Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to add a drop
shadow in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started. OK, first I'm going to do a really quick
way in case you've already got something created, and all you want to do is add a drop shadow. I've
got two bunches of test tubes. I'm going to select the first one. And now these are all a set of
paths. They are not grouped. And we can go up here to Effect>Stylize, and>Drop Shadow. And then we'll
get this dialog box with a lot of the options and everything. You can hit Preview and see what's
going to happen. And we'll say OK. Now you can see there's been a drop shadow added to every single
little piece of this. And that might not be what you want. Down here, I've grouped the objects. You
can do that with CMD G, or CTRL G on a PC. So now I'm going to select these and not the background,
then come up here to Effect>Stylize and>Drop Shadow. And we'll do a Preview here, and you
can see it's a more natural way of doing a drop shadow. We'll say OK. You can see, for example,
that the drop shadow is not added inside each test tube. Up here, the drop shadow was applied
to everything. So if you want it to look more like this, just group them, and if you don't, ungroup
everything. OK, now if you want to edit the drop shadow, you can just select the piece you want to
edit it on, and then open your Appearance palette. If this palette isn't open, you can go to Window
and >Appearance right here. All of these other palettes can be found right under here also. OK,
so we've got our Appearance palette open. So it shows that this is a group, and then it shows the
drop shadow right here. We can just click on that once, and it'll bring up this drop shadow dialog
box. So now we can just change a lot of things. Let's knock the Opacity down to 25 instead of 75.
I'll go ahead and hit Preview so you can see what we have. And now you can see it's a much more
subtle drop shadow behind here. OK, so I'm just going to quickly go over these. The Mode is your
shadow blending mode. So usually when you're doing drop shadows, you'll want Multiply, but
you can also play around with the rest of these and see how they look. Your Opacity is obviously
like your Transparency, and that is of the drop shadow itself. So we're going from a 75 real dark
drop shadow here to a 25% here. Your X Offset is the shadow's horizontal left and right position.
So you can make this a negative number if you wanted to. We'll preview that. And it'll jump
over to the other side. We'll make it positive, maybe 10. And Y Offset is the same thing, only
it's vertical. So you can make it go down and to the right or, you know, above if you want to. And
then the Blur is the shadow's size. So if we knock this up to 15, and then click into another area,
you can see it's really enlarged the size of that shadow. And then your shadow color and darkness...
your color... you can change it if you want. We'll try red. You can see that it's kind of
made it reddish back there. And then, you can also change the darkness too. But that's only if you
choose black as your drop shadow. I'm just going to go ahead and cancel because I like what I had,
as opposed to this red strange drop shadow now. OK, I'm going to CMD minus and zoom out.
I'll just select all these and pull them off of the artboard, so we have a blank artboard.
I'll hit Z and zoom back in. And now I'm going to create some objects and texts and add drop
shadows to them. So let's go ahead and create this shape here. So I'm going to get my M tool,
that's the Rectangle Tool. I'll just draw the stem of that beaker, then I'll hit L on my keyboard,
which will get me to my Ellipse Tool. I'll hold SHIFT and draw a circle here, and then I'll hit M
to get another rectangle and draw it right up here. Now I'm going to go ahead and
click on this circle. I'm going to copy, paste in front. So that's CMD C and CMD F
on a Mac, CTRL C and CTRL F on a PC. And I'm going to hold SHIFT and OPT or SHIFT and ALT to
resize from the center proportionally. All right, I'm going to change the color of this to green.
And now I want to cut off the top just like this one. So I'll hit M on my keyboard and just draw
a box around the part I want to cut off. Then I'll select both by holding SHIFT and then I'll hit
SHIFT M which will get me to my Shape Builder Tool which is right over here.
And then I'll hold ALT or OPT to just drag across the pieces I don't want. This is looking pretty
good but I'm going to select everything and just center it up by going to Align
and Center. Actually, I had this aligning to Artboard instead of Selections, so if
yours jumps to a different part of your screen, that is why. So if you don't see that, you can
go to the little hamburger menu and choose Show Options here. I'm going to select this top piece,
hit A to get to my Direct Selection, which will give me my corner widgets.
I'll just pull those in. OK, so this is pretty close to what you see here. Now I'm going to
Select All, and we'll group this with CMD G. And now we can just apply our drop shadow.
I'm going to make it 40. And this, the rest of this looks pretty good. Now let's move this one
over here. Now you can also do the same thing with text. Now I do want to say that when you
add a drop shadow to text, it kind of doesn't look very good a lot of the time, so you have
to be careful with it. But I do want to show you how you can. So I'll hit T on my keyboard. I'm
just going to type 'TEXT'. Then I'll click back on my Selection Tool, hold SHIFT and grab a corner
and make it quite a bit bigger. I'll hit CMD T to bring up my Character palette. This is also
in Window, as you know. And you can also find that up here in the Control Panel.
If you don't see the Control Panel, you can go to Window and >Control right here,
so you can get to your text either way. I'm going to change this to Montserrat.
We'll choose Montserrat-Bold. I'll hit I on my keyboard to get the Eyedropper Tool,
and then I'm just going to choose blue for now so it shows up. And let's go ahead and add a drop
shadow to this. So we'll go to Effect>Stylize>Drop Shadow. And let's preview that. All right,
it looks OK. We'll say OK. Now to me, this does not look very good, but if we make our text white,
it gives us an interesting effect. That just gives it kind of a raised paper cutout feel. And I think
that looks pretty cool. That's one use of a drop shadow on texts that...that I think works pretty
well. And don't forget, you can select whatever you want to change and then your drop shadow
should be in your appearance. And if it's not, you might have to double click in a few places. But
most of the time, you'll be able to see it right away. You can change anything you want here. And
same here. You need to click on the group or on the piece that you've applied the drop shadow to,
and then it'll be in your Appearance, and you can make changes. All right, if you like the way I
teach, I also have full courses out on Skillshare. And there's a link in my description where you can
get two free weeks on that platform. If you're able to watch all of my classes in that amount of
time, you can get them all for free. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!