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

938 Halftone pattern and Zig Zag in Illustrator

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

938 Halftone pattern and Zig Zag in Illustrator

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's techniques". As you may recall, we are currently in the process of creating this wickedly articulated cat's eye inside Adobe Illustrator. All in celebration of Halloween. Today, we're about to build up the fantastically intricate iris using a couple of dynamic filters that just happen to run inside Illustrator: halftone pattern and zig zag. Halftone pattern comes to us from Photoshop, meaning that it actually produces a pixel-based effect. Even inside the resolution-independent, hallowed halls of Illustrator. The other filter, zig zag, is all vectors, but it's expressed as two words, zig and then zag, which is perhaps a nod to the fact that you get more than you bargained for. See this ridges per segment value? A value of one gives us one bend. So the segment zigs and then it zags. A value of two makes it zig, zag, and then zig again. You always get one extra zig, so odd values produce even quantities, and even values produce odd ones. So a bit weird, which is just as it should be, because it's all in the name of creating Halloween-suitable eye candy as each and every one of us homebound trick or treaters is about to find out. All right, so here's the final version of the cat's eye artwork open inside Illustrator. And I'm showing you this, in part, because if you open this artwork, you may see the jagged white edges tracing along these rough scales. That is a screen artifact, by the way. And you can confirm that's the case by going to the view menu and choosing whatever you see as the first command. In my case, I'm currently previewing to the GPU as by default, but I can switch to view using CPU, that is my computer's central processing unit. At which point, notice that everything becomes nice and smooth. All right, I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my artwork so far, and I'll click on the eye with my black arrow tool in order to select it. Now, we're going to add a couple of additional fills. And so you want to go up to the window menu and choose the appearance command in order to bring up the appearance panel. All right, I'm going to twirl this guy closed just so that I have a little more room to work. Notice that in total we have one, two, three, four, five fills. We're going to be adding a few more. And so I'll go ahead and click on this second-to-top fill right here in order to select it. And then, I'll drop down to the little plus icon in the bottom right corner of the panel. In older versions of Illustrator, it looks like a tiny page icon. Either way, click on it, and that will duplicate that fill like so. All right, now, we want to make some modifications. So I'll twirl this guy open by clicking on this little so-called twirly triangle. And I'm going to switch out the gradient by going up to the window menu and choosing the grading command, which brings up the gradient panel. Now, I favor the gradient panel over the gradient tool, because I feel like it gives me more control. Now, notice that the type is set to radial gradient, which is exactly what we want, but we want to switch out the colors. And so currently, we're fading from what I'm calling khaki green to dull gold and back to khaki green. The only color I want to switch out is this guy in the middle. And so I'm going to go up here to the swatches panel, which I have open. If you don't, you can choose the swatches command from the window menu. And then, I'll go ahead and grab pale yellow from this cat eye colors group right here. And I'll drag it and drop it onto that color stop in order to switch out just that one color like so. All right, now, I'll go ahead and click on the stroke tab in order to hide the gradient panel so I have more room to work in the appearance panel. And notice along with that fill, I copied all of these dynamic effects. All right, so I'll click on the word ellipse to bring up my shape options dialog box. And notice that I have a width value of 370 and a height value 400. Turns out that's exactly what I want. So I'll just go ahead and click okay, or I could cancel out. But I just want you to see that a dynamic effect such as ellipse is editable way into the future. All right, so we also have a transform effect right here, which is moving the fill upward because we have a negative vertical value. Again, that's what I want. Just want to show you what's going on. And we also have this roughen effect, also by the way, set exactly the way I want it to be. All right, so I'll go ahead and cancel out of that guy. And you may find that you need to click the cancel button twice, by the way. All right, so I don't need this outer glow effect. So I'll go ahead and click on it in order to select it, and then I'll click on the little trash icon in the bottom right corner of the panel in order to delete it. Now, I want to click on this fill once again, and this time, I want to add a halftone pattern effect. And so I'll go ahead and click on the FX icon down here in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel, and I'll choose sketch, and then I'll choose halftone pattern. And this is the exact same effect that's available in the filter gallery inside Photoshop. And so in other words, it's a pixel-based effect. And so I'll go ahead and choose halftone pattern in order to bring up this ginormous dialog box right here. I want the size value to be five, and I want the contrast to be 10. I also have the pattern type set to dot at which point I'll click okay in order to accept that effect. And I end up with these square halftone dots right here in the center of the eye. All right, now I want you to notice the order of the dynamic effects here inside the appearance panel. They are typically organized from top to bottom in the order that they've been applied. So the first one to be applied is up here at the top. That would be the ellipse effect. And the most recent one, halftone pattern, is located down here at the bottom. I want halftone pattern to be applied before Gaussian blur. So I'll go ahead and click on it and drag it upward, and then drop it between the roughen and Gaussian blur effects like so. At which point, we end up with a very different effect. And so notice if I click on Gaussian blur, I have the radius value set to four pixels, which is what I want. So I'll just cancel out of there. Now, this is looking pretty interesting. I'll go ahead and press control plus or command plus to zoom in, but not interesting in a good way. And so what I need to do is change the blend mode that's assigned to this specific fill, and you can do that by clicking on the word opacity right here, directly below Gaussian blur, and then clicking on normal. And I'm going to change this guy to one of the contrast modes here, overlay through hard light. And so I'll start with overlay. That's a bit much. In which case, what you want to do is switch to soft light instead. And that's going to give you a more measured effect as we're seeing right here. All right, now, I want to add another fill, but this time instead of duplicating one of the existing fills, I'm just going to create a new one by first twirling closed this fill right here, clicking on it to select it, so the second-to-top one, and then you want to drop down to this add new fill icon in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel and click on it. And that will go ahead and add a fill. Notice if I twirl it open, even though it sits at that same gradient, I'm not seeing any of the dynamic effects. Now, I don't want a gradient this time. So I'll go up to the swatches panel, make sure the fill is selected, and then I'll click on this guy right here, dark green, in order to create a solid color fill like so. So the only thing that's appearing in front of it at this point, anyway, is that black pupil. All right, now we want to apply a few dynamic effects by clicking on the FX icon, and then you want to go up to convert to shape and choose the ellipse. And so this effect right here is going to convert the shape of the fill from the current eye shape to an ellipse. So I'll go ahead and choose that command. And then, you want to select absolute, which is going to convert it to a very tiny ellipse that's hidden behind the pupil. To make that ellipse bigger, go ahead and select the width value and take it up to 150 points, and then tab to the height value and change it to 300 points like so. And click okay. That ellipse is the right shape now, but it's in the wrong location. And so I'll go ahead and click on that fill in order to select it, and then I'll click on the FX icon, choose distort and transform and choose transform. And then, I'll go ahead and drop down to the move values here. And I'm going to take the vertical value as we've seen before down to negative 100, which you might think would scoot that green ellipse down, but in fact, a negative value scoots things up like so. So where vertical is concerned, negative goes up, a positive value goes down. At which point, I'll click okay. All right, now, what I want to do with this ellipse is convert it into this kind of spiky shape around the pupil. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to my illustration at hand, click on that green fill, once again, just to make sure that it's selected, click on the word FX down here in the bottom left corner, return to distort and transform. And this time, you want to choose zig zag. Not one word, zigzag, but zig zag. All right, now, notice if your preview checkbox is turned on that you're converting the ellipse into a kind of spiky shape. What we want to do is make sure that the absolute option is selected. And then, you want to change the size value to 40 points. And notice if I now tab that I get these ridiculous spikes. Well, what I want to do is add more ridges per segment. And so I'm going to take that value from four up to 40 like so, so that we get a bunch of spikes, and then I'll switch my points from corner to smooth so that I smooth off those corners ever so slightly. And then, I'll click okay. All right, now, notice things have gotten a little messed up here. Ellipse, which we applied first, is at the top. Transform, which we applied second, is at the bottom. And zig zag's in the middle. We want zig zag to be at the end. So I'll just go ahead and drag it down. That's not going to change its appearance, but it is going to make it easier to tell what's actually going on. All right, now, I'm going to click on that green fill once again. Click on FX, return to distort and transform and choose roughen. And you may wonder how in the world I came up with this recipe. Well, it's a whole lot of experience, but it's also a bunch of trial and error, as well. And so I'll go ahead and choose roughen in order to bring up the roughen dialogue box, which makes an absolute mess of everything at least by default. And so what I'm going to do is select absolute once again. And then, I'm going to change the size value to a mere two points. And I'll tab down to the next numerical value right here, which is called detail. It's actually the number of back and forth segments per inch. So I'm going to take that value down to five inches, and then I'll switch my points, once again, from corner to smooth. And I'll go ahead and click okay. All right, now this looks absolutely terrible. But notice what Illustrator has done once again. It sandwiched roughen, which we just applied, in between ellipse and transform. We desperately need roughen to be after zig zag. And so I'm going to go ahead and drag it down the list like so, and notice once roughen is applied after zig zag, then we get a much more appealing effect. Alright, now I want to blur this effect. And so you might think you would click on that green fill once again, click FX and choose blur followed by Gaussian blur. But if you do that, well, first of all, it looks terrible. But even if I take this radius value down to one, then we're kind of blurring back and forth, and so we're gumming up the detail. If that's not what you want, then cancel out. And for a more finessed effect, go ahead and click on the FX icon once again. Choose stylize, followed by feather. And now, notice if I take that value up to three points, I end up with this much nicer effect. And so instead of blurring both directions and gumming up the detail, we're blurring inward at which point I'll click okay in order to accept that change. All right, we're almost done. Just need to change the blend mode. And so click on the word opacity under feather right here in order to bring up the transparency panel, and change the blend mode from normal to multiply, which is going to burn that green into its background. And then, go ahead and click off that panel in order to hide it. And now, I'm going to twirl closed that green fill just so things are a little more tidy. And finally, I'll click off the path outline in order to de-select it. And those are a couple of ways, anyway, that you might employ the pixel-based halftone pattern effect, as well as the vector-based zig zag here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to infuse your cat's eye with a couple of translucent highlights. If you're looking forward to next week, well, alas, Halloween will be over, but our cat's eye will continue, because cats, our beloved, bewitching, perennial cats are for all seasons. "Deke's Techniques" each and every week. Keep watching.

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