- [Deke] In this movie, we'll put the finishing
touches on her tattooed face.
Now, for starters, these lines wouldn't be
nearly so sharp, they would have bled into
the skin to some extent or other,
so I'm going to go ahead and target
the tattoo two layer, right there
and I'm going to shift target tattoo one.
So the entirety of both layers are selected.
The only reason that we can't see any selection edges
is because I hid them by pressing Control + H
or Command + H on the Mac.
Anyway, I'm going to leave them hidden,
and I'm going to go up to the Effect menu, choose Blur,
and then choose Gaussian Blur.
I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox
so I can see what's going on and notice
even at a low radius value of three pixels
this looks terrible.
So I'm going to take this value down to one pixel
and see if that looks any better,
and as you can see we've got a ton of pixels
and that's because our document raster effects setting
is set to a low resolution.
So for now, just go ahead and click OK
to accept that change.
Then to make things look a whole lot better,
I'll go up to the Effect menu
and choose Document Raster Effects Settings
which is going to affect not just the selected stuff
but the entire document and then notice right now
we're working with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch
which makes for a very speedy environment
but if we want better looking raster effects,
then Gaussian Blur is a pixel based effect.
Then we need to switch to high, 300 pixels per inch,
at which point, I'll go ahead and click OK
to apply that change and a moment later,
you'll see that everything looks much better.
Here's a problem.
I'll go ahead and switch over to the appearance panel,
and click on Gaussian Blur.
Notice that Illustrator has thoughtfully
scale this radius value and taking it up to 4.2 pixels.
I'm not sure I want that much blur,
so I'm going to turn on the preview checkbox
and take this guy down to three pixels
at which point I think it looks a lot better.
Alright, now click OK.
Now, you may have wondered over the years
what the difference between Gaussian Blur
and this command right here Stylize Feather.
What are the difference between those two commands?
Because they're both fundamentally blur effects.
Well, let me show you.
For a moment, I'm going to go ahead and turn Gaussian Blur off
and then I'll return to the Effect Menu choose Stylize
and choose Feather, and this time I'll go ahead
and set it to four, let's say,
and I'll turn on the preview checkbox.
Now for one thing, the Feather value works
in whole point increments whereas you can
enter decimals for Gaussian Blur
But also notice this is not really a blur,
this is almost a masked kind of blur effect,
and as I reduce the value by pressing the down arrow key,
you can see that we're filling in the edges
and so we're almost puddling paint
inside the edges of the artwork here
and we're also dulling the corners.
So I'm going to take this radius value down
to just one point so that we have just a little bit
of that effect going and then I'll click OK.
And now, I want this guy to appear before Gaussian Blur,
that is to get applied before Gaussian Blur,
and so I'd like to drag it up the list
but I can't do that.
And you may recall where dynamic effects are concerned,
the one at the top is the one that's applied first
and the one at the bottom is applied last.
But because I have multiple layers going on,
I can't change the order.
So I'm going to switch back to the layers panel
and target just one of the layers,
tattoo one to start with and then I'll switch back
to the appearance panel and I'll drag this guy up
and now it works great and I'll turn on Gaussian Blur
so that it gets applied second.
In this way, we'll get a little bit of an averaging effect,
before we apply the blur.
Alright, now I'll switch back to the layers panel,
target the tattoo two layer,
switch back to appearance, go ahead
and drag Feather above Gaussian Blur
so it gets applied first and turn on
the Gaussian Blur filter like so as well.
Alright, that takes care of most of what we need to do.
I'm going to press Control + Shift + A
or Command + Shift + A on a Mac
to deselect the image and then I'll zoom out
and I'm going to go ahead and unlock the gradient layer
because I want to add a little bit of texture.
We have so much texture going on in the face now
that it seems a shame that even though
our background contains a gradient,
it's relatively flat.
And so, I'm going to go ahead and click
in this file named gradient to select it.
We can't tell the rectangle is selected
because the edges are hidden so I'll press
Control + H or Command + H to bring them back
and at least that way we can see
this little center point right there.
Alright, now, I'll switch to the appearance panel
and what I want to do is add a pattern fill.
And so I'll go ahead and click on the add new fill icon
at the bottom of the panel.
It ends up appearing above the stroke,
I don't care about that, because there isn't a stroke
and now I'll go ahead and bring up the swatches panel
which you can also get by choosing Swatches
from the Window menu, and notice this default swatch
right there, it's called Jive,
I'm going to click on it to select it,
and you can see that it's got
some transparency built into it
but it's only transparency, no blend mode.
We've got some 100% opaque stuff,
this paths right here, the start blue paths,
and then some 40% opaque paths.
And I just happened to know that
because I inspected the pattern
and we'll see what that looks like
when we take a look at seamlessly repeating patterns
in a future chapter, but for now
what I want to do is change the blend mode
assigned to this fill, so,
go ahead and twirl it open, click on the word
Opacity to bring up the opacity panel
for the specific attribute and change the blend mode
from normal to multiply,
and that's going to create a very dark effect indeed.
It's too dark, in my opinion, so I'm going to press
the the three key, to back off the opacity to 30%.
Of course, once again, assuming that you installed
dekeKeys, you can do the same.
And now, I'm going to zoom out once again
by pressing Control + Zero or Command + Zero on a Mac,
I'll select that fill, and I want to increase it's size.
I want to scale it by going up to the Effect menu,
chose Distort & Transform, and choosing Transform,
or again if you loaded dekeKeys, you have that
shortcut of Control + E or Command + E on a Mac
and I'll go and turn on the preview checkbox.
Now, you want transformed objects to be turned off.
You just want transformed patterns to be turned on.
'Cause otherwise you'll scale the rectangle as well,
which isn't that big of a problem
because you just scale it so that it was bigger
than the art board, but that's generally
the best way to work.
And then click in the horizontal value,
and press Shift + Up Arrow, one, two, three,
four times, in order to increase that value
to 140% and then do the same for the vertical value,
that'll take it up to 140% as well,
and then I'll click OK to accept that change,
and I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A
on a Mac in order to deselect my artwork.
Now, you can see, if I zoom in a little bit,
that we've got this nice balance
between the soft texture in the skin
and that much sharper texture in the background.
Alright, those are our final changes
to the tattooed face, here inside Illustrator.
In the next movie, I'll show you how to
export your artwork to Photoshop
and edit it still further.