Deep Inside the Subwoofer with Adobe Illustrator

In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke continues his “subwoofer from thin air” in Adobe Illustrator project, making use of the Blend command that allows you to quickly make incremental duplicates between two objects.

We begin were Deke left off last week and draw another circle around the speaker’s surround, setting the fill to none and starting with a black stroke.

A black circle atop other gradient circles in Illustrator


Next Deke applies a linear gradient to the new circle, which comes in as this default white-to-weak black color.

The new circle with the default white-to-gray gradient applied around the circumference.


Next, Deke customizes the gradient colors and instructs Illustrator to “apply the gradient across the stroke” by using that command in the Gradient panel.

The gradient panel with a custom gradient


Next, Deke creates two more circles on their own layer, which will end up being the inner and outer points of the “blend” of concentric circles.

The subwoofer so far with two new white-stroked concentric circles added


By applying a Blend command, and setting the Blend Options to 8 Specified Steps, Deke fills in the center of his subwoofer in one fell swoop.

The Blend Options dialog box set to Specified Steps and 8 increments


Finally, some tweaking of the blend in the Appearance panel and adding of a drop shadow gets us one step closer to the finished project.

The Drop Shadow effects dialog box applied to the blend circles


Deke’s Techniques, listen up while you can.

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