Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

31. Change the direction of the gradient to vertical. Press

the G key to switch to the gradient tool. Illustrator will

display a horizontal gradient annotator in the document

window. Now draw a vertical line (press the Shift key

as you do) from Sam’s elbow down to the bottom of the

white edge of the keyboard. The aftermath, complete

with annotator and fading piano, appears in Figure 8-27.

32. Save your changes. Press the V key to select the black

arrow tool. Switch back to the Transparency panel and

click the fi rst thumbnail, the one that looks like the

spine of a piano, to return focus to the illustration. Press

Ctrl+Shift+A (-Shift-A) to deselect everything. And then

choose File→Save As or press Ctrl+Shift+S (-Shift-S) to

save your most recent changes without overwriting your

last ones. Name this fi le “Opacity masks fi nal.ai,” and

click the Save button.

Opacity masks permit you to employ any of Illustrator’s tools

in the name of modifying the transparency of a path, group,

blend, or layer. Use the blob brush to paint holes. Use gra-

dients and blends to produce soft transitions. You can even

use editable text to cut character-shaped holes or house ob-

jects inside letters. Opacity masks are beyond PostScript,

but they’re well within PDF and as fl exible as the day is long.

Applying Blend Modes

Witnessed back in Figure 8-1 (page 243), blend modes are

methods for mixing