Creating transitions with blends in Illustrator CS2
Table of Contents
Creating a blend
If there were always just one way to perform a particular function in Illustrator, there would be less of a need for books like this one. But as we’ve seen, Illustrator offers a variety of ways to perform tasks, each of which offers specific benefits. In the case of blends, Illustrator allows you to generate a blend from a menu item, or you can achieve finer control over the result of your blend using the Blend tool.
Method one: Using the blend submenu
Creating a blend using the Make command is the quickest way. You simply select at least two objects and choose Object > Blend > Make. Using this method, Illustrator takes the bottom-most object in your selection and creates a blend with the next object up in the stacking order.
Method two: Using the blend tool
Creating a blend using the Blend tool takes a few extra clicks of the mouse but gives you the ability to control the blend in ways that the menu command can’t. You begin by selecting the objects that you want to blend, and then you choose the Blend tool from the Toolbox. Then, click once on an anchor point in the first object to define where you want the blend to start, and click an anchor point in the second object where you want the blend to end. If you have more than two objects to blend, keep selecting an anchor point from each object until the blend is created.
Unlike the first method where Illustrator created the blend based on stacking order, this method allows you to control in which order key objects appear in the blend. Additionally, if you click an anchor point near the top of one object and then choose an anchor point toward the bottom of the next key object, Illustrator rotates and modifies the intermediate steps of the blend to match the orientation of the anchor points (Figure 5).
Figure 5: When you click with the Blend tool to blend specific points (instead of the entire object), Illustrator twists and rotates the blend steps accordingly.
