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About this lesson

After laying down the flat colors we can begin adding some extra shapes that will serve as our shadows.

Quick reference

Throwing Shade

After laying down the flat colors we can begin adding some extra shapes that will serve as our shadows.

When to use

Once you have your base colors figured out and applied we can begin thinking about the shadows.

Instructions

  • Begin by opening the Throwing Shade Exercise.ai file
  • Open your custom color swatches once again
  • Select the large shadow area on the right side of the chest/neck shape that we filled with a flat color in the previous lesson
  • Try some of your colors and decide on a nice shadow color that will work with your main flat color
  • Again, make sure that you have a solid fill and a stroke of none
  • After changing the color, you may notice that certain parts of the nose/mouth and neck areas are no longer visible
  • Just like we did in the previous lesson, we will need to send this backwards by pressing Command/Ctrl+[ until all of our other shapes become visible
  • You could also go to the Object Menu and choose Arrange > Send Backward
  • If you go too far with sending your shape backwards, you can bring it forward by pressing Command/Ctrl+] 
  • Once you have established your shadow color, select one of the solid black shapes in your design with the Selection Tool (V)
  • Go to the Select Menu and choose Same > Fill and Stroke
  • You should now see that all of your solid black shapes are selected at the same time
  • Switch to the Eyedropper Tool (I) and sample the shadow color to change all of the black shapes to your shadow color
  • If any of the shapes are still appearing as black, make sure that everything is unlocked by going to the Object Menu and choose Unlock All
  • Once you unlock any shapes that still show up as black, select the shape, grab your Eyedropper Tool (I) and sample the shadow color to change it
  • You may notice that the shadows we created for the inner part of the eye have also changed to the shadow color
  • To fix this, select the first shadow shape, then hold down the Shift Key and select the second shadow shape inside of the other eye
  • Once both shapes are selected, press 'D' on the keyboard to apply your Default colors (solid white fill with a black stroke)
  • Press Shift+X to swap the fill and stroke colors and you should now have a solid black fill and a white stroke
  • Next, change the stroke to none so all you have is a solid black shape
  • With the shadows still selected, go to the Transparency Panel or access it through the Window Menu and reduce the opacity to 50%
  • Change any remaining shapes that have a black stroke into a solid fill color such as the outline for the lower part of the mouth
  • There should be a shape on the lower part of the mouth that is appearing hidden, but when we click we can't select it
  • In order to select the shape beneath, first select the top shape and lock it by pressing Command/Ctrl+2 on the keyboard
  • Continue to select and lock all of the other shapes until you are able to select the shadow shape below
  • Next, with your hidden shape selected, go to the Object Menu and choose Arrange > Bring to Front
  • There is another shape that appears hidden in the large right shadow area on the chest/neck area
  • Select this shape with your Selection Tool (V) and then use your Eyedropper Tool (I) to sample some of your normal base color
  • This will provide some contrast and make our shape visible once again
  • Change the color of the main nose shape behind the nostrils which should currently be filled with your shadow color and change the main tear drop shape behind them to a lighter 'highlight' color 

Hints & tips

  • When opening custom swatches, you can dock them to the panels on the right so they will be available to you without having to go through the Window > Swatches menu.
  • For many of the menu items such as Arrange > Send Backward, you will notice that the keyboard shortcut is often placed right next to the command for reference.

 

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  • 00:04 Now that we've got our base colors set up here,
  • 00:06 we can start thinking about some shadow colors that we wanna use.
  • 00:10 So I'm just going to continue this process and bring up my custom colors, so again,
  • 00:14 I'll bring up the swatches panel.
  • 00:16 And it doesn't look like I can see my colors right now.
  • 00:19 So I'm basically going to toggle until I can see if I can find them here because we
  • 00:24 had them loaded before, but it looks like we may need to load them up again.
  • 00:31 And you come back to swatches, Open Swatch Library> User Defined and
  • 00:36 bring up our custom palettes here.
  • 00:38 Now I'm thinking in order to get these to stay in here that I may actually dock them
  • 00:42 over on the side.
  • 00:43 And you'll see that I just added this icon here, so
  • 00:47 now I can undock that and place it back here as needed.
  • 00:51 All right so for now let's just go ahead and zoom in a little bit, and
  • 00:56 you'll see that we have this large shape on the right on our first pass layer.
  • 01:01 And this is gonna be basically a large area of shadow that we want to use on this
  • 01:05 side of the logo, now not only is that gonna help to break up some of
  • 01:09 this color but it'll also help us by adding some depth.
  • 01:12 So if you notice over here in my colors I have a black out line but no fill.
  • 01:17 So I'm just gonna select the fill come back to my palate here and
  • 01:22 try some of these colors out that we wanna see for a shadow color.
  • 01:27 And we could go with a dark brown, but I don't wanna go too dark with it.
  • 01:32 I'm thinking that something in the family still would look pretty good.
  • 01:35 I think this is a nice compromise because, the saturation or
  • 01:39 intensity of the color is about the same but it is a darker value.
  • 01:43 So now I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the stroke, and
  • 01:47 just leave this set to a solid fill.
  • 01:49 Now just like we did on our last lesson we had to send this backwards a couple
  • 01:52 of steps.
  • 01:53 And if you remember you could do that by either coming up to Object > Arrange >
  • 01:57 Send Backward.
  • 01:58 But you'll also notice the keyboard shortcut here fo command in the left
  • 02:01 bracket.
  • 02:02 Let's go ahead and tap that a few times until we see our mouth shapes and
  • 02:06 the head in front of it.
  • 02:09 And I can tell that I went to far when it is behind that main orange shape, so
  • 02:13 then I can just bring it forward by pressing Cmd and the right bracket.
  • 02:16 Now that's gonna basically serve as a shadow color.
  • 02:19 And I'm thinking that all these other parts that are black we may wanna actually
  • 02:24 change this shadow color as well.
  • 02:26 So the way I'm going to do that is by selecting any of these black shades
  • 02:31 come up to the select menu and choose Same> Fill & Stroke.
  • 02:35 And now what we can do is grab our eye dropper and just sample that shadow color.
  • 02:39 Now it looks like there is one shape that I missed here so
  • 02:42 I'm gonna come up to the object menu again and
  • 02:44 choose Unlock All to make sure that everything is unlocked.
  • 02:47 And you'll see that our eye was indeed locked.
  • 02:50 So now that that shape is unlocked I'm just going to sample that one color
  • 02:54 there, too.
  • 02:55 One other thing that got messed up here are the shadows for our eyes.
  • 02:59 We actually do want that to stay black, so I'm going to press D to go back to my
  • 03:04 default colors, and then Shift and X to swap the fill and the stroke, okay?
  • 03:08 Now I'll press X to toggle between those two and choose None for the stroke.
  • 03:14 Now at this point we have 100% black in here, so we're gonna have to go back and
  • 03:19 adjust the opacity once again, or the transparency.
  • 03:22 All right, I'm just gonna set that to 50 and close that.
  • 03:26 Now there are a few other areas in here that
  • 03:29 we can still see some black outlines for.
  • 03:31 So, for this shape for example I think I'm just gonna sample some of this yellow
  • 03:35 color, and then I want to get the shape that is behind it.
  • 03:38 So if you are ever in a situation like this where you can't select the shape that
  • 03:42 is underneath it you can press Cmd and
  • 03:44 two to lock the shape until you are able to grab the shape that you want.
  • 03:48 All right, at that point you can press Cmd + Shift and the right bracket, or
  • 03:52 come back up to the Object menu and choose Arrange > Bring to Front.
  • 03:56 And that will assure that the shape is now on top.
  • 03:59 Now, also in here, we have this other shape kind of in the opposite side which
  • 04:03 was originally going to be filled with a shadow color.
  • 04:07 But since we've changed all of our blacks to this new shadow color, I'm actually
  • 04:12 going to do the opposite and make this a highlight or make it our main base color.
  • 04:16 Then we have the sides of the nose here which we may wanna use a different color
  • 04:21 for as well.
  • 04:22 So let me go ahead and grab my custom palettes once again, and
  • 04:26 then we'll try and figure out a good kind of color here.
  • 04:29 Now there's not gonna be a lot of this color in the design so,
  • 04:33 we just wanna pick something that is kind of subtle but works.
  • 04:36 All right, and I think something like that looks pretty good.
  • 04:39 So, now that we've basically laid our shadows in here as well as our made flat
  • 04:44 colors, we can begin thinking about our highlights.

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