See how to create some effects such as rotations and a transparency heart effect in Illustrator. This is Part 2 of the videos on halftone hearts.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to take a step further from our halftone hearts tutorial and have a look and see what we can do with the halftones that we create. In this video we’re going to go one step further than the last video.
In this video we’re going to create this sort of circular effect from the string of hearts that we created using the Blend tool in Illustrator. And then I’m going to show you how you can use a transparency mask to create this sort of effect in Illustrator as well.
We’re going to start with a brand new file. And I have some of the elements left over from the first video here that we’re going to use. And we’re going to bring in this heart shape. And I also have a spare set of this string of hearts that we created so I’m going to bring that in. That just saves us having to recreate those. Now I want two sets of this so I’m just going to drag a second set away from the first.
Let’s have a look first at how we would create that sort of spiral. I’m going to size the hearts down in proportion so I have a small set because I’m going to rotate these around to create the full rotation. To do that I’m going to choose Effect and then Distort and Transform and I’ll select Transform. I’m going to click Preview so I can see what’s happening, and I’m going to rotate these around at this bottom point. So this is the very bottom point of this chain of hearts and I’m going to rotate them 10 degrees. Now I haven’t got Copy set so this individual string is going to be rotated 10 degrees but I want enough rotations that I can go all the way around a circle. And if I rotate something 10 degrees in 10 degree increments I need 36 of those to go around the circle because a circle has 360 degrees. And that’s all I need to go to create this shape so I’ll click Ok.
And now that shape is created but of course it is still really just a string of heart. And to make it into the individual shapes we’ll choose Object and then Expand Appearance. And now it is those little heart shapes individually. The other thing I want to do is to create a set of halftone hearts that we can use as a transparency mask for this particular heart.
First of all I’m going to switch the foreground and background colors here so that we have a pink heart. And I need to create a box, a sort of rectangle of these hearts. So again I’m going to shrink these down so they’re about the same size or height as this heart is because they’re going to be used for a transparency mask for that. I’m going to select these and again I’m going to do is the transform so I’m going to choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. This time I’m going to create about 20 copies. And I want to move these so I’m going move these in a horizontal direction about 7 or 8 pixels, let’s say 8 pixels here, and just click Ok.
I just want a block of hearts big enough for me to put my heart on top of that. So they just need to be that size. I’m going to expand the appearance of this halftone effect so I’ll choose Object and then Expand Appearance. And then I want to copy it to the Windows clipboard so I’ll select it all and choose Edit and then Copy. So it’s now in the Windows clipboard and I can just tuck it outside out of the way because we don’t need it anymore.
With the heart shape selected I’m going to use the Transparency palette which we can get to by choosing Window and then Transparency. And I’m going to click to make a mask. And because I want this mask to be clipped to the heart shape I’ll click Clip. I’m going to select on the mask here and I’ll just choose Edit and then Paste. And here is the halftone heart shape. And I’m just going to position it into position here. And I want the little hearts to be pretty much up around the top curve of the heart so it’s really quite well defined. So I’m thinking that’s probably going to be about the right position. And then to go back to working with my heart I’ll click on the heart in the Transparency palette. And that’s how the final effect looks.
What I did when I showed it to you earlier was I created a filled, a red filled square that was over the top of the heart. I’m just going to create my square. And this needs to be sent behind so I’m going to send it to the back. And the heart itself instead of being filled with pink was filled with black so I’ll just click the fill color and we’ll fill it with black. Now if the mask is not in exactly the right place we can also just select back on the heart, reselect the mask and perhaps adjust the positioning of the mask by a pixel or two, reselect the heart and we’re back working with the heart itself.
So there are some effects that you can create using this sort of halftone effect which we created this time using halftone hearts rather than halftone dots in Adobe Illustrator.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out on this YouTube channel for more of my video tutorials and go to my website at projectwoman.com for more tutorials, tips and tricks on Illustrator, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and more.
Learn how to make half tone effects with hearts (instead of dots), in Illustrator. Uses the Blend and the Transform tools for this effect. This is part 1 of a two part series on halftone hearts.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make halftone hearts in Illustrator.
Before we get started creating our halftone heart effect let’s see what it is that we’re aiming for. And this is the effect that we’re going to create by the end of this video tutorial. And if you look at the link below for the next video tutorial in this series I’m going to show you have to create this effect and this one too.
But for now let’s get started on this effect. I’m going to create a new file by choosing File and then New and click Ok. I’m going to view my rulers so that I can drag a guide in that I will use as a guide for drawing my shape. I’m going to grab the Pen tool. I’ll click and drag on the guide. I’m going to add a curve over here, another one here, and one finally back here down on the guide. And I’m just going to Ctrl click outside to disable that Pen tool. And here is my shape. And obviously I need to do something with it before we go any further.
I’m just going to adjust these points so that we get something looking a little bit more like a heart shape. I’m going to get rid of my guides so I’m just going to clear my guide. And let’s go back over, select this shape and let’s give it a stroke. So with the shape selected I’m going to give it a pink stroke, and I’m just going to make that a bit of a larger stroke so we can see it clearly. To flip this shape to make the rest of my heart I’m going to first select the shape and then I’m going to click the Reflect tool which shares a toolbar position with the Rotate tool.
The first thing to do with this tool is to click on the anchor point across which you want to flip it. So that’s going to be either this top point here or this one here. It doesn’t matter which. I’m going to Alt click on it. Now I’m getting that reflected shape sort of across the vertical access and all I want to do is to click Copy to make that a heart shape. And now I’m going to join it together by selecting it and choose Object Path Join. And here is now my heart shape.
Now I want to size this down a bit. Actually I’m going to scale it in proportion. And I’m going to make a duplicate of it so I’m going to hold it as I drag a duplicate away. And I just want to tuck this duplicate out of the way for the minute. I don’t want it around but I’m but I’m going to need it a bit later on. So let’s go and select this one and let’s size it down to be the starting point for our halftone heart. So I’m just going to fill this with pink. And I want another duplicate of this so I’m just going to Alt drag a duplicate away. And this is going to be the top one of my hearts. And I want these to line up, although right now is not the time to line them up. I’m going to size it down first of all. So this is going to be my little heart. This is going to be my big heart. And now I’m going to place it in position.
So I want these to align perfectly to their mid lines. They’re not doing that right now. There we are. This is the line that I want. I want to make sure that they’re perfectly aligned so that the point of this heart lines up with the point of this one. And I’m going to change the color so this one I’m going to make quite a sort of dark crimson color. Only I wanted that for its fill and not its stroke. So we’ve got a dark large heart and a very pale pink small one. What we’re going to do now is to blend these two shapes together so we’re going to blend the little and the big heart together. So we’re going to use the Blend tool here on the toolbar. So I’m going to select it and then I’m going to click on the first of the shapes and click on the second. And that blends these two shapes together.
Well it does such a good job that it looks nothing like what it is that we really want. So I’m going to double click the Blend tool to open the Blend options dialog. First of all I’m going to enable Preview and I don’t really want Smooth Color. I want Specified Steps. At the moment there are 127 steps to blend these two shapes and colors together. And I don’t want that. I want to actually see the shapes. So I’m thinking I’m going to start with something like 25 steps and see how that looks. That’s pretty good. Probably let’s just try down to 20 on this one. The other thing that you can do is you can also use Specify Distance as well as Smooth Color. So we don’t want Smooth Color. We definitely want to see these shapes. And we can either go with steps or distance. But I think that’s pretty good so I’m going to click Ok to accept that.
So now we’ve got the first of our lines of hearts and we just want the rest. And we get the rest with a Transform effect. So I’m going to click Effects and then choose Distort and Transform and we’re going to choose Transform. And here’s the Transform dialog. Again I always want to click on Preview so I can see what’s happening here. And let’s do 15 copies. And what I want to do is to make each copy a little bit to the side of this one. So I’m just going to choose Horizontal Move here. And I’m going to move these apart until they are looking like what I want them to look like. Now I quite like that but I think I don’t have enough copies. So I’m going for 25. What I want here is I want these hearts to run into each other. I made it so that the ones would run into each other in the vertical direction. And I want these in the horizontal direction also to run into each other so that I get this final effect. So I’m just going to click Ok.
And there is my effect that we came here looking for. This is a halftone set of hearts. And they vary from light at the top, very small too dark at the bottom. And if we want to create these so that we can work with them we’ll expand them. So with this line selected I’m going to choose Object and then just Expand Appearance. And these are now grouped but their appearance is expanded so we can work on them a little more time. Here is the Link on working
When you need to make a duplicate of an object without copying and pasting it you can do so. With the object selected hold down Alt as you click and drag to where you want the copied object to go. To do it again without having to click and drag, press Ctrl + D on a PC or Command + D on a Mac – it’s the command to repeat the previous action. Repeat as often as required.
Angle of your object not right? You can rotate it by selecting the object, hover just outside one of the bounding boxes corners. Your cursor will change to a curved double headed arrow and when it does you can rotate the object by clicking and dragging it until you get the perfect rotation..
When you want to edit a specific part of a group of shapes without ungrouping everything to do so double click the grouped shape to enter isolation mode. Now select the object that you want to edit and make your changes. When you’re done double click outside the grouped shapes to exit isolation mode. This works for groups contained within groups as well.
When working with Multiple Shapes to make one image it’s good to be able to resize or edit them together. To Group them all together, begin by selecting everything to be grouped and press Ctrl + G on a PC or Command + G on a Mac. To ungroup them press Ctrl + Shift + G.
Learn how to make paisley shapes in Illustrator using Graphic Styles. I demonstrate graphic styles such as scallop edges stroke style, dotted stroke and a stroke that shows dots that vary in size from big to small.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to be using Adobe Illustrator and we’re going to be making paisleys with graphic styles. Before we go ahead and actually create our paisley shape let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.
This is a paisley that I’ve created using graphic styles and we’re going to create these graphic styles so that we can create it ourselves in future. You can see that there’s a scalloped border around the edge and you’re going to learn how to make this scallop border. You’ll also see how to make these blue dots which are another graphic style and then how to make these pink dots so that they change in size. So each of these is a graphic style and it’s just applied to the shape really, really easily. So it’s a very simple process to create this once you create the graphic styles. And they themselves are pretty simple too.
So let’s just close this down for now and we’re going to work on this document here. For ease we’re going to start with a rectangle because it’s just a whole lot easier than drawing paisleys right now. So let’s do a rectangle. And the first graphic style we’re going to create is that scalloped edge. So we’re going to start by selecting a stroke color to use. And I want my scalloped edge to be a sort of pale blue so I’m going to select that as my stroke color. And I want the fill color for this to be a sort of darker blue so I’m going for a darker blue here. Now the stroke is going to need to be fairly wide so I can see my dots so let’s make that 20.
And here we have the beginnings of our scallop edge but it’s just not looking a lot like a scallop border right now. What we need to do is to go into the appearance panel. So you would select Window and Appearance to get to it. Now we’re going to change the stroke so that we actually have dots. So I’m going to click Stroke here. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that the Cap is round and I want to use a dash line and I want this option here that aligns dashes to corners and paths. And I want to make my dash zero and then my gap something less than the weight of the lines. So here 16 is a pretty good fit here and that’s going to give me my scallop border.
Well it’s giving me a two side scallop right now, but that’s easily fixed. You see this appearance panel works very much like a layers panel and so the appearance that’s at the very top is the one that way we’re seeing over the top of everything. And right now that’s the stroke. If we put the fill over the top of everything then the fill would fill up to the edges of this rectangular shape and we’d be left with a scallop border not on the inside of the shape. So all I need to do is to target the fill here and just drag it up above the stroke. And you can see when I drag it above what I’m seeing is this scallop border. So now that we’ve created the first of our graphic styles we’re just going to save it. And I’m just going to click here for new graphic style and it’s now saved.
Now we can go ahead and create the second one which was those blue dots. We can continue to work on the shape here. That’s just fine. Because we’ve already saved the graphic style we won’t be losing if we make changes here. The first change I want to do is I want to remove the fill entirely. So this will be an empty rectangle with just a border. I’m going to select a different color for the stroke and this time I’m going for an even darker blue than we’ve been working on. So let’s go for this dark blue here. And let’s go for stroke and we want to change the values here. I want the weight to be 16. So this is going to be a slightly thinner set of blue dots which would be appropriate if we’re trying to make a shape that’s going to be reducing in size every time we add a graphic style to it. But I want the gap to be bigger because I want things to be circles and I want them to be dots separated from each other not overriding each other. And I do that by changing the gap value. So I’m going to make that 25. And you can see that that’s giving me my circles. So there’s our second graphic style. Let’s just save that.
And let’s go ahead and make the third one. The fill again is nothing, but this time I’m going to choose pink as my shape and we want to make pink dots that vary in size. And that’s just a little bit different to what we’ve been doing previously. Now the weight needs to be a bit smaller because it’s going to be further into the center of this paisley shape. So I’m going to reduce the weight down to 12 points. Because the weight is 12 points I’m going to decrease the gap. So I’m going to make that 16 so the dots are a little closer together. And now we have to make sure that our dots are going to reduce in size. So I’m going to make sure that I have my shape selected. Again, let’s go to stroke and let’s have a look at how we make them reduce in size. At the moment the profile is uniform so all these dots are the same uniform shape. If I change it to width profile one what I get is small to large and that’s what’s giving us these different shape dots. So there’s our third graphic style and we’re just going to save that.
Now if I was to trash this document I’m going to lose those graphic styles so let’s go ahead and let’s make our paisley in this document. So I’m just going to delete the rectangle shape. And we’ll go ahead and make a paisley but use the pen tool to do that. So I’m going to click and drag to start my shape. I’m just going to make it using 3 points so click and drag at the top of the circle. And you can see that we’re still using that last graphic style so it’s happening in place as we draw. It’s not the one we want but we’ll put up with it for now. What I do want is this original style so I’m just going to click on it to apply it to that shape. And here is our paisley shape with the first style on it.
Now all we need to do is to make the same shape but a little bit smaller. So I’m going to select the move tool here and I’m going to choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. And that should give me a second version of the shape. Let’s just make this a bit bigger here so we can see where we’re working. I’m just going to size this down. And right now I’m going to size it down in proportion so I’m holding the Shift key as I resize it. I’m just going to drop it into place here. And this time instead of this scallop border I want to use the blue dots. So I’m just going to tap on the blue dot graphic style and you can see that we’ve got the scallop with its second layer. And again, I’m going to select that layer, choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place, Paste in Back, placed anywhere, really it doesn’t matter. I’m going to just move it out of the way here. I’m going to Shift and resize it so it’s a smaller size, apply my pink dots to it and just move it back into place. Actually I think I want it a bit smaller still because I have an idea for an intermediary step.
Okay let’s just go and get the blue one. We’re here. I’ve got it selected. I’m going to Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste it. And this time I’m going to add just a very plain stroke. So I’m going to get a green and I’m going to make it a weight of about 10 points. And let’s just go to the stroke options here and let’s just turn off this dash line because I want it to be a plain line. Now I’m thinking that’s a bit wide for this purpose. So let’s just make it that and let’s put that into place. It’s not small enough yet. I think I can resize this in place a little bit. So there’s our paisley shape. And we can do this over and over again using graphic styles. We will have to save these graphic styles though if we want to use them in other documents. So from this right click menu we can choose Save Graphic Style Library and we could save that as a set of graphic styles that we could use again in future.
But you’ve seen here how to create a scallop border, how to create a graphic style that is just dots and how to create a graphic style that is a series of different size dots and then how to apply them to increasingly smaller size shapes so you can create a paisley that looks like this very quickly and very easily. And of course these graphic styles can be applied to any shape so you could do it to circles or stars or whatever it is that you want to draw.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and please subscribe to the channel if you’d like to hear about new videos because we do distribute them twice a week. You can find more of my tutorials and links to other work on projectwoman.com and please like this video by clicking the like button if you liked it. And I always look forward to hearing your comments.
Want to get a complete view of the document you are working on? To fit the entire document to the current window size, double-click the Hand tool. You can also press Ctrl + 0(zero) on a PC or Command + 0 (zero) on a Mac.
You can close the current document you are working on to clean up your work area, by pressing Ctrl + W on a PC and Command + W on a Mac. If you haven’t saved the image you’ll be prompted to do so before it closes.
Photo By: Joana Croft
It’s true you can press Ctrl + + and Ctrl + – to zoom in and out on a PC or Command + + and command – on a Mac, but I find this tricky to do on a small keyboard such as the one on my laptop. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can hold the Alt key and scroll up to zoom in or scroll down to zoom out. This works no matter which tool is selected at the time. The tool you were working with gets targeted again when you release the Alt key. I find this an easier way to zoom in and out when I am working on an image.
Photo by: StillSearc via sxc.hu
Photo by: salssa via sxc.hu