Hi everyone. In this video we are going to blend stuff together. We take two objects and let Illustrator fill in the gaps. It's super cool, especially when you  add eighties grads to it. Okay? And oh, look at it hypnotic.

And then we go and crop it into a business card  'cause it looks cool in the background. Alright, let's jump in  and blend stuff together in Illustrator. Alright, I've got a file called blending open. You don't really need it, just got a dark background  and we are going to grab the rectangle tool,  which is the M key. Okay? And I'm going to draw a rectangle.

What I wanna do is have no, uh,  fill just for this particular one. Um, so I'm gonna hit X to bring the fill to the front  and then hit the forward slash to get rid of it. Bring X to the front to be the black stroke. And actually I need this stroke to be white  and I'm gonna make it one point. Okay? And I'm gonna do the same thing with a circle.

Who remembers the circle? It's the al key. I dunno why. Okay, so I've got two shapes. Um, they could be the same. They could be different.

I'm gonna select both of them. Okay? And I'm gonna grab the blend tool. Okay? It's over here. It's the W key.

If you can't see it, just say W. It's the blend tool. And what you do is if you've got 'em selected first,  hit the blend tool and then say U can see the asterisk U  plus U equals blendy mode. And you are like, nah, that's not very good. Um, now everyone's will be slightly different. If I grab my black arrow  and I kind of click off, click back on this one.

Actually go into it. 'cause now it's kind of a group. If I move it further apart, can you see it kind  of depends on yours, how far apart it is. It'll try and blend them together. You are like, yeah, that's kind of cool. And what I wanna do is double click  to come out is we can force it to put more options in here.

So with it selected, okay,  you can either double click the blending tool, okay? And you get to this or with it selected,  you've got the one in the vehicle. Blend options either way. Okay, smooth as a default. I like specific steps. Okay?

And you can say I want it to have not just 2 1 2,  I want it to have 20. Cool. Huh? Get that kind of like spirograph  kind of feel to it. Now you could use specific distance, okay? If you want 'em to be like 20 points apart,  whatever the measurement you're using in your document,  you can decide how the spacing goes.

I'm gonna go that many steps. Cool. Now a couple of things. The two first shapes are still editable, okay? You kind of, I kind of showed you how to do it. Okay, go with black arrow.

Okay? Double click to go inside  and you can work around with this first one  and this last one, not the bits in between. Okay? A nice way  of working though is if you go into outline mode,  so remember command y, control y,  just kinda like, ah, there we go. Then you can mess around with this  and go, all right, I want this to be  squished down for whatever reason. Okay?

Command y, control y to come back out  and you can manipulate both the beginning and end. I'm gonna undo that. Um,  you can all actually just while we're in here,  I'm gonna grab the uh, direct selection tool. You don't actually have to go into it to adjust it. You can just use the direct selection tool if you want. I'm gonna go stroke and little known.

Interesting fact, if you go to stroke,  I've made some grads here. If you don't, you can go to the window color swatches  and find some gradients or make your own. But you can actually add a gradient to the stroke. Okay? So I've got the stroke at the front  and it can do some cool things when you are blending across. 'cause it tries to kind of go from this  gradient all the way to the white.

I'm gonna select on this one and pick a different gradient. You, okay? And it does some interesting things. The other thing to note about these is  we're going from left to right. Obviously you can go, uh, I'm going to go  inside of it, okay? Um, and you can go left to right, top to bottom,  but you can actually overlap them  and you get some really cool shapes going on when there is  a bit of overlap.

Okay? Can you see? Wow. Oh this is cool. All right, stop it then. All right.

Double click it. Come back out. Other useful things is, let's say  that you do wanna start pulling this apart  'cause you want individual parts, okay? I'm gonna go inside this one and move the shapes. I'm actually just gonna separate them out  to make it a little easier to work for us to work  with, okay? And what you can do is select it  and you can say you, I want to go to object  and we can go down to blend, okay?

And we can go to the one that says release or expand. Release. Kind of puts it back to how it was. Okay? I want the expand option, okay, I'm gonna say expand. And now these, they're grouped,  I'm gonna ungroup them, okay?

These are all individual parts  that you might wanna work around with. You know, you might do something different with them. Alright, let's do it with the whale. Okay? So I'm gonna move, actually grab this. Oh, individual bits, I'm gonna undo it  till it was back together.

You go over there at the whale. Actually you go over there too. So I'm gonna have whoop,  I'm gonna have one version here. I'm gonna duplicate 'em in one version over here. What you can't do is you need to have them grouped  to work on this properly, okay? Because if I try and use my sig them all  and grab my blending tool, which is the M key go you plus,  uh, actually it's not the M key, it's the W key.

I'm gonna go U to U and it only does what you click on. So I'm gonna undo that. I'm gonna group you group U group,  I'm gonna add gradients to the two. Make sure the fills up front. Remember the X key toggles the  fills to the front U you  and I'm gonna do the transition with a gradient as well. Alright?

So I select both of these  and instead of using the blend tool, that totally works. I'm just gonna show you that another way. It's command option M is it? Nope, that's mesh command. Option B. Oh it is.

I thought you had me. I know all the shortcuts. I know a few of them anyway. Um, so that's control option. Um, B on a pc, um,  what people would normally do is they don't use it enough  and they just go up to object. Um, blend and make, okay?

You can use the tool like we showed it first,  or you can do it this way, it doesn't matter. You're never in the same place. Okay? Um, like before, you can either go to Blend Options,  double click the Blend tool or go to Object blend  and go to Blend Options. All the same place. I'm gonna put in specific steps.

If you type in a thousand now, okay, don't, okay,  your machine will roll over and die. It finds it tricky to do, especially complicated stuff. This is not too complicated, but be prepared. If you start going 200, let's just do it Dan, do it. Oh, I did it, okay? Okay.

Uh, don't do 2000. Oh, I won't let you do it, but let you do a thousand. Wow, look at that. I think the last time I did this  blending tutorial, I was using my old computer  and for whatever reason it killed it. Don't try this at home people. I'm a trained professional.

All right, so that looks really cool. You can get that really cool blend. All right, we've learned something together. I want the steps though because what I want  to show you is something called a spline. So if I click okay, if I go to outline mode again, okay,  you'll see that I have my two shades. What's that thing in the middle there?

That's the spline. Basically it's gonna follow that and it's straight, okay? By default. But all you can do is you can adjust it. Okay? So I can grab my direct selection tool, click on it, okay?

Gonna grab my pen tool and I'm just gonna click once  and I'm gonna say that is a curve to get some handles. Go back to my direct selection tool and jiggle it around. You're like it's doing nothing. You're like, wait, come outta outline mode. Look at that. Got a spline and it follows it.

It's jumping outta the water. Look at our happy whale. Now you can adjust this a bit, okay? So with it selected with the black arrow,  go to your blend options. And in here, this is what this is, it doesn't do anything  unless you've got a bent line, okay? A bent spline, okay?

And or a curves line. Uh, let's go to this option here and look at that. He follows the orientation of the curve. Okay? Then you can go, all right, I like this. I'm gonna go maybe down to 12.

And what I'm gonna do is sometimes you, you're like,  that's not quite what I hope you'd do. And you can go into this option. I don't wanna go to outline mode. I do actually, okay, I'm gonna double click it to go inside. I'm gonna grab the whale and I'm gonna have this  guy, what is he? He's diving but this, oh, that guy's diving too.

All right, let's change the, let's change this. So he's doing this thing. There we go. That's what I wanted. Okay. But you can grab him and go, all right with this guy  to follow the line a bit more,  I'm just grabbing him with a black arrow.

I'm inside of my blend, okay? I double clicked it to get inside  and you can make adjustments afterwards  just to kind of move it around. Double click to come out and why and look at him. There are some other options under object. Come down to blend. And that's what these are.

You can uh, reverse the spine so he is going the other way. That's not what I wanted. Okay, I can go to object blend  and at the moment this final guy is on top,  so you want it the other way around. I can say what did I want reverse front to back. Actually that's not what I wanted. I want to go  to object blend and go reverse spine.

It just means that now this guy's at the top, okay? And this guy is kind of hidden underneath it all. There are some little bits of adjustment you can do. Alright? That's the big bits for the blending mode. Let's do that kind of business card thing.

So in your exercise file there is a business card, okay? This is a free template from Adobe. Um, you can have a look if you go to file new  and you can go into like let's say print. That's where I found this one and I went to all presets. Actually not all presets down the bottom here there's  some templates, okay? And I found one, where is it there I clicked on it  and hit download and then clicked open.

Okay, so just the simple business card layout. And what I'm gonna do is maybe back here, I'm gonna create  that sine wave like you saw at the beginning. You  Can go now I'm just gonna make a cool  design and crop it in. Uh, so I'm gonna grab my pencil tool, the N key. I'm gonna double click my pencil  to make sure my fidelity is right up to smooth. So it makes me look good when I'm drawing.

And I'm gonna do like a sign wavy type thing one. And I'll do another one that kind  of goes slightly different. Now mine don't have strokes on them,  they're actually made command y, okay? I just have no stroke on  them, so I'm gonna select them both. I'm going to bring my stroke to the front by heading X  and then I'm gonna head my comm key to add in gradient. Now my ones just from the ones that I pre-made,  I'm gonna pick some to actually what I'm gonna do pick this  first one, I'm gonna say you are going to be this one  and this one down the bottom is going to be kind  of the blue green one.

Now when it is blending, you can blend between sizes, okay? You might decide that the top one's thick  and the bottom one's thin and it will blend between those. What I might do is make sure you see it's got this kind  of like weird end, you know how to do it, right? If I slick them both and I go to stroke,  I want the round caps. There we go. You could add a stroke as well.

I could select this and say, actually under stroke I want  to add a profile of this kind of like wobbly one. There we go. Alright, get on with it Dan, let's blend it. So slick both. Come on option B or control alt B. And I'm gonna go to my blend options and I'm gonna go steps  and I'm gonna go that many.

That looks cool except this top line up here I don't really  like, I'm gonna double click the top line  and say you are one point. There you go. I can see the gradient. Ooh, looks so lolly, sweet, whatever you call it. There you go. Okay, I can go through  and mess around with this now and it's quite hypnotic again.

Okay, when you are adjusting this thing here,  you can start messing around with it. Oh, I'm mine to overlap a little bit, so I'm going to  do some of the, oh, look at that. That's cool. All right, and now I'm gonna grab it. Is it cool? It is cool enough.

All right. That's cool enough. I'm gonna select it, grab it. And I do like it when these sign waves  are kind of cropped in stuff. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to paste it in here. Is that the right size?

Ooh, that's kind of cool. I'm probably gonna mess around with a stroke down  to a hairline 0.25. Ooh, that looks cool. And I'm going  to adding my, I'm so good. It, it's a good Dan. Uh, anyway, I like it.

And I'm going to create a mask. Okay, so I'm just drawing a rectangle the same  size as my business card. I'm gonna shift, take them both. I'm gonna go command seven. Control seven, I'm gonna move it  to the back, something like that. Oh, look at us.

I do feel like we should be some sort  of music producer  or maybe some sort of geology seismic thing. Anyway, curvy lines that are blended together  with gradients on them look awesome. And hopefully that gives you a kind of a good overview  of the blend mode in Illustrator. It's super fun to experiment with. Um, yeah, that's it. I will see you in the next video.