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

941 Shading to your cat’s eye in Illustrator

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

941 Shading to your cat’s eye in Illustrator

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we're going to take our cat's eye, set against some grayish reptile-like scales that we created over the course of the last three weeks by the way, so good job everyone. And we're going to add some vector based shading here inside Illustrator. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final version of the shaded cat's eye just so you have a chance to see it open inside Illustrator and here's the artwork from last week. Now, if you're seeing these very thin jagged white outlines around each one of the rough scales, that's a screen artifact by the way and to get rid of it, you go up to the view menu and choose view using CPU, which switches the preview engine over to your computer central processing unit and that is slower incidentally, however, in our case, it's also going to deliver smoother results. All right, now what we want to do is click on the scales layer in order to make it active here inside the layers panel and we're going to create a new layer by dropping down to the little plus icon in the bottom right corner. In previous versions of Illustrator, that used to be a tiny page icon and then you want to press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click on it in order to force the display of the layer options dialog box and I'll go ahead and call this guy shading and change the color to this guy up here near the top of the menu, light red, and then I'll click okay. All right, now I'm going to zoom up by pressing control minus or command minus on a Mac and notice our blend from last week is extending well outside of the red blue boundary. That's exactly what we want. And now we want to create a big radial gradient that also encompasses the entire red bleed boundary and we're going to do that by placing the radial gradient inside an ellipse. And so I'll go ahead and click and hold on a rectangle tool or whatever tool is the occupant of the shape tool slot and I'll choose the ellipse tool from the fly out menu. Now you want to click any old place inside the document in order to bring up the ellipse dialog box and these are the values we're looking for incidentally. A width value of 1,650 points, and a height of 1300 points just happens to work out very nicely for this illustration at which point I'll click okay and we end up in my case with the big, huge white ellipse. Now it's obviously in the wrong location. We want it to be centered on the art board and to make that happen you want to click on the word align up here in a horizontal control panel. If you're not seeing the horizontal control panel go to the window menu and choose control. In any event, once you're seeing that panel, click on the word align, and then you want to change align to to align to art board right there and now, click on these two icons, horizontal align center, which will center that ellipse horizontally, and then vertical aligne center, which will center that ellipse vertically. And now notice that the ellipsis is so big that it encompasses the entire red bleed boundary which is what we want. All right, now I'm going to press control plus or command plus on the Mac to zoom in. Now depending on the speed of your computer, you may have something of a delay each time you apply an operation and that's because we've got this complex blend on a scales layer, as well as all these dynamic effects on both the scales and eye layers. So there's a lot of computation for Illustrator to be performing on the fly. All right now, go up to the window menu and choose the gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. Make sure, this is very important, that your fill is selected here inside the panel. We don't want the stroke to be on top. That would be a mistake. So switch to the fill and then go ahead and click on a second type option radial gradient in order to apply a default radial gradient like so. Notice it goes from white in the center to a kind of weak black at the outside edge. It's weak because it's a hundred percent black ink without any cyan, magenta or yellow, even though we're working in the RGB color space, we want that to be a pure black. And so what you want to do is make sure your swatches panel is available on screen. If it's not, you would choose the swatches command from the window menu and then grab black right here, drag it, and drop it onto that final color stop so that it's absolutely pure black like so. Now grab it again, black, that is, the black color swatch, and drag it and drop it onto the first color stop so that the entire gradient is black and then you want to do that again. Go ahead and grab black and dragging and drop it to any old location toward the center of the gradient, and then change that location value to 60% and then shift tab to the opacity value and change it to 0% so that the gradient is going from black at the center to transparent to black along the outside. Now we can't really see the black in the center because the eyes in a way. So what we need to do is select the first color stop right there and reposition it. So we're going to move it outward a little bit by changing the location value to 30% at which point we'll end up with this effect right here. All right, now I want to add a couple of drop shadows behind the eye. And so what we're going to do is, we're going to select the eye object on the eye layer and then we're going to paste it onto this new layer right here. And so we can see what we're doing, I'll click on a stroke tab to hide the gradient panel. Gives us more room to work here inside the appearance panel. But here's the thing, if I go ahead and switch to my black arrow tool the one Illustrator calls the selection tool even though it has a keyboard shortcut by the way of V which is an upside down arrow incidentally, now click on the eye in order to select it. Now, what I want to do is copy and paste it but I want to get rid of all its appearance attributes and so if I were to go to the window menu and choose the appearance command you can see that we have a ton of fills accompanied, each one's accompanied, that is to say, by some dynamic effects and so to clear all that stuff, you'd go to the flat menu icon right here click on it and choose clear appearance and that will get rid of the fill and stroke. Every single fill and stroke attributes gone. However, if I were to try to apply a drop shadow to this, it would disappear, and that's because notice the word path right here, it has a dashed underline that tells us that we have an opacity mask and then see what's up there, I would click on the word opacity up here in the control panel and I would note that we have an opacity mask. I can release it by clicking on a release button but if I do that then I've got the mask as well as the eye shape and then I need to delete that opacity mask and so forth. It's a lot of steps. So here's a better way to work. I'll go ahead and undo that last operation so that we bring back the eye. We don't want it to go away and then click on the word opacity. Click on the opacity mask thumbnail right here in order to switch to the opacity mask. Notice that de-selects the eye and if I were to go ahead and click on it once again to select it, now notice here inside the appearance panel, that all but one of those fill attributes disappears and we've jettisoned the dynamic effects and the word path does not have a dashed underline, and that's because here inside the opacity mask this object just has a white fill and nothing more. So now what you want to do is go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command or you have that very standard keyboard shortcut of control C or command C on the Mac and click on the word opacity again and click on the colorful thumbnail right there in order to switch back to the actual artwork. And now notice if I were to click to dismiss that panel that I've regained all of my appearance attributes and the word path has a dashed underline. All right, be that as it may, I'm going to switch back to the layers panel here and I'm going to turn off the eye layer just so we can better see what we're doing, then click on a shading layer. Now just to make sure the coast is clear here, you want to click on the fly out menu icon and make sure paste remembers layers is turned off. You do not want that command to be turned on at which point go up to the edit menu and choose paste in front or you have that very old school keyboard shortcut of control F here on a PC or command F on the Mac, which is going to paste the copy of that white path outline so we don't have all that folderol. We just have a static path outline and nothing more at which point you want to click on the first color swatch up here on the far left side of the control panel and change that fill to black so we end up with this effect here, and it's all in the name of creating a drop shadow behind the eye. And here's the thing in Illustrator, at least the way things are right now, your path outline has to have a fill in order to support a drop shadow. All right, now I'm going to switch back to the appearance panel here. Just make sure that path is selected. You don't want, for example, the stroke to be selected or something like that and then drop down to the FX icon in the bottom left corner of the panel, choose stylize and choose drop shadow. And these are the settings I'm looking for. So I want the mode set to multiply. You want to click on a color swatch right there and just make sure that the RG and B values are all set to zero so that we're applying a black drop shadow then click okay. And I'm looking for an X offset value of zero points, Y offset of 20 points and a blur of 30 points at which point click okay in order to create that drop shadow as we're seeing right here. Now, I want to double the power of that drop shadow. Under certain circumstances you might be able to apply a second drop shadow to the same path outline, but if you do that then you're going to magnify the size of the drop shadow. It's going to become absolutely huge. So what we want to do instead is go to the edit menu and choose a copy command, control C or command C on the Mac, and then return to the edit menu and choose paste in front, control F or command F on the Mac, and that's going to effectively double the drop shadow. So we've got a drop shadow sitting on top of a drop shadow at which point, switch back to the layers panel and turn the eye layer back on then go up to the select menu and choose de-select or you can press control shift A or command shift A on the Mac and notice that we have this wonderful darkness around the cat's eye at which point, just to make sure the eye is safe, go ahead and click in the second column in order to lock it down. And that is at least one way to add some dramatic shading to your cat's eye artwork here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow up movie in which we further shade our cat's eye with the help of some variable width strokes subject to Gaussian blur, not inside Photoshop, mind you, but here in Illustrator. If you're looking forward to next week, that's when I reveal why in the world. I set a cat's eye against the reptile-like scales in the first place and that's because this isn't a cat's. It's psych, secretly a dragon's eye! Deke's Techniques each and every week. If you can key what.

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