Explore the process of creating and positioning clouds in a digital environment with the use of guides, opacity settings, blending modes, and masks. Learn how to create a realistic night sky scene step by step in Adobe Illustrator, using various techniques like gradient adjustment and layering.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to create and position clouds in a digital artboard by using guides, changing opacity to 50%, and inching them out from the middle to create depth and realism.
- The author provides a step-by-step tutorial on giving the clouds a night-time appearance by grouping them, reducing the group opacity to 30%, and applying a 'soft light' blending mode to add a more natural feel to the scene.
- The tutorial also covers the addition of a gradient-filled ellipse as a mask to the cloud group, creating a more complex lighting effect that simulates the appearance of a moonlit night sky. The mask allows the clouds to show through in areas that are white, creating a varying opacity effect, replicating the way light would naturally diffuse in such a setting.
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In this video, we'll be working with our clouds. To begin, let's add some rulers and add guides. We'll right-click and select Show Rulers*, and next, let's add a guide halfway across our artboard—at 1920 divided by 2—and hit ENTER.
Next, we'll add another horizontal guide, this time adding our guide right at 540 while holding Shift. With our guides in place, we can now reposition our clouds. Let's right-click and select Lock Guides*. Next, let's position our clouds.
I'll start with the bottom clouds, and while it doesn't have to be perfect, I'll simply move them to the center so that they're intersecting right at about the intersection of our guides. I'll then hold Shift, select both, and let's turn the Opacity down from 100% to 50% and hit ENTER. Next, let's inch them out from the middle.
Holding Shift, I'll use the arrow key and inch it out—one, two, three, four, five—and next, with our left cloud, I'll do the same using the left arrow key, moving it five keystrokes to the left. With our additional clouds, I'm simply going to move them just below and just to the left of our other clouds, and feel free to resize as you feel is appropriate. I'm going to resize this right cloud, and I'll leave it right about there.
Once you have the clouds to your liking, let's hit CTRL+A to select all of them, and we're now going to be grouping our clouds. We'll right-click and select Group*, and as an additional change to our Opacity*, we can see that we have 100% opacity for our group, and we're going to be changing this from 100% all the way down to 30% and hit ENTER. As we can see here, our clouds are even more faded, but let's now select an additional blending mode for our opacity.
We'll go to Opacity*, and from here, rather than Normal*, we'll be selecting Soft Light*. When we click outside, we can see the change that this has made. These clouds are barely visible right now; however, given their opacity, we can see that they have layers and give the appearance of being at night.
Let's next add a mask to our clouds. In order to do this, we're going to start by creating an ellipse right in the center of our intersection. We'll utilize the Ellipse Tool found in our Toolbar*, and clicking from the center, let's create an ellipse,000 ×,000 and click OK.
From here, we can drag our ellipse so that it's centered right at the intersection of our guides, and now we'll want to change the color of our ellipse. In order to do this, we'll be adding a gradient. We can do this by going to Fill*, and let's select our white-to-black gradient.
As we can see, we have white on the left side and black on the right, but if we go to the top, our next change will be to edit to a Radial Gradient with white on the inside and black on the outside. We can edit our colors with the Gradient Tool*, shortcut G on the keyboard. First, we'll start by double-clicking our white and making sure that it is in fact all F's and true white, and next, we'll select our black and make sure that it's all zeros. From here, we can adjust how much it changes between white and black, and we'll adjust it so it's pretty close to the edge and fades more toward the edge.
We'll then hit CTRL+C to copy our ellipse and then we'll delete it. With the ellipse in our clipboard, now we can create a mask with it. We'll hit V on the keyboard to first select our cloud group, and now we're going to be opening up a new panel by going to Window > Transparency*, and from here we can select Make Mask*.
When we do this, we'll see that the objects that we're working with that will be masked are on the left (white thumbnail), and if we click on the black thumbnail on the right-hand side, these will be the objects within our mask. When we place an object within a mask, it will show through the objects below for all the areas that are white. Therefore, when we hit CTRL+Shift+V to paste our ellipse in place, we'll see that toward the center where it's white, it shows through the most, and on the edges where it's black, it's more faded.
From here, we can also edit our gradient using G on the keyboard, selecting the Gradient Tool*, and as we drag our black in, we'll see that it fades in, or we can manipulate it with our slider. Feel free to make changes to your gradient here, and if we hit CTRL+Shift+A to deselect, we can see our work. Sometimes, when I'm working with different masks and layers, I accidentally have this panel closed and want to go back and work within our other layers.
Unfortunately, right now we can't do that because we're still in the mask that we're editing. I'll then recognize that we have an opacity mask that we're working with, and to go back, we'll reopen our Window > Transparency panel. We'll then re-select the white thumbnail to no longer edit our mask, and if we hit CTRL+Shift+A, we'll be back to working within our normal layers outside of our mask.
Let's now drag our Transparency panel down with our Pathfinder*, and we'll leave this panel floating. In addition, we can right-click and close Align and close Transform*. Finally, let's save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll begin adding our moon.
See you there!