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

935 Creating a Halloween cat’s eye in Illustrator

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

935 Creating a Halloween cat’s eye in Illustrator

- Hey gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. Every year I do something special for Halloween. Each and every year, year after year. And this year is no exception. The one difference is that I originally created the artwork that you're about to witness, not a few days ago, but full on six years ago, then I somehow totally misplaced it, lost all memory that it even existed and proceeded to create a bunch of different Halloween projects in a year sentence. But then, upon checking the contents of an old obsolete hard drive, covered in spider webs, complete with a creaking door and a quick with less storage space and a Japanese sleeping capsule, I found this. A vector based cat's eye created in Adobe illustrator. But how, how did I make it? I had no idea. In fact, until just three days ago, it remained a mystery. That's when a wizard burst forth from my brain and told me Deke, you got this. It was really thoughtful actually. Thanks brain wizard. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final version of the artwork just so you have a chance to see it open inside Illustrator. And by the way, if you see these little white jaggies along the edges of the scales, then you can go up to the view menu and choose view using CPU and that should resolve those issues. So in other words, it's just a screen artifact. All right, we're going to be starting off inside this document right here which contains a photographic tracing template, as well as these primitive shapes. And the photographic template by the way, it comes to us from the Dreamstime image library about what you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. All right, now this is pretty basic stuff what I've done so far, but if you're interested in how you create a tracing template as well as these primitive shapes then you can stay tuned for a followup maybe. But for now what I'm going to do is duplicate this primitive Slayer here inside the layers panel by clicking on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner and choosing duplicate primitives, then I'll go ahead and turn off the original primitives layer. So I don't mess it up. And I'll double click on the new one the one that reads copy and I'll change its name to eye. And I'll change the color let's say to this color down here, grass green, but of course you can use any color that you like. All right, now I'm going to select all these primitive shapes by pressing Control + A or Command + A on the Mac. And then I'll turn them into an eye shape by selecting the shape builder tool from this fly out menu right here. And then all you have to do is drag over the central portion of the eye into this area right here. Now this is part of the eye on the inside edge, this fleshy stuff right here and just make sure you're dragging over everything like so, so that you're seeing that dotted matrix and then release and you'll go ahead and create the central shape. Then what you want to do is switch back to the black arrow tool which you can get by pressing the V key, and Shift click on this area right here in order to de-select that shape you just created and then press the backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac so that all you have left is that eye shape. All right, now, what you want to do is click on the eye in order to select it. And we want to swap the fill and stroke, which you can do by clicking on this little icon right here, near the bottom of the toolbox or you can just press a keyboard shortcut of Shift + X like so. Now, we're going to need this shape in just a moment. And so go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command. Or you can press that standard keyboard shortcut of Control + C here on a PC or Command + C on the Mac. All right, now you want to change the fill. This will make more sense in a moment from white as it is now to black, like so. So very simple change. And now what we're going to do is build up a bunch of additional fields inside the appearance panel. And so to make that happen, go up to the window menu and choose appearance, and that'll bring up the appearance panel wherever it's showing up on your screen, and notice that we have a single fill right here. What you want to do is click on that fill and then click on the little plus sign down here in the bottom right corner of the appearance panel. It used to look like a little page icon, in any event click on it in order to duplicate that fill like so. All right, now, assuming that you're seeing your swatches panel, which you can get by choosing the swatches command from the window menu, then make sure the fill is active and then drop down to the older right here, which is called cat eye colors, and click on the first Swatch pale yellow and notice that these are all global swatches as indicated by the white wedges in their bottom right corners which tells you that you're establishing a link between the color and the filled object. All right, now we want to modify the shape of this fill and you can do that by making sure the fill is selected here inside the appearance panel and then drop down to the FX icon in the bottom left corner. And here's where things get a little intricate just because we have a ton of sub menus as you can see, you want to go all the way up to this guy, convert to shape and choose ellipse. And that way we're converting them pale yellow fill to a big ellipse. That we don't really want to be that big. So go ahead and switch to absolute right here and that's going to make it very tiny. Now we have the dial and new values and the values that work where this effect is concerned are a width and a height value of 600 points like so, so that we get this big circle. Next, go ahead and click okay in order to accept that effect and then twirl open the little fill here inside the appearance panel and notice that you have an ellipse effect. Now, what I want you to do is click on that field to make sure it's active. So we're editing this one fill independently of that black one. And then once again, drop down to the FX icon, this time choose distort and transform, followed by the transform command. Now this field right here is going to represent the central portion of the iris. I want to move it with respect to the eye shape. And so I'm going to change this vertical move value to negative 100, like so, and then we'll press the Tab key. And with any luck, your preview checkbox is turned on and notice that a negative vertical move value, moves the fill upward. All right, now go ahead and click okay to accept that effect, go ahead and click on the field once again in order to make it active. And now once again, dropped down to the FX icon choose stylize this time, followed by inner glow. And notice that I've set the blend mode to multiply as opposed to screen so that we're going to create a dark glow. Then click on that little colored swatch right there, click on color swatches in order to switch to the list of predefined swatches, go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the list and you'll see this color called dark green. Go ahead and click on it and then click okay. All right, now we're looking for an opacity value of 100%. I want the blurred to be set to 75 points and you want edge as opposed to center to be selected. And if you've got the preview checkbox turned on, you can see the effect applied onscreen after which point I'll go ahead and click okay. All right, I want to darken that edge further still. So I'm going to click on the inner glow effect right there and create a copy of it by clicking on that little plus sign down here in the bottom right corner of the appearance panel, and then to modify that new inner glow click on the words "Inner glow" to bring up the inner glow dialog box. And then you want to click on a color swatch right there and change it to black. And you can do that just by dragging that little circle to the bottom left corner of this field. At which point you should see R, G and B values of zero , that is black. And so click okay to accept that change and then change the blur value to something smaller, such as 25 points, let's say. And that gives us a kind of gradient of inner glows right there from black to dark green, to pale yellow. At which point, click okay in order to accept that effect. All right now, at this point, you may notice that our fill is kind of leaking outside of the eye shape. We don't want that. We want it to be entirely inside the eye, like so, and so let's just go ahead and switch back to the document in progress. And I'll click on the word opacity up here in the control panel at the top of the screen. And then you want to click on this button right here "Make mask" in order to create a clipping mask, then click on that mask icon. At this point, it's going to be totally black. So in other words, we're hiding everything at which point, go up to the edit menu and choose paste in front, which is going to pace that white eye shape into the opacity mask. So we end up with this effect right here and to see what that looks like. I'll go ahead and click on the word opacity once again at which point we're seeing this black region which is concealing the fill and then this white region, which is revealing it, which is why the fill is now contained inside of the eye shape. After which point, assuming that you want to work on your drawing once again that would have set here inside the appearance panel. We're not seeing the fills that we've created and that's because only the opacity mask is selected. To switch back to the illustration itself, go ahead and click on this thumbnail right here, and then press the Enter key. And I want you to notice what happens here inside the appearance panel. As soon as I press the Enter key, we once again reveal those two fills that we've created so far. All right, now if you switch back to the final version of the illustration you'll see that there's a ton of additional fills going on inside the final version of the eye. We're going to investigate those fills in future movies. But for now, I'm going to create the pupil. By switching back to the document in progress, go ahead and click on that pale yellow fill right there and create a copy of it by clicking on the little plus sign down here in the bottom right corner of the appearance panel. And I'm going to change the fill from pale yellow to black once again. Because after all black is the traditional color of a pupil, and then I'll go ahead and click on the word ellipse right there, and I'll change the size of the ellipse to just 80 points wide and 280 points tall. So that we end up with this pupil right here and then I'll click okay. All right now, our other effects are still in place. We need the transform effect in order to scoot that pupil up. So that's fine. We do not however need these inner glows. So click on one, shift click on the other and then click on the little trash icon down here in the bottom, right corner of the appearance panel in order to get rid of them. You're not going to see any difference because we are multiplying those glows in. However, because we don't need them, there's no sense in keeping them. All right now, I'll click on the field once again and I'm going to blur it by clicking on the FX icon choosing blur, and then choosing Gaussian blur. And I came up with the blur value of four pixels as you can see right here at which point I'll click okay to accept that effect. All right, now I want to add one more effect, a kind of dark outer glow to this pupil. So I'll click on that black field once again, click on the FX icon, go up here to stylize, and then choose outer glow. So we got rid of the inner glows. We're going to add an outer glow at this point and that'll bring up this dialog box right here. Notice that the blend mode is set to normal. That's going to work out just fine. Go ahead and click on the color swatch in order to bring up the color picker dialog box, click on the color swatches button. So you can see all the swatches, scroll down to the bottom of the list. Once again, select dark green if you're working along with me and then click okay to accept that color and we get this kind of greenish glow around the outside of the pupil. And notice my opacity value set to 100%, my blur values cranked up to 40 points, which is exactly what I want. So click okay to accept that effect. Now I'm going to switch back to the layers panel so I can show you the difference between what I've created and the photographic template in the background. So if I turn off that eye, notice that the position of the pupil changes to right about here. And I can match that if I wanted to, by turning the eye layer back on and then targeting that layer by clicking on this little circular target there in the right hand column and then I'll change the opacity value up here in the control panel to just 50% so that we can actually see through the object to the template below. And then I'll switch back to the appearance panel. Notice that the layer is targeted. We want to get back to that eye path. So double click on this item called contents at which point you will once again see that black pupil fill, then go ahead and click on the word transform to bring up the transform effect dialog box. And I'm going to click in the vertical value and I'm going to reduce it by pressing Shift + down arrow, followed by the down arrow key a few times. So at a vertical move value of negative 114 things line up vertically, then I'll Shift + Tab to the horizontal value and press shift down arrow followed by the down arrow key a few times in order to move that guy over to the left, at which point it matches quite nicely. And if you want to see what that looks like, then just go ahead and switch back to the layers panel right here. And then notice that target now appears gray that tells you that the eye layer has a dynamic effect assigned to it. That is the other layers have hollow circles instead. And so if you want to get rid of that dynamic effect, you just go ahead and drag that gray circle down to the trashcan icon like so and then drop it. And notice that the circle becomes hollow and that we've reinstated an opacity value for the entire layer of 100% as we can see up here in the control panel. But I don't really like that pupil position. And so I'm going to switch back to the appearance panel. I want the pupil to be centered inside the iris. And so I'll go ahead and click on the word transform once again. So this is an entirely dynamic effect that you can change anytime you like. And I'll go ahead and switch the horizontal move value back to zero, and I'll restore a vertical move value of negative 100 once again. And then notice if I press the Tab key everything updates on screen at which point I'll click okay to accept that change. And that my friends is at least the beginning of how you create a vector based cat's eye using a bunch of dynamic effects here inside Illustrator. Okay, so we have a pupil set against the kind of gradient iris, but we need so much more. Which is why, if you're a member of LinkedIn learning I have two, count them, two follow up movies. In the first we add some more dynamic gradients in order to fill out the cat's iris. And in the second, I go back in time and show you how to trace a photographic image inside Illustrator using the most primitive path outlines there are, ellipses. Deke's techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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