- [Voiceover] So here we are zoomed way in on the art work
and I want you to notice this dark edge right there
that nearly surrounds the entire honeycomb.
So what we wanna do is add a shadow
that's being cast by this edge right here
and soften up the dark stroke as well
in order to create this final effect here
and we're gonna do so using a combination
of two additional dynamic effects,
drop shadow and gaussian blur.
All right so I've already selected my polygon
but if you haven't, all you have to do is press
control a or command a on the Mac
because it's the only path outline in this document.
And then, here inside the appearance panel,
go ahead and select the bottom-most stroke
and you might as well twirl it open as well
so that we can see the effects as we add them.
Now drop down to the fx icon in the
bottom-left corner of the appearance panel.
Click on it and go up to stylize this time
and choose drop shadow and by the way,
the stylize that we're looking for is not this one,
there's two stylize sub-menus.
One is associated with this bottom group
of Photoshop effects, which are pixel-based effects
by the way, and the other is associated
with this top group of Illustrator effects.
So, go ahead and choose stylize and then choose
drop shadow and turn on the preview checkbox
and you'll see that the shadow is going the wrong direction.
It's coming down and to the right.
We want it to come down and to the left
and to make that happen you need to change the x offset
value from positive to negative
and then notice things will move in the other direction.
So, what we've got here is a mode, don't really need
to worry about that, it's set to multiply by default
that's gonna ensure that everything darkens
as shadows do so just leave that as is.
You have an opacity value, which you can lower
if you want softer shadows but we want a nice
dark shadow so I'm gonna take it up to a hundred percent
in order to produce this very dark effect here.
We have an x offset value that's gonna control
how far things are moving either to the left,
if it's a positive value or to the right if it's negative.
I want it to go farther to the right
so I'm gonna take that value down to negative 10.
We have the y offset value that's gonna move things
up if it's negative or down if it's positive.
We do want the shadow to move down of course
but farther down so I'm gonna take that value
up to positive 10 points and then we have a blur value
and that determines how soft the shadow is.
I'm gonna take it up to 10 points
in order to produce this effect here.
Now, notice if you will that things look pretty good
in the dark areas but the colors start to flatten out
in the medium-dark range and that's
because our color is set to black.
Now you can try darkness if you want
which is basically gonna use whatever color it finds
to darken the image but we want more control
so go ahead and switch to color once again
and then click on the color swatche
to bring up the color picker dialog box
and notice the C, M, Y, K values.
They're all zeroed out except for K,
which is set to a hundred percent so in other words,
we're just darkening with black and nothing more.
What we wanna do is add in some of that rich brown
that we dialed in the past and that means
a magenta value of 85% and a yellow value of 100%.
Now you're not gonna see anything happen
in the background until you click ok
but I want you to keep a sharp eye out as that happens.
I'll click ok and now watch these colors
get more lively right in this area
and so they are much more saturated than they were before.
Alright so having done that I'll go ahead
and click OK to accept that drop shadow.
Alright now we still have a very sharp edge
associated with the stroke and the best way to blur it
is using an effect called gaussian blur
and you get to it by clicking on the fx icon
once again, this time we're not gonna go higher
than the Photoshop effects so this is
a very well-known in fact, Photoshop effect,
which means it generate pixels
but it's not like you can see em cause they're nice
and blurry and obviously you don't have to
tend to the pixels the way you do inside Photoshop,
it's still a vector-based effect
so go ahead and choose blur and then choose gaussian blur.
And now go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox
so you can see what kind of difference it makes
and in fact, it makes a very big difference
at two pixels which is good enough for what we need.
You may see it start at one pixel or something like that,
let's go ahead and make it one
so we can see the difference here
so I'll go ahead and take that down to one.
That's a blur of one, this is blur of like seven,
which makes it massively blurry, we don't need that much
so I'll just go ahead and set it
as I had it in the first place at two
and then go ahead and click OK to assign that change.
And so, to see the difference, all you have to do
is turn the effect on and off so I'll turn off the
eye in front of gaussian blur.
That's the very sharp edge and then if I turn it on,
that is the softer edge that I think works much better
inside of this art work.
Now notice once again, where effects are concerned,
you're seeing the first effect applied on top
and the second effect applied on bottom, underneath.
If you want, you can switch the order of the effects
so you can blur first and then assign
the drop shadow second which is gonna look like this.
So, it's gonna create a much bigger, darker shadow.
And to see what that looks like, I'll go ahead
and press control zero or command zero
on the Mac to zoom out.
So this is a very dark shadow that's created by applying
drop shadow after gaussian blur
and the reason it's darker is
because drop shadow has a softer edge to work with
in the first place, whereas if I drag drop shadow
above gaussian blur so that I'm applying it first,
to a sharp edge and then blurring that edge
I get a brighter shadow as we're seeing here.
Alright, I'll end things by pressing the f key
a couple of times in order to switch to the full-screen mode
and then I'll go ahead and zoom on in.
And that friends is how you build a
repeating honeycomb effect from a single polygon
using a combination of fill and stroke attributes
along with dynamic effects here inside Illustrator.