The Adobe Illustrator CS Wow- P13: Sharon Steuer is the originator of The Illustrator Wow! Books. When not working on Wow! books, Sharon is a painter, illustrator, columnist for , and the author of Creative Thinking in Photoshop: A New Approach to Digital Art. She lives in Connecticut with her cats, Puma and Bear, and radio star husband, Jeff Jacoby. She is extremely grateful to her co-authors, editors, testers, Wow! team members (past and present), Adobe, and Peachpit for making this book possible | Colorful Masking Fitting Blends into Custom Shapes Advanced Technique Overview Create a complex blend mask it with a custom masking object create a second mask-and-blend combination make a two-object mask using compound paths. J Swatches brushes 3 Red Yellow I pendí Yellow Blue Radial pencils Gradient J bp Í Angle ö . û 0 ÏT The best way to learn how to mask is to make some masked blends. With Laurie Grace s pencils you ll learn how to mask complex blends to fit into custom shapes. And with the patriotic corners of Danny Pelavin s baseball illustration you ll learn how to mask one blend into two different objects by using compound paths. 1 Creating the basic elements not requiring masking. Create your basic objects. For her pencils Grace created The gradient for a pencil body the long barrel of the pencil with a gradient fill. Creating objects and blending them in pairs then creating an object to use as a mask Selecting the blends with an overlying object designed as a mask the blends masked 2 Creating the first mask-and-blend combination. To prepare a mask for the pencils create a closed object outlining the shaved wood and pencil tip and Lock it Object menu . To ensure that your blend will completely fill the mask make sure that each created object extends beyond the mask. Then select and blend each pair of adjacent objects see the Blends Gradients Mesh chapter . Grace created the slanted outside objects first and the center object last so the blends would build from back to front towards the center. Unlock your pencil-tip object choose Object Arrange Bring to Front select the blends with the mask object and choose Object Clipping Mask Make. Then Object Group the mask and the blend. 334 Chapter 10 Advanced Techniques 3 Preparing the next masking objects and mask. Select and copy your mask then select and lock the mask with the masked objects to keep from accidentally selecting any of them as you continue to work. Next use Paste in Front to paste a copy of
