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

902 Changing a pool ball from solid to stripes

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

902 Changing a pool ball from solid to stripes

- [Deke] In this movie, I'll show you how to take solid pool balls such as this green six ball here and turn 'em into stripes, as is the case with this purple 12 ball. And it's all in the name of creating this final vector base pool hall clock here inside Adobe Illustrator. All right, so we'll start off with the document that we created in the previous movie. I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac in order to zoom out to take in the entire art board. And then armed with my black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key, I'll go ahead and marquee all of the objects associated with this green six ball. And then I'll go up to the Object menu and choose the Group command, or you have a keyboard shortcut of Control + G or Command + G on the Mac. And the reason that I'm grouping these objects is not just to keep 'em together so that they don't end up straying apart from each other, but also because in future movies we're going to need this guy to be a single group in order to properly transform it. All right, now I want to go ahead and create a copy of this pool ball up here at the top of the document. And so I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac. And because an arrow tool is active, that brings up the Move dialog box. All right, notice that my Preview check box is on. And in my case, the horizontal value is set to zero. You want to set yours that way as well. And my vertical value is set to negative 250 points. And incidentally, negative vertical values move objects upward. Positive values move them downward. And that's just how things work inside Illustrator. But I want you to notice that this vertical value of negative 250 moves the six ball directly onto the cue ball. I want to move it twice that far, so I'll go ahead and click after the vertical value and enter *2 in order to multiply it times two like so so that we get a vertical value of negative 500. So horizontal, zero. Vertical, negative 500. And now you want to click the Copy button, or you've got a keyboard shortcut of Alt + Enter here on the PC or Option + Return on the Mac. All right, now notice once we turn this color into a stripe, we're going to need some whiteness in the background up here at the top and bottom of the 12 ball. And we're going to achieve that effect by duplicating the original cue ball. And so I'll return to this document here. Select the cue ball, which is a single circle, nothing more. And then I'll press the Enter key once again or the Return key on the Mac. And I'll change that vertical value back to what it was before, or I could just click after it and enter /2 in order to divide it by two, and that will move it to that same location, which is to say a horizontal value of zero and a vertical value of negative 250, at which point, again, I'll click on that Copy button. Now, we're not really seeing the cue ball, and that's because it's currently in back of the six ball, and that's because we created it first. So by default, early objects are located below recent ones. In any event, what I want to do is take that selected cue ball and send it to clipboard by going up to the Edit menu and choosing the Cut command. Or you've got a keyboard shortcut of Control + X here on the PC or Command + X on the Mac. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on that six ball to select it. And I'll zoom in on it just by pressing Control + Plus or Command + Plus on the Mac. And the reason this works so nicely is because in recent versions of Illustrator where I had to press Control + K or Command + K on a Mac to bring up the Preferences dialog box and then switch to this guy, Selection & Anchor Display, you automatically zoom to the selection as a result of having this check box right here turned on. All right, I'm going to cancel out of here. And then I'm going to enter this group by double-clicking on it. And what that does is it switches you to the group isolation mode. And as you can see up here in the left corner of the window, we're working on a group that's found on the balls layer. All right, so I'm going to go up to the View menu and make sure that my Smart Guides are turned on. They're not, so I'll go ahead and choose that command. And then I'll grab the Rectangle Tool from the Shape Tool fly-out menu, and I'll make sure to position my cursor right there at the center of those circles. And then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click in order to bring up the Rectangle dialog box. And these are indeed the values I'm looking for, a width of a hundred points, so wider than the 80 point diameter of the green circle, and a height of 55 points, which just happens to look good where the stripe is concerned. All right, so I'll go ahead and click OK. And as you can see, this is going to be the stripe, incidentally. Now, it happens in my case to be filled with the gradient that I used on the cue ball. Don't care about that. All you want to do at this point is switch back to your black arrow tool, which, again, you can get by pressing the V key, and then Shift + Click on this larger green circle like so. And then you want to go up to the Object menu, choose Clipping Mask, and choose Make. Or if you like, you have a keyboard shortcut of Control + 7, Command + 7 on a Mac. That's been that way for eons, if you care to remember that one. And notice what happens is we go ahead and mask that green circle inside of the rectangle. We also lose any fill or stroke attributes that are associated with that rectangle, which in this case is a good thing. All right, now I want to bring back that cue ball by going up to the Edit menu and choosing Paste in Back. Or you have an old-time keyboard shortcut of Control + B here on a PC or Command + B on a Mac. And now we have our stripe. The problem, of course, is that these objects are located at the top of the stack, so we can no longer see the number 12. So what you need to do is Shift + Click on that rectangular clipping mask right here so that both the original cue ball and the green shape are selected, and then you want to right-click anywhere inside the document window, choose a range, and then choose Send to Back. Or you have another keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + Left Bracket. That Command + Shift + Left Bracket on the Mac. All right, now this wants to be the 12 ball, so I need to switch that number six to a 12. And I'll do that by selecting the Type Tool, which you can get by pressing the T key. And then I'll just go ahead and drag over the number six like so and change it to 12. Then I'll press the Escape key in order to accept that change. Now, the 12 ball happens to be a different color than the six ball, and so we've got to change this green gradient here by double-clicking on it, not just once, but twice like so in order to get inside that clipping mask. So notice up here in the top left corner of the document window, we now have a path to the selected object. So we're working on this ellipse which is found inside this clipping ground, which is itself inside another group which is found on the balls layer. So we're really going deep where this isolation mode is concerned. Now, notice over here in the Swatches panel that the fill is active. That's exactly what we want. I need to bring back the Gradient panel by going up to the Window menu and choosing Gradient. And then you can see that we have this Radial Gradient that we created in the previous movie, and we can see all of its color stops as well. The white color stop is just fine. We want to keep that one. But we want to replace the two green color stops by grabbing this swatch right here that I've created in advance. It's called 4/12 purple, and that's because both the four and the 12 balls are purple in the world of billiards. And so I'm going to go ahead and drag this guy and drop it onto the green color stop right there. And then I'll grab it again and drop it on the other green color stop. That's going to restore a tint value of 100%. We need to reduce that tint value by double-clicking on that final color stop. This is it right here, this T value. T stands for tint. And so I'll go ahead and change this value to 50% and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right, now that we've re-colored the ball, we want to escape out of this entire isolation mode. And you do that by either clicking on the word balls up here if you want to, or you can just press the Escape key, and that'll take you all the way out so that you're editing the entire document, at which point I'll go ahead and click off that pool ball in order to deselect it, and then I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac to center my zoom so that we can see we now have a total of three pool balls, the white cue ball there in the center, the solid six ball down here at the bottom, and a striped 12 ball at the top. And these are the three pool balls that we'll be using in order to create this final pool ball clock, as you will see in future weeks of "Deke's Techniques."

Contents