the Control panel I can see these alignment icons. I'll go ahead and select Align Center. And then I'll click on the word Character in order to bring up the Character level formatting attributes. And I'm going to change the font from Myriad Pro to Myriad Variable Concept. And that's because if I use Myriad Pro, on this particular system, notice that I only have three styles. I want bold, which isn't here. So I'm just going to go ahead and switch over to Myriad Variable Concept instead, and then I'll go ahead and choose bold from this very, very long list of pre-defined styles. All right now I want to select this type size value. And I'm going to change it to 30 points. Works out very nicely. Then I'll go ahead and Tab over to this guy right here, the kerning option. And I'll change it to Optical. This'll come in handy with our double-digit numbers such as 12, as we'll see in the future. And then I'll go ahead and select this tracking value, and I'll change it to negative 50. And then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now you want to position your cursor inside the circle but not along the edge. That'll create the text inside the circle, which is not what we want. So you want to see an I-beam inside of a dotted rectangle. At which point, just go ahead and click in order to create this placeholder text, and type the number six in its place. And then press the Escape key in order to accept that change. All right now I want to move this guy by its point. So this is a little bit of point text here. I want to drag it by its point until it snaps into alignment with the center of that circle, as happened just now. And now you want to press Control + K or Command + K on the Mac just to confirm that the keyboard increment is one point as by default. After which, I'll go ahead and click OK, and then press Shift + Down Arrow to move that type 10 points downward. And then finally, go ahead and change that opacity value once again to 70%. And another way to do that inside the more recent versions of Illustrator is to hover your cursor over that value, press the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel on your mouse in order to modify this opacity value in increments of 10. In any event, I'll take it down to 70% like so. And then I'll go ahead and press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac in order to deselect my artwork. And that's how you change a plain white cue ball to a colorful green six ball here inside Illustrator. Okay, if you watched last week, you know we're in the process of assembling a pool hall clock. It's as if you cut each one of the billiard balls in half and added some hour and minute hand sticks. Which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which we transform the solid green ball into a striped 12 ball. If you're looking forward to next week I'll show you the difference between the Rotate tool inside Illustrator and the Transform Each command. Hint, the Rotate tool rotates your entire brain, and the Transform Each command rotates each of your brain cells independently. That is not right, but that is not wrong. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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