No free house and that has cost me

What the title said

Well as I thought, I did not have a free house today so I did not get as much done as I would have liked to, but I did make some really good headway and learnt a few little tricks that have made my logo look the way I envisioned.

Adding the shade

No the way I saw someone add the shade was to create live paint, expand the appearance in live paint and use the knife to chop sections out and add a darker shade depending on the part of the picture.

This method did not work for me as I had multiple objects on multiple layers so I had to do it a little different.

I decided to create a black box and change the opacity to about 15%. But the problem is that part of the cube was slighter darker compared to the original shade of grey. The only way around this was to use the knife tool and my graphics tablet and draw around the half of the image I wanted to be darker. The problem with that was that not all the anchors were following the shape of the image. So from here, I had to use the direct selection tool and move anchors around, add anchors and move the paths so I could get the curves I desired. This process took a while.

Some time later...

After making the shade the correct shape I needed, I wasn't happy with the way the top of the image was appearing. I had the the difference in shade on the left and right of the cube but not the top. So I tried to make another square but it did not appear at the same angle as the top of the cube. So I used the direct selection tool to manipulate the corners and create the shape I needed. I changed the opacity and was struck with a new problem. The half that I had created the shade on which overlapped the top part of the cube, was a different colour. So essentially, I had the shades of the left and right side of the cube at top, even thought it was meant to be one colour.

Sounds confusing but we're nearly there.

What I had to do AGAIN, was use the knife tool, cut the shape of the top of the cube but make sure it was following the same lines as the cube. So I created another square, cut the shape, deleted the the cut so that the art on the top of the cube was the same colour, arranged the layers so the the square appeared on top of the artwork, changed the opacity and bobs your uncle! Here is the result:

Start of the shading process

As you can see from the Zeus figure, adding the squares and changing the opacity gives the illusion that the image is mapped onto the cube which looks AWESOME!!!!

All I need to do is repeat the painstakingly long process of cutting and positioning anchors for the other pictures and I'm very nearly done.