the vectorbot's playground

Creating a neon effect with the blend tool



Difficulty: Beginner

Sometimes a glowing neon effect in your design, illustration or website can really grab some attention. This week, we are going to learn how to do it with the use of the blending tool.

Outline shapes
To create a neon light effect, we need to start by drawing an outline shape with the pen tool ("P" shortcut key) or the pencil tool ("N" shortcut key) for a freehand style. At this tutorial, I've created an outline "neon" word like the sample to the right.
A neon light look best on a dark or black background, so we are going to place the outline shapes we have just created into a black background and make the stroke white (Also remember to group the shapes if there are more then 1 path). In this tutorial we are going to create the neon tubing and the glow differently. We are starting with the tubing.

Neon tubing
1
For the tubing, we need a white thin stroke for the brightest part of it and a thicker stroke in blue color for the outer side. In this example I set the white "neon" word to 0.5 point in weight. With the white "neon word" still in selection, we drag it down with the selection tool ("V" shortcut key) and option (Mac) or alt (Windows) key pressed to make a copy of the word below. The stroke of the second "neon" word is set to blue in color and 8 points in weight in this example. The real neon tubing is rounded in the corners and ends, so we need to change the cap and join to round by clicking the "round cap" and "round join" button at the Stroke palette.

2
Select both the "neon" words with the selection tool and choose the blend tool from the tools palette ("W" shortcut key), click at the starting anchor point of the 1st "neon" word then the same anchor point of the 2nd word to create a smooth blend. To set the blend to a specified steps, click at the starting anchor point of the 1st word then hold down option (Mac) or alt (Windows) and click at the same anchor point of the 2nd word. This will bring out the blend options. By default the spacing is set to smooth color (Illustrator calculates the optimum number of steps to create a smooth color transition.). If we are not going to use the illustration in a very large size we can set it to a lesser steps by selecting "specified steps" at the pull down menu and type in the number of steps we want in the field next to it. The steps are set to 20 in this example.


Tips: It's wiser to use a lesser steps in a blend according to our need, if the computer processor speed is slow or if we are working on a complex illustration.


3
Now we have a blend of 20 steps from the thinnest and brightest "neon" word to the thicker and darker blue word. To make it look like a neon tubing, we need to align the top "neon" word to the bottom one. Select the direct selection tool ("A" shortcut key) from the tools palette and drag a rectangle around the top "neon" word to make a selection of only the top word (If we use the selection tool to make the selection, both the top and bottom "neon" words will be selected together). After that, click and drag on one of the anchor point of the top word to the same anchor point of the bottom word to align both the top and the bottom word as in the example to the right.
Now we are done with our neon tubing.

The glow
1
For the glowing effect of the neon tubing, we are going to create a blend of a darker blue to black color (background color) with a thicker stroke using the same steps as how we create the neon tubing. The top "neon" word here is set to 12 points in weight and a darker blue (slightly thicker and darker then the neon tubing) and the bottom one 40 points in weight and black color which is also the color of the background. Create a blend between these words and align it afterward to create a glowing effect.

2
Now we have a neon tubing and a glowing effect just like the sample to the right. All we need to do now is to align both the words to achieve the neon tubing with a blue glowing effect.











Close-up
















That's all for this week's tutorial. This tutorial is with compatibility to legacy format in mind, which means is safe for submitting to royalty-free stock photo site like iStockphoto.com. If not we can actually create the same effect with the use of the Gaussian blur (Effect>blur>Gaussian blur...).

Have fun vectoring.