Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to be talking
about the Gradient Tool in Adobe Illustrator, specifically, how to apply it to shapes, how
to change colors, and also we'll go over all the settings that are involved with this tool.
All right, let's get started.
All right, I'm in Illustrator right now, and I'm just going to go to 'Create New'.
And I'll do 600 points by 600 points.
I'm going to hit CMD zero to get this into the middle.
And now I have a few shapes that are already created that I'm going to copy and paste in
here.
But you can also use a Gradient Tool with any shape, so anything underneath here, or
just other shapes that you've drawn with the Pen Tool.
So you can draw a rectangle or maybe a circle and do these same things.
But I'm just going to delete these.
Just...
I'll just use my V Tool to select all of these, copy, and then I'll just close this.
And I'll paste these in here.
And now we're going to apply some gradients to these.
OK, now I'm going to choose this gear.
I'm going to come over here to the gradient and click that once, and then just click on
the gear once, and that'll give us our normal white to black default gradient.
And we'll also have this bar across here.
And this bar lets us do a lot of adjustments to the gradient.
So we can click on this white circle and pull it in to change the white part.
And we can click on the black circle over here to pull it in and change that.
We can also move where the halfway point is, by just moving this diamond across like this.
We also have this black square over on this side.
If we hover nearby it, we'll get a Rotate icon.
And if we see that, we can click and rotate that angle.
So now the black is coming from up here and going down here.
If we're in a different place nearby, we'll get a Scale icon, and pulling that out will
make the gradient bigger.
So the black part is all the way out here right now and we can't see it on the shape.
But if we pull it in, you can see that black part.
To change the colors, we can click here and just click on the white dot, and then go to
our Swatches panel and choose, for example, red.
We can also double click that, and we have a few different options here.
We can change our CMYK sliders, we can choose a swatch, or we can use the eyedropper and
sample something else on our screen like this red up here.
All right, now we'll change the other one, so I'm going to double click on the black
and we'll change this to orange.
Now I can't move this panel around.
So if you're having trouble seeing what's underneath, you can go ahead and click back
on here.
And you can choose a different swatch over here or come up to the 'Gradient' panel where
you have all of the same options that the Gradient Tool has.
And we can use our sliders here to get a more harsh gradient.
Now here are some of your other options.
We have types of gradients here.
We've got the Linear Gradient, which is one side to the other.
We have a Radial Gradient that goes from in to out.
So I'm going to move this so we can see that a little more.
I'll move the red out, get more of a sun look on our gear.
And we also have the Freeform Gradient.
Now I have a whole other video about the Freeform Gradient, so I'm not going to get into that
today, but I'll leave a note in the description so you can watch that video if you want.
OK, let's go back to the Linear Gradient.
And here are some other options.
We can change the angle.
I'm going to put it at 45.
And you can see it also changed our slider here.
So we could do that here, and you can see that it changed it up here.
So these are all the same controls that you have here.
But the Gradient Tool allows you to do them right on the object and see the changes as
you go.
We can also add more colors to our gradient.
So I'm going to get right underneath this bar and add another color.
We'll make this one yellow.
Now we can also do this on our tool itself...hover just below that bar, and you can add a gradient
in the same way, just by clicking.
I'll double click this, and we'll make this green.
So now we sort of have a rainbow going on.
We've got red to yellow to green to orange, even though that's not really the rainbow
order.
That's OK.
And now these locations are where on this panel that these colors fall.
Right now this green one which is selected, is at 51.8.
And we could put it at exactly half by putting it to 50%.
So if we maybe wanted this one exactly 75%, we could change that here.
And the yellow one at 25%.
So now they're exactly evenly spaced apart.
And if we wanted to switch the gradient to exactly the opposite, we can just click this
button.
Now it looks a lot different because we moved our slider over.
So you would have to adjust that to get it to look exactly opposite because it's going
off the edge, as you can see here.
So to do that, we can just click on this and just drag it a little more centered over the
gear.
Now after you've applied a gradient, you can still change the shape of your object if you
want.
So for example, we could use our A Tool to grab a couple of these points, click and drag
them out, and because you extended the shape, that is where the gradient is going to start.
OK, I'm going to try to add another gradient to this heart.
So I'll click on my Gradient Tool and click once.
But you probably noticed that I don't have that bar here.
And that's because this is a group.
So I'm going to ungroup it, and the second I do that I get a bar to adjust the gradient.
So if you're not able to see the adjustments bar, ungroup it, get it down to only a path,
and then you should have this bar to adjust.
I'm going to use my eyedropper tool to just click on this one.
Oh, and there's one more thing I wanted to show you: How to make a gradient go to transparent.
So I'm going to hit M to get a Rectangle Tool.
I'm going to draw a rectangle behind this heart and send it to the back with SHIFT CMD
[ or SHIFT CTRL [ on a PC.
And we'll make this just a solid purple.
I want this heart to go from blue to transparent so it blends in with the purple.
I'm going to get my Gradient Tool, double click, and choose a light blue.
And I'll leave this one black, but I'm going to set the opacity to zero.
And I don't know if you can really tell on this, but it goes from blue to kind of muddy
grayish and then to transparent.
And I don't really want that.
I'd rather it go from straight blue to transparent.
And the way to do that is to make the entire gradient blue, but just make one side of it
transparent.
So we'll go ahead and do that.
I'll double click this.
We'll choose that same color of blue and zero percent opacity.
And now it's a beautiful blue to transparent gradient.
And we can also reverse this here.
Now a really great use for gradients is buttons.
It really helps them to look 3D.
So I'm going to hit A and select this.
And you can see we have a light blue to a darker blue transparency.
And I think that's the best way normally to use gradients, is just go from a darker shade
of the same color to a lighter shade.
It just gives it more depth without looking kind of crazy like these look.
So although this button is already made with a gradient, I'm going to just show you how
I did that.
So we're going to change this to a light green gradient button.
First I'll get my Gradient Tool, click once.
I'm going to choose the first color, which is light green, and then choose the second
color, which is slightly darker green.
I'll change the angle to 90 and hit Return.
And then I'll reverse it.
So now we have a nice clickable-looking button for a website or something like that.
All right, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please click on the 'Like' button.
And, if you want to take full courses in Adobe Illustrator, please check out Lindsay Marsh
on Skillshare.
She is just a really great teacher.
And she has a ton of classes all about graphic design and Illustrator.
And there's a referral link in the description.
And if you click that, you can get two free months of Skillshare.
All right, I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!