Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

11.

Rotate the blue path. Illustrator tracks blends by connecting an

anchor point in one path to what it believes to be an equivalent

anchor point in the next. But in connecting the blue and peach

paths, the program got it wrong. For example, the bottom-right

point in the blue path blends to the bottom-left point in the

peach-colored one.

The solution is to reshape, reposition, or transform a path in a

way that forces Illustrator to recalculate the blend. In our case,

a slight rotation will suffi ce:

•

Again in the Layers panel, twirl open the Blend item. Then

target the Base path by clicking its circular meatball.

• In the control panel, click the blue X (or Y, W,

or H) to bring up the Transform panel.

• Click the

icon on the left side of the panel

to highlight the rotate value. Enter 5 degrees,

and press the Enter or Return key.

By rotating the blue path a few degrees counter-

clockwise—so it’s more in keeping with the angle

of the purple and peach paths—you make Illus-

trator reconnect the anchor points, this time with

more success, as in Figure 7-9.

Blends create smooth color transitions and update au-

tomatically. But the same can be said of gradients (as

documented in the video lesson). In fact, the blend in

Figure 7-9 isn’t all that remarkably different from the

one I established back in Figure 7-4 (see page 206), ex-

cept it required more work and no longer fi ts tidily inside

the original rectangle. But this is just the beginning. You

can edit blends with far more control than that afforded

by gradients, and you can mask them as well, all of which

I explain in the next exercise.

Editing and Masking a Blend

In this exercise, you’ll build on the previous project by modifying

the placement of a blended path, adding another color and path

outline to the blend, and setting the blend inside a mask.

1.

Open an illustration that contains a blend. Keep

working inside the fi le you have open from the last

exercise. Or if it isn’t handy, open Blended shapes.ai

found inside the Lesson 07 folder.

Figure 7-9 .

209

Editing and Masking a Blend