Hello it's Kat, and in today's tutorial, we'll be creating this Bokeh
background design in Adobe illustrator.
We'll start with this free summer stock image of the beach.
I'll show you how to quickly create a subtle blurred background from the image.
Then I'll show you how to create this bokeh effect using simple
radial, gradients and blending modes.
Finally, we'll put it all together to create the summer
bokeh background that you see.
Let's get started.
Starting with the blank canvas here of 1920 by 1080 pixels,
I'm going to go to file place.
And I will import the image that I've downloaded.
The link for this particular image is in the description down below.
But you can use any image you like.
I'm going to scale this down to 1920 wide to match my art board and just click the
align shortcuts here to center that up.
I'll also adjust the height of the image here.
I'm just going to click this to unconstrain the proportions and
hit 1080 pixels there and enter.
And now we have an image exactly the size of our art board.
Now I'll show you a quick trick for blurring out this background so that it
acts as a nice base for our bokeh lights.
So we just want to select the image.
You can do that using your selection tool, click on it
once and go to our object menu.
Find the option called create gradient mesh and click on that.
And you'll see that illustrator creates a gradient mesh from that photo and it
automatically blurs out the background.
Now you can change your settings here.
I'm going to go with 10 rows and six columns and leave the appearance
and highlight options on their defaults and just click okay.
So that's just a nice, quick way to get a blurry background that we can
start building the bokeh on top of.
Here's a preview of the shapes I've used to create the bokeh effect.
On the top here over the white background, you'll see nine different circles that
have radial gradients applied to them.
And they may look a bit odd in this format, but once you apply the correct
blending modes that we'll be using and put them over a colored background,
you can see down here on the preview, how they turn into glowing circles
that create that bokeh effect.
Let's quickly walk through creating one of these radial
gradients, go to your ellipse tool.
And draw a circle, I'm holding down shift to keep it a perfect circle.
And now we'll go to our gradient panel here and you can start
with the radial gradient.
You'll see that by default, we have white on one end and black on the other
end, these are called color stops.
We're going to click in the middle to add a third color stop.
The important thing to note here for all of the bokeh styles is that you'll want
a darker color around the edges, usually black and a lighter color in the center.
It can be white off white, or usually you'll see a pink or a red color.
And all of these combinations work really well with three blending modes that
we'll use to create the bokeh effect.
So let's adjust these three color stops so that we have the
effect that you see on the left.
Select your circle.
And for my lightest color here, I'm going to go with a tan color I'm
setting the RGB value to 219, 204, 182.
For my mid-range color.
I actually want this to be black.
So I'm going to adjust that to an almost black color and I'll change
the location of this color stop.
I want it to be three quarters of the way through.
So somewhere around 70% is fine.
And my last color stop here is already a black color, which is fine.
And we will leave the location where it is, but I'm going
to drop the opacity to 0%.
This gives a nice feathered edge around the gradient.
You can also adjust the sliders between color stops up here to
decide where your colors blend.
The exact settings for these gradients are something that you can experiment with.
There are a ton of combinations that you might want to try.
I do recommend spending some time playing around and making your own
set of gradients for this purpose.
I will be including a link to an AI file that has the set of gradients
that I've used for this tutorial.
Just to help you get started so that you can dig into each
one and see the exact settings.
To give you a quick idea of what we have in the file, this is the
first gradient that we just set up.
The second one here has a few more color stops, and you can see that I'm
adjusting the opacity of the actual gradient circle in some cases, this
one is at 50% and that will help add some variety to your images as well.
Some of these are at a hundred percent.
And mostly they follow the same pattern, the red and pink ones you
see here will not show up as red and pink when we're using the three
blending modes that I'll show you next.
And we will go into that right now.
If you're not familiar with blending modes in graphics programs,
basically what they do is change the way the color of your object
interacts with the colors behind it.
So here you can see the three modes we'll be using lighten screen and color Dodge.
Each of these creates a really interesting effect when you place them
over different colored backgrounds.
There are plenty of other blending modes that you can try out.
These three in particular, tend to give that glowy lightening effect.
So this works perfectly for creating a bokeh effect or
any sort of glowing lights.
So let's take a look at how we put this all together.
So for my final image, all I've done here is taken a random selection of these
9 gradient circles and moved them over the image in various shapes and sizes
and applied one of the three blending modes that we just learned about.
You can see if I turn off the blurred background image, that
we are still working with the same colors that we built.
And when you turn it back on, it will magically apply those blending modes
and you'll see the glowy bokeh effect.
For this image I manually placed these circles, but you can certainly
automate this process by making a scatter brush or a symbol that you
can use with the symbol sprayer tool.
I will cover that in a tutorial in the future, but this covers the
basic concepts of how we make a bokeh effect in Adobe illustrator.
I do hope this was helpful if it was, don't forget to leave a like and feel free
to subscribe for more tutorials like this.
Thanks for watching and have a great day!