Gradients

Now that you're familiar with adding color or fill to specific objects and curves or shapes that you create here inside illustrator. Let's take a look at how to apply a gradient. And if you're not familiar with a gradient it's essentially one solid color changing or transitioning into another solid color or actually one transitioning into another into another into another. So let's just jump right in and see how this is done. First let's create a shape so I'll just grab the Ulip tool draw it out I'm holding Shift to make a perfect circle and spacebar again to position it. Before I let go and you can see that or fill here is white and our stroke is really one point of black. So it almost looks like we have nothing here inside our board. So our gradient tool is down halfway to the end of our tool bar here. You could see gradient tool or you can simply hit the keyboard shortcut the letter G to access it. So I'll click on that. And if you just simply click inside the circle that you created it will apply a gradient. And you get this gradient bar which allows us to adjust our gradient. Now if you're familiar with Photoshop you have to go and adjust the gradient in the gradient tool options. But what's really great about this bar here is that it allows us to kind of change gradients on the fly. You notice at the beginning of the bar we have a circle at the end of the bar or we have a diamond or a square. We click on the circle we can actually move the entire bar around our shape. So if I move it to the right you can see that the gradient adjust itself in if we're looking at this bar which is a gradient from white to black we essentially get more white because we've adjusted our bar over where I can put it back in the center. And you could see we're getting more of an even distribution between white and black. Again if you hover over this bar you're going to see these color stops at the bottom. And these are what allows to change the color of our gradient itself. So for instance in the first color stop I can double click on that and I can get a swatch. Yours might look something like this so I like just using the color swatch here instead of the color palette so I'll simply click on the Swatch icon and then I'll choose a color so he can choose something like yellow if I go over to the other color block here and double click on that we can bring up again our color swatch and then choose something maybe like a dark red I can hit the return or enter key to get rid of that color swatch. And if you want to add more colors you can do so by simply clicking anywhere here on the gradient bar just below it. And we get another color stop so we can double click on to bring up the swatch and we can choose any color in the rainbow and then hit return or enter to apply that color. So again if you click and adjust this bar you can see that we're adjusting our gradient. You can actually click on the cube or diamond here at the back and then it just the length of the gradient so if you wanted a very tight gradient you could do so or if you wanted a very wide gradient that distributes these colors across the surface you can do so like this. You can also move any of these color stoppers that you created so I can click on them and just slide them over. You'll also notice that if you come close the end here not quite on the Cuber diamond but hover a little bit off to the right. You can actually rotate degrading itself so you can stick and rotate this to something maybe like vertical and then we want to position are great and again we can get something that looks like a sunset. So take a moment to create a simple shape and then use your gradient tool to create a new gradient for that shape and then adjust it by adding more than one color. Adjusting those colors and positioning rotating your gradient tools so that you can get a different type of gradient