Explore the techniques to create a reflective lake using effects like blur and tools like the curvature tool in graphic design. The article delves into the detailed process of creating a natural curve for the lake, applying a Gaussian blur, and creating a compound path for a realistic appearance.
Key Insights
- The process begins with the selection of glow and city elements on the graphic, followed by the application of a Gaussian blur to create the base for the lake.
- The lake is drawn using the curvature tool, which allows for the addition of anchor points to create a natural curve. The lake also receives a Gaussian blur effect for a surreal finish.
- The creation of a compound path aids the realistic appearance of the lake. Additionally, the color of the path is changed to match the background for a cohesive design. A masking technique is also employed to hide imperfections.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll be adding our reflective lake. Let's begin first by selecting our glow as well as our city and let's apply a blur to both of these.
We'll go to effect and blur and from here we'll select our Gaussian blur. Selecting preview we can modify our blur and in this case I'm going to leave mine right at about four pixels and click ok. Feel free to choose whatever blur you'd prefer and next we'll be drawing our lake.
To do this we'll utilize a new tool our curvature tool and with the curvature tool it works similarly to the pen tool. With our curvature tool we can simply click and add anchor points and as we click we'll create a natural curve for our shape. If we need to move our anchor points once we've completed our path we can simply click and drag them and when we've completed our lake let's add a blur to this as well.
To do this we'll go to effect, blur and Gaussian blur again. For our lake put it up to about five pixels and click ok. We can see that our lake is now blurred and now we want to create a compound path.
To do this we utilize our rectangle tool and simply draw a rectangle right around our lake. From here we'll use v on the keyboard to select the rectangle and holding shift we'll also select our path. We'll then right click selecting make compound path and finally we're going to change the color of this path hitting i on the keyboard and selecting our background color.
From here if we hit CTRL shift a we can see a preview of what our lake will look like. If we want to modify the area of our city that comes through we can select our city and I'll simply move it up on the keyboard using the arrow keys and I like this area of the city to come through our lake. With this new change we'll want to cut off some of the top so we'll select our compound path and hitting a on the keyboard I'm simply going to move these two anchor points holding shift and move them up.
I'll then hit CTRL shift a on the keyboard to deselect and as we can see here we have our lake however we also have areas that are showing from behind. Therefore we need to now create a mask. To do this we'll utilize our rectangle tool again and we'll simply draw a rectangle around the area of our lake.
In this case I'll move our rectangle a little bit out and with this rectangle drawn we'll now draw a selection box over all of our items within our reflection layer and we'll right click and select make clipping mask. From here we can see our lake. In addition we don't have anything outside of the clipping mask we've created.
So let's now save our work hitting CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll begin working on our stars. See you there!