Learn about designing a moon with added effects in digital design. This article will guide you through the process using different tools and methods for creating a new layer, adding and manipulating shapes, adjusting opacity, and applying effects such as outer glow and gaussian blur.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed process of creating a moon design digitally, starting with creating a new layer, naming it 'moon', and locking other layers for focused work.
- Using the ellipse tool, a moon shape is created and its opacity adjusted. Rings are added to the moon with the offset path command, their opacity adjusted, and effects such as outer glow and gaussian blur applied for desired visual effects.
- The moon design is further refined by adding a clipping mask, effectively trimming the design for a more finished look. The final work can then be saved and imported into a larger project.
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In this video we'll be adding our moon. Let's begin first by creating a new layer. We'll retitle this moon and hit ENTER.
In addition let's also lock our clouds layer. Now within our moon layer we're going to be adding a moon that intersects with our two guides. We'll again utilize our ellipse tool and make sure that we have no stroke.
From here we're going to simply begin creating our moon. We'll start by dragging a moon out from the center and holding shift to make a circle and ALT to drag from the center. Let's drag our moon to be right around 400 pixels and we'll release.
Next we want to add rings to our moon. To do this we could add additional ellipses or we can offset our path. We can offset our path by going to object, path, offset path.
For our offset we're going to add 60 pixels and we'll see a preview of this. This will be our first ring and we'll click ok. Next we're going to do this two additional times.
With this outside ring now selected we'll go to object, path, offset path, and again do 60 pixels and click ok and we'll do this one more time. Object, path, offset path, and 60. Next we need to select all the rings of our moon.
We'll do this by hitting CTRL A and we're now going to change our opacity from 100 percent double clicking to five percent. And hit ENTER. If we hit CTRL shift a we'll deselect and we can see our work.
Looking at these rings right now even though they all have the same opacity as we stack them on top of each other the opacity actually grows. Therefore adding multiple transparent objects on top of each other will produce more opacity. In the case of these outside rings I like it at five percent however let's hit v on the keyboard to select our center circle for our main moon and for our opacity for this let's go to the top and set it at 100 and hit ENTER.
Here we have a nice bold moon with our outside rings. In addition to this let's add one more effect to our moon. With the moon selected we'll go to effect, stylize, and we'll be selecting outer glow.
With this outer glow we can utilize the screen mode and select rather than black a white color and click ok. To preview this we can check our preview box. We'll see that while it doesn't make a huge difference with it selected we certainly get a little more glow and we'll click ok.
For our other rings we'll select them one at a time holding shift and for these rings we simply want to blur them a bit. We'll go to effect, blur, and utilize our gaussian blur. If we preview this we'll see that we have a slight blur and click ok.
We'll then click outside and we can see the effect of this. In order to change how much it's blurred we can also select our rings and go to our properties panel selecting the gaussian
Blur and we can either increase the blur or decrease it. In this case I'm going to decrease it a bit and I'll just leave it at 1.8 pixels and click ok and clicking outside we can see this effect.
I like the look of this a little bit more with less blur as I feel like it helps to distinguish the lines. Let's select all of our moon and right click grouping it all together. As one final change we're going to be adding a mask to our moon and so to do this we'll select our rectangle tool and simply drag a rectangle from the top left hand side cutting off just the bottom of our moon.
We'll release there and then hitting v on the keyboard and with our rectangle selected we'll hold shift and also select our moon. We'll then right click and select make clipping mask and as we can see we now have our moon cut off at the bottom and only showing where our clipping mask is. Let's now save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll be importing our city.
See you there!