From the course: Introducing Illustrator

Using the Gradient tool - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Introducing Illustrator

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Using the Gradient tool

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- [Instructor] All right, now I'll show you how to create gradients inside Illustrator, which nowadays come in three varieties, linear, radial, and freeform. We'll start off inside this document, and I'm going to back out by pressing control minus or command minus on a Mac. And then I want to select all three of the red stripes. And there's a couple of different ways to select multiple objects inside Illustrator. One is to click on one with the black arrow tool, and then shift click on another. And as I've been saying, the black arrow selects and deselects whole objects inside the program. And then I could shift click on that third stripe. Now shift clicking serves as a toggle. If you shift click on something that's already selected, it's going to deselect that object like so. Another way to work is to draw a marquee. And you do that just by dragging in an empty region. In my case I'm starting in the pasteboard. And you just need to partially marquee the objects. So if I were to bring my dotted rectangular marquee into the art board, then I would end up not only selecting the three stripes, but I would select that big, blue background as well. I'll go ahead and click off the objects to deselect them. So what I want to do is start my marquee right about here, let's say, and then just partially marquee those three stripes, and then release. And that will select those stripes like so. All right now. As you might expect, there's a few different ways to assign gradients inside Illustrator. Arguably the easiest is to select the gradient tool, which is located midway down the toolbox. And now, I'll just go ahead and click inside each one of these rectangles in order to fill it with the default white-to-black gradient. Now that we've filled the objects, we're seeing what's known as the gradient annotator for each and every one of them. And you use the annotator like so. Notice that over here on the right hand side, we're seeing this tiny square? That allows you to scale the gradient inside of the object. And notice that I'm affecting the middle object only in this case. If you want to move the gradient inside the object, then just go ahead and drag the gradient bar like so. Now don't worry about the fact that you're seeing this dash marquee. All that tells you is that the gradient annotator is going to snap back up as soon as you release. And that's just a function of Illustrator trying to keep that annotator centered inside of its path outline. All right now, there's one other thing that you can do here, and that's to move your cursor slightly outside and beyond that square, at which point you'll see a little rotate cursor, which will allow you to rotate the annotator to any angle that you like. And so now as you can see, it's going up and to the left. All right, so I'll just go ahead and move it back in so that I can show you that we have the circular color stops. So this guy right here is black by default, and this guy at the other end is white. To change either one of them, just double click on that color stop, and that will bring up those very tiny swatches. In this case, you don't have the option to change their size. All right, so I'm just going to select this shade of red right here. And as you can see, if I press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to dismiss that panel, that we now have a red-to-white gradient, which is perhaps a little easier to make out. If I go ahead and drag this square right there, it's tricky to get to it by the way. At least in this version of Illustrator, you need to make sure that you're seeing an arrowhead cursor and not a little finger. And so once you get the arrowhead cursor, then you can drag that square in order to change the length of the gradient. All right, now I could modify each and every one of these gradient annotators independently, but that might prove to be pretty tedious. So the better solution is to combine all of these paths into what's known as a compound path. And you do that by right clicking anywhere inside the document window, and choosing make compound path. And that will combine them all into a kind of uber-path. All right, now I have just a single annotator, as you can see right here, at which point, I'll position my cursor outside that square so I'm seeing the rotate cursor right there. And I'll drag this down so that I'm matching more or less the angle of each one of these path outlines. And then, I'll go ahead and drag this bar over to about this location here. Actually, I'm going to need to move it to this location so that I can scale the annotator. And now I'll drag the square with my arrow cursor, notice that. All right, so I've got red over here, dark red on the left hand side. I'm also going to assign that same shade of red over here on the right hand side by double clicking on that white color stop, and then selecting that shade of red, which is R 193, G 39, B 45, for what it's worth. And it may seem like madness to create a gradient between two identical colors, but that's just the start. I'm going to add a third color right here in the middle. And notice if I position my cursor underneath that gradient annotator, I'm going to see a white arrowhead with a plus sign. And if I click, I'll go ahead and add a color at that location. All right, now I'm going to double click on that item to bring up these swatches. And I'm going to switch the color to this bright shade of orange that begins with R=251. And then, I'll change the location value right here just by clicking on the word location and entering 50%, so that that color is smack dab in the middle of the gradient. And then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to accept that change. And because at this point I'm done, I'll just go ahead and switch back to the black arrow selection tool up here at the top of the toolbox, and I'll click off the paths to deselect them. And that is how you fill, in our case, three path outlines that have been combined into a single compound path, with a three-color linear gradient, here inside Illustrator.

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