The radial gradient tool is great for anything from adding dimension to your
shapes, to creating special lighting effects or even making a beautiful
sunset out of one background shape.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to turn this flat circle into a shiny sphere
using radial gradients and give you sneak peek at some more advanced effects
that you can achieve with this tool.
Once you learn the basics, let's jump right in.
You can access the gradient tool, a few different ways.
There should be a shortcut to the panel here on your workspace.
If not, you can go to window gradient to open that.
or you can use the gradient tool and click on a shape on your art board.
If you already have a gradient applied to an object, there will
be shortcuts to get to the gradient panel that show up in your properties
tab, or you can press G to bring the gradient annotation tool back up.
And we'll be using that quite a bit.
I'm going to pull out my gradient tab here just to keep the panel
up throughout the tutorial.
To apply a radial gradient I'll select my circle and choose this middle
option here in the gradient panel.
Now we've got the default radial gradient, which has two color
stops, one white and one black.
The most important part of the gradient panel is the annotation bar here.
And understanding working with color stops.
Each of these circles on the bottom of the bar is a color stop.
And each color stop can have a color, an opacity and a location.
To add a color stop, you can click underneath the bar.
You'll notice that the mouse has a plus sign when you're in the right spot,
and to delete a color stop, make sure you have it selected, indicated by
this thicker white circle around the color and click the trashcan button.
You can edit most aspects of the gradient in the gradient panel itself,
including the angle and the aspect ratio or dragging color stops or midpoints
around, but to get the full experience of the gradient tool and change something
like the origin point, you'll need to use the gradient annotation tool
that comes up on the shape itself.
And we can access that by pressing G on our keyboard or by clicking the
gradient tool in your tool panel, using the gradient annotation tool directly
on the object allows you to adjust settings visually like the aspect ratio.
The rotation and the size, one thing that we can do with the gradient
annotation tool that's really handy is to drag the origin point of the
gradient so that you can define where it's starting within the shape.
You're working with.
One thing to note with gradients is that the gradient tool will
remember your last settings.
If I were to draw a new shape right now, it would maintain the position changes
and aspect ratio changes that I just made.
If you want to clear this appearance, you can go to your appearance
panel, click the menu here and just use the clear appearance option.
Now, if we reapply a gradient, you'll see that it's back to the basic appearance.
So how do we go from this basic radial gradient to this 3d shading?
If I select this shape, you can see that it's just four gradient stops.
If I bring up the gradient annotation tool, you can see that we've adjusted
the angle and the origin point.
Let's walk through recreating the sphere.
You can either press G on your keyboard or click this edit gradient button to
bring up the gradient annotation tool.
Now we'll click under the annotation bar in the panel to add to new color stops.
Doesn't matter where you add them initially, because we'll
adjust the location individually.
Next we'll apply these four shades of purple to the color stops.
The hue you choose doesn't matter, but we need four different
values of the same color.
So you'll use a base color.
A version of that base color, that's almost black, a lighter, mid tone,
and an even lighter highlight.
I've added these four colors to my swatches palette just to make
it a bit easier to choose these colors for each of our color stops.
You can do this by either double clicking the color, stop inside the
gradient panel and choosing a swatch.
Or you can do the same thing on the shape itself inside the gradient annotation
tool by double clicking, the swatch you want to change and applying the color.
I'll go ahead and apply the last two colors here.
We're just working from lightest to darkest going outward.
Next we'll adjust the location of our color stops.
If you click a color stop, you can see the location changes in this box down below.
We want the first one to be at around 10%, the middle one to be right around 55%.
And for the last color stop, we want to bring it in from the edges.
So I'm going to put that about 85%.
Now we'll adjust the origin, the angle, and the start point by using our
gradient annotation tool on the shape.
First thing I'll do is grab this origin point.
You can see an X appears when you got it.
And I'm going to click and drag this up just outside our circle.
We want that light color touching the edge of the gradient bounds.
You can see this already starts to give a 3d look to the sphere.
Next we'll adjust the end point of the gradient.
I'm going to click and drag this until the darkest color is just
outside the bottom of our circle.
And then we'll adjust the size to bring this back down.
And then you can click and drag on the annotation bar itself to
adjust the position of the gradient.
So we'll bring this in until we have the lighter color, almost touching the
edge of the upper angle here and the darker color, just outside the circle.
Now I'll make some manual adjustments just dragging the color stops and
the midpoint sliders until we get the effect that we're looking for.
If I deselect, you can see this is starting to look a
lot like our sample image.
With our circle, starting to look more like a sphere, the only
thing it's missing is its shadow.
What I've done for the shadow is just another simple radial gradient with three
stops, one with an almost black color, one with a medium gray, and we fade out
to white, which I've set to 0% opacity.
The gradient itself also has a much thinner aspect ratio.
As I've squished it down here to match the circle.
To recreate the shadow all we need to do is grab our ellipse tool, and drag
out an ellipse that's roughly where the shadow would be if this were a 3d ball.
And we'll go ahead and open our appearance panel and click clear
appearance so that we can start over with a default centered radial gradient.
And if you click this down arrow next to the gradient color, you can
click the default white, black, and change it back to a radial gradient.
And if we go ahead and hit this button, it will reverse the direction
of the color stops that exist.
So this gives us a good start for our shadow.
I'll press G to bring up my gradient annotation tool one more time.
And we'll click to add just one color stop, and double clicking, I will just
choose a medium gray for this one.
And then we will click on our white color stop and use the opacity
dropdown to set that to zero.
I'll just open my layers panel here and quickly drag the ellipse that is
going to be our shadow right underneath the ellipse that is our sphere.
Now, we'll grab this top circle to start reducing the aspect ratio
down so that it's narrow and fits the ellipse that we've drawn.
If you grab the end point here, we can extend the gradient out.
And this can be a bit of a trial and error process where you'll
change one setting and then have to go back and change another.
Remember that if you grab the bar itself, you move the entire gradient within
the shape that you're working with.
So we'll move this down just a bit.
So it looks like it's right under the ball.
And if I deselect, you can see that already looks like a pretty decent shadow.
While you can't really see the effect that the opacity change has on a
white background, if we go ahead and add a solid shape behind the sphere,
you can see that the white color has faded out towards the edges.
Now, one more thing that's really powerful with radial gradients is
if you change a blending mode, for a shadow, we usually will set that to
multiply, you can see that that gives you a beautiful feathered shadow.
That is good for any color background.
If we go ahead and change the background color to something different, we'll see
that the shadow blends into the background because of that multiply effect and the
0% opacity at the edge of your gradient.
This vector spotlight effect is a great example of something
you can do with radial gradients to create lighting effects.
If I select one of the shapes here and open up my gradient panel, you can see
that this is basically the same concept that we just used to create the sphere.
And all I'm doing here is using different blending modes and
different opacities and layering these ovals or circles over each other.
And each of them has a radial gradient applied.
I do have a tutorial on this already uploaded, so you can follow along to
create the spotlights if you want to get some practice with your radial gradients.
And one more effect I want to show you here is our sunset
that you saw in the opening.
And if I open my gradient panel to show you here, this one just has multiple
color stops in different settings.
And that creates the entire sunset effect.
I do plan on uploading a full tutorial of this sunset.
If you'd like to see that feel free to subscribe.
I hope this was helpful if it was don't forget to leave a like!
Happy illustrating and have a great day.