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

940 Blending reptile-like scales in Illustrator

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

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940 Blending reptile-like scales in Illustrator

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- Hey gang. This is Dick McLellan. Welcome to Dick's Techniques. This week, we're still inside Illustrator and we're still working on this cat's eye but here's the difference. Halloween is behind us. In fact, here in the United States, today, this very day is election day which is why today we'll be setting our cat's eye against some grayish reptile like scales as if this creature is no longer a mammalian cat but some kind of scaly robot cat, possibly alien in nature, very likely built by a race of lizard people. Here we see what might be an artist first-hand account, complete with wings. I did not see that coming. Today's scales are nothing more than three open path outlines combined into an old school object blend and then subject to the random edge bender that is the Roughen filter. Again, inside Adobe Illustrator. Still just for fun, Imagine that this cat's eye is just a detail from a much larger and much more terrifying winged robot cat that might kill us all. Somehow today of all days, that brings me comfort. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here are those blended vector-based scales just so you have a chance to see them open inside Illustrator and here's that eye from last week. And so I'm going to start things off by clicking on the photo layer here inside the layers panel. And now I'm going to create a new layer by dropping down to the little plus icon in the bottom right corner of the panel. In previous versions of Illustrator, it looked like a little page icon and you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click in order to force the display of the layer options dialog box. And I'll go ahead and call this layer scales. And just for the sake of variety, I'll change the color of the layer to gold, and then I'll click, Okay. All right, now zoom out a little bit by pressing control minus or command minus on a Mac. In that way, I can see the entire art board at which point I'll switch to the pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. Now, we're going to be drawing a total of four smooth points in order to create a kind of waving line across the top of the eye. And to create a smooth point with the pen tool you drag. And so I'll start right about here, down and a little bit of the bottom left corner of the red bleed boundary. And I'll just go ahead and drag like so, in order to create a smooth point with two symmetrical control handles. Next, you want to position your cursor over one of the anchor points associated with the eye. So I'm going to go with this guy right here over on the far left side, and I'll drag once again in order to create another smooth point connected to the previous smooth point by a curving segment. Now, you want to position your cursor over the top right point of the eye, and go ahead and drag once again in order to create another smooth point and notice that I'm continuing to drag to the right. So in other words, I'm dragging in a more or less clockwise fashion and then you want to move your cursor way over here to the right of the red bleed boundary, and go ahead and drag. And I'm not going to drag too far because I don't want to force an auto scroll. All right, now that I have these four smooth points in place, I'll go ahead and switch to the white arrow tool which you can get by pressing the A key, if you like. And that's going to allow us to modify each one of these points to our heart's content. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on this smooth point, let's say in order to select it, and I'll drag up and to the left in order to extend this curving segment right here. And also drag this control handle upward like so, and I may have to go back and forth between these two control handles in order to more or less match the curvature of the top edge of that eye. You don't have to get it exactly right. So once again, just more or less match it. And then I want to drag this control handle right here in order to increase the curvature of this last segment. And other than that, I think things look pretty good. I might click on this segment right here in order to make sure the control handles are in decent locations. And a rule of thumb is that you want each one of the control handles to extend about a third of the length of the entire segment. All right, so having done that, I'm going to switch to the black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key and I'll click on this path outline in order to select the entire thing. And then you want to go up here to the horizontal control panel. If you prefer, you can work from the properties panel and go ahead and change the fill swatch from white to none. And then notice that my stroke swatch has set the black which is theoretically exactly what I want. Actually, now that I think of it, I want to swap the fill and stroke. So I want to fill and no stroke opposite of what I have. So in other words, I've made a terrible mistake but all you have to do to swap them is click on this little swap icon where you can press Shift X and you'll end up with a black fill and no stroke. All right, now you want to make sure your swatches panel is up on screen. If not, go up to the window menu and choose the swatches command. But do not choose the command if it has a check mark in front of it, because that'll make the panel disappear. In any event, you want to make sure that your fill is active here inside the swatches panel. And assuming that you're working along with me inside this exercise file, then you'll see a group here called cat eye colors. And what you want to do is select this swatch right here, dolphin. So named because it's kind of a dolphin color. All right, now we want to draw another path outline in the same direction we drew this one once again with four smooth points. And so, I'll go ahead and select the pen tool. Again, you can get that by pressing the P key. I'll go up to the select menu and choose Deselect. Or you have a keyboard shortcut of Control Shift A or Command Shift A in a Mac in order to deselect the artwork, and then zoom out even further so you can take in more of this dark gray pasteboard. And then you want to drag from right about here. So pretty close to that first smooth point but not directly on it, because if you dragged directly on the smooth point, you'll connect it. So you light up that previous path outline, which is not what we want. We want this to be an independent path outline at which point, move your cursor up, like, so, and then drag once again. And you can be pretty sloppy about this one. You don't have to be as exacting as we were with the previous path outline. We just want this big kind of arching path outline like so, complete with four smooth points and then drag right about here in order to create a fourth smooth point and notice that we do have a total of four smooth points all of which I drew in a consistent direction. Once again, more or less clockwise. And it's very important that you continue with the same direction so that the paths blend correctly. All right, now, press the V key, V as in Victor in order to select the black arrow tool and then I'll click anywhere on the path outline in order to select the entire thing. And then here inside the swatches panel I'll change the fill color to black. Now, we want this guy to be in the background that is behind the previous path outline that we drew. So what you want to do is right click anywhere inside the document window, choose a range, and then choose Send to Back. Or if you like, you have a keyboard shortcut of Control Shift, Left, Right, that's Command Shift left bracket on the Mac, and that will send things backward, like so. Right now we want to draw one more path outline, this one's going to be really easy once again with the pen tool, mine as well. And this time you want to drag from right about here. So down into the right of that very first path outline and then drag, let's say right about here. So we just want this curving arching path outline that's not quite right. So I'm going to press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool. And I'll go ahead and drag this anchor point down a little bit, and I'll drag this one down as well. So that the path outline is entirely inside the dark gray art board. And that's important because we want this path outline to be entirely inside the dark gray pasteboard. And that's very important because we want the blend to extend outside of the red bleed boundary. All right, so having done that, I'll go ahead and press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. I'll click on the path outline to select the entire thing and I'll change its color this time around to a global swatch that I've created in advance called midnight, and that will assign this very dark, low saturation blue. All right, now I want you to select all three of the path outlines on the scales layer by clicking in the top right corner of the layer here inside the layers panel. And then we'll go ahead and select all three without selecting, for example, the eye. And now we want to apply an inner glow effect to all three paths, by going up to the effect menu, choosing Stylize followed by Inner Glow, and we're looking for the mode to be set to multiply. So in case it's set to screen, change it to multiply, which will burn in the effect then click on the color swatch and set it to black so that the RG and B values all read zero and then click Okay. And then we're looking for an opacity value of a hundred percent. We don't want the blur value to be this high so I'm going to take it down to 10 points and then make sure that edge is selected as opposed to center. And if you have the preview checkbox turned on, then you can see the effect applied inside. For example, this very first path outline. At which point, click Okay to accept that effect. All right, now we want to blend these three paths. And the easiest way to do that is to go up to the object menu, choose Blend and then choose, Make. And assuming that you drew each one of these paths in a consistent direction. So in our case from left to right then you will see incremental path outlines drawn in a consistent direction. Now, those aren't a sufficient number of path outlines. So what I'm going to do is go to the object menu, drop down to blend once again and this time choose Blend Options. And that's going to bring up this dialog box right here, change the spacing value to specified steps by the way. Turn on the preview checkbox so that you can see your changes applied on screen. And then we just need to increase this numerical value. So for example, if I change it to 10, then a moment later I will see 10 steps in between each one of the path outlines. I want more than that, however, so I'm going to end up changing this value to 30 steps, works out pretty nicely. And then I'll go ahead and click Okay. All right, now I'm going to click off the paths to deselect them for a moment and I'll press Control 0 or Command 0 on the Mac in order to center my zoom. And I wanted to see these tiny little white outlines around each one of the black inner glow effects. These little light jagged outlines don't actually exist by the way which may surprise you because after all we are seeing them but that's just a screen artifact. And to get rid of it, in case this is a problem for you. Go up to the View menu and notice here in the title tab that the values inside the parentheses read RGB GPU, that GPU means that we're previewing the effect using the GPU on the graphics card. If that's not working for you then you go up to the view menu and choose View Using CPU which is the central processing unit on your computer's motherboard. And in our case, that's going to get rid of those white jagged outlines. So anytime you're wondering if you're really seeing the right thing on screen you can go up to the view menu and switch this setting. Notice that it now reads; View using GPU. In any event, that's not what we want, what we want is what we have. And so now notice, up here in the title tab, it reads RGB slash preview. It doesn't say GPU, at least in this version of the software. All right, now we want to create some nice rough scales and you can do that just by clicking anywhere inside the scales in order to select that entire blend. And notice up here in the far left side of the horizontal control panel we're seeing the word blend. Now, you want to go up to the effect menu, choose distort and transform and choose Roughen in order to rough up the path outline. And this is the kind of thing in the old days that you'd have to do by actually drawing all these spikes. But for the last gosh, 15 years maybe 20, we've been able to apply this dynamic effect. All right, now I'm going to turn off the preview checkbox just so that I don't have to wait for the preview to update every time I change the setting and I'm going to switch from relative to absolute right here, and then I'll change the size value from five to 10 points. And I'll tab over to the detail value right here and change it to four back and forth Jags per inch. And then I'll switch the style of anchor point from corner to smooth. And then I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox and notice that it does take a moment in order for this dynamic effect to apply. But in the end, you'll see something like this. And the reason I say, something like is because Roughen applies random effects. So every time you apply this filter you're going to get a different result and now click, Okay. And I want you to notice how every single line of scales is different from its neighbor. In fact, every roughen effect is absolutely unique, at which point I'll go ahead and press Control Shift A or Command Shift A in a Mac in order to deselect my artwork. And that's how you create utterly unique, blended, reptile-like scales behind your vector-based cat's eye here inside Illustrator. All right, so whatever that was, that happened. If you're looking forward to next week assuming there even is a next week that's when we're going to integrate our cat's eye with its randomly scaled skin using some good old-fashioned, vector-based shading. I mean, just compare this to this, so much better. Dick's Techniques each and every week. Keep hoping that you can keep watching.

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