Transcript:
Hi, this is Anne from design bundles. And today I’m going to tell you how to add hard shadows to text or objects in Adobe Illustrator, and these aren’t soft shadows because we want them to be vector, so we could cut them with a cutting machine. For example, alright, let’s get started, Okay, We’re in Illustrator. Now, so let’s create new and I’m going to come up here to print, and I’ll just choose letter, then we’ll create, okay, and now we need to type some text. I’m gonna hit T on my keyboard and then just click once and Ill type baseball. I’ll grab my selection tool and then we’ll change the font. I’m going to choose a sporty font to go along with my sporty word, so I’m gonna choose college and now Ill just with my selection tool still selected. Ill click and drag on the corner and then I’ll hold shift to make it resize proportionally. I’ll just move it up here into the center. Let’s change the color to red, and now we want to get our appearance palette up. And if you don’t have this up, you can go to window appearance right here, okay, So if we have the text in the character’s area. If you double, click this, you can see. Our text is down here in the character’s area and to add a shadow in an easy way. We need to have it up here in the type area, So I’m going to remove it here, and then I’ll come up here and click on type and then on the flyout. We’ll do add new fill, so now it’s up here in the type, not in the characters below. Okay, so let’s change it to red now. Okay, and I’m going to drag the stroke behind the fill. So any time we do that. You’ll only see half of the stroke width, but anyway, let’s add a stroke. I’m going to make it five points and maybe a little bigger than that. Now you don’t actually have to have a stroke on your text to do a shadow, but I just like the way it looks. Okay, so we have an eight point stroke and now. I’m going to click on the fill and hold shift and click on the stroke and then I’m going to hold option and drag those below. And so you see, it’s going to make a copy. Now we don’t see any changes here on the artboard because those are exactly behind the ones up here, but that’ll change here in a moment so first, let’s click on fill. Then we’ll go up to effect, go to distort and transform and then transform now we can come down here to the move area and make sure preview is checked and then. I’m going to use my arrow keys and just increase this a little bit. I’ll come down here to vertical and make it the same seven, and you can see this little shadow. We’ve got going on now and we’ll say, okay, and now let’s click this little caret beside fill and you can see transform is right here. That’s the effect we just applied to the text. So now if we hold option, click and drag it to the stroke, it’ll also add that same effect of seven pixels to the right and down to the stroke Okay, now! I want the whole shadow to be black, so I’m going to change this fill to black. So now we have a pretty cool shadow on our text now. The nice thing about this is if we have changes. Let’s say we want to say softball. We can still type in here and get the same effect, so that is really nice about using the appearance palette. We can also save this whole effect as a graphic style. I’m gonna pull graphic Styles out, and then I’ll double Click on it. You can also go up to window graphic. Styles if you’re not seeing this palette up yet. Okay, so now I’m going to click right on the little picture in appearance. Not over here, not anywhere down here, but right on the picture. I’ll click and drag this into graphic styles and that will give us the effects that we’re looking for. And now we can apply this to any other text or any other objects. So I’m gonna hit em on my keyboard to get the rectangle tool and I’ll just draw a rectangle. And now I’m going to click this graphic style that we just made, and it has all of the same effects as the softball word we’ve got fill a stroke and then an offset fill and Stroke just like the softball word. Okay, so what if we want to make this shadow a little smoother? We can also do that, but we have to outline the text, so let’s make a copy of this first. I’ll hold option and I’m going to click and drag this off to the side and what I’m doing is. If we ever wanted to change the word again, we would still have the live type over here and we would also know what font it is, so I really recommend always making a copy. Just put it off to the side of your artboard, and you don’t have to worry about it, and now we’ll focus on the one on our artboard, so I’m going to click this, and then I’m going to come up here to type create outlines. You can also hit shift command O on your keyboard or shift. Ctrl O on a PC. Okay, so let’s hit command. Y now and you can see. We have outlined type over here. You can see live type and the difference between those. But if you look at this, you don’t see all the outlines or anything like that. Oh, by the way command. Y or control Y to get back to this view. You can just toggle those off and on, but anyway, we don’t see all the strokes and effects when we hit command. Y or control Y. And we kind of need to be able to manipulate those, so let’s go up here to object, expand appearance and now when we hit command Y we can see a little more, but not everything still hit command, Y or control Y again and then go to object expand and we will expand the fill and the stroke and say okay, And now I believe we have everything. I’m going to zoom in right here, and then when we command Y. We can see all the little pieces now. This might kind of scare you a little bit because it is a lot of little pieces going on, but don’t worry, it’s going to be easy here in a moment. Okay, So let’s go down here to the Pathfinder. If you don’t have this up, you can go to window. Pathfinder and we’ll want to click on divide. Which is this first one on the bottom level, and when we do that, what’s happening is everywhere where it overlaps has now become its own piece, so it is broken up into lots of little pieces, which is okay, okay, so now. I’m going to zoom out with command – and what I want to do now is combine all the red things, but if I do that, it’s also going to try to combine the red from the live type over on the side, So what I’m going to do is I’m going to hit V on my keyboard to select the selection tool. I’m going to select this and select my type and then I’m going to hit Command 3 and that will hide it. Now it’s still there. It’s just hidden so now we can select all of our red hit. Y on your keyboard to get to the Magic wand tool. And I’m just going to click right in here. This has selected all of the red and then it will come down here to the Pathfinder and Unite. I’m gonna hide that with Command 3 I’m also going to use the Magic wand to select a black piece and it will just grab all of the black and then we’ll come to the Pathfinder and unite that alright now. I’m going to unhide everything and to do that. Its Option Command 3 or Alt Ctrl 3 on a PC. So now everything is back, OK? And now we can actually come in here. I’m going to, you mean close to our softball word and adjust the L part, and then I’m going to hit P and then – on my keyboard. That’ll give us the little pen tool that is going to subtract anchor points and we can just subtract out the ones we want to make smooth and I’ll speed this up. So you’re not too bored trying to watch it you now. These two little pieces here. They they don’t have another point that will stop it from going all the way up there. So I’m going to use my a tool. Which is your direct selection tool and just draw a box around that one then. I’m going to hold shift and draw a box around this one, and now I’m just going to click. Hold shift and move those up. Okay, so that’s it. That is how you can get a really cool kind of sporty, hard shadow on some of your texts after. I’m done with a design. I like to hit command Y to see if there are any little stray points that I might not want in there. So I might delete this one. I’ve got my G tool. Which is my group selection tool. That’s this one right up here and I’ll hold shift. I’m also gonna cut out that little piece right there. I’ll just hit delete and then well command Y or control Y again, and this is looking really nice, so I think we’re done. If you liked this video, and you want to see more like it, just hit the subscribe button and you’ll be notified every time A new video comes out, alright? I’ll see you in the next video, thank you!