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.