Gradients can be confusing to some students as I've learned throughout the
years teaching Illustrator and it doesn't have to be that confusing.
There's a couple of things to consider,
a couple of tips to apply effective gradients and In this lesson you'll learn those.
Go ahead and draw out some shapes. I'm going to draw a circle here first and let's say, I'll do the Stroke set
to None and then the Fill, right now we just have white, and so if you want to add a
gradient to this, if I choose the Gradient tool here, click and drag, it does nothing, right?
You need to apply a gradient so down at the bottom where it has Color, None and then in
the middle we got Gradient. Go ahead and click that.
That will apply a gradient and we've got our gradient panel, it should pop up, but if it
doesn't, just go to Window and then Gradient and check it.
And so right here we have white on one side, in fact, click and drag it over to
the right. You'll notice more of it's white there and then it begins the gradient
in the middle instead. Drag it over to the left, it puts it back. Same thing with the right
hand side, the black, and then there's a midpoint right here. You can go to the
left, to the right, to emphasize one or the other. Now you notice if I click down here
where I hover the mouse right below it and click, that adds another slider.
In between each pair of sliders you get the midpoint slider there. You can add a
couple of those. If you don't want those, just click and drag it off and it will delete those.
And you can also click these and enter in specifically, let's say you want to
reset this back to 50%, you can type it in or select it there with the arrow
and then it resets it to the middle.
Now what if you want a different style? We have Linear and then there's Radial.
So that's a completely different type of gradient, and if you go back to Linear, you have
Angle. You can do 120 degrees, 180 or you can type something in, a custom number.
Then if you change the aspect ratio of the radial, it'll change to be different.
You can do a 100% as the default. So go back to Linear
and there's a couple of presets up here. There's white, black, orange, yellow,
and it shows it has five sliders here, and then Fading Sky, Super Soft Black Vignette
and so on. So what if I want to color here? If I double click on this,
it actually brings up the color options here. If you click this, it'll change it.
You can choose from RGB, Grayscale, HSB, CMYK, Web Safe RGB.
So my default CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow, black. If yours is RGB, that's fine as well.
It's just going to depend on which one you have selected. I'm going to pull this up here.
Alright. Double click on it
and then we have the options here. So you can drag the sliders here to change it
or you can just click a custom color in here.
I have that kind of blue there, and then over here,
double click that and let's just do a slightly different color,
and then you can add a slider in the middle add a completely different color if you want.
So you might be thinking, well, why do we have a gradient tool here? Well, if you click and
drag over here, you can actually change the distance and the angle of the gradient
instead of having to rely on this. So it will change the angle right here, but you can
just click and drag over the shape that the gradient's been applied to and it will
change it for us here in the Gradient panel.
You can hold SHIFT if you want it perfectly level, so it will change it to 0 degrees,
-90 degrees, -180 degrees or 90 degrees. So if you have a couple of shapes open here,
it's applying that gradient we already have selected, but if I choose
the Gradient tool and click and drag over, it will apply only to the one
that's selected. See how this one's already selected?
If I just click on the background so nothing is selected,
and then I choose the Gradient tool again,
it's not doing anything right? It's always going to be applying it to the
one that's selected. You can also save this gradient. Let's say you have a gradient that
you like. Up here at the top, you can click that and then click this right here,
Add to Swatches,
and now I have it right there. So you can save custom swatches for later.
And one more tip. You can click this and it will reverse the gradient compared to what
we have it at. So that's how you use the Gradient tool in Illustrator.
I will see you in the next lesson.