Creating drop shadows can give you more depth to your designs. Or delete drop shadows from another vector design. In today’s tutorial, we will learn how to create and delete drop shadows in Illustrator.
Add Depth to Your Designs
Start by selecting the object that you want to add a shadow too, and then you go to the menu, Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. A pop-up box will appear with a bunch of options, and the first one is to set a custom Blend Mode. Before we go any further, make sure you check on the Preview on, so you can see exactly what you are doing in real-time!
Then we have the X and Y offsets. The ‘X’ is the Horizontal and ‘Y’ is the Vertical Offsets, which allow us to put the Shadow in any direction we want but by offsetting it.
Finally, we have Blur, which controls the level of dispersion that we can apply to our Shadow. You can change the Colour of the drop shadow as well. Click on the swatch and choose a colour, use the sliders, or use the colour picker to slide over a colour. And Darkness, which allows us to control the percentage of black that Illustrator adds to the drop shadow itself.
Now, what if you want to remove or delete a drop shadow. Select the object then go to the Menu, Window > Appearances. If you hit delete on your keyboard, the whole object will be removed, so don’t do this. Instead, In the Appearances panel, select the drop shadow, and either drag the drop-shadow to the trash can or click on the trash can.
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