- [Voiceover] In this movie, we'll lend our artwork
a sense of depth by adding some soft glows
and shadows around the cubes.
Now the first step is gonna be to add a gradient background.
So I'll press "Ctrl + minus," or "Command + minus"
on the Mac, to zoom out.
And then I'll click on Guides layer to make it active,
and I'll drop down to the little Page icon
at the bottom of the Layers Panel,
and I will "Alt" or "Option" click on it
to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box,
and I'll call this guy "Gradient,"
and then change the color to Grass Green.
And the reason I go with these colors
versus the initial ones, by the way,
is I think these first colors are really ugly,
and these later colors are more interesting
and stand out from each other better.
Alright, so having done that, I'll click "OK,"
and now, I'll grab the Rectangle tool,
which, of course, you could get by pressing the "M" key,
and I need my Smart Guides back on,
so I'll go up to the View menu, and choose
the Smart Guides command, and then I'll go ahead and drag
from one corner of this red bleed outline to the other one
in order to create a massive rectangle like so.
Now, I don't need a stroke, so I'll click
on the Second Swatch icon up here in the Control Panel,
and I'll change it to "None," and then I'll go over
to the Swatches Panel and make sure
that my "Fill" is active, which it is,
in the top left corner there.
And then you wanna bring up the Gradient Panel
by going to the Window menu
and choosing the Gradient command.
And now, assuming that you're working with my swatches,
go ahead and grab the Darkness swatch,
which is actually a very dark shade of brown,
and drag it and drop it to the end
of that gradient bar right there,
and then grab the "Gold" swatch and drag it
and drop it to the beginning of the bar.
Alright, now I'll make my Gradient Panel bigger
by clicking on the Double Arrow icon
next to the word Gradient, and then I'll change
the type to Radial, and now all we need
to do is expand the gradient by switching
to the Gradient tool, which you can get
by pressing the "G" key, and I wanna go ahead
and rotate this guy, so I'll position my cursor right here
at the end of the gradient, so I get a little rotate cursor,
and then I'll drag all the way up so that my cursor
is right there above the top-right corner.
Now, you're not gonna get a snap, even though
your Smart Guides are turned on,
so you'll just have to eyeball it,
and then you want to extend that gradient as well,
so go ahead and drag that square end of it
all the way to the top-right corner like so.
Alright, that takes care of that,
so I'll go ahead and press the "V" key
to switch back to my Black Arrow tool,
and I'll just go ahead and switch to the Stroke Panel
in order to give myself a little more room,
and I'll lock down that gradient layer
by clicking in the second column.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and press "Ctrl +"
or "Command " on the Mac, to zoom in,
at which point we're now ready
to add some glows and shadows.
And we're gonna be doing so using
a single effect known as Outer Glow.
And so, I'll start by clicking on this outer group
of purple cubes, and even though it looks
like everything is selected, it's really just
the purple cubes and nothing more,
and that's because there's all these cubes
in the background right there.
Alright I'll press "Ctrl + Z" or "Command + Z" on the Mac,
to undo that move, and just so I can see
what I'm doing a little better, I'll press "Control + H"
or "Command +H" on the Mac, to hide the anchor points,
and then I'll go up to the View menu,
choose Stylize, and choose Outer Glow.
Now we just so happen to be looking
at the settings that I want to apply,
but let me show you how I got them.
You first want to click on this Color Swatch right there,
and then dial in a shade of yellow, and you can see
that it's got a hue of 39 degrees, a saturation of 100%,
and a brightness of 89%, but if you have my swatches,
then you can click on the Color Swatches button,
and then locate the Gold swatch, which will be way
at the bottom of the stack, and then click "OK."
Now change the mode to Screen, which is gonna uniformly
brighten the image, which is why Screen
is the Default blend more for the Outer Glow effect.
Next I set the Opacity to 50% and the Blur to 33 points,
at which point you can turn on the Preview checkbox.
So here's the idea: if you were to crank up
the Opacity value, you'd get more glow,
and if you were to crank up the Blur value,
you'd make it bigger, like so.
But we don't really want that, and we don't want
something dinky either, because in my opinion
that looks terrible, so I'm gonna set the Blur value
to 33 points, just easy to enter, and then I set the Opacity
value to 50% in order to dial things back a little bit,
at which point you can click "OK" to accept that effect.
And once again, that is a dynamic effect
that you can change anytime you like by switching over
to the Appearance Panel there, and notice we now have
and Outer Glow assigned to that group.
All you have to do is click on the words "Outer Glow"
and make any modifications you like.
Anyway, I'm going to cancel out, because I like what I have,
and now I'll press "Ctrl + H," or "Command + H" on the Mac,
to bring back my anchor points, just so I can better see
what I'm doing for the next step, which is
to either deselect the purple cubes and then select
the blue, green, and red ones,
Or, in my case, I can just go up to the Select menu
and choose the Inverse command
in order to deselect what's selected and select what's not,
which ends up producing the same effect.
Alright, now that I've confirmed that everything
is the way I want it to be, I'll press "Ctrl + H,"
or "Command + H" on the Mac, in order to hide
those selection edges, and notice how things
keep flashing here when I hover over the outer glow,
that is a function of Smart Guides,
which is why I'm going to turn them off
by pressing "Ctrl + U," or "Command + U" on the Mac,
and then, I'll go up to the Effect menu.
And notice you're going to see two instances
of Outer Glow up here at the top of the menu.
And that's because the Effect menu is always trying
to show you your last applied dynamic effect,
and the reason we have two variations
is because if you choose the first one,
you're just going to reapply the exact settings
you applied before, so we now have glows
around all of our cubes.
That's not what I want, so I'll press "Ctrl + Z," or
"Command + Z" on the Mac.
What I want to do is repeat the effect
with different settings, so I'm going to choose
the second command, which ends with an ellipses (...),
indicating that we're going to have a conversation
in the form of this dialog box.
Now this time around, I want a Shadow effect,
so I'm going to select a dark color by clicking
on that color swatch right there,
and then, I'll switch to my color swatches
and select Darkness this time around,
and if you're wondering what that looks like,
I'll just go ahead and click on Color Models
so that you can see that I've got a hue value
of just eight degrees, a saturation of 100%,
and a brightness of nine percent,
at which point I'll click "OK."
And notice, if I turn the Preview checkbox on,
I'm not really seeing anything, and that's because
I'm trying to screen with a very dark color.
in other words, I'm using an exceedingly dark color
in order to light my scene.
And it's really like I'm shining a flashlight
onto the scene, but I've gone and painted the bulb
dark-brown, which is not going to work.
What I want to do instead is use that darkness
in order to darken a scene, which is why
I'm going to the Blend mode from Screen to it's opposite,
which happens to be Multiply, which is the reason
it's the default effect for shadows inside Illustrator.
And that does give me a Shadow effect,
and I'm going to make it darker by increasing
the Opacity value, keep your eye on the Document window,
to 100%, and then I'll press the Tab key,
and you can see how that darkens things significantly.
Now I no longer want this giant Blur value,
so I'll take it down to just 10 points like so.
And we end up with the smaller but darker shadows,
at which point I'll click "OK"
in order to accept that effect.
Alright, now I'm going to press "Ctrl + H,"
or "Command + H," to bring back my anchor points,
and I'll press "Ctrl + Shift + A," or "Command+ Shift + A"
on the Mac, to deselect my artwork.
Alright, now at this if you're wondering why in the world
I used Outer Glow instead of Drop Shadow in order to create
my shadow effects, the reason is that Drop Shadow
is a directional effect, so in other words
it goes at an angle, whereas Inner Glow which goes inside,
and Outer Glow which goes outside,
are both omnidirectional effects,
meaning that they're uniform all the way around your shapes.
And that's how you impart depth in your scene,
by adding soft glows and shadows,
using an Outer Glow effect here inside Illustrator.