When it comes to simulating three dimensional depth in your illustrations, the Blend Tool is your new best friend. Watch and be amazed at the power of Illustrator CS3 as it reaches through your monitor and, with defiance, and slaps you in the face with it’s subtle charm and versatility.
You can find the source files in the directory labeled “source” that came in the files that you downloaded. You may wish to look through them briefly before we begin.
Step 1
Using the Ellipse Tool (L) create a perfect circle. Then apply a vibrant 4 color gradient (G) from light to dark using complimentary colors. Command + F9 will bring the Gradient Window onto your screen. Make sure you have Show Options selected. You can add multiple points to your gradient by clicking along the bar in the Gradient window. Adding more points and changing their brightness and hue slightly is a way to spice up the color of your illustration.
Step 2
Select your first circle and while holding Alt drag your mouse down to create another copy of your circle. Then, scale (S) it up a 100+% (Hold shift to keep proportions).
Step 3
Double-click the Blend Tool (W). Change the Spacing to Specified Distance and the Distance to 0.01 inches. Keep the Orientation on Align to Page. Now that you have your settings for your Blend Tool hit OK. I hope you have at least 2 gigs of ram, a decent CPU, and good graphics card because this can get hairy. Illustrator can crash suddenly when performing graphical combat maneuvers such as these. Save often from here on in. Side note: before every use of Live Color also I recommend saving. This is another Illustrator tool that crashes the program often.
