In this week’s free episode of Deke’s Techniques, Deke puts some fine-tuning on last week’s extruded letter blend project, namely he makes the extrusion of the letter u pass through the extrusion of the letter L.

When we last witnessed this puzzling interaction at the end of last week’s episodes, the u abruptly stopped when it reached the L’s extrusion:

Illustrator doesn’t really allow blends to cut through one another in the way this project requires, so the trick here is to give the letter u a second blend to the end and then hide the overlap behind the L, thus giving it the appearance of passing through.

You’ll note in the video, that the L needs it’s own “secret” duplicate blend so that it’s blend seems to resume after being interrupted by the u.

If you’re a member of Lynda.com or LinkedIn Learning, then Deke’s got an exclusive movie this week in which he further slices across blending letters to make this puzzle truly integrated with itself. I think. In any case, the Z is asserting its authority here.

Deke’s Techniques, slicing and dicing your puzzle into perfection.