Transcript:
[MUSIC] holiday, you’re watching dance key. And this is the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial. We’re going to learn how to create a neon text effect in Adobe Illustrator, and it looks something like this, so let’s jump into illustrator and figure out how on Earth we’re going to create this, so I’ve created a new document 1920 by 1080 pixels and the color mode is set to RGB and the first thing we’re going to do is select the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that is the same height and width as our artboard and we can do this by left, clicking and dragging or if we know the dimensions we can left, click and type 1920 by 1080 dimensions and click. OK, and from the color picker, we can select a fill color of RGB black. That’s all the way in the bottom left corner and we’ll remove that stroke and we’ll just shuffle that into position and we can then go to object lock and selection or we can keep the background on its own separate layer and from the layer’s panel double-click the text and type background. So it depends how you prefer to work, and if we hover over next to the eye, we can click in that space and it will lock the background and from the bottom of the layer’s panel, we can make a new layer and call it text, so this is so we don’t accidentally select the background by mistake. Now we have our text layer. We can select the type tool just left. Click anywhere on the artboard and type the text, so I’m going to type neon and hold shift to scale this up. Of course it’s black, so you can’t see it at the moment. However, we can give this a color from a swatches panel and make sure that you select global because we’ll be able to change this in literally a few seconds later on rather than lots and lots of clicks and it’ll be a lot of a hassle if it’s not a global Swatch, so that’s all white tab in the corner means that it’s global and we can just scale this up and set this up in the center and from the character panel at the top, we can select all of our font preferences, so we can just type their bass in here. That’s the font! I’m using first tutorial, but you can do this with any font whatsoever and I’m going to adjust the tracking or spacing between each of the letters and then swap that fill on the stroke, so we have no fill, but we do have a stroke and I’m going to increase that weight slightly to two point, and I’m also going to select round cap and round join just so it rounds everything off. So once you have a version of your text, if you’re happy with, I would definitely recommend just holding Alt and dragging a copy over here. So this is an editable version that we will keep if we need it. Should anything go wrong, so we can go back to our main versions and with the selected go to type and create outlines now. This text is no longer editable, but we can do some other stuff in Illustrator. So if we select this now, we can use a scissor tool that’s located by left, clicking and holding on the eraser tool. You’ll find this is the tool underneath and we can go and snip out some parts of this text. This is to reflect actual neon lighting in real life, so we can just click and click again and it will allow us to remove that space in between so. I’m going to do this for each letter. Try and make the the incision the same height for each letter. But if I don’t get it exact, we can change that later on then we can do more than one. We don’t have to do just one, so once you’ve gone through and you’ve kind of made those incisions with the scissor tool what we can do is go into outline mode. That’s command or control. Y and then just drag over everything with a direct selection tool. Then you can clearly see those extra anchor points that weren’t there before are where we’ve made those incisions and we can just drag over that space between those two points and delete or backspace twice, so it removes the line and then the leftover anchor points as well, so we’re just dragging over that space in between and then hitting delete or backspace twice. We’ve got a couple that we did on the letter N now, and if there are any aren’t the same height ly, you’d like to measure them and make them exact, you can go in with the direct selection tool and just drag these up or down just to increase or decrease best space, so let’s just zoom in a bit more using the direct selection tool, so you can really kind of finesse, these spaces and the rest of your lettering until you get something that you’re totally happy with. And when you come out of outline mode, that’s command or control. Y you should have something that looks like this and you can do this. As si with any font and this is all grouped together as one object by default, so that’s fantastic what we can do now is if we zoom out, we’re going to create another rectangle and just basically extend our background and we can use the eyedropper tool to quickly sample that same black background and go to object lock and selection, so our background is now locked. Now we’re going to need to put our neon text layer to the front, because if we drag it up, it will go behind this black block that we’ve added, so we can do that by going to object. Arrange, bring to front, and now it’s on top of everything, so we’ll leave this one here the width. It’s selected well. Go to edit copy edit paste in place, hold shift and just press up on your keyboard until it is not overlapping the text and just repeat this copy paste in front process several times you could do it between three and six times. What we’re going to do is we’re going to apply different amounts of blur to each one and create a much more realistic staggered blur effect. So the top one we’ll leave as is. That is absolutely fine. The next one down we’re going to go to effect blur. Gaussian blur can add one pixel of blur. Now, when you add small amounts of blur in Illustrator because it’s vector based, it doesn’t always handle blur as well as something like Photoshop. Maya is Raster based, but that doesn’t matter because the next one down we’re going to add two pixels of blur and the next one down three pixels of blur, so because we’re creating this staggered Blur effect, Any pixelation should hopefully be masked quite well and again effect blur Gaussian blur for the last one. I could go for fourth. I could jump for something like five to six, just so it’s a bit more of a glow, so we should have something that looks like this lots of different stages of blur and we can select each of these pieces of text and turn hold shift and use the down arrow key and it will slot these all back on top of each other in the exact place, with no misalignment so really, really handy way of using shift in the arrow keys to nudge something out, edit it, make some modifications and then use the opposite arrow key with shift to bring it back into place and we can go to object. Unlock all and remove this big black block from the top. So this is what it looks like. We’ve got. Our text made up of lots of different layers of blur that looks cool, actually, but not what we’re going for and what we’re going to do is we could stop there, but I’m going to select the top layer, which has no blur whatsoever and from the swatche’s panel, I’m going to double Click White and set this as a global Swatch and you can see we get a slightly different look there. We could bring that weight down, so this is all still fully editable. Obviously, if you go too Large, it will overshadow the blur effect, but we could bring that down to one point and we could even drop the opacity to 60% so lots and lots of subtle changes that we can make, however, for this tutorial going to do something a little bit cooler, so we’ll select that top layer, go to edit copy edit paste in front and again, hold shift and use the up arrow key to nudge this out and we’ll just bring up that opacity from 6% I think that was meant to be 60 and just go and go to fix that, okay. So that’s how it looks with that white stroke and 60 percent opacity, but we’re going to do something better because we’ve got the white stroke here and we’re going to select the gradient, so go to the gradient panel select anywhere on the gradient slider. Make sure you have these strokes selected and we’re going to bring black to the middle double. Click it and we can click our blue global Swatch and now we’re going to select the white and as we start to drag this if we hold down the Alt key, it will create a copy of that Swatch, so we’ve got four letters in our text and we’re going to kind of make some random gradients showing highlights with the white and then the neon of the blue as well, so if we add some other instances, so I’m just holding Alt and left clicking, so wanted to alternate between white blue and white, so lets. Just get that right in the middle -. This one’s in the center, and then I can just space The remaining ones. Our parts Are there nice and consistently spaced. We can even adjust the angle, so we could go for a 45 degree angle if we wanted, but we’ll leave that set to zero for now, so we’ve got something that looks like this very, very randomized, where the highlights are and where the blue is and what we can do is actually if we take this one out. So this is our plain white one. We’re getting an upgrade, so we’re going to go back to this one. Hold shift and use the arrow key and nudge that back into position and you can see there that it adds those highlights and it just makes it look so much cooler and what we can do is we can actually shift this back out of place and select all of these different layers at once by dragging over them and from the stroke panel, we can actually increase the stroke weight, so we’ve still got a degree of control over all of the blur, and we can actually select the layers individually and from the appearance panel. Adjust the blur. If we want, it’s a bit of a fast trying to pick all these layers apart, so you might prefer it having each piece of text on its own layer, so text one text to text three. It depends how you work, so we’ve increased that blur, and I’m actually going to add another one, So if we go to edit copy edit and this time, we’re going to go pasting back and from the appearance panel. I’m going to bump this up to ten, so you can see there. We’ve just added another blur piece of text at the back with a really large blur, so it’s just creating a glow around the lettering and we could hold shift and use a down arrow key to shuffle that back into place now. And, of course, that layer on top with our crazy gradient, we can still adjust that we can make it thinner, thicker. Depending on what we’re going for, you can also bring that down ever so slightly in the transparency panel, just so those highlights aren’t as intense If we’d like it to be a bit more subtle. And there we go, That’s how to create neon text in Adobe Illustrator, As always. Guys, please. Aveda leave any questions or comments down below like this video. If you enjoyed it, take care, son, see you later. [MUSIC] And you [Music]!