A little more detail

Best to give a decent description

After the post I did yesterday, it did occur to me that it may be a bit hard to understand exactly what I did. So I thought I would go into a bit more detail on how I did it with the next figures in the logo.

Step 1: Creating the shadow

So the first thing I did was create a sub layer with a black box and carefully position it over the side that needed the shadow. With the box still selected, I changed the opacity to 15% as seen below:

Box for shadow effect

It was at this point where I selected the knife tool and with the aid of my graphics tablet, cut around the shape I wanted to be darker. Here is the result of me cutting:

Result of the knife tool

The one problem I thought I was going to have was getting a straight line down the cube to split the sides. A workaround was to make all the layers invisible except for the shadow and cube layer. This allowed me to see the lines of the cube and I straightened them up as best as I could free hand.

After the line was straightened, I made all the layers visible again and proceeded to adjust the anchor points and paths. But a problem was the position and the amount of anchors around the shape. There was too few and wouldn't allow me to get the curves I desired.

Not enough anchors to get the desired curves

Step 2: Manipulating the shape

The only way around this that I know was to do the following:

Select direct selection tool, click on the desired area where you would like an anchor.

then go to object > path > add anchor points.

More anchor points

As you can see, this gives me a few more anchors so I can adjust the shade to the shape I want. Now comes the very exciting point of spending what feels like an eternity adjusting the anchors and paths. Oh happy days......

So after adding more anchor points and spending some time relatively being careful arranging them, I am left with this:

Finished result of manipulating the shadow

And if I zoom out and deselect the object, it looks like this:

The half way point of adding shade

Step 3: Adding the top layer of shade

As you can see the left side is looking pretty good but it continues up to high and ruins the illusion that the picture is part of the cube. So the only method I know is to create a black square on a new layer, select the layer with original shade and cut around the square and the shape. The result for me was this:

The result of cutting around the shape and square

I did this very quickly and was left with a few bits that needed deleting with the selection tool which gave me the following result:

Nearly there, just one more step

So all that is left to do is make the created square visible, make sure the colour is white and change the opacity to 20% which gives us the following:

The finished result

So that is my method for adding shade to the characters to make it appear they are part of the cube. Once I get around to the background and lettering, i'll make a new post to explain how I did that.