From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

834 Shading an impossible trident with gradients

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

834 Shading an impossible trident with gradients

“

- [Instructor] All right, currently we have an all-white trident. I want to infuse it with color in the form of these gradients. And so first thing I'm going to do is, armed with the black arrow tool incidentally, I'm going to click on this path outline right there in order to select it. And I want the trident to be purple where it's sitting against this orange background and orange where it's sitting against this purple background. All right, so I'll go to the window menu and choose the gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. And I'll just click on the gradient slider right there in order to lift the default gradient which obviously looks terrible. And I'll go ahead and set the white color stop to a location value of 50%. And then I'll take this black color stop and I'll set it to a location of 20%. And then I'll replace it with color two. So you don't want to click on this guy. You want to drag it and drop it into this position. All right, that's all there is for that guy. So now, I'll click in this wide area of the central path. And notice that it's already got a gradient. We've got opaque white going to transparent white right here. We want to add purple. So I'll go ahead and grab color two, drag it and drop it to right about there. I want the opacity to be 100%. And then I'll tab to the location value and change it to 20% like so. All right, now I'll grab this guy. He's a little more complicated. And so I'll just go ahead and click on the gradient slider in order to load up that last gradient, which has purple at a location value of 100%. We've got white at 50%. And then we have a transparent white. I'm going to take it up to 100%. And I'll increase the location value to 80% like so. And then I'll grab color one, this shade of orange, and I'll drag it and drop it into that position. And you know what? I've been forgetting about the angle value. This guy wants to have an angle of 20 degrees. And you can see what that looks like if you select the gradient tool. And you may be comfortable with rotating the gradient annotator like so. I don't like it though. I've just decided I'm not that crazy about working with the annotator these days. So anyway, I'm going to press the control key or the command key on the Mac in order to temporarily grab my black arrow tool. And I'll click on this guy, the one that we just filled a moment ago. Oh, and he's already got an angle value of 20 degrees. So that's awesome. Now, I'll control or command-click on this guy. Actually, that's the wrong guy. So I'll control or command-click here in order to select that first path. And notice that the angle's at zero degrees. I'll change it to 25 degrees and we can see that that works out pretty nicely. All right, now I'll control or command-click on this path right here, which is already filled with a gradient. And so you can see right there we've got white at a location of 59%. I'm going to add color one to right about there. And then I'll change its location value to 80% like so. We definitely want the opacity value to be 100%. And now I'll control or command-click on this guy in order to select it. And the reason I keep control or command-clicking is because pressing and holding the control key or the command key on the Mac is going to get you the most recently-used arrow tool, which in my case is the black arrow. All right, now if I release, I go back to the gradient tool. And I'm going to go ahead and select this gradient even though it's not quite right. I don't want this transparent color stop. So I'll go ahead and drag it down to get rid of it. And then I want this opaque white color stop to have a location value of 50% like so. And now I'm going to change the angle value to 140 degrees. Actually works nicely. It would work nicely if I built the gradient properly. But this guy needs to come over to the other side. So I'll go ahead and change orange to a location value of 20% like so. And then I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool and I will click off the path outlines to deselect 'em. And that's it. That's all there is to it. That is at least one way to shade your impossible trident using nothing but linear gradients here inside Illustrator.

Contents