Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Don’t worry that the gradient doesn’t quite cover all the

illustration. We’ll correct that problem with a mask in

the next exercise.

17. Add some black ink to the blue. The blue of the gradi-

ent is washing out too much of the black strokes in the

bottom-left corner of the artwork. (The lines on the fl oor

even manage to turn white.) To bring some of that black

back, again hover over the annotator. Double-click the

bottom blue color stop to bring up the color panel. And

change the K value from 0 to 35 percent. This ratchets

back the Screen mode in the Black ink, as in Figure 8-41.

18.

Save your changes. Press the V key to reactivate the black

arrow tool. Twirl closed the Gradient layer in the Layers

panel and press Ctrl+Shift+A (-Shift-A) to deselect the

illustration. Choose File→Save As or press Ctrl+Shift+S

(-Shift-S), name your updated fi le “Blended objects.ai,”

and click the Save button.

To recap: The Color mode colorizes background objects with

the active one, Luminosity colorizes the active object with

those behind it, and Overlay heightens contrast. Meanwhile,

Multiply darkens the illustration and Screen lightens it. Back

off an ink to reduce the effect of the Multiply mode; increase

an ink value to back off the effect of the Screen mode.

And that, in a nutshell, is how blend modes work in Illustrator.

Cropping Entire Layers

Cropping is one of the more diffi cult issues to come to terms with

in Illustrator, in part because it’s handled so easily in other print

programs. In Photoshop, for example, you select the crop tool and

drag around the portion of the image you want to keep. In InDe-

sign, you import a piece of artwork and drag a corner handle. But

Illustrator has no canvas (as in Photoshop) or frame (as in InDesign).

In other words, Illustrator lacks a natural crop zone.

Some would argue that the crop zone is the artboard. This argu-

ment is marginally true for printing and exporting, as you’ll learn in

Lesson 12, but those tasks are just a fraction of the picture. Which

introduces our second problem: Illustrator has so many things to

crop that arriving at one solution is impossible.

In Lesson 6, I showed you how to crop from the Pathfi nder panel.

Then in Lesson 7, we employed a more deft clipping mask. I end this

Figure 8-41 .

267

Cropping Entire Layers