- [Instructor] Alright, we're going to end this project with
a topic that frankly, has nothing to do
with brushes whatsoever,
and everything to do with blending.
So, we're going to wrap things up by taking that denim pattern,
and we're going to blend it throughout the entire artwork,
to create this highly consistent effect here.
Alright, so let's start things off
by twirling open the base layer right here,
and notice that it contains a single rectangle
and nothing more.
Go ahead and unlock that rectangle, and then,
click on it in order to select it,
as we're seeing here inside the layer's panel.
Now, you want to switch over to the appearance panel,
where you'll find a total of four fills and no stroke.
And so, I'm just going to go ahead
and twirl these guys close for a second
and turn off each one of the fills,
except for the bottom one.
And so notice, the bottom fill is pretty boring.
It's just a solid pale blue and nothing more.
Then, on top of that, I had the first copy
of that tile pattern,
which as I've been saying,
I'll show you how to create it in the next chapter.
But I want you to see it if I twirl it open here,
that it does have a transform effect assigned to it.
So I've gone ahead and scaled it down to 50%,
and rotated it 90 degrees, and of course,
only Transform Patterns is turned on,
Transform Objects is turned off.
And you can get a sense for what this looks like
without transform, just by turning it off.
I'll also turn off the opacity setting,
so that you can see that it's ultimately a bunch
of vertical black lines,
set against a transparent background,
so that we can see the pale blue underneath.
But, I wanted to reduce its size a little bit,
which is why I applied the transform effect.
And also notice that the opacity is set to 100%,
with the blend mode set to Soft Light.
And I want you to see the difference here:
had I set the blend mode to Overlay,
I would've achieved a much more colorful effect,
which is not what I wanted.
Whereas Hard Light would've kept the black lines,
that wouldn't have worked at all,
which is why I went with Soft Light instead.
Alright, now notice this next fill,
it is once again the tile pattern.
This time, I set the transform effect to the settings
that we've used a few times throughout this chapter,
that is to say both scale values are set to 77%
and the angle value is -30 degrees,
Transform Patterns is on, transform objects is off.
And again, I set the blend mode to Soft Light,
if I'd gone with Overlay,
the effect would've been way too colorful.
Alright, I'll go ahead and undo that change.
And now, I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+0,
or Command+0 on a Mac to zoom out.
And I want you to see this final fill, it's a gradient.
So if you were to see it, it's set to the Normal mode,
it would look nothing like more than radial gradient,
that goes from slightly dark gray around the outside,
to a little bit light gray in the center,
and that just helps to add
a little bit of a vignette around the edges,
especially when the blend mode is set to Overlay.
Alright, so now what we want to do with the shape,
is duplicate it to the top of the stack,
by switching back to the Layers Panel.
And now, you just want to grab that layer right there,
you can go ahead and press Ctrl+Shift+A,
or Command+Shift+A on a Mac to deselect the rectangle.
And then, go to the Layers Panel fly up menu,
in the top right corner of the panel,
and choose Duplicate Base.
Now, we can go ahead and twirl this guy close,
might as well twirl this guy close as well,
and drag what it's now called Base Copy
to the top of the stack.
Go ahead and double-click on an empty portion of the layer.
I'm going to name this layer cap,
and change its color, as if that matters, to cyan,
and then click OK.
Alright, now you want to click on this rectangle to select it,
and then, go up to the word Opacity,
up here in the Control Panel.
Now, for some reason, the blend mode is set to Overlay,
even though we're not seeing any interaction
between this rectangle and any of the path outlines below.
And if something like that ever happens to you,
you can just switch it to Normal, in which point,
it might become obvious what the problem is.
In my case, that gradient must still be selected.
And so I'll switch over to the Appearance Panel,
and sure enough, the top fill is active,
that's not what we want.
So I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac
to undo that change.
And then, I'll click on the word path,
or you can drop down to this opacity option
at the bottom of the stack.
But just for the sake of parity here,
I'll make sure path is selected,
then I'll click on the word Opacity,
sure enough the blend is set to normal.
Now, if I wanted to burn this texture
into the artwork in the background, I'd go with Multiply.
But, that really does a number on the brightness,
so I decided that instead of Multiply,
to go with Hard Light,
which does a nice job of merging that texture.
And then, you want to reduce the opacity value.
And in my case, because I loaded Dkeys,
I just tapped the 5 key to reduce the opacity to 50%.
Then, just to make sure I didn't mess anything up
from here on out, I switch back to the Layers Panel
and lock that top layer like so.
Alright, and now I'm going to press the F key a couple of times
to switch to the full-screen mode
and I'll go ahead and zoom in,
so that we can see the way that pattern texture moves
to every single element of the artwork.
And that's a least one way to infuse your artwork
with a consistent pattern texture here inside Illustrator.