Introduction to Blend: Brushes - Page 4

In the previous page you added and modified a circle. In this page, let's continue by making a few more tweaks and adding some extra circles!

20. Right now, your circle is fully visible. What we really want is a slight transparency applied to the entire circle to make it blend better with the background. To adjust the background for the entire circle, you will need to alter the OpacityMask property.
    
    Select your OpacityMask property from the Brushes panel and select Solid Color Brush:

[ select the OpacityMask property to adjust transparency ]

21. Your OpacityMask helps determine how visible (or how transparent) your selected object is. You can try the colors of your selected object using the displayed color box, but nothing will happen. The main thing the OpacityMask property looks at is the Alpha channel (A):

[ the Alpha channel determines how transparent your selected object is ]

Click on the A (Alpha) field and enter a value of 60:

[ select the Alpha (A) channel to adjust the level of transparency ]

After entering 60 for your circle's Alpha, you will see your circle becoming partially transparent. This means that part of your background is now visible through your circle itself:

[ your circle is partially transparent now ]

22. The last thing we are going to do is copy and paste a few more circles and scale them. Make sure your circle shape is still selected in your Artboard, press Ctrl + C (or go to Edit | Copy) and press Ctrl + V (or go to Edit | Paste).

23. While it may be difficult to see, a copy of your original circle has now been placed perfectly on top of your original circle. Click on the circle and drag your mouse to move the circle to a new location:

[ paste a copy of your original circle ]

When you pasted your circle, I mentioned that it was difficult to notice that because they are perfectly placed on top of each other. While that is true when observing the Artboard, when you look at your Objects and Timeline tree, you will see two copies of your Ellipse shape representing our two circles:

[ a better way to find and select objects in your Artboard ]

The timeline makes it easy to know exactly which objects are currently placed on your stage, and that is helpful when trying to select objects covered up by another object or selecting an object that is completely transparent/invisible.

24. Make sure your newly pasted and moved circle is selected if it already isn't. Notice that a box outline with eight small squares is displayed around your selected circle in the Artboard. You can click on any of the boxes and drag the mouse to skew and scale your circle's shape.
    
    What we want to do is make our circle bigger. You can do that by clicking on any of the corner boxes and dragging your mouse outward:

[ you can scale an object by clicking on a corner box and dragging with your mouse ]

When scaling using this approach, you might find that the scale isn't even. Unless you are dragging outward in a perfect 45 degree angle, your scaling will skew your object to be more horizontal or vertical than you want to.

To fix that, hold down your Shift key when dragging or prior to releasing your drag action. Holding down your Shift key sets the horizontal and vertical scale values to be the same:

[ holding down your Shift key while dragging makes the scaling even ]

We're almost done now. All that is left are some more finishing touches, so let's wrap this up on the next page.

Onwards to the next page!

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