Illustrator Tutorial: Honeycomb
The next tutorial was on making 3D honeycombs, as I wanted to touch up on third dimensional art skills.
To start off, I made a creamy yellow background, followed by a few green hexagons. This wasn’t because they needed to be green, but there just needed to be a contrast to the background, for that moment.
To have the hexagons properly click without any gaps, I needed to disable the bounding box. After that was done, I duplicated the shapes over and over again, switched the fill to line, and made a honeycomb.
The next steps to making a 3D Honeycomb, was grouping all the hexagons, making them into a lighter cream colour, duplicating them (copy and paste to back), and adjusting the angle of the back group to make sort of a shadow. Change the line colour to a browner shade, then go into blend option, make sure it’s on specific steps, make it 600, press OK, then select both groups, and go into ‘make blend’ and you have you base honeycomb.
What you want to do next, is copy the lighter cream honey comb, copy it, lock the blend layer, then paste it (making it go on top). Then what you want to do is give it another random base colour, expand it, use pathfinder to to connect the all the expanded shapes, take off the colour, then apply dark lines with a reduced opacity.
The last step now if for the shadows. Duplicate the brown honeycomb and paste it at the back, and invert the lines to a fill, then copy that layer again and place it at the back and that will be the drop shadow layer. Play around with the drop shadow, and make sure it’s seen, but isn’t too obvious and be sure it’s the same colour as the brown you’re using for the bottom honeycomb).
To have a dragged shadow now, duplicate the layer again (remove the drop shadow from that second duplicated layer), make it the same cream yellow as the background and use the same blend. However, the edges may no sync with the honeycomb’s, so add lines (matching the fill’s colour) on to the second brown layer and keep expanding the lines till they match the honeycomb’s edges, though this will make the shadow looks weird. What you do then, is you select the comb that was made to match the background and added lines that have the same fill the colour, helping them to blend.
This was a very successful tutorial and helped me grasp 3D art a lot better.
Reference: tutvid. (2017, May 13). Honeycomb Vector Illustration — Illustrator Tutorial. Retrieved April 15, 2021, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYHf9AoI84c&list=LL&index=11&t=505s
