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

934 Combining dynamic effects in Illustrator

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

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934 Combining dynamic effects in Illustrator

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- In this movie, we'll take our illustration so far subject to the dynamic free distort effect. And we'll add a couple of additional dynamic effects to better integrate the vectors with their photographic background here inside Illustrator. And so notice this natural shadow right here, it kind of cuts as you can see from being fairly sharp to blurry. And so I figured we should match that location with the drop shadow from our vector-based artwork. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to that artwork and notice that I have the appearance panel onscreen, which works out beautifully because I can select any one of these path outlines using the black arrow tool and notice that I'll see here in the appearance panel that I've selected the path. I'll also see it stroke and fill attributes, plus because I've assigned a dynamic effect to the layer is a hole, I can see the layer here inside the appearance panel. And so if I want to switch focus to the layer, all I have to do is click on it just a single time. All right, I'm going to hide my selection edges by pressing control H or command H on the Mac. And then I'll go up to the effect menu, choose stylize, and then choose drop shadow in order to bring it the responsive drop shadow dialog box, meaning that I can turn on the preview checkbox in order to see the effect on screen. All right, so a blend mode of multiply is just fine. And the color by default is set to black as you can see here. If this were a color photograph, I probably recommend we come up with a more colorful shadow. However, because this is a gray scale image, a black shadow is going to work out fine. A blur of five is going to work out nicely as well, but I want to move the shadow farther away. And so I ultimately set the X offset value to 66 points, and then I set the Y offset to 40 points. Happens to look pretty darn good. With one exception, of course, it's way too dark. And so I'll take the opacity value down to just 30% and then I'll click okay. All right, now I want you to notice that we're applying these dynamic effects in the order that they appear from top to bottom, which is a little unusual. In other words, it's different than the way things work in a layers panel. So we're going top to bottom rather than bottom to top. In other words, we're applying free to stuart first, and then we're applying the drop shadow. However, things work out better if we apply the drop shadow first and you can make that happen just by dragging that drop shadow upward, and then dropping it into place like so. And you can see that changes the shape of the effect. So here's the way things were before. I just press Control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo the reordering of the effects here inside the appearance panel. And here's the way things look now. And so we have a brighter area, for example, inside this gap around the left eye. All right, now we need to somehow blend those strokes into the background so that the strokes, in other words, look a little more photographic. And so you could just get rid of the strokes if you want to by double clicking on the contents item right there, at which point you will see that two points stroke. And that's because all of the path outlines share that same stroke, and then you could select it and just hit the trashcan icon in order to get rid of the strokes. And you'd end up with this effect right here. However, I decided I wanted to keep the strokes. They had an interesting element to the artwork. And so I'll go ahead and press Control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that deletion. And instead I'll just click once on the layer, once again, the layer item at the top of the appearance panel to once again, target that entire layer. And then I'll go up to the effect menu, choose blur, and then choose Gaussian blur. And I came up with the radius value of three pixels. Now you can go your own way on this one if you want to, but three pixels looks pretty good from this distance. So it's looking a little too blurry if you zoom in, but right now I'm seeing the illustration and a hundred percent. So I figure this is pretty representative. In any event, I'll click okay. Now I want you to notice that we have, once again, change the way the artwork is working. So if I turn off the calcium blur effect, which is being heaped on top of the other ones, that's why it appears last. I'll go ahead and turn off the eye there. A couple of shapes brighten up. So look at this guy right here. I was originally calling it shape six. It's the one that has two gradients working together. One of which that bright one is set to the screen mode. And then there's this guy shaped nine down here on the edge of the chin, which is set to the screen blend mode as well. And so both of these shapes are brightening up the photographic background. As soon as I turn Gaussian blur back on, I want you to look closely at that right eye right there. As soon as I turn this guy on that screen feel no longer interacts with the photograph. Its still interacts with the other gradient for what that's worth, but not the photographic background. And the same goes for the edge of the chin. Again, I'll turn Gaussian blur off. You can see that it's very bright. It's brightening up that photograph. And then when I turned Gaussian blur back on, it's no longer doing so. It's still brightening shaped 10, this big, long shape right here, but it's not brightening the photograph. And that's just the function of the fact that Gaussian blur is a filter that's brought over from Photoshop. And so if I go to the effect menu, you can see that it's listed with the Photoshop effects right here. And so any of these Photoshop effects are going to contain the blend modes to the inside of the effected layer. All right, so I'll go ahead and escape out and I'll go to the view menu and choose presentation mode in order to fill the screen with the image. And I'll perhaps zoom in a little bit as well. And that is how you use dynamic effects along with translucent gradients in order to create a fairly mesmerizing piece of artwork that integrates vectors along with pixels and is ultimately based on little more than equal lateral triangles.

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