In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make these easy spotlights, just
using radial gradients and blend modes.
First let's open up Adobe illustrator and create a new document.
The dimension should be 1080 by 1080 pixels, and you want to make sure that
the color mode is set to RGB color.
I've got the colors I'll be using today to the left of my art board.
You can find the RGB values for these in the description down below and to
the right of the art board, I've got the three gradients that we'll be
using to build our spotlight effect.
The first thing I'll do is create the background square by clicking on my
rectangle tool and just hovering over the corner of my art board till I see
that "intersect" and then I'm going to set this to 1080 by 1080 pixels to
match our art board size and click okay.
With the background square still selected, I will click on my gradient
panel to open it and we'll click this middle option here to create a radial
gradient I'll press G on my keyboard to bring up the gradient annotation bar.
And I'll double click on the darkest color stop here.
And I'm going to set it to this color, which is a purple that's almost black.
And then for the center, I will double click and set
this to our mid purple color.
For this gradient I'm going to leave all of the other options default.
To begin building our first spotlight shape we'll use the ellipse tool.
You can find this by pressing L on your keyboard, and I'm just going to drag
out a circle roughly in the center.
And then I'll use these align shortcuts just to make sure that it's
perfectly centered to the art board.
With our circle selected, if you open the gradient panel, you'll see
that it's applied the last gradient that we built for the background.
I'll press G on my keyboard to bring up the gradient annotation tool.
And now we'll edit the colors.
If I double click on the last color stop we're going to set
that to our pure black color.
Next we'll add a color to the gradient bar, double clicking on this color stop,
we'll set this to the bright mid purple.
Finally, we'll edit the lightest color in the middle by double
clicking on the first gradient stop.
And we'll set that to our very light pink purple here.
One more adjustment I want to make with this gradient is to grab the
middle slider here and drag it to about 25% of the way through the gradient.
You can see the location down here and you can also just select from the menu.
If you'd like to change that.
The reason I've used pure black around the edges of this radial gradient is
because we're about to set the blend mode to screen and pure black will disappear,
completely giving us a perfect feathered edge all the way around our gradient.
To see this in action, go ahead and select your circle and open up the
transparency panel using this dropdown.
We're going to go to screen mode, and now you can see that there's a feathered
edge all the way around our circle.
You can also see that the brighter colors in our gradient are having the
effect of lightening the background now.
We'll make an adjustment to the gradient now by selecting our circle
and hitting the G key to bring the gradient annotation tool back up.
And we're going to grab the center point.
If you hover over it, you'll see a little X and this is called the origin point.
We're going to click and drag until this is just about at the top of our circle.
Next thing we'll do is reshape our circle into the spotlight shape.
Once again, you can select the circle.
If you hover over the side here, you'll see the arrows that
indicate we can scale the shape.
And if you hold down alt on windows or option on Mac, you
can scale proportionally toward the center of your shape.
I want this to be about 300 pixels wide.
And then we'll scale vertically in the same way so that the shape
covers most of the art board.
To make the lighting effect more intense in the center, we'll go ahead and
duplicate our shape by hitting control or command C to copy it and then control
or command F to paste it back in place.
Now we've got two identical copies of the spotlight shape on top of each other.
What we're going to do with the top one is scale the same way that we
did holding down alt, so that it scales proportionally to the center.
We don't want this second glow to be as intense all the way through.
So I'm going to grab the bottom here and just scale it up towards the middle.
You can also bring your gradient tool back up and manually
adjust these midpoint sliders to adjust how your gradient blends.
You can experiment with this until you get an effect that you like here.
We'll create our light source with one last gradient.
We'll make another ellipse and you can see that it's applying
the gradient from our last shape.
We're going to go into the appearance panel, just click this button to clear
all of the appearance attributes and that way we can start building a new gradient
that is centered instead of having the origin point at the top of the circle.
The gradient panel is still remembering the last three colors
that we used, which is fine.
We can start here first.
We will hit G to bring up our gradient tool and we'll double
click this first color stop.
And we'll set this one to pure white.
The middle color can stay the same.
We're using our mid-range bright purple and the last one
will still be our pure black.
Now we'll adjust these color stops.
I'm going to put the bright color to about 60% location and the bright
white will go almost right next to it.
We're going to leave a little bit of a space and you can see that this
gives us a bit of a harder edge.
So it's starting to look like a light instead of a glow.
Now to make this look like a spotlight that we're seeing in perspective,
I'll grab my direct select tool and just scale this down a bit until it
looks more like an oval than a circle.
And now grabbing my light source, I'm going to use the aligned shortcuts to
align it to the center of the art board.
And to the top, you can see that the black is still around the
edges here, which means that our shape is not in screen mode.
So let's select that.
Open your transparency panel.
Set this back to screen.
Now it's blending into our light glow.
So I'm going to move this down until it looks like the light
is coming from our light source.
I think it's a little bit small.
So I'm going to go ahead and scale it up.
I'm holding down shift and alt or shift and command if you're on
a Mac and just dragging so that it scales up from the center.
So this is our basic spotlight.
One more thing I wanna show you is to just add the glow to the floor so that it gives
the illusion of dimension in your image to do this, I will copy and paste the
base shape that we made at the beginning.
So this should be the back shape of your spotlight glow, and we'll just use control
C or command C to copy that and control F or command F to paste it in front.
Now I'll press V to get my direct select tool . And scale this down from the
top and then scaling it out from the sides I'll hold down alt or command.
And you can see that our gradient has the origin point at the top,
which looks a little bit off.
So what we want to do is just go to the appearance panel, click
the clear button here, and then we will reapply the gradient by
sampling it from our swatch here.
And we'll go ahead and bring the gradient tool up by pressing G and grab this
black marker at the top click and drag to begin compressing this gradient down.
We want to match the height of the circle approximately.
Now, if you grab this black square here, you can click and drag that.
And it's just going to expand our gradient towards the edges so that it matches about
the shape of the circle that we've drawn.
Again, we're going to have to switch this to screen mode, to get rid of
the black circle around the edges.
And I'm going to adjust the transparency down to 80% just to make it more subtle.
So I've hidden my color swatches, because I'm done with those and I'm
just gonna move this up a touch.
And now that we're done with the spotlight effect, you can
always add more spotlights.
I'll select all of my spotlight shapes here and hit control
G or command G to group them.
And then if I copy and paste, you could start adding more
spotlights to your image.
You could even rotate them or stack them.
And there's plenty of other effects that you can add to create more
detail, depending on how realistic you want your lights to look.
If you're interested in more lighting effect tutorials, you can learn
how to create neon graphic styles.
That color change with global swatches here.
And I will be uploading a few more in this series coming up.
So feel free to subscribe if you'd like to see those.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments down below.
Thanks for watching and have a great day.