Transcript:
(SUBTLE Electronic MUSIC) – [Dan]. Hello, everyone, My name is Dan from Solopress And welcome to our tutorial for how to use the gradient tool in Illustrator, as part of our graphic design tutorial series Were creating a lot of free content, so make sure you click subscribe and the bell icon to be notified of when we upload. It is a simple process and we’ll first start off with making a shape in our Illustrator file. Just as an example, I’ll be making a shape using the Rectangle tool. Holding the Shift key as I draw it, Go to the Gradient panel on the left hand side of the screen and click to select. Ill then click on the box and Illustrator should have created a smooth black to white gradient. Depending on your settings, you might not have any options showing up on your screen. To rectify this, go to the Fill box on the right hand side and click Gradient Options to open up a little settings box. Firstly, though, we’ll talk about how during the line can lots of different types of gradient styles. If we keep the Gradient tool enabled and draw a short line, then the gradient will generate over a short distance. By power of deduction, this also means that the longer line will create longer gradients. We can also change the angle when first generating it too. By changing the direction, your line is facing, it will change the angle of the gradient and therefore give you different effects. Now, on to the Gradient tool settings new in the 2020. Version, there are now three different types of gradients, including the new Freeform mode. But we’ll get back to that one in a minute Below this, there’s the option to manually and accurately change the angle of the gradient, which will rotate it. Now to change the colours of the gradient double, click on the small circles at each end of the gradient bar. You have the option of choosing some predetermined colours, or if we select one of those colours, we can go into this box and manually adjust it to exactly what we need. I’m going to go for a bluish colour for the first box and then a darker blue for the second one. If you’re following along with this tutorial, an important thing that might have been different is that I’m using CMYK sliders, which are different to the traditional RGB. You might be using when editing photos and what you might be seeing on your Illustrator. Cmyk is a colour process used in printing and so has a different colour space to your monitor. We’ve made a video explaining the differences. So click the pop out banner in the corner or follow the link in the description to find out Anyway. Now that we’ve changed the gradient colours. We can go about stylizing them. Going back to the type of gradient we have linear and radial. Linear is just a simple gradient from one end to the other. But by contrast, radial peaks at a certain point of the gradient. By default, the centre will be in the middle. But if we grab the little hand with the centre and move it, we can adjust the central point of the gradient. Radial is circle based. So we can also change the maximum radius of our secondary colour. Which is this one? What’s similar with both is if you look at the gradient bar on the Gradient box we’re able to slide the colours closer to each other. This affects the transition harshness between those colours. As before with making a short line on the gradient tool, it’ll also make the gradient a lot shorter. Switching back to linear. We can see a visual representation of how we’re changing it. By looking at the physical line on the gradient itself, we can see where the colours are meeting and you can more accurately set the start and stop points anywhere on this line. This will also affect the location box of the colour you’ve selected. If I select the lighter blue and try to move it as close to the middle as possible looking at the location box should reveal that I’m actually a little way off. I can drop down the menu to snap the gradient point to a certain percentage of the image or type in my own value and press Enter. So that’s how you make traditional gradients. But in the latest update of Illustrator, which, at this point is Illustrator 2020. There’s a new Freeform gradient option within this tool. Selecting it, you’ll see that the colours we’ve previously selected are gone but instead replaced with four points and randomly selected colour scheme. It’s actually pretty useful for gradient generation if you keep changing to and from the Freeform option like this. But I don’t like these colours. I’ve decided I want a pink one. I can select each of these gradient points by clicking on them. You’ll see there’s a small dashed line around it. And you can adjust this by dragging the handle to affect the weighting of the colour points. Incidentally, Pinks and purples have proven to be quite popular in gradients, I can then go through and change the other colour points to different colours using the same method (machine running). Actually, I want five gradient points. So by keeping the Gradient tool selected, I can click anywhere on the shape to make another one, which I can still adjust the weighting and colour of. If you make another one by accident or just want to delete your gradient, you can select it by clicking it and then press the Backspace button. Or when it’s selected, click the bin button here. Really simple interface here. Like you may have noticed that there’s the option for drawing points or lines We’ve had points selected, but we can also create a colour in a line by clicking one point for the start and nother for the end. You can also adjust the shape of this line by making a third point in a different direction, which will bend it Or simply by adding a third point between the first two and dragging that to make a curve. Each of these points will need separate colours to be input. The gradient tool is very versatile and it’s currently a graphic design trend, especially the Freeform style. Thankfully, Adobe have made it simple and easy to use. So that’s how you use it. If you found this video useful, please leave a like. And if you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment. Them We’re creating all kinds of tutorials for Adobe programmes. So hit subscribe and enjoy our content. My name is Dan. Thanks for watching.