My dear dekeIpeds, imagine if you will, our curious, if unsuspecting necrowalrus, just trying to get through his day without being contaminated by random sprays of BLUDE, vee-OH-lence, or crud hue-MORE. The weight of the world, crushing his spirit. Boom-shaka-laka. If you don’t know what the heel I’m talking about, you’ve completely missed or possibly ignored last week’s Deke’s Techniques post, in which Deke created this charming character and I shared a totally awesome promo movie for Battleblock Theater.

Anyway, with all that crap going on, our guy needs a glowing red aura to keep evilness and incivility at bay. In this week’s free movie, Deke shows you how do just that, using Illustrator’s dynamic effects.

You can adapt this relatively simple (once you get everything in place) technique to protect any creature you like:

1) Copy all the pieces that make up the character onto a new “Aura” layer.

During the drawing phase, Deke created various parts of our guy on different layers, so the first thing we need to do is select the contents of those layers (by clicking the upper-right corner of it in the Layers panel) and then Alt-drag (Option-drag) the colored square that represents your selected items down to the new layer.

2) Select the clipping masks.

In this project, the different layers were created with clipping masks which, when combined altogether cause inaccuracies in the complete outline. To isolate of them, deselect everything by pressing Ctrl-Shift-A (Cmd-Shift-A), and then choose Select > Object > Clipping Masks.

3) Delete the Contents of the clipping masks.

In the Control panel, click the Edit Contents icon as shown below in order to select just the contents of the clipping masks.

4) Delete.

Press the Backspace (Delete) key to send those contents on their way.

5) Unite the paths of the Aura layer.

Click in the upper-right corner of the Aura layer in the Layers panel to select it all, then click the Unite icon in the Pathfinder panel to fuse the shapes together.

6) Change the fill to red and stroke to None.

In the Control Panel, do what I just said above. (Wow, your attention span is shorter than mine.)

7) Transform the fill to create the first layer of the aura.

In the Appearance panel, click on the Fill entry to make it active. In the Effect menu, choose Offset Path, set the Offset to 4 points and click OK. Go back to the Effect menu, choose Distort & Transform > Roughen. Set the Size to 3 points, switch from Relative to Absolute, set the Detail to 12, and the Points to Smooth. Click OK. Our walrus feels safer from mayhem and incompetence already.

8) Reinforce the aura with another layer of awesomeness.

In the Appearance panel, grab the fill you just adjusted and drag it to the page icon at the bottom of the panel to duplicate it. Click its Opacity entry and change it to 33 percent. Then click on its Offset Path setting and change the Offset to 8 points and click OK. Click Roughen, and change the Size to 6 points and the Detail to 1.

Relax in knowing your walrus is now safe from irritation. And if you’re a member of lynda.com, you can watch this week’s exclusive movie here, in which Deke shows you how to make the lines that constitute our walrus into variable-width strokes, thus giving him a dose of hand-drawn character. (If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free week trial at lynda.com/deke.) Boom-shaka-laka.

Have at it!