Vectordiary

Day 12: Transparency & Graphic Styles

By Tony Soh Posted on July 25th, 2008

Transparency effects open the door for designers to create eye catching effects. You can add transparency to drop shadows or apply blending modes to objects to enhance your illustrations.

Adding Transparency

You can add transparency in Illustrator by lowering the opacity of objects so that underlying artwork becomes visible. Go Window>Transparency to open up your Transparency Window. Stack a few objects and set it to a lower opacity of 50% for the underlying color to show through.

Blending Modes for Objects

If you are familiar with Photoshop, you may have heard of Blending Modes. Blending modes let you vary the ways that the colors of objects blend with the colors of underlying objects. Here I have an example of 3 popular blending modes to show you the effect. I shall not go through how each blending mode in detail as it is quite technical for beginners. If your are interested, you can read Adobe livedocs here.

Button Reflection Using Screen

Screen blending mode is one of my favourite as it allows me create reflection effortlessly. I will be showing you a popular technique on creating a button reflection using Screen. First draw a circle and apply a gradient of light to dark orange to it.

Draw another circle on top and apply a gradient from black to white.

Finally, select the black to white circle and change the blending mode to Screen. And you’re done!

Applying Graphic Styles

Illustrator has some built in graphic styles which you are quickly apply to your objects. It is like a saved set of attributes. Once you have created an object style, you can apply it across different objects.

To see the attributes of an graphic styles, go Window>Appearance. Here we can see that there are 3 fills with effects(fx icon) applied. We will learn more about using effects in the later lessons.

Next Lesson: Transforming & Moving Objects »
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About The Author: Tony Soh

Hi. I'm the founder of Vector Diary. Illustrator is my passion and I have written numerous tutorials on illustrator helping people learn illustrator. My most popular tutorial on learning illustrator in 30 days has been a hit. It makes learning illustrator so easy and has benefited more than 20,000 people worldwide. Also, I've revealed some of my secret techniques in the premium tutorials. So don't forget to check it out!

Read all articles writen by this author

• Illustrator Trick #11: Transparency & Knockout Group
• Illustrator Trick #6: Copying Text Styles with Eyedropper
• Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days
• Tutorial: 3 methods to make a realistic CD
• Day 11: Editing Objects, Layers & Groups

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+Add Comment15 Comments

1. 
   dev July 29th, 2008

   i read all of your tutorial and can i ask that is that u use mouse to draw?
   coz i draw so many time using mouse and all result are bad….

2. 
   iStockdiary July 30th, 2008

   Yup, all done using mouse. Complicated shapes can be built from basic shapes or using Pen Tool. There’s no need by drawing tablet.

3. 
   Heidi August 5th, 2008

   Once again, I miss something. In Button Reflection, when I choose Screen for the black-white gradient circle, it simply turns white. I can make it work with Soft Light, but not Screen. (I’m using CS3.)

4. 
   DM August 7th, 2008

   I’m having the same problem as Heidi –the black portion of any gradient turns white instead of transparent. I’m guessing that maybe it’s a CS3 thing cause I’m using that as well…help please!

5. 
   Eli August 16th, 2008

   You should update the bottom of this article with the next days lesson. It says “Next Lesson: Coming Soon…”

6. 
   BogDinamita August 25th, 2008

   same problem as Heidi and DM…. please respond

7. 
   Vectordiary August 25th, 2008

   Hi BogDinamita, no problem on my side. I’m also using Illustrator CS3. Make sure the gradient is from black to white. Black areas will turn transparent, while white areas will turn white after you change it to Screen mode. Hope it helps.

8. 
   Leroy Simpson August 28th, 2008

   rasta blood claat man good lesson, true dat

9. 
   Keyo October 13th, 2008

   @BogDinamita I think is the mode (CMYH/RGB). Use RGB.

10. 
    dan October 30th, 2008

    nope. i have the same problem as above

11. 
    Ben November 25th, 2008

    I am having a problem too. The circle turns white. What is up with that?

12. 
    Vectordiary November 25th, 2008

    Hi Ben, go File>Document Color Mode>RGB Color. It should do find now. I suppose CMYK doesn’t support transparency effects.

13. 
    David February 7th, 2009

    I did the highlight example, but I don’t get the result you do with Screen mode, I even tried reducing opacity. I got a better result with soft light.

    :oP ?

14. 
    Andrew February 13th, 2009

    I had the same problem, but changing the document color fixed it

15. 
    juan salvatierra April 25th, 2009

    Hi Vectordiary thank you for all awesome tutorials