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Lesson Info

How to Make 3D Gradient Lettering Blends in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there in this video we're going to make this kind of effect where it's kind of three D. And gradients happening. It's very retro, it's very in. I don't really know what to call it. We'll do a couple of things, we'll look at some of the more advanced uses and we'll add a kind of a cool grain to it as well to kind of grunge it up. Alright let's go and do that now in adobe illustrator. Alright let's get started. I've opened up blending two from the exercise files. You really don't need to open it because it's just a great background and I have added some gradients which you might want to do regardless. Let's start we need to kind of things. We need our gradient kind of line and then the shape that it's going to follow. So let's draw the gradient first. I'm going to draw an ellipse. Okay and I'm gonna fill it with one of the gradients that I've gotten here. Okay make sure it's got no stroke. It looks a bit weird with a stroke. So I fill any kind of gradient. Doesn't have to be this one.

I'm gonna make a duplicate of it and then I want to blend it and we've been using different tools in this course. Let's go for a shortcut time, command option, be on my keyboard or if you want a pc. It is Control B. That'll do the blending just automatically. Okay let's double click the blending tool and switch out the steps now. Don't worry too much. How about how many steps you do here go high enough let's go to 80 whatever so you know that looks quite nice, you can start to see the banding. It's okay. Don't worry too much about it at this stage because when we attach to the line we're gonna have to adjust it quite a bit afterwards. So don't worry too much about it. And I want a couple of copies. I'm gonna have a little copy over there, maybe a couple of copies. All right now we need the shape for it to follow. I'm gonna use my pencil tool. Okay? He's underneath the shaper tool and I've double clicked my pencil tool, cranked up the smoothing and turned off. Keep selected. Let's click ok it just helps with the flow of it. You could use the curvature tool, the pencil, anything you'd like to. Okay and I'm going to draw a squiggle. Okay? I I had no stroke on. Okay so I'm gonna give it a stroke so you can see my amazing nous. And now we're going to get this to follow. I just have to select both of them and go to object. Go to blend and let's go to replace the spine and it's kind of cool like that. Right. Um All we need to do is increase the steps. Okay so double click the blend tool and we're gonna have to go, you have to play around with how much you want or don't want of these little dots. Okay if you want it to be super smooth, you have to go quite high. The only trouble with that though is that you do run into potentially stressing your poor machine out and How high can I go before my machine dies. A 1000 turns out. Okay, so you probably maybe in my draw quite a long line. What you might do is draw a shorter line so those 1000 steps work fine. Alright. I've practiced loads on this one and target loads and it always comes out better than that. I feel like we failed there and you can also do hand drawn type. Okay, so let's quickly do that and we'll look at some of the extra options like you saw at the beginning. So pencil tool stroke, pick white and it doesn't have to do one continuous line. I'm gonna I wish I had my wake on with me today. I'm stuck at home, this was Snow Day today, so that's why the audio sounds a little different because I'm stuck inside or stuck in my home office. Cool. That's as good as it's gonna get with a mouse. Alright, so there is 1234 different ones. So for this to work we need four of these in total. Okay, come here fellas And I'm gonna go keep our backup four plus back up. I'm going to pick a different gradients. Okay now at the moment it's really hard to adjust because they're kind of stuck in a blend. What you can do is you can double click these guys to go inside. Okay I'm inside this blend and I'm gonna pick the first and last guy. You don't have to have the same things. Okay? They can change over time. Let's see what that looks like. So we'll change this first one to this kind of bluey green one and we'll see what these two different changes due to come out. Double click that arrow a few times. And now I don't want you guys, I want this new fella. So I'm gonna duplicate one user shortcuts, command or control d on a pc to duplicate it. Okay now you doesn't really matter where they are. Okay? And you let's blend them object blend, replace, explain. Cool. Huh? Now also what you might do is this guy here is a bit big maybe. Okay. Um So you can change it now and he can never you know, so it's kind of like your line. Wait oh sorry your stroke weight. So let's go again uh replace mine. Also we're gonna have to do is with this guy selected. Let's go to double click the blending tool and specified steps. You can go specified distance and go actually want this to be like just one point away click preview, freak it out a little bit and it will just kind of keep them one point away rather than amount of steps, but do make sure you expand this at the end because it's an active effect and can stress everything else. It's already my fans already come on, so a few things that we can do to make this, well actually I'm going to fast forward now to have the whole damn thing done. So let's go and fast forward it now. All right, you're back. Okay. And so a couple of things I want to show you is to kind of tidy these things up, is with the selected. Often you want to play around with object blend and who's at the front and who's at the back. If you reverse the front back, you can like that's kind of more what I was looking for. I think all of these guys do. I like that. I'm not sure there's a lot of kind of trial and error here. So object blend. Rephrase, reverse front back. Yeah, bits of it. I like bits of it. I don't, other things you can do is you can edit it. Okay? So I like to go to command y or control y on a pc. You can edit a couple of things, the splints and the and the kind of circles that we're using for blending. So I'm gonna grab my white arrow, my direct selection tool and let's say that I want this kind of whip to be like a lot bigger, I wanna maybe pen tool and I'm going a little bit, spending too much time here is the curvy or not the curvy the better. But you know, you can, you can spend a bit more time here fixing these up. Also these guys here now I've got a beginning and ending shape, right, so actually let's go command way, so we've kind of fixed that one, you can play around in the beginning and ending shape, so I'm going to zoom in, I grab my white arrow tool, click on him, I'm gonna try and click on with my black arrow, I'm going to double click on him until I go inside of him and that guy can be a lot bigger, Let's have a look and why they don't have to be the same size. They're kind of like, let's say it's caterpillar looks like a like neon caterpillar and what else can we do? Sometimes? What I like to do is see this bad one here, like it's not my favorite, but and what I like to do with the gradients. So let's go inside this one, I'm gonna double click the edge, double click it until I double click it and come inside the blend. I can see the feel here. What I like to do is go to my fill gradient options and maybe just tuck that in a little bit right and add another one. So just click so just drag that one and then click somewhere down here and it makes a new swatch, double click that swatch and go to my favorite hue saturation brightness and just drag down this a little bit, you see what's happening here? It gives it a kind of, I find sometimes it just needs a little bit of that to kind of get the depth right, okay. Is it better? It's not much better, but it's got a bit more three D shiny nous to it, You can add a little bit of highlight on one side, just a really slim bit of white. You can look quite cool when you're finished. Um Don't look like this area here. Machine is struggling. My fans are going now. The other thing, I'll just talk about it, it doesn't have to be circles, right? And you can use squares, triangles, stars, they don't have to be the same at both ends, one could be a circle, one could be a star and you get some really cool effects. Last thing I wanna do is I want to show you some kind of grain um This one here. Now if you're finding like mine, it's stressing out and you're happy with it and you're like man that's that's the kind of thing I wanted to do and I think I like the other way, you can select it all, can you do it all in one big go object blend and we're gonna go to expand. Okay. And is it better? What happens is it's lots of shapes, but it's gonna be less stressful on this computer than the blend mode. Trying to do it. The only trouble is it's not kind of editable like it was before. It's just zillions of little shapes. Cool. So adding a bit of grain hides some of the banding and just looks kind of cool. Is that film grain type of thing? And we do it this way, so we're gonna grab the rectangle tool. Okay? And we're gonna draw a rectangle over the whole thing cause I wanted to kind of go across the great as well. I'm going to fill it with white, I'm gonna have no stroke and it's an effect up here called effect down to down to texture and then go to green. Okay. And um mine's kind of set from when I was practicing before. Mine's 40 by 50, it really depends on the size of the box that you're using, what kind of grain you want, like the intensity, I'll crank it up, you can see it kind of gets a bit more grainy, depends on the kind of look you're looking for, you can play around what kind of grain there's all sorts of stuff you can do. Let's click OK. Doesn't quite work. Right? You've got this big white box but remember our color blending modes. Okay. And remember pop quiz, where is it? Right, click on opacity. Or if you're an older version go to window appearance, click on capacity and here normal. Probably multiply everything works on multiplayer. Right? And play around with different ones but it just gives I've over cooked it. I totally have but you get the idea there, I really want to go back and change this. The cool thing about it is an active effect so I can click on grain okay and go back and say actually dan thought he was kind of cool, stop messing with it and let's have a look. Yeah I feel like that's kind of a happy medium. Maybe even still a bit much but it's a bit of texture to your really strong vector. Alright so it is class exercise time. Okay and it's gonna be pretty easy one to understand. I want you to make your own name. Okay and and all shapes. Okay I want to just see some three D blobby goodness, maybe some caterpillars? Um Yeah and I'd like you to share it on this this website here as a project. Okay. And but I'd love to see it on twitter and instagram. So um instagram is bring your own laptop and twitter is dan loves adobe. You probably got this burned into your heads now Alright. I will see you in the next video by now