If you’ve watched any of my videos, you know that my favorite software can easily be Adobe illustrator. The reason I love it so much is that it’s so easy to create anything and everything from scratch. If you know some of the advanced tips for how things work, you can create some complicated designs in a matter of minutes. You just can’t do that with other software. One of the coolest, and least known tricks in Adobe Illustrator is how to blend two objects effectively. In today’s tutorial video, I’m going to show you how to blend objects in Adobe Illustrator and edit them afterwards.
A lot of people don’t realize that you can add it to objects that you blended using Adobe Illustrator’s blend settings. Most people don’t even know about the blend settings, and that you can change them from a smooth blend, to specified steps. You simply go to object, then you go to blend, then select blend options. You can change smooth to specified steps. What’s great is that you can even change the number of specified steps. Until you expand these shapes, the blend is considered completely editable. This means that you can go back and change the number of specified steps to get just the effect that you want.
You’ll notice that when you click on a set of blended shapes, that there is an imaginary line connecting the two. That imaginary line is called the spine of the blend. One of the coolest tricks, and something you’ll see in the video, is the fact that you can select a shape, such as a circle, and replace the spine with that shape. This capability enables you to do some really cool things with shapes that would otherwise take a very long time.
For example, if you wanted a circle of stars they started out big and smaller as it went around the circle, you could create a blend from a larger star to a smaller star. You could have a specified number of steps to create the intermediate stars. Then, you could replace the spine of that blend with the circle. If there were too many or too few stars, you could go back and edit the specified steps in the blend options. Otherwise, to make this happen and to create the same effect by hand would be complicated and would take much longer.
Conclusion
Did you learn something new in today’s video? I hope you enjoyed it and I hope it makes your life much easier. If you have any trouble re-creating the steps from today’s tutorial, or you have any questions about Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign, post them in the comments below and it may become one of my next videos.
