Does anyone know how to change colors in letters to appropriately represent silhouette? A perfect example is the opening for the movie Superbad:
The 'U' is perfectly a U while having the right change of color to form the silhouette. I am trying to do a similar effect in Illustrator CS6, but no luck. I can create outlines of the text I have into fonts and play with the paths, but these seems tedious, is therein easier way?
Quick and easy:
Put your figure in the back. Set your text in the front. Turn your text into outlines.
Select both.
Pathfinder→Divide.
This breaks the text into pieces using the back figure as the slice point.
Use the white arrow to select the pieces of the text which overlay the figure. Color at will.
One quick and easy way to do this is with a Clipping Mask:
I've got two text layers, one for green and one for purple. I duplicated the silhouette path and used it as a Clipping Mask for the purple text
Another way is to use Blending Modes:
The top silhouette is filled with blue and the Blending Mode is set to Overlay. Under that is a duplicate of the silhouette filled with white and the Blending Mode set to Difference.
The advantage to this is you can have a single text object, but the disadvantage is that it's more difficult to control the colors.
