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

931 More advanced gradients in Illustrator

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

931 More advanced gradients in Illustrator

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to apply a few more advanced gradients here inside Illustrator, including this guy right here that has this abrupt color transition that looks almost as if we've got a clipping mask going on. And then there's this shape, which contains there's a couple of gradients working together in order to create these translucent effects inside the final version of the illustration. All right, so here's the file from the previous movie. I'm going to go ahead and select shape six, and then I'll go up to the window menu and choose the gradient command to bring up the gradient panel. Notice that the fill is active, which is exactly what I want. And so I'll just go ahead and click on the gradient slider in order to apply this default gradient. All right, I want the darker color to be in the bottom of the gradient, so I'm going to change the angle value to negative 90 degrees like so, so that the gradient reads left to right as top to bottom. All right, right now with my swatches panel available here, I'll go ahead and grab color one and I'll drag it and drop it onto the first color stop. And then I'll grab color four and I'll drag it and drop it onto the final color stop in order to create this effect here. All right, now I'll go, ahead and select shape one right here, which is the first triangle I created last week. And I decided to experiment with the idea of some ambiguity where the eyes are concerned. So we have this kind of moving triangle face with the chin represented at shape eight. And the left eye, I guess it's right eye, represented by shape 11. But then I thought, "Instead of making "the opposite eye shape six, "let's see if we can make it with shape one." And so I'll go ahead and click on that gradient slider once again, in order to apply the last applied gradient, which begins with color one. And to confirm that you can just double click on that color stop, and assuming this little color icon is active, you can see that we're working with color one. The change I want to make is to that opacity value, and I'm going to take it down to 50% and then press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to invoke that change. All right, now, I'm going to make a copy of this color stop, the right hand stop, by ALT or Option dragging it to any old random location for now. And then I'll grab color two up here in the swatches panel and I'll drag it and drop it onto that swatch. And then, I decided to grab black and drag it and drop it onto the final color stop. All right, now we need the gradient to go at the same angle as the triangle that is from the top right corner down and to the left. And if you want to do that by hand, then you can switch to the gradient tool, which you can get by pressing the G key. And then you can position your cursor slightly beyond that gradient annotator so that it looks like a rotate cursor. And then you would drag that guy up and to the left like so. However, we really want an angle value of exactly 30 degrees. So I'm going to enter that value into the gradient panel and then I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and hide that gradient annotator. And that way I can just better see what I'm doing. All right, I'm going to select the black color stop right here, and I'm going to change its location value to 72% like so. And then, notice that by dragging this middle color stop around, you can change how rapidly the colors transition. I want them to transition very rapidly. So I'm going to change that location value to 70%, which will put these guys right next to each other and produce this effect here. So, we have this kind of implied pupil at this location. So the various triangles inside the face appear as if they're transitioning, perhaps back and forth as well as up and down. All right, but we do have a problem because I brought up the gradient annotator, so I'm going to have to bring it back by once again switching to the gradient tool. And I need to drag this guy up and over like so, so that the gradient is truly beginning at this location here, and then I'll drag this square downward so that it aligns to the top right point in the shape. All right, so I'll go ahead and press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. And I'll click off the shape to de-select it, just so we can get a better sense of what's going on. I didn't really buy it though. When I came back to the artwork later, this dark area right here, started to look like more of a dimple on the cheek. And so I decided to add a kind of eye effect to shape six, in the form of a second gradient. And so notice my appearance panel is up on screen right here. If yours isn't, then you can go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command. At which point you'll see the stroke and the fill both assigned to the path outline. Now I don't have a lot of room to work right here, so I'm going to switch to the stroke panel just for a moment. And then notice that my fill is twirled open right here so that we can see its opacity value and notice that it's indented to show me that it applies to the fill. Whereas this guy here, applies to the entire shape. I'll go ahead and click on that fill opacity then, and I'll change the opacity value to 50%, in order to create a translucent gradient. Now, I'll click on the fill item, and then it'll drop down to the bottom of the appearance panel to this little plus icon right here. It looks like a page icon in earlier versions of Illustrator. In any case, click on it in order to make a duplicate of that gradient. And I'm going to click on it's opacity value right here and raise it back to 100%. And then I'll click on the blend mode represented by normal, and I'll change it to screen, so that we're screening this gradient into the one below. All right, now, I'll switch back to my gradient panel so that I can edit this gradient. And I might as well click on a fill just to make sure that I'm editing the one on top. And now with this last color stop selected, I'm going to change its location value to 50% so it's right in the middle there. And then I'll make a copy of it by ALT or Option dragging it to this location works fine. I'm really looking for a location value of 70% and now I'll Shift + Tab to the opacity value and change it to zero so that the colors are fading away. And now, select this first color stop. I'll change it's opacity value to zero as well. And then I'll tap to the location value and take it up to 30%. All right, now this works out pretty nicely, except that it's the wrong color. I want it to be color three right here, which means that I need to drag that swatch to each one of the color stops as you see me doing here. And that way I'll maintain my opacity and location values. All right, now the angle is messed up. It needs to be once again, 30 degrees. And I'm going to apply that value without invoking the gradient tool so that we get this effect here. Now, if it looks a little plain at this point, rest assured it's going to work out brilliantly when we bring in the photographic image.

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