select shadow effects

[jackyj53675796]

hello adobe community,

I am a student and still learning. I sometimes take illustrated art and try to copy it for learning purposes to experiment with techniques that I would like to learn. I am stuck on one thing that I havent found a solution too and that i obvisoulsy want to learn how to solve. I atteched a picture of art by Eiko Ojala. I would like to learn how to put the shadows that he used around the face and the brain. I know how to use drop shadow but I am not quite sure how to solve this problem because the face and speech bubbles are one continous line. How do I put the shadow in select spots. I have tried adding layers too that will have the shadows with a gradient but I could not get it to look like this. How would you work through this to get this right?Illustration by Eiko Ojala

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

To understand the hear of Illustrator you need to learn about Appearance Panel that allows to customize appearance of any object. Here is the referance to help. https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/appearance-attributes.html

Each of object in this picture contain shadows seperately which you can control from shadow properties panel.

[Myra Ferguson]

I've been trying out various possible solutions in Illustrator, and maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not easily reproducing the effect. Is the spiral cut in such a way to make multiple layers to which varying sizes of drop shadow are applied?

[Myra Ferguson]

The continuous line does make the drop shadow effect not as straightforward as applying a drop shadow to layers. I would think it's possible that the effect was created in Photoshop where the artist would have more control over raster effects.

[Monika Gause]

Most probably this is not the bread and butter drop shadow effect. Those are carefully layered shapes that create the spiral effect and then extra shapes that make the shadows.

[kphotopage]

Well, yes, the real challenge here is that spiral.

For starters, you have drop shadows on the lower parts and various highlights and shadows on the upper paths.

Here I used Illustrator.

Total 10 Closed Paths- Fills and Strokes, and various settings for Drop Shadows on all paths.

For colors, I just used various tints & shades of orange.

No gradients, no brushes, and no obvious cut seam where all the closed paths meet in the middle.

I feel this is just only a good start. All is editable.

Of course you can spend more time to fine tune as you wish.

Other Adobe user members will surely have more methods.

You can even combine with Photoshop to contine the fun and tweak.

K