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

925 Adding a ring around the Mercedes star

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

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925 Adding a ring around the Mercedes star

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- In this movie, I'll show you how to add the ring around my improvised variation on the Mercedes star. All right, so if it's not already obvious, I'm working inside Adobe Illustrator, and I'm fixing to create that ring using the ellipse tool, which I can select from the shape tool flyout menu. The only question is, how big should it be? Now, I know it wants to be bigger than the portion of the artwork that I'm seeing onscreen. So I'll go ahead and zoom out by pressing Control + minus, or Command + minus on the Mac. My smart guides are turned on, as you can see. And so I'll position my cursor at the center of my star, and then I'll begin dragging. Now I want to create this circle from the center outward, so I'll press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac. I want it to be a circle, so I'll add the Shift key, like so. The problem becomes, how do I snap it right there into alignment with the point of the star? I just can't get to it, as you can see. I could try to drag upward, like so, but that's going to flatten the star, which is not what I want at all. Fortunately, I already know exactly how big this circle should be. And so I'll just go ahead and release the mouse button and press the Backspace key, or the Delete key on the Mac. And so, as you may recall from a couple of movies ago, when we were creating that equilateral triangle in the first place, the radius of a triangle inside Illustrator is measured according to its so-called circumcircle, which had a radius, as we can see diagrammed here, of 200 points. And so what you want to do, because this is the exact data we used in order to create our artwork so far, is switch back to it like so, position your cursor at the center of the star, and then press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and click. Now we know the radius of the circumcircle wants to be 200 points, but the ellipse dialog box wants to know the diameter. So I'll enter asterisk two, like so, and then press the Tab key. And that gives me a result of 400 points, which I will duplicate inside the height value. And then I'll go ahead and click Okay. And we end up with this perfectly-sized circle. Now you wouldn't know it, because it's covering up the star. So I'll go ahead and zoom in a little like so, and then I'll go up to the first swatch, up here in the horizontal control panel, That's the way I prefer to work, as opposed to the galumphing, screen-hogging properties panel. And now I'll go ahead and click on this guy and set it to none like so, so we can see through to the rear shapes. And now I'll go ahead and switch to the eyedropper, which you can get by pressing the I key. And you may want to press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the eyedropper options, and just go ahead and turn on this appearance checkbox, which will collapse all these various options as well, and then click Okay. And now go ahead and click inside this shape right here in order to lift its fill. All right, now this shape, even though it's currently filled, is going to serve as the hole inside the ring. We're going to to need to use it twice. So I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command, or you can press Control + C, or Command + C on the Mac. Then go ahead and switch back over to the ellipse tool, position your cursor right there at the center, and Alt + click to bring up the ellipse dialog box. And now I'll just go ahead and link these two values together. And I'll click inside either one of them and press Shift + Up arrow a total of four times in order to increase both values to 440 points, and I'll click Okay. Now that covers up the previous shape. If you like, you can just go ahead and right click, choose a range, and then choose Send Backward, not Send it Back, just Send Backward, so we can move this guy behind the previous circle that we just got done drawing. Then press the V key to switch back to your black arrow tool and Shift + click on that smaller circle. And then you want to go up to the object menu, choose Compound Path, and choose Make in order to convert that guy to a compound path, so the smaller circle is cutting a hole in the larger one. All right, now we want to create the inside edge of the ring, and I'll do that once again using the ellipse tool. So I'll just go ahead and select the tool. And then I'll Alt or Option + click right there at the center to bring up the ellipse dialog box. And with these two values linked together, I'll press Shift + Down arrow this time twice in a row in order to reduce both values to 420 points and I'll click Okay in order to create this shape. And now I want to retrieve that 400 point diameter circle by going to the Edit menu and choosing Paste in Front, or you have that time-honored keyboard shortcut of Control + F here on a PC or Command + F on a Mac. And now I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. And I'll Shift + click on this guy right there, so the second circle out, at least among the visible circles, and it'll convert these guys to a compound path using the keyboard shortcut, which is Control + eight, by the way, or Command + eight on the Mac. And you can remember that keyboard shortcut cause the number eight has two holes in it and is in fact a compound path. All right, now we have two gradients running in the same direction here. And so I'm going to go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. My fill is not active, so I'll go ahead and click on it to make it active. And notice that the angle of the gradient is 90 degrees. That's just fine. However, it needs to be bright on top where the background circle is concerned, the bigger one. So I'll click on it to select it. And you can either change the angle value to negative 90 degrees, or you can just click on this Reverse Gradient icon in order to produce this effect here. All right, that takes care of the drawing. Now what I want to do is create a big, thick, shared stroke around everything. And I'm going to do that by first switching to the stroke panel, and I'm not doing that because that's where I'm going to change any stroke values. It's just that I want to hide the gradient panel and open up the layers panel a little more. And notice, if I were to change the stroke of this selection right now, the way it is, to something like, let's say six points, just so you can really see it, that's going to create a thicker stroke on the outside than on the inside of the ring. And that's because this shape right here is covering up the inside edge of that big stroke. And also we're going to start bleeding the stroke into the star. What I really want to do is stroke everything all together. So I'll undo that modification, and I'll go to the layers panel. And notice this circular target right here, go ahead and click on it. And that way we're targeting the layer itself. Then you want to go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command in order to bring up the appearance panel. Notice that the word layer is bold here inside the panel, which tells you you're effecting the layer as a whole. What you want to do is drop down to this icon in the bottom left corner that reads Add New Stroke, and that will add a stroke like so. And I'm going to change the line weight to six points, which is going to make an absolute total mess of everything. What you want to do is, notice the word contents right here, that's the contents of the layer. You want to take that stroke you just made and drag it down to below the contents in order to produce this effect here so that every single one of these items shares a common stroke that is layered in back of the objects themselves, at which point I'll click off the shapes in order to de-select them. And now, just so we can see the artwork independently of the interface, I'll go up to the View menu and I'll choose Presentation Mode, and I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. And that is how you create a variation on one of the most famous logos in the world, using nothing more than a circle and an equilateral triangle that share common radius values, here inside Illustrator.

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