Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to make
a gradient opacity mask in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started. All right, I'm here in
Adobe Illustrator, and I'm just going to create a new document. So we'll come over here to Create
New. I'll come up here to Print and then Letter. And then we'll Create. Now I'm going to paste in
a group of objects. So I'll hit CMD V, and I'll make this a little bit bigger. You can see we've
got a lot of different pieces here. And the nice thing about having a gradient opacity mask
is that all of this can just fade away into nothingness.
And that's exactly what I'm going to do now. And there are really two ways to do this. First,
we can select all of the pieces that we want to fade and group them. These are already grouped,
but you can do that with CMD G, or CTRL G. Then I'm going to draw a rectangle over the top of
everything. So I'll hit M on my keyboard to get to my Rectangle Tool, and I'll just click and drag.
I'll bring my fill to the front, and then I'm going to get my Gradient window up. And that
is under 'Window' right here. Now all of these other palettes that you see can also be found
under 'Window'. Now make sure you have the fill in front, and we'll just click the gradient slider.
And I'm going to get rid of that stroke. And now I'm going to cut this. And to do that, I'll just
select it and hit CMD X or CTRL X on a PC. I'll click on my group of objects, and I'll open the
Transparency palette, and then I'll choose 'Make Mask'. And that makes it just kind of disappear.
And it'll make a black mask...everything that's black will go to transparent. So all the vector
parts that you see are now transparent. And now I'm going to click on that black part,
and then paste in front with CMD F or CTRL F on a PC. And now you can see that gradient over here
in the mask area. So as you can see, on the white side, the white side of the gradient,
all of our stuff is showing up pretty well. But on the black side of the gradient, everything
is kind of fading out. And we can also adjust our rectangle and move it in like this, to have
it line up and be really light over here and dark over here. And now we can get our Gradient Tool.
We'll click that. And usually you'll get a slider across here. I don't have one right now, and
that's because my fill is not in front. So you'll see the slider when you move the fill in front.
If you still don't see that, make sure you've got 'Rectangle' up here in the upper corner.
If you have any kind of group here, you won't see the slider. So now we can really fine tune
our gradient and how it's going to look. We can even come over here and rotate it if we want to.
And now to get back out of that editing mode, I'm going to click over here on the little hourglass,
and now we can see those pieces. Now I'm going to paste in another graphic. And this one is
kind of a moon shape. And I want to show you how you can just fade one part of this. So to do this,
I'm going to hit L on my keyboard to get my Circle Tool. I want to make a circle
right about right in here so or so. So this is probably about the center. I'll click and then
hold SHIFT and OPT. That's SHIFT and ALT on a PC. And I'll just move it down a little bit to get
right over that. And now I'm going to hold SHIFT and OPT and make it completely enclose that moon
area. Then we'll go to our Gradient window and click the gradient bar. I'm going to go
ahead and choose 'Radial' this time. This time I want the white on the outside and the black
in the middle. So I'm just going to flip these. And then I'm going to bring the black in a lot.
I'll bring the white in too, so it's got a really hard edge right there.
OK, now I'm going to do the same thing. I'll CMD X or CTRL X on a PC, click on this one,
and then 'Make Mask'. Then I'll click on the black area and paste in front. And you can kind of see
we're getting the effect that we want now. I'll go ahead and get my gradient slider. I'm going
to move my gradient around the other way so I can have a little better control with it.
And I'll zoom in really close, then get back on the gradient tool.
And I'm just going to bring this out like this, maybe this one in, and now we can kind of fine
tune how much of it we want to fade. You'll probably notice in this mode, you can only move
the circle or the mask around. So you definitely need to click back on this square to get back
out of that mode. We'll CMD minus. Now these actually do fade into a background. So if we add
a background to this, I'll hit M on my keyboard, and then I'll just draw a rectangle. I'll hit D on
my keyboard to make it a white fill and a black outline. And then I'll hit SHIFT X to switch
these two. So I've got a black fill and a white outline. And why don't we just change this to
a different color. We'll say OK, and then we'll hit SHIFT CMD left bracket, or SHIFT CTRL left
bracket on a PC. And as you can see, these actually do just fade out straight to red.
Now I'm just going to draw kind of a random shape so that we can work with a different way
of making the mask. And I'll color this one green. OK, we'll make it a little bit bigger. And now I'm
going to come over to 'Transparency', and just click 'Make Mask' right off the bat.
And now we have the black mask, but we don't have anything to go inside it yet.
Then I'm going to draw a rectangle around that area. And the reason I like to do it
the other way is because I don't know exactly where the edge of that is, if I can't see it.
That's why I like to draw the rectangle first. And now we can draw with the Brush Tool, and you
can see it show up on your mask. And you can use any of your tools to modify this mask. You can
even take a screenshot. Let's take a screenshot of this up here. And then paste it in and resize it.
Of course, the mask will only work with black and white, so that's why we're seeing it like that.
So you can get pretty crazy with what can be done here in this mask.
I'm going to use my Width Tool, and make my Pencil Tool that I just used in there,
(which is also a gradient) a lot wider. So you can get really creative with it. Then
when you're all done editing your mask, you can just go ahead and click back on your main object.
And now when you go to your Layers palette, if we hit f7, that'll bring up the Layers palette,
and we click the little drop down, you can see that path right here. And it does not have any
layers underneath it. But it is underlined kind of in a strange way. And what that means is, there is
something in the Transparency window. So whenever you see a dotted line underneath your layer,
go ahead and go to your Transparency window, and see if there's an opacity mask in there.
And if you want to get rid of it, you can just release it, and it'll show you everything that's
inside. And then you can just delete the pieces that you don't want. Now the cool thing about this
too, is that we can export with the transparency so I'm going to get rid of this red background.
And I'm going to move my artboard up so that it only includes these two objects.
And now we'll export as a transparent PNG. I'll go ahead and make them 300...a nice high resolution,
and then we can come out here and see how they turned out.
And they look great. If we pull them on to our Chrome Window, you can see that
they actually do fade into transparency. So those are the ins and outs of opacity masks
in Illustrator. They can be really handy. All right, if you like the way I teach, I have a few
full courses out on Skillshare, and I also have a link in the description below that will give you
two free weeks. It's a trial for Skillshare. And if you can watch all my classes in that amount of
time, you'll get them all for free. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!