Transcript:
Shortly, I will show you all. The steps needed to have this rainbow fade from opaque to transparent. But for those of you in a hurry, I’d like to show you absolutely everything you need to know about this process in one minute or less. So I’ve got a red dot. I want it to be opaque at the top and fade away to transparent at the bottom. I’ve created a second shape with a gradient going from white to black. This will become the mask, which will sit over this red dot with masks, white reveals black conceals and the shades of gray will reveal semi-transparency so my shape with my gradient. I’m putting that over the top of my red dot. I’m selecting both of them from the transparency panel, which you can find at the bottom of the window menu, choose, make mask and we are done and just to prove that this isn’t fading to white, it’s actually fading to transparency up under view show transparency grid. There we go and we are done guys, okay, so for those of you, not in a hurry, let’s take a breath. Let’s slow this down a little bit and go through this methodically from the start. Okay, so my objective here is to have the rainbow nice and solid at the top and have it fade away to transparency to complete transparency before it gets to the very bottom of the canvas just here, so let’s review my layer’s panel just here, so I’ve got a sky layer clouds. We’ve got the sun and the clouds in the foreground, just there and wedged in the middle. Is the rainbow just here? Now if I unlock that, and if I select this all of the rainbow elements just here, they have been grouped together, but just so, you know, they don’t have to be grouped together in this case. They just happen to be okay. So what we need to do is now draw a shape. It will completely sit over the top of this rainbow and then apply a gradient, a black to white gradient to it. So I’m just going to scoot this over. Grab my rectangle tool and just draw out any old rectangle shape. Don’t worry, we can easily resize this later now. This just happens to have no fill. Excuse me, no stroke and a white fill, but it doesn’t matter what you’re starting with because we are going to force this to have no stroke so coming up and setting that to no stroke and the fill just here. Now there’s a black to white gradient option available within my swatches panel just here, but there’s a good chance you may not have that directly available to you, so you want to open up the gradient panel so window gradient. Now let me just back up a step here. Let’s say I just had this solid. White applied to it with the shape selected. I’ve got the fill targeted within the gradient panel, where it says type just here. I’m just going to click that first button. Just there linear gradient. Just click on that now again. I’ve gotten lucky here. I just happen to have a white to black gradient, but if you don’t get that by default, it’s very easy to dial this in now. Guys, you want one? Stop at the end and another stop at the other end. Uh, if you click inside of this area whether deliberately or accidentally you will add other stops, which you can apply other colors to we’re keeping this super simple this time. Okay, so if you’ve done this, you can just grab that and drag it outside the panel to throw it away now to edit the color just down here. I’m going to double click, and it’ll. Bring up this little panel just down here now. There’s multiple buttons just in here with this one selected, you can choose from swatches so you can choose the white Swatch. If I click on the color button, just here I can dial in any color. I like and often guys when you come in here. You’ll actually see this grayscale slider now. That might trip a few of you up. If you prefer those normal RGB sliders, just go to that same menu in the upper right corner. Choose RGB, and you should be good to dial in whatever color you like, so having done one color just down here, we’ll double, click the other, and we want to make sure that’s black so again we’ve got swatches or color just there, and in this case, zero is across the board for RGB, so we’ve indeed got black, fantastic, so guys, we’ve got our gradient going from white to black, which we dialed in via the gradient panel. The next step is to actually very specifically dictate how this gradient falls across the shape and we’re going to use the gradient tool to do that. So I’m pressing G or I can come over to the tools panel. Just here and choose the gradient tool now. The way this works is you click drag and release. And when you do, you basically define the start and the end points for the gradient. If you want the gradient to be square in other words, 90 degrees. Hold down your shift key while you’re drawing. So if I want it perfectly left to right, hold down the shift key perfectly top to bottom. Hold down the shift key. Now, also with gradients, You can see. I’ve been drawing rather lengthy gradients just here. If you draw a short gradient over a short distance, this is the result now. Remember, ultimately what we are. Drawing here is to become a mask that will sit over the top of the rainbow and remember wherever it’s white, we will perfectly see the rainbow wherever it’s black, we will see nothing and these shades are greatest in here. We’ll see semi-transparency. So if you want a very short transition between opaque and transparency, draw something like this in this example, though, I think something more like this with a gentle fade will look more aesthetically pleasing and also other things to consider, for example, guys. Maybe I want like the top third of the rainbow to be perfectly opaque and have the bottom two thirds. Fade away in that case. Maybe I would draw a gradient that starts white say around here, and then it fades to black by the time it gets to the bottom. Just there. Okay, fantastic, we’ve got our gradient. Nicely applied, lets. Now get it over the top of the Rainbow. So I’m going to, uh, bring it into place just here and also remember this thing that’s to become the mask needs to be sitting in front of all of your artwork. So if it somehow managed to get behind some of your artwork, just right, mouse, click on it and choose. Arrange, bring to front. I’m going to zoom in on the bottom just here. I want you to see the mask. I’ve drawn doesn’t actually completely cover the rainbow. That’s not a problem. Wherever you don’t have mask, you basically just won’t see any of that item that you’re applying the mask to okay. So I’m pretty happy with this. All I have to do now is select everything, remember? I just happen to have my artwork grouped. You don’t have to, so I’m selecting everything. And then in the transparency panel, just click on the button, make mask fantastic and check it out. Let me zoom in a little just here. This is looking great. It’s nice and opaque, just up here fading to transparency and it goes to complete transparency just before it gets to the bottom now again, we’re pretty much there, but there’s a few things I’d like to point out if you need to edit this after the fact, so I’ll click back on here Within the transparency panel. Guys pay very close attention to which of these two things you have selected now. The thing on the left is representing the artwork and the thing on the right is the mask, so your layer’s panel looks normal, But I’ve seen this trip up many people. If you’ve clicked once on the mask, the layer’s panel is now showing you the elements within the mask. So if this is looking a little bit weird, come over to the transparency panel, make sure you’ve clicked on the thumbnail for the artwork as opposed to the mask. Now you can hide the mask if you hold down the shift key and click on the mask. You see, you get this Red X. And all of the original artwork comes back, but what’s great is the mask is still applied, we’ve just temporarily hidden it, hold down the shift key and click on the mask again to to reverse that process If you hold down the alt or the option key and click on the mask, you can now directly. Visualize the mask so that could be very handy. If you want to tweak the mask, so if I press G to bring up my gradient tool again, I could easily make some changes just now so I will hold down Alt option and click on the mask again to jump back to our normal view, just here and so again, guy’s alt or option to click on the mask to edit it, but I want to emphasize the fact that you don’t have to be directly visualizing the mask to actually edit the mask. So for example, we’re seeing the artwork just out here. I’m clicking once on my mask, so I’m actually targeting the mask. If I press the G key, and if I click drag and release, you can see, I’m actually re-drawing the mask just there, although I’m actually visualizing the final artwork, so that’s a very powerful way to work, guys. So if you just click once on the mask, you can actually continue to edit the mask. Although you are actually viewing the artwork, one last thing left to show you with the item here selected. There is a release button just here so clicking on that will release everything. There’s my mask and there’s my original artwork. I kind of like what we drew there, so let’s back up a couple of steps just there, and that’s pretty much it there. Guys, I might leave it there. So that’s how you can fade something to transparency here inside of illustrator. I hope that gives you some good ideas and helps you out. Catch you later.