Hello out there.

Once again I’m going to have to offer my most sincere apologies for the somewhat sporadic nature of these little tutorials of ine. It’s probably not much of an excuse but I really have been very, very busy lately.

What with family business and far too much work, I’ve been finding it very hard to spare the time to maintain this blog. But I promise, I really do promise, that I’m going to try and men my ways. Watch this space!

Apart from that I’d like to thank all the people who continue to tune in. We’ve now reached the 10,000 hit mark. Which I think is amazing given the short amount of time that I’ve been running this blog.

For today’s exercise I’m going to be doing another album cover. So many people seemed to enjoy my recreation of Queen’s Jazz album cover that I’m going to attempt the granddaddy of them all: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. This is a simple enough looking design – a triangle with a rainbow running through it. However, if you’re going to be able to do it correctly there is no option but to do a little trickery with opacity masks and blends.

So here we go... Have fun – and as always your comments are very welcome.

1. We’re going to have to be pretty organised with this. For this reason we’re going to create two layers – one for the Black background and one for the prism. So begin by creating an A4 document and selecting the Rectangle Tool. Single-click on the artboard and create a square that is 375pt x 375pt. Use the Align Palette to align the object to the centre of the artboard (as you know I always do). Double click Layer 1 and call it ‘Background’. Now lock this layer.



2. Create a new layer and call it Working Layer. Select the Polygon tool and single-click on the artboard. Create a three sided polygon (i.e. a prism) with a radius of 68.5. Position this prism at 301 pt on the X axis and 416 pt on the Y axis (you can use the control panel or the Transform palette to do this). Fill the Prism with white and remove the stroke.


3. What we have to do next is actually quite complex, but also rather simple. We need to have the prism fading from white to turquoise to transparent. We achieve this by first of all copying the prism (this is most important that you do this, I can’t emphasise this enough) then heading over to the Transparency palette and from the palette menu selecting Show Options and then Make Opacity Mask. Now select the second of the two squares that appear in the Transparency palette (the black one) and hit Apple-F (Paste in Front). You are now working on the opacity mask rather than the object itself.

4. Now select Effect> Stylize> Feather... Turn on Preview and use the up and down arrows to feather the prism something like this:


5. In the Transparency palette turn off Clip and invert the mask. Now go to the Appearance palette and double-click on ‘Feather’. Now adjust the feathering so that it looks like this:


6. In the Transparency palette select the first of the two squares to exit from opacity mask mode. We’re starting to get there now. In the Layers palette expand the Working Layer and make a copy of the the prism by dragging the sub-layer on to the New button. In the Tools palette make sure that the Fill is in the foreground and then choose or create a turquoise colour from the Swatches palette. You now have two prisms, one white and one turquoise. The turquoise prism is sitting bang on top of the white prism.




7. We now have to create the illusion that the white of the underlying prism is fading into the turquoise prism. To do this go to Effect> Stylize> Feather and feather the turquoise prism so that it looks like this:



8. Now go back to the transparency palette and select the second of the two square to re-enter opacity mask mode. Go to the Appearance palette and once again double-click on Feather and and then adjust the feathering of the opacity mask so that it looks like this:



9. We have now achieved the effect of white fading into turquoise and then into transparent; and we couldn’t have done it without opacity masks. Exit the Opacity mask by clicking on the first of the two squares in the Transparency palette, That’s the hard part over. Phew!

10. Now lock the Working Layer and create a new layer called Rainbow. Hit Apple-F to paste in front the prism that you created ages ago (remember I said that it was important that you copied the prism?). Use the Line tool to draw two lines of approximately this size and location. Make sure that both lines generously overlap bothe prism and the edge of the black background.



11.Now draw yourself a rectangle that overlaps the two lines, as below:



12. Select the blend tool and – one at a time – click on the two lines. You’ll get a blend that forms and looks something like this:



13. Double click on the Blend tool and set the spacing to 5 specified steps. Your rainbow will now look like this:



14. Select the rainbow blend and go to Object> Blend> Expand. Now Bring out the Pathfinder Palette and select the white prism, the blend and the small rectangle and hit Divide.

15. If you’ve done this correctly the end result will look like this:



16. Ungroup the divided objects, delete the bits you don’t want and then fill the rainbow segments with the colours of your choice. Like this:



17. Now hit Apple-F once again to paste the prism in front. Use the Pen tool to add and remove points until you get an object that looks like this:




18. Copy this object and hit Apple-F again to you-know-what. Now use the Direct Selection tool to move the two points on the right of the object over to the left of the black square on the Background layer. As follows:



19. Now Select the white object in the middle of the prism and use the transparency palette to knock back the opacity.



All done... How difficult was that? Any questions – and I realise that there may be quite a few – please drop me a line. Hope you had fun doing this.

Until next time...