Hi everyone. In this tutorial we are going to look at creating our very own neon effect in Illustrator. It's a great way of combining lots of the skills we've learned already in this course into cool neon effect. Alright, let's jump in. Alright, neon go time. Open up the neon, uh, file or just find a font that kind of looks neon ish.
It's gotta be on a dark background. I'll show you how to do the brick work at the end. Um, this kind of like faded effect. Now there's lots of different ways of doing this. There's some built into uh, illustrator. I'm gonna duplicate this and show you it.
You could just go window and actually go to help. Go to um, illustrator help and if you type in neon here, okay, neon, you'll see that there's a few different options. The neon glow artistic me doesn't work very well. Um, there's a graphic style built in. You're like Awesome. I like graphic styles and these ones me, you might be done.
You feel like that is it? Love it. Okay. There's nothing wrong with it. I guess I'll get a bit like it's not custom, it's not good. Okay?
But these are perfectly fine. We'll leave this one over here. Okay? And that's perfectly fine. Let's make our own graphic style. Okay, with a lot more work.
But I think it looks cooler. The other interesting thing to look at, if I click on this, can you see what they've done under their parents panel? They've added a stroke. A stroke, a stroke, stroke, stroke. There's just lots of strokes, okay? And they've lower the opacity of them.
That's all they seem to have done in this one. Okay? So what we are gonna do though is something different. Okay? So we are going to add a fill to it. Know that, remember with text we kinda looked at a earlier the, you have this kind of overall parent thing called the type.
Okay? And if you go inside the characters, it has its own fill. Okay? And we're gonna leave that alone. We're gonna come back out to work on just the overall and we're gonna throw over the top a fill, okay? And that fill is going to be any color you like.
Okay? Um, we're going to expand that. I'm gonna use a gradient 'cause I quite like it. Okay? It's my little hack on the million tutorials out there on Eon Glows. Okay?
So I'm gonna start with this. It's in your exercise files, otherwise you can make your own using the gradient tool. We'll just pick a plain color, okay? And what we're gonna do is, uh, with this fill, we don't want it for the fill color, we want it to affect the glow, okay? Or the blur in this case. So we're gonna have it selected and we're gonna go to effects.
And we're gonna say, I'd like to add a blur to this Fill gian blur. Okay? And you get the hint of what's gonna go on. Okay? And this is basically we need two or three. This will depend, you know, the radius and how many you need will depend on the kind of neon glow you want and the kind of font you are using and how big the actual document is.
So just play around with this. Get with something. Start with something small. Okay? Can you see the hint around the outside? Let's click Okay, I am gonna have it selected and I'm gonna hit this option here that says duplicate that fill.
So I've got two of them. Grab the top one by clicking on Gian blur and have another one on the top. Okay, that's kind of in the medium kind of range of um, glows click. Okay. And do you need another one? That's up to you.
Now I'm gonna do maybe one more click on this. You can actually have two gian blurs. You can duplicate the gian blur but end up kind of canceling each other out when they're in the same fill. So I'm gonna undo that. So we kind of need two fills or in my case I'm gonna do three. This top one's gonna be quite big and kind of expansive like that.
Now um, the layers in the appearance panel here are quite important 'cause watch this. I'm gonna say characters, which I know if I go inside of it has a fill color, okay? But I can't see it, right? It's not white. So you can say, oh want you guys on the top. So now we get that kind of like crisp edge that makes it more legible.
If we wanna maybe tone that back again, we can add a new fill. Actually let's duplicate an old fill. Okay? And let's have this one above my characters. And let's have a fill color of white only because I want blur it as well. Okay?
I'm gonna say you have a blur calcium blur of actually I already have it applied. Okay, you don't need apply signal one go into here. I can say you kind of just to fuzz up the edges a little bit. Cool, huh? Now you might be running into a couple of problems. Now the the pixelization you might be like why is mine pixelated?
And with it's actually you don't need it selected. Go up to effect and go to document rust the settings and you can have your resolution down at 72. If I click okay, it's really yucky and it's fast, okay, but it doesn't give us the true effect. So let's go to effect document RA settings. Let's go to 300. Um, and the other problem you might have is you might have some clipping.
Let's have a look. I think I have got mine off by default. Let's go to effect. Let's go to document ruster settings and let's create a really small clipping mask. So you might find that your edge is getting clipped on. You can see the glows getting like trimmed off mine's actually okay, but if you're getting a line around the outside, okay, ooh, you can kind of see it there.
It's quite hard. Can you see the line there? See banged up against the edge. You're like, oh, how do I stop that? Okay, what you can do is you can get a effect and you can say document rust settings. Again, you can say actually I want it to clip the blur, but I want it to be massive.
So just crank it up to a really big size. Let's type it to a uh, 500. Okay? And nothing happens. The weird thing about it's you need to go of give it a jiggle. Do I need to resize it or just move it?
I resize it. There's lying gone. I'm trying to look around, clean my screen. Yeah, it's gone. So sometimes with those RAs effects you need to kind of, even with the resolution, you might need to give it a resize or a move just to tell um, illustrated like go and look at that again please. Like can you play around with it and like redraw it and that new clipping mask setting we just did and that might be us.
I'm digging it. You can play around with different gradients. One last thing you might do is I might actually with this uh, top fill here, actually this tippy top one is I might add another effect that says, uh, stylize and do an inner glow. Okay? And for me, I've picked this like, like yellow, that's not quite um, you know, not quite yellow, not quite white, just this kind of like, I dunno, I feel like it's a cool neon effect. And you can decide whether it's edge or center and depending on your text you can decide on how blurry it is as well.
Kind of a bit of experimentation. Now you can see mine where you can't see mine, but my computer's struggling a little bit. It's because I've got my resolution up to my rasa resolution up to 300. So what you might be doing, especially if you're in a maybe a, an older computer, you might be doing a lot of this, Okay? Under maybe one 50 or 72 and only at the end switching it to 300, get it close and only when you're kind of finished you want to give it the, the full noise okay? To kind of really see how it finishes.
Now the cool thing about it though is there's a lot of work and a lot of fudge in around. Okay? But we know that if I select this I can make it a graphic style reusable. I'm gonna add one in here. I'm gonna double click it and call it neon. And now it means that I can grab my type tool, type something else.
I'm gonna make it bigger. I'm going to make it white. I should pick a better font. But I can just set my graphic style and hopefully it should go through and add the neon glow to it. Not the greatest font. Let's go back to Lakehouse Lakeside.
Nope. Lake something or other. It is lakeside. Cool a Alright, before we go, I promised I would show you how to do the vignette against the brickwork. And what did I actually did was, um, let's right click this and unlock the rectangle. The only thing that's happening is there's a rectangle on the top with a kinda a transparency gradient on it.
So nothing really to do with the brickwork. Okay? So, um, let me show you how to recreate it. Let's grab um, a rectangle. It's just filled with black, okay? In your swatches panel there is a soft vignette already in there.
Okay? And that's kind of the basic way. I don't really like that one for some reason you can adjust it by hitting the G key okay? And clicking on it G key even. Okay? And you've got this transparent swatch in the middle that's black that they've kind of, you know, pulled out to kind of add a hole.
So see through hole and you can adjust. They've kind of got these different ones in here. I prefer just making my own, um, 'cause I'm cantankerous. Okay? So I'm gonna grab black rectangle, I'm gonna have it selected. I'm gonna go and pick uh, black to white, okay?
Gradient. And I'm gonna pick uh, radio gradient and you can kind of see where I'm going and hit G. This middle one is going to be black. For some reason in this document I've reset my black to not be full black. I dunno how I did that. I've never done that before.
There you go. This one here on the outside is going to be full black as well. And what I'm gonna do is this inside slider is with it slicked. Okay? Double click it. I'm gonna say the opacity on this in one is zero and that's kind of how I did it.
Um, there you go. Okay. And what I did was, is you go over there, okay and you go there. I'm gonna resize it so it fits. I'll show you one last little trick while here is you can have that kind of fuzziness over the top. That might be cool.
You can play with a layer order okay? And move it back so that the text is above it. The other thing you might do is with uh, it's selected, you can go to opacity and you can say actually let's find dark and normal. Something that's gonna interact with the image quite well. Anything lighten screen, you wait there, it's gonna go through them all. Alright.
The one I liked was soft light. Okay. And you can see it's, I don't know, it's very cool. Um, on off kind of has a bit more kind of interaction with the background. There you go. That's why I do a kind of a fake vignette effect.
Alright, my friends, that was Neon Glow in Illustrator. Hope you picked up some new tips and tricks and kind of working out that a lot of the effects that we're learning adjust all the techniques we've already learn in different combinations. Alright, I'll see you in the next video.