Illustrator: Chiaroscuro

NOTE: Some of the techniques in this tutorial are now out of date. Most of what is done as separate objects here could be done with the appearance palette as a single object.
Illustrator is a great tool for very tight rendering rendering if you know what you’re doing. In this tutorial we’ll go through some of what I think are some of the best tools in Illustrator (and most under-utilized). We’ll look at opacity masks, a few common filters, and one of many ways of achieving simple smooth shading.

Duplicate your circle using “copy” and “paste in front”. Now go and change your keyboard shortcuts so that command/ctrl + v is “paste in front” instead of paste. Why on earth this isn’t the default I will never know.

Make sure that after clicking “make opacity mask” you actually click on the mask’s icon in the transparency pallette to edit the mask. This is easy to miss.

Blur the shape and voila: adjustable soft highlight.

Bring in some graphics…

Warp them around our shape…

Clip off the edges and fade them a bit, and we’ve got fairly convincing 3D text.