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

942 Shading with variable-width strokes

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

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942 Shading with variable-width strokes

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to shade your artwork using variable width strokes here inside the Illustrator and along the way we're going to create this shadow right here, along the top of the eye, as well as this one along the bottom eyelid. Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch to our artwork so far and what you want to do is zoom out by pressing Control or Command + minus, so that you can see all of your artwork as we are right here. And then you want to turn off the Shading layer here inside the Layers panel and then I'll go ahead and click outside the eye in order to select those blended scales from last week. What we want to do is select this central path outline right here and make a copy of it. And so in order to grab that path outline, I'm going to double-click on it and that will take us to the Isolation Mode right here so that we're only seeing the paths inside the blend and then I'm going to click that same location in order to select that path outline. And in case you're having trouble finding it, I'll go and click off the path to de-select it. Notice the appearance of my arrow cursor right here, you want to see a little black anchor point next to it at which point if you click, you're going to select your artwork but notice I select the entire blend. I don't want that. So click outside the blend to de-select it and then I'll just partially marquee this region right here in order to select this central path outline and nothing more. Now you want to go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command or you have that standard keyboard shortcut of Control + C or Command + C on the Mac. Now, go ahead and press the Escape key. In order to escape out of the Isolation Mode, go ahead and click outside of the path outlines to de-select your artwork, click on the Shading layer to make it active and then turn it back on as well. So click in the eye column right here and now what you want to do is click on the Flat menu icon and make sure that Paste Remembers Layers is turned off. At which point, assuming that your Shading layer's active you can go up to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Front or you have that standard keyboard shortcut of Control + F here on the PC or Command + F on the Mac. And that will paste a copy of that one path outline and nothing more. Now, you want to go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command in order to bring up the Appearance panel. We want to get rid of this Inner Glow effect right here. So click on it to select it, and then drop down to the little Trash icon in the bottom right corner of the panel and click on it. All right, now I want to swap the Fill and Stroke attributes. And so I'll click in this little Swap icon or you can press that keyboard shortcut of Shift + F and that way we have no fill. Currently, we've got a dolphin colored stroke, and so I'll click on this second Swatch up here in the horizontal control panel, and I'll change the color from dolphin to black, is going to work out nicely. And then you want to select this line weight value right here and change it to 40 points. So we have a big thick path outline. All right, now we want it to have a variable width. And so go ahead and select the Width tool. If you're not seeing this little guy, then go ahead and click and hold on whatever tool you are seeing and choose the Width tool from the Fly Out menu. All right, now I'm going to double-click on this anchor point right here in order to bring up the width point edit dialog-box. You want to make sure the total width value is 40 points. And just go ahead and click Ok. And that will create a width point at this location, surrounded by these two little points right here which indicate the width of the stroke at this point. Now double-click on the first endpoint down left and change its total width value to zero points and click Ok, so that it starts very skinny and gets thicker. Giving us a calligraphic effect. Then double-click on this point right here in order to once again, bring up that dialogue-box. This time you're going to have an arbitrary total width value, change it to 40 points and then click Ok. And then double-click on the last anchor point over here to the right side of the art board and change its total width value to zero and click Ok. So that we have a stroke that basically fades in and then back out. All right, now you want to give it a Gaussian blur by switching back to the black arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Selection tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of V, which is indeed an upside-down arrow that will go ahead and select the path outline. And so basically, the idea is if you want to edit the path outline as a traditional path then you have to switch away from the width tool, because the width tool is just going to let you assign a variable width. All right, now, go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur and then choose Gaussian Blur. And we're looking for a radius value of six pixels for this effect. At which point I will go ahead and click Ok. And notice that we end up with this kind of fuzzy variable width stroke. All right, now, click off the artwork in order to de-select it. And I'll press Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac, in order to center my zoom. All right, now we're going to draw a little three point path outline along the bottom eyelid and we're going to do so using the Pen tool. And so go ahead and select that tool. It has a keyboard shortcut of P for pen, and now we're going to create a total of three smooth points working from the left to right. And so I'll go ahead and drag right here in order to create that first smooth point. And then I'll drag like so, notice that I'm dragging from left to right, so I'm maintaining a consistent direction or if you prefer, you can think of it as dragging in a counter-clockwise direction. And so I just dragged at each one of the three anchor points in order to create a very simple path outline. We may need to modify it a little bit later, but for now just go ahead and switch back to that black arrow tool, click on the path outline in order to select it. And then notice that this first Swatch on the left-hand side of the horizontal control panel reads none, which indicates that we have no fill. And the second Swatch is set to black. We want it to be this kind of blueish-gray, which I've called dolphin. So go ahead and select that color. And then just go ahead and switch to the width tool right off the bat and double-click on the first anchor point and set its total width value to zero, then click Ok. Then click on this middle anchor point right here in order to once again, bring up the dialog-box and change its total width value to 20 this time around. Click Ok and click on the final end point, over here on the right-hand side, to bring up that dialog-box and change the total width value again to zero points and click Ok. Then you may wonder why in the world, this stroke is all cut off and that's because much of it is hidden by the eye. And so I'm going to go ahead and switch back over to the Layers panel right here, click on the Eye layer to select it. And we're going to create a new layer in front of it by dropping down to the little plus icon in the bottom right corner, used to look like a little page icon. And what you want to do is press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click. In order to bring up the Layer options dialogue-box go ahead and call this layer Edge let's say, and I'm going to change its color from cyan, which is kind of ugly in my opinion to violet which is awesome looking and I'll click Ok. And notice that we have this new dge layer. Now, notice this little black square that represents the selected path outline. Just go ahead and drag it and drop it up to the Edge layer in order to move that path outline up the stack like so. All right, now you might want to modify the position of your anchor points by switching to the white arrow tool which you can get by pressing the A key for arrow. And now go ahead and click on the central anchor point and I'll just drag it down ever so slightly like so and I might modify the position of this control handle as well as this guy right here, your results will vary. And so it's entirely up to you where you decide to put these anchor points. You just want a nice, shiny bottom eyelid at which point I'll switch back to the black arrow tool. Again, you can get that tool by pressing the V key, click on the path outline in order to select the entire thing, go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur, followed by Gaussian Blur. And this time we're looking for a radius value of four pixels, which point I'll click Ok in order to accept that effect and then notice the word Opacity up here in the control panel go ahead and select that Opacity value and change it to 50% like so, and then you can go up to the Select menu and choose De-select or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac. All right, now notice all of the shading works very nicely with this scaly background, but it also works nicely with the original photographic image. And to show you what I mean by that, I'm going to turn off the Scales layer so we can see the photograph in the background. And then I'll double-click on that Photo layer in order to bring up the layer options dialog-box and I'll turn off the Template checkbox and I'll click Ok, so that we can see the absolutely opaque version of that photograph. And so whether you're working with those lizard-like scales or not, those are at least a couple of different ways to shade your artwork with the help of variable width strokes here inside Illustrator.

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