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Hey what's up everybody? Welcome into this Adobe Illustrator tutorial brought to
you by tutvid.com. And today, we're going to take a look at this cool, little sort of,
I don't know, interlocking circles, almost opening and closing aperture type
of effect. I see it used relatively often online in a lot of different artwork for
differents c's, and g's, and all kinds of different circular letters. Maybe 'o' could
be thrown in there. And it's really an effect you can use in all kinds of different things.
It's a neat, little effect. We're going to cover a lot of basic to intermediate tools
here in Adobe Illustrator. It's gonna be pretty fast. It's going to be relatively easy to
complete, if you follow closely. And if you do enjoy this video, well, may I suggest that
you subscribe to this channel, so that you never miss any Illustrator or graphic
design related tutorials in the future? Let's jump into Illustrator now, and check this
thing out. Okay, here we are in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to begin this whole process
with a new document. I'm going to go 2560x1440. And I'm rolling with CMYK color,
you can get much more vibrant color with RGB, and you're probably creating this
graphic for the screen. So, you should probably go with RGB. I just like working with
color in CMYK. So I'm going to roll with CMYK. If you want to follow exactly everything
I'm doing, including getting the exact colors that I'm getting, you should probably
follow along in CMYK. Just wanted to throw a little disclaimer out there. I'm going
to create this new document. And what we're going to do - well, first I'm going to open
up my panel options for my layers panel. And I'm going to make these much larger,
the thumbnails, that is. Just a little easier for you to see. And I'm going to go
ahead, and grab my ellipse tool. And I'm going to begin this whole process by creating
a new 600x600 pixel ellipse. I'm going to hit OK there. I'm going to drop the fill,
just so I have just a white - er, I'm sorry, a black stroke. In fact, over here in the
appearance part of the property panel, I might just bump that up to a five pixel stroke.
And then using my align panel here, I'm going to make sure that, number one, I'm
aligning to the artboard. And then I'm going to push this right to the center, both
horizontal and vertical; just like that. Now, I'm going to go ahead and create another
ellipse. I'm going to click anywhere. This one is going to be a 280x280. I'm going to
hit OK. You can see, it's just got the same no fill, just a black stroke. That's great. I'm
going to select both of these ellipses. And I'm going to make sure again, I'm just
aligning to the artboard. So we're just going to throw these to the middle, just like that.
Center them up just perfectly. Now, what we need to do, is create an ellipse, this is
going to require a little bit of both geometry and math, I guess. Geometry is a little
math-y in and of itself, but we want to create an ellipse that is the radius of the
outer circle, plus the radius of the inner circle. So the radius, as I'm sure you're very
well aware of, is half the diameter. The diameter is the straight across width of a
circle. So remember, this was 600x600, so our radius of this circle is going to be from
this point to this point; which is 300 pixels. And then, for our little guy here in the middle,
it's 280. So basically, it's just 280 divided by two, which is what? 140. So, 300 plus 140 is
440 pixels. It's important that you remember that little equation, because it allows
us to get the proper sized ellipses here. So I'm going to click with my ellipse tool, and
I'm going to create a 440x440 ellipse. And what I'm going to do, is I'm going to align
it to the center and bottom of my large ellipse. Here's how I'm going to do that. I'm
going to select both of those ellipses. Not the little center ellipse. See how that's
not selected. Over in the align panel, I'm going to choose to align to key object. Now, what
I need to do is click on the shape that I want to be the key object, In this case, the key object
is the shape that is going to be aligned against, if that makes any sense. So if I set
the large ellipse to be my key object, that's not going to be moved. We're going to move
the second ellipse with respect to that initial ellipse. So what I'm going to do here,
is I'm going to say, look, align this to the bottom, and also, to the horizontal center,
just like that. And now I can deselect. Now what I'll do, I'll select those two ellipses
again. I guess I really didn't have to deselect. Hold down SHIFT, and drag this clockwise,
just like that. It's going to rotate that ellipse 45 degrees, looking good, just like so.
Now, basically we're going to repeat that process. You could, I guess, duplicate
this ellipse. So I'm going to select that. Hold down ALT/OPT, duplicate it out here,
just let it go. And - whoop! I didn't hold down ALT/OPT. You want to make sure you
hold down ALT/OPT to actually create duplicate like that. And then hold down SHIFT,
and just select that larger outer ellipse again. Once more, we're going to align to
key object. We're going to click on that larger ellipse, we want that to be the key
object. We're going to go align horizontally, and then to the bottom middle, and now
we're going to hold down SHIFT, and we are going to rotate this the other direction. So
I'm just going to hold down SHIFT, and click it once, sort of counter-clockwise, just like so.
So, we're getting most of the shapes we need. We need one more shape here, and that's
going to be a straight up rectangle. And I'm going to click once, and I'm going to ignore
the strange sounds coming out of my computer. I'm going to go 360x360 for the
rectangle. Hence, making it a square. I'm going to drag it over, and I'm going to hold down
SHIFT, and I'm just going to rotate it so it's more like a diamond. Now, this is where
I like to turn my smart guides on. So, I'm going to go view, make sure the smart guides
are turned on. Because what I want to do, is I want this leftmost point to align with
the very center of my circle. So I can just drag this over, and you'll see, thanks to smart
guides, that'll snap right into place. Just like so. Alright, so now what I'm going to do, I'm
going to select all these shapes. And we're going to swap stroke and fill. So, now we
have, what's going to essentially look like a big, black blob. Maybe to make this easier, I'll
go to outline mode here under view outline. You can see, we still have all of our paths.
We can even select them and work with them. So here's what I want to do; first and foremost,
I want to select the outermost circle, and the innermost circle. So, I'm going to make
sure I hover over it. Oh no, there we go. I almost just got it there - there we go. And
I'm going to go to my path finder panel, and I'm going to choose to minus front. So that's
going to use that central circle. And as you can see here in our transparency panel,
just punch a hole and create this donut shape for us. Now, if I get out of outline mode,
we're still not going to see that, because we have these other circles that are covering that
up. So I'm going to enter back into outline mode. And here what I'll do, I'll do the same
thing with my now donut shape, and the square. So I'm going to SHIFT select both
of them, and I'm going to choose to minus front here, as well. And you can see, this is
giving us this c-shape. Very cool. But we still have these other, odd-looking circular shapes
that we need to do something with. We need to clean this up, and complete this effect.
All I want to do, is select all of these shapes, and use the divide path finder feature. So,
I'm going to divide it, they're going to be grouped up here, if I look within my layer,
so there's the group. I'm going to ungroup them, CMD+SHIFT+G, and really, because it's
ungrouped, I can select the stuff I know I don't need. Like this shape here, I think I don't
need that. I can probably delete that. I can look at what's going on there. That open thing
in the middle, I don't need that. And now its going to be a process of selecting shapes here,
and rebuilding the bits that I want. So I know I want this little piece of the path to be
merged with this shape, so I can select both of those, and I can just go ahead and hit the
merge option. There we go. We've got that stripe of our letter 'c.' And then underneath here,
let's see, can I select - can I select both of these shapes? Maybe it'll be easier - let me collapse
my properties panel real quick. Maybe we can select them here in our panel. Where is this?
Okay, so that's got to be a part of this inner shape. Down there, that's also part of
the shapes. So let's just SHIFT click both of those. And then, I think it's this big piece here
that we need. Yeah, it's that big piece. Let's try merging all these together, there we
go. We have that. I think we probably should have selected that little piece, as well.
Let's try merging all those together. And what I'm going to do, in fact, here, is just hit
this unite option that, you can see, is going to give us one big, old shape like that. Then
I can select these remaining two pieces right there. We can go ahead, and merge those
together. And we don't need to do any kind of uniting, and we have these three shapes. Now,
if I get out of outline view, you can see that it still looks like we have three - really nothing.
We don't see the three shapes, that's part of the problem; we have just one big, black letter 'c,'
and I want to change that. So what I want to do here, is select the topmost shape. I'm
going to go my CMYK viewing option, and I'm going to set the K value to zero.
I'm going to set cyan to 100, and I'm also going to set magenta to 100. So, it's this
blueish/purple-y color. I have a difficult time seeing blues and purples. But it should be
that based upon the CMYK options that we dialed in. Here we're going to set Y - er,
yeah, I'm sorry, K to zero. We're going to boost cyan to 65; and once more, magenta up to 100.
This should be a little bit more purple-y than the more blueish color above it. And then here,
for our final color, I think this should probably be the darkest of all the colors. Let's set the K to zero
percent, as well. We're going to go, once more, 100 in terms of magenta. And I think
I want to pop a little yellow in there, as well, just to enrich that magenta a little bit.
So it's three, at least in my eyes, very, very similar colors. But, still each with their own unique
differences. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm just going to restock my layers so that they
work exactly how the graphic looks. See, this is the top piece, there's the middle piece,
there's the bottom piece. I'm going to select these three objects. I'm going to copy and
paste them in place. So, we'll go Edit>Copy, and then we'll choose Edit>Paste in Front.
And now what I'm going to do, is I'm going to fill them - all three of them. I'm going to keep all
three selected to make this easier. And we're going to fill them with a black to transparent gradient.
So what I'll do here, is I'll drag the black slider out. Click somewhere behind the black slider to just,
you know, include the black. In fact, I'm going to set this to full CMYK, and we're just
going to set all of our sliders to 100%. And I will select the other handle, and I'll just do the
same thing. I probably should have done this before I duplicated it, but hey - you know what?
Hindsight is 20/20. There we go, that's great. And now I can just drag the white slider,
get that out of there. Drag the black slider all the way over the other side. I'm going to select
the rightmost slider, and I'm going to set the opacity of it to 0%. So, we now have three
black-to-transparent gradients. We can work with them all individually, because they're
all on their own layer. Alright, so what I'm going to do, is I'll select the topmost gradient
first. I'll grab the gradient tool here, it might be an easier way to work with this. And
I'm going to shift the gradient off to the side, maybe just like that. I can go to the - I'm
sorry, not the path finder panel. We want to go to the transparency panel, which I have
down here. We can try setting this to multiply, it's not really going to make much of a
difference for us, because we just have black-to-black - uh, transparent. What I will
do, is use my opacity, and maybe knock this down to 50%, something like that.
We'll come back, and adjust transparency, if we need. But I'm going to try to
just, I don't know, freehand it, see what we get here. Now, I'm going to come over to
this path. And, in this case, we want the darkest part of our shadow to be up there. So
I'm going to rotate my gradient around, and let's just kind of adjust. And adjust. And maybe
stretch the gradient out a little bit. Adjust it a little bit more. And I'm going to try setting
the transparency here to maybe 70%. Cause that should really be probably the darkest
part of the image, because it's like the top of the 'c' should be casting a shadow, if
you will, right there on that part of the graphic. Alright, let's select the bottom-most gradient,
right there. I'm going to grab my gradient tool. And in this case, the gradient is where we
want it to be. Let's just back it off a little bit. Maybe we'll rotate it a little. Kind of something
like that. I'll push it back a little. And then we can set the opacity, I don't know, let's
try 65%, something like that. Oop! Let me try typing in 65 again, sometimes I have a
difficult time with numbers. There we go! So just like that, we got kind of some nice,
subtle shadowing that we have on our letter. And of course, you can go with any colors
you want. I'm just picking these, like blues and purples and pinks, because I think they
look kind of neat. And now, what I want to do, is I want to select the middle shape. So I'm going
to select it here in the layers panel, I'm going to copy, by going Edit>Copy. And by the way,
I'm selecting it in the layers panel, because I want to select the fill colored shape, not the
gradient one. So, I'm going to go Edit>Copy, and then I'm going to choose paste in front,
and I'll have to go Object>Arrange, and I'm going to say, look, bring this guy all the way
to the front. You can see, it's all the way up in the front. And what I'm going to do,
is I'm going to max it out, fill it with white. And I'm thinking about that wrong. I want
to slide everything back. There we go. Zero percent across the board is, in fact, white.
I like to live in the CMYK world, but sometimes I'm still thinking in RGB. Alright, so we've
got this shape. Basically, what I want to try to do here, is go Object>Path, and choose to
offset this path. And I want to offset it - uh, I'm going to preview this, by the way -
I want to offset this, probably about ten pixels will work, but what I'm looking for here,
is, I don't like how it just suddenly ends right there. I want it to continue on, so I'm
going to change the miter limit here until I'm getting something that I like. So essentially,
I want this to be very pointy on the edge. Now, this needs to be very pointy. It needs to come
out pretty far, so a miter limit of 200 might work. There we go. 200 is going to work,
can we go a little shorter than that? Let's try 175. 175 would work. Will 150 work? 150 will work too.
I think we'll ride with 150 there, I think that works for me. That just allows the shape
to really continue out; and we're going to trim it off, so that doesn't matter. I just want
it to continue out. We may end up masking it away, I don't know yet. We'll see. Next,
what I want to do - and by the way, ignore this purple shape here in the middle, it does
have a gradient. It's just sometimes, Illustrator doesn't preview things correctly.
What I have here is the original sized shape, and our new shape. I can select the original
sized shape, and just delete it. We don't need that at all. And this new shape, we're
going to create a mask here, that we're going to - Well, I'll show you what we're going to do,
we're going to create a mask though. What I want to do is select the topmost shape, just
like that. And also, the bottom most shape, by holding down SHIFT and selecting that,
as well. So, you can see, I've selected this bottom magenta/pink shape, and the top,
more blue/cyan, I think it's more blueish, shape. And I'm going to copy them. So I'm going
to go edit, and I'm going to choose copy. And now, I'm going to select my top layer
here. In fact, I'll rename this layer "stroke," because that's exactly what we're going
to get here. I'm going to go to my transparency panel, and I'm going to double click here
on this thumbnail, which is going to give me an opacity mask. You can see, it filled with
black, that's actually perfect. We're going to go Edit>Paste in Front, to paste those
shapes back in. I think I'm just going to fill this with solid white. So I'll come over here to
my color panel. I'll say, look, give me solid white. You can see, we're getting these two
interesting stroke effects on the edges of our color. Now, if we really wanted to take
this effect a little bit further - well, first and foremost, we'll probably go and set this layer
to the blend mode of overlay. Or, really, it's the shape to overlay, I'm sorry. I should be
out of my layer mask, hit the artwork layer again. Let's go and set this to overlay. You can
see, there we go. We're getting this type of effect. And we could even reduce the opacity
a little bit, if we like. I don't think I'm going to reduce the opacity though. I think what
I'm going to do is give it this same black-to-transparent gradient, and see what we can
get. So I'm going to select stroke, I'm going to select those shapes, and I'm just going to
hit the black-to-transparent gradient. It's going to give it that fill. You can see, we've got some
weirdness going on here, because, basically, it's going to make our entire little stroke go
away. But I'm going to use the gradient tool, I'm going to redraw this, because I just
want the black to maybe appear up here. But, of course, if I was thinking straight, I don't
want black at all. I want these to be solid white. So I'm going to go, look, give me solid
white. And I'm going to select the other black, and say, give me solid white. And let's try this
with this gradient. What we'll do, is we'll stretch this out a little bit. And actually, I want to
flip this around, because I want the bulk of the white to be over here. So you can see,
basically, what's happening is, the gradient is beginning at this stop right here, the far left stop.
And that's where it's saying, look, we're going to go from solid white, where everything is
going to be showing, and just begin, at this point, to fade it out, and by fading it out, we basically
get solid black. And what it's going to do, is just take our stroke in its full strength, then it kind
of fades off to nothing. So, we probably, in the end, didn't need to do that little miter effect,
but it's a cool thing to know how to do. So, we did it anyway. Alright, so now that we have the gradient
created, I can just select this bottom shape, I can grab my eyedropper tool; say,
give me that white gradient that I have up there. And then I can use the gradient tool here,
and I can just tweak and adjust this, as well, as I see fit. And maybe what I'll do here, actually,
spin this gradient around, and we'll just fade - whoop! let me try this again, let me just draw
the gradient this way. And my idea would be, just kind of fade the little shape here, as we enter
the center part of the 'c,' just like that. Great. And I will deselect that. And then, what I'll
do, is down here in the transparency panel, to get out of the mask, I'll just select the return to
normal editing mode thumbnail, right there. And you can see, we've just added that cool, little
accenting stroke there. And without it, the artwork looks very flat. But once you throw it in
there, it looks pretty stinkin' cool. And maybe, last but not least, what we'll do, we'll
just lock up this layer. And I'll create a new layer, and I'll drag this down beneath, and we'll
grab our rectangle tool. We'll click a single time. We'll go 2560x1440, which is the size of our
document. And I'm going to use the align panel. I'm going to say, yeah, align this. Horizontally,
vertically, all that good stuff. And then here, with CMYK, maybe we'll boost cyan and magenta
to 100%. And then just really darken this to give ourselves a nice, deep, very blue, purple, whatever
it is, type background, that really just gives us a nice popping contrast for this shape.
Either a little shadow or glow, under or behind it, something like that, if you were really
feeling risky. But this is essentially how you can create these spiraling, think open aperture
type graphics, here in Adobe Illustrator. And then, of course, we add a little - we put a little
English on it, in terms of the stroke edges, and the background, and all that fun stuff. But this, here,
is how you create this effect in Adobe Illustrator. Ah, yes, well, there you have it. That is the little effect.
If you do complete this tutorial, I'd love to see it. Upload your design to Instagram, tag me in the
Instagram post. My Instagram handle is @tutvid. I'd love to see you over there on Instagram.
We also have a community that we're building over on Discord, discord.me/tutvid, that's what
it is! There's a link down in the bio, where you don't have to rely on my remembering of URLs here.
You can just go click that and join us over there on Discord, as well. So, for all these different effects here
in Adobe Illustrator, using shapes and color gradients; offsetting of paths; and everything that we
covered in this video tutorial. Ladies and gentlemen, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.