From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Linear gradients - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Linear gradients

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- [Instructor] Gradients really do add some dimension to your work. In fact, the file you're looking at there are plenty. In the background, on the desk here, in the small machine that you see there, even the screen, you can see that and these cables. So let's have a look at how we can make a gradient. I'm going to select one of these objects here, this one down at the bottom of this column. And then using command plus or control plus on Windows. I'm going to zoom in like so. Okay. We've got a nice clear view of that then. Next, I'm just having a quick check over in the toolbox to make sure that the fill is in front. That's the solid square, not the hollow square there because otherwise that will apply a gradient to the stroke which we'll look at later. And then, we can go ahead and apply one. So, we do have a few gradients here inside of the swatches. We also have a gradient panel, and clicking on the ramp here will create you a gradient. I'm just going to undo that command Z or control + Z. But another way to do it very quick way is to just tap a period key on your keyboard. There you go, you get a gradient just like that. So, let's go ahead and mix one. Now we have these color stops on the bottom of the gradient. You'll see if we move them around, it's affecting the object underneath. And between any two color stops, we have this midpoint slider here, which we can drag to different places to change the blend. The default is right in the middle at 50%. You can actually change that exactly, either by typing or using the dropdown that you just saw here in the gradient panel. To change the colors, the quickest way is to double click on the color stops, like so. And then we get a panel. Now, at the moment, we have a gray scale slider here because the color is simply white. We could go ahead and click the fly out for this small mini panel here to another color model. So we could go and work in that. And we can also use the swatches as well. And you'll notice there are no other swatches in here just the colors. Let's choose maybe one of the colors from the artwork. Let's choose this very, very light yellowish color just here. Then click away and double click on the color stop on the other end, and maybe choose something else. Maybe one of these darker colors like so, or even something very contrasty like the blue that we have just here. Change the midpoint blend if you want to. And then we're going to take a look at something called the gradient annotator. And that's attached to the gradient tool in the toolbox. Tap G on your keyboard to get that. And this is a way that you can actually work with gradients on your artwork. It's exactly the same as it is in the color panel. You can go ahead and double click to access the color and swatches widget just there. You can move the stops around, you can introduce new stops by simply clicking underneath. They don't have to be the same color. That's an auto generator color there. You can mix whatever you want. You can even sample colors by engaging the eyedropper just here. This color picker allows you to go out and pick a color from the artwork or any sort of artwork, really underneath, including image files. You can even bring that in from there. You can, with the gradient tool, also change the angle of the gradient as well. So you'll see here, let me just disengage the color picker. That's the only thing you do have to remember to do, is click on that. But if I click and drag, you can see here that I can change the angle of that gradient. Loads of shading possibilities. There, you can see how much different that is. You can also change that angle numerically. There's a small field here inside of the panel, and if you have a gradient you think you're going to use again, you can come to this small icon at the top left of the panel, click there and then down at the bottom you can go ahead and add that to the swatches. Now, the only thing you don't get to do there is to give that a name. So what you can do is you can deselect your artwork. Okay. Go ahead to the swatches, double click on the swatch and then you can name it from there. Let's go ahead and apply that to one more piece of artwork just here. So, if we select the artwork on the other side, we can now apply our gradient to it. So let's click to do that. However, of course, it's pointing the wrong way. So, how do we get around that? Well, one of the quickest ways is to go to the gradient panel and click this icon, which will reverse the gradient. And there you are, that's how we can play with linear gradients. There are other objects in here that you can color up. You can use the gradients that are in the swatches or make entirely new ones of your own. You can have lots of fun with gradients. So I suggest strongly that you use them, play with them and also try and examine other pieces of artwork as we go through this chapter and see if you could shade certain things with gradients.

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