Creating Gradients Crash Course - Adobe Illustrator

1. Class Promo: radiance are awesome. They can add a punch to any design in this class. We're gonna go over to three multiple ingredients to create a lot of awesome effects. We'll even take a look at typography and how to apply ingredients to that create dynamic headlines. You can do some pretty amazing things with radiance photography. They'll give that awesome filter and, as always, let's learn together. 2. Let's Great Started with Simple Gradients: welcome and stay. We're gonna create beautiful Grady INTs right now. I'm in Adobe Illustrator, But everything you learn in this class you can apply to photo shop and other programs as well. So it all kind of works the same. So I'm going create a few boxes and we can start start off with a few Grady and options. So I'm gonna go ahead and just select my rectangle tool. And I'm just gonna create a couple of long rectangles and was going to make this a solid gray color for we have too much fun times. Good. Copy and paste. A couple of these guys kind of put on a little bit further apart. And let's start off with just four for right now. So let's add some color to this and makes it beautiful radiance. So let's go ahead, and I'm gonna just expand this little bit, make a little bigger. I kind of see what I'm doing here. Okay, so I gotta go hands like this first shape, and I got to go to my Caray deviant tool and you'll do the same thing. And Photoshopped, if you're in Photoshopped and I'm gonna pull out by ingredient tabs. Gonna drag it over here so you guys can see it. If you cannot find this than just go to your window and then you should have radiant right here. It's checked for me, but let me uncheck it and then I'll check it again and you'll be able to see your radiant panel. And also make sure you have show options available when you're doing this. Chills going. Create a simple to color, Grady it so they could have won Grady int from the side that slowly moves over to the right and changes to another color. It's called a linear to color, Grady. So you do linear ingredients at first? Very simple. So let me go ahead and click on this default. You're always gonna start off with the steeples. Good click anywhere on this Grady int slider in your radiant panel, it's gonna load in this very boring white to black radiant. So we're gonna go ahead and double click on this very 1st 1 and it's gonna be our left side was going double click, and she's a color. And if you only see option like a gray scale, there's no problem. You just go over to this extra options panel and make sure that RGB or see him Why care? Selected our veggies? Great. Let's go ahead and pick out a color here. Let's pick out a beautiful blue Let's fade for blue degree and that seems to be very popular and filters with photos I see on Facebook and advertising. Let's go ahead and do blue kind of mess with them a little bit. Can I like that since good click off and then now we're gonna double click on here and change this one. So this is gonna be the right side that's gonna fade into. It'll let me select it and make sure to say I think it did. RG viewed the last one. And so let's go ahead and have this fade into a nice green. So it has that kind of a blue to green fading. So there's kind of a radiant and I always go ahead, select our shape. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so you can kind of see how this is working. We'll zoom into 2 50 Here we go. This is simple to colored radiant and how I kind of change how quickly. It changes from the first color to the second color. No good. Select my, um Grady it tool right here. And I'm gonna click and hold the mouse and eager to see kind of a line being created depending on how far I drag the mouse and your drug it the other way and you can actually change the direction from left to right. Give me to go up and down. I can go this way. Diagonal is still kind of let you change the linear Grady int from left to right. So the further I dragged this, the slower It's got a transition from one color to the second color. If I click and drag over to the right, then I do in a very short line. It's gonna start the Grady it very quickly, and then it's gonna end up with, ah, a little bit more of the right side and do it. So just play around with this with the different directions to come to see which you like. I usually like long blended once. I don't like the ones that transition to quickly like that. That doesn't look very good. So I'm gonna click and drag and get a nice, smooth transition. That's our first Grady in our fate. 1st 2 colored radiant and so stay tuned and we're gonna create more. 3. Let's Try Three Color Gradients!: So now that we created a very simple left to right linear Grady, let's go ahead and complicate things a little bit. So what I'm gonna do is like this, like this next far. Let's do some different colors. So I'm gonna go to my radiant tab that's hiding right here and here it ISS Let's go ahead and select the different colors. Let me do like a purple to let me see. Maybe a pink me a little bit more purple, darker for bulls. This is where you play around with different things, usually slept in colors that aren't opposites on the color wheel usually tend to harmonize better. So let's. That's why I'm doing kind of. They're both purples. Two steppers, shades. Okay, so now I have my light purple shading into my dark football when it creates a really beautiful, radiant. And so that's good selector, Grady. And do what we did last time selector. Grady a tool and this click and drag and see kind of how we want it, how quickly we wanted to blend. So let's if we would you left to right or right to left. Let's do left to right out right there. Okay. So really like where That Grady it's going. So let's go ahead and select it, and I'm gonna throw in, um, extra challenge. I would actually have this baiting into three colors and to keep it in the same family, which usually harmonizes a little bit better. I'm actually to take this second darker purple, actually, take the lighter purple was gonna click and drag it over into the middle and said to create our third color was gonna click anywhere here or anywhere, actually click over here and create 1/3 color. So let's go ahead. And what's great about clicking on this and then creating your new color next to it is gonna copy that same color. So now I can double click. And now I could just do some small adjustments and this go stay in the same color family. So let's make this lighter and make this lighter. I want to add warm tones I might want at all. It's a nice, warm tones there. Look at that's very vibrant. Okay, so you can also adjust thes so you have this fading to the right or the left a little bit quicker and also up here. You cannot change these so you cannot actually drugs all the way next to this color. You'll see the transition from this, the slider color to the to the kind of the medium shade as much quicker. So you can kind of Hafun and adjust something a little bit. Maybe I don't want it so dark over here. Maybe I think this over a little bit. So the dark, it's still there, just not as prominent. And if I want these two colors to but up with each other, it's a transition. I could do that, too. So there's three colored radiant and I could go ahead and select it. It's like my great tools. I wanna have it have kind of a diagonal angle. I could have a fade just like that. So now when I take this and expand it, go ahead. Delete these other two great bars. Tennessee were some nice filtering. Come in. Now that I have this bigger, we have a fade a little bit. Sometimes I have to zoom out. It's about 200% to really get that line as long as I need to get it. I really like long faded radiance. I don't like him like this. That looks awful. That looks all that looks awful. Foodie dragon again today I smooth transition. That really looks beautiful. Okay, so now it created 1/3 color. 4. All About Radial Gradients: Okay, so now that we created a grating with three colors, let's talk about radial Grady. It's so the whole time I've been doing linear, Grady it so everything kind of blends in a nice even line. But what if we wanna have something a little different than a linear blend? We could do what's called a radio blood, so that's gonna blend it in a circular fashion. So let's go ahead, and I don't know which color like better. Let's just take this top color. We're to paste it here, actually gonna believe that and create a square instead Well, down ships and kind of see the action. This is linear. Just like my great tool. You do it tight lines and kind of see that linear grand. We're gonna make Iranian tab instead of type linear. I had a select radio. Do you see Coming down out blends in a circular fashion so you have a little bit more power when it comes to making it look like it shaded or highlighted. Ah, lot of backgrounds and advertisements or made this way. Let's go ahead. Uh, what kind of mess with this color and shade a little bit so bear with me like a little bit more vibrant. Actually, you take this nice purple. I really like this purple a little bit better Was changed it to a linear or I'm sorry, radio. And so when you go ahead, take your tool, your great tool and dragon make a nice long line. Really looks nice and almost kind of creates a natural shading in this box. So it almost seems like the boxes three. D Just by adding a radio Grady int lost. Let's go ahead and to kind of, um, see, it's kind of keep playing with it. My Grady. A tool. You could make it to the other direction and noticed the tighter Do the Grady in the kind of less to me blended and realistic it looks. His long lives haven't really blend nicely. It always create highlights. Low lights, shadows. Um, well, with the radio radiant tool, we go back and do linear. And so you kind of see the difference. I can really do a lot with that radio option 5. Metallic! Create Awesome Metal Gradients: So now we're gonna create a metallic grating from scratch So never gonna go and take our three color ingredient that we've already created And I'm just gonna go And just to make it easy, I'm gonna go to edit colors. I'm actually gonna convert this to gray scale. So now all of this is gonna be a grayscale. So it's kind of a quick way to get back to my black and white Grady in, So to create in the talent color, you probably don't want to have 10 to 12 different colors all throughout this band ingredient. Sometimes you make this little wider. It's easier to create. It's what we're gonna do is we're gonna move some of these really close together. We're just gonna create maybe 10 or so points the border. Do you? Sometimes the more realistic it ISS. So where you want to do is go to create highlights and shadows, bars of highlights and shadows to create the metallic effect. So it's going and click are some. Let's go ahead, Teoh grayscale make it easier. Let's make that brighter. I'm gonna click on pretty much every other one kind of make it a different color darker and lighter. Just like that. Sunken Go a little wider or lighter than others. Grayscale Just just keeping it simple. You could do this colors. Well, I could make gold. You can make blue metallic. Oh, no, no, no. I want to do gray scale. It's not bad color this So you wanted to varying shades. So I don't want this one This highlight to be the same as this lie. Highlight to be the same as this highlight. So shake it out. Maybe we can add some darker accents. This one, they make that darker. This one right here could be darker. So do great skill that makes life easy to show. You make that one really dark and maybe this one on the end dark Make that 100% black. Let's make a couple of really light winds right here. You can already see kind of our metallic kind of coming together. And of course, you can shift these around the highlight my shape first and shipped these around and you condemn really tight. See how it kind of creates have been almost looks three d make some of these tighter and looser. This is just your playing around. Of course you could see it pretty good in your preview here, then. Just kind of play around. Well, just make him a smoother blend like this. Okay, So now we're gonna go and select a great tool that lets go ahead, click and drag. Since he kind of where we like the metallic filler, we could also do radio as well, saying that that looks like sometimes a radio, sometimes better to the linear for metallics that tenses, um, create a better lighting effect. It's not some kind of change the colors a little bit. I gotta edit colors. Ah, let's convert to RGB and let's see if we could manipulate the colors. Just color balance was kind of just see what kind of a metallic color effect do. That's kind of neat. Do you read? I'm just adjusting the pillars here. And so instead of having to manually adjust all these of the colors I like, I just go to adjust colors and ah, you are to be. And I can kind of do all that without having amazing you doing all and they're all gonna be in the same green family together. Ooh, I like that one. That's pretty esos goods like that and just keep messing around. This is a real quick a review of how to make metallic radiance. 6. Font/Type and Gradient Fun: So now we're gonna have fun and apply some of these Grady INTs that we've learned how to create Teoh typography and text. Let's go ahead and select our text tool. All this will apply in Photoshopped as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and dio Let's do my name. Seems simple enough. Let's go ahead, make it bigger. It's got a farm we like. This is always the hardest thing to do. Who I like that to go back to where we were so many options. What is a great and get a look good with usually Boulder works really well, Script looks really well, I really like that. When I selected that need to find out where that is. That was a great one. It was around this area. Let's for right now, let's go ahead and click. Let's do a nice bold type because you're gonna be able to see especially the metallic a little bit easier. So I'm gonna go ahead and right click to apply a Grady int. Um, you're gonna have to create outline. So right now this is live edit herbal text. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna create outlines or you could go to object and create outlines. So I'm just gonna go ahead and right click, create outlines case, and now it's no longer edible. So now I'm able to apply a Grady into the text. That's an important step, because if I were to take a live text and go ahead, try to sample this, it wouldn't do anything. So I right clicked, and I created outlines. So let me go and take my eyedropper tool. It's going to the metallic. So when hands like the metallic and when you have a fund are a type that's been outlined when you select a grade and when we select another ones, you kind of see what happened. So what happens is each letter is gonna have the radiant. It's not gonna go ahead and be across the whole thing. It's Each letter is gonna have the beginning of the color and the end of the color, and it's going to start over, and that can look a little messy and dated and busy. So go ahead and select your name and create a select the Grady Int tool. You gotta go to do what we've done before and let's do a nice blending across the entire name. So I'm gonna go ahead and click the mouse and drag, and we're gonna create a nice blending. So in that much nicer and more modern, let me actually take away this third color out of the middle. I'm just dragging it down. It just automatically deletes it. Boom! Let's make this a little more vibrant, just like that. Perfect. Let's go ahead and play. And sometimes with font, that's kind of makes it looks like the highlights. Let me make this bigger. Looks like the highlights are coming from the top, so it almost looks very natural with the highlights starting on the top. Let me let that blend longer. Year ago, I wonder what a radio look would look like and notice. When I click on radio, it's gonna reset it. So now each letter has its own radiant. It's good, and click on the name was. Do a nice blend across. Get rid of that. So sometimes one years could kind of be neat, because now I can have a highlight here, like almost like the sun is hitting this angle. So that's how you do that? Let's do kind of, um I kind of like radio. It's cool in here. Just kind of get it How I like first. Okay, so let's, um it's a live text again. This is my headline. Just get a types and kind of generic text make the smaller we make this bigger and let's do a beautiful script Fought instead how about this one? And I got a copy and paste. Since I know I like that one, gonna keep that there and let's see if I can find something better And if I can't already like the one that I selected really want a script warrant? So I think script ingredients can look really beautiful. Humbled this one. Conceive a lower case. T looks better. Yes, that does look better. All right, that's great. I'll put that to the side, but let me work on this for right now. So, like always, we need Teoh before we can apply radiance. Let's right click and create outlines. Now I can apply a Grady A. It's going to take her eyedropper tool and let's see what this one looks like. And it applied it to each letter. We don't want that. I mean, maybe you do, but it looks better if you go ahead and blend it the whole way like that. Really love AARP anklets to keep doing this paint so you can kind of see a very nice graduation of the color. Kind of like going at angles with linear kind like that. So it's not just straight across. That's kind of how I created that. Of course, you could do this with gold. You could make it gold. So let's go and make the smaller back to the side. Copy and paste. Make this bigger. Let's get our blue Grady in there and let's see what this looks like. It's to kind of a tighter when they don't want flu. I kind of want gold's Let me go To select this, we got to edit colors. I'm gonna Dease C Let's go to adjust color balance and see if we could get it kind of like a brown gold color. So we're just kind of adjusting. That is getting close because you want to add texture to you wanna go online and find the texture to overlay it. You could do that as well. This was very popular nowadays to do click OK, kind of more of a brownish gold. But if you ever want to experiment with mawr metallics, you can go to your Grady INT panel. Our show your color swatch channel and you go to your library, which is this icon right here, and you can import radiance. Eso. Let's see all these different Grady. It's already created for you if you not really sure what to do. If you go to metals, that's got a kind of load some metallic for you. So let's go ahead and click on a silver gold, looking for a very vibrant gold. That's a little crazy. You can always download radiance and load them to your libraries. Well, a photo shop. An illustrator. It's kind of a quick gold by I Honestly, you create my own Grady in for this last one. Go back to my radiant panel and I can't find it. Where to go. No problem. Gonna window and we'll find it again. There it is was experiment with a color here. It's kind of see all the knowledge we've learned in this class, see what we can create. What's the blue one So what I'm gonna do is I really like this blue on it Keep it in the blue family So I'm gonna click on this blue and I'm gonna click next to it And this gonna sample that color. So now when I double click it I don't have to adjust too much. Get a color alike. This is where it's gonna be all an experimental game. Drag that down it deleted it. Let's do a radio stick. Radio blend. Oops. Let's bring this over the right. So now it's kind of got a normal transition. Okay, So you could see I kind of experiment. Apply this, Grady into this color as well. This linear. So we're just gonna have it plans. You could have fun with this. 7. Creating a 3-D Effect with Gradients: So let's have fun with shading using radiance It was good and create a simple box letdown shipped and creating a some fox. And I'm gonna just select the default ingredient that's available. So I'm gonna go to my swatches. Where's my swatch panel? No problem. Goto window and I could find it. There it is, was gonna default. Grainy. And this is your default White to black, radiant. If you ever need to kind of go back to a default one so it could be able to create your own Discover your swatches panel and then you can select White Black has your default radiant. I'm so gonna go ahead and select Mike Iranian tool. I got a select radio on. We're going to kind of create three D effects here, so I'm just gonna go from the left down to the right and it's gonna create a natural shaded box. So we're gonna copy and paste we do the same thing with circle is a circle. So now notice how the circle looks. Three D. It's a flat circle, But just by using this radio, Grady, until we're able to kind of create a highlight and a low light shadow. Just find these ingredients. Eso continue once you already have in your line Created Going to go like this and actually moving around a little bit just by dragging this. Okay, I want the shadows to come from the right. I want the shadows to come from the bottom. You can actually drag and make your line longer to blend smoother and sometimes in creating shadows actually like to have a shorter line. Quicker blend. You can kind of see that shadow just on that top portion of the circle. Make it tight, just like this. Tight and long. Kind of like seeing more shadows. Kind of how I had it before and I can create three D shapes. We're going to select this into a different color. You can do the same thing, usually always have to go back in. Select Lynn here. Let's do the same thing. But now we have kind of some color. Now we can actually make this part of the same family of since purple is going. Drag this out. Click on this color click next to it. I sampled that color that will click it, make it lighter. Let's make a real light. Really Get some highlights going on in here, so must make it white. Let's pick a white well, may with a hint into the purple There. Okay, Now, let's see. Kind of a dramatic, a little bit more dramatic of lighting when we do that. So now, even if I wanna have more detail sugar to create a shadow underneath the circle, this is just extra. I wanna have it. Let's see when I I'm just doing a little bit of a blurring of Gaussian blur on this shadow . Okay, I'm gonna make this a little bit darker, so I'm going to go to the edit color and let's see. So just color balance. Yeah, let's make him darker manually was good decision so I could show you what that is. I'm just down rating all these colors, making a darker Skippy to the left. Darker but keeping Yeah. So now I was gonna go to my transparency, make it a little It's a fairly show through We're associating, Actually, the need to move my shadow here the lights coming in from this top angle. So to change that, the closer it is the object, the closer the object is to the ground. Of course, you can adjust that a little bit too. So just kind of creating three D. You could actually create highlights around here. There's a lot of things you could do, um, with radiance to help you create a three d effect. 8. Using Gradients to Create Photo Filter Effects: right. So we've created with text we created with shapes. How come when he's Grady INTs with photography and kind of have that filtered Look, that's what we're going to do today. We're gonna create a simple box, and you could do this in the photo shop, but you do it the same way so I could just create a box on top of the photo and has a radiant right here. Uh, good. And kind of get a radiant I like. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click this in photo shop. You would just go to your layers panel and drag it below. You want this to be want this Grady int to be the very back layer? So it's going right. Click that I just could go toe arrange and I'm sending it to the back. Now our radiant is hidden in the background. It's back there. We're gonna go and click my photo, which is on top, and I'm gonna go to transparency and blending mode. Actually have a blending mode class if you're interested. Take Nazi can learn all about this. This is just a kind of a quick few minutes overview but I have a whole class on how to do this photo shop. I'm starting to go the transparency panel right here, and I'm gonna go ahead and select luminosity and there's are So what's gonna happen? Is this gonna when I select the transparency effect, it's gonna let things behind the photo through and and that's why they call it the transparency. So now it's letting that nice, beautiful grainy in that we have underneath through and creating a really cool, filtered effect. So let me go ahead and drag this up. So now I can have access to my Grady int layers. We're going to click on that. So I have access to this box Mitt Flip back here. Now that I've selected this bottom layer, I can do what we've always done with radiance and kind of drag and create kind of where I wanted to blend. I wanted to could be harsh, blend just like that and have a transition. Um, let me go ahead and change his green. It's gonna play around here wants, do not quite as harsh. Let's do more of a purple. I like that. Okay, so let's play around with that a little bit and linear. Always. Our radio always looks really good with some of this. So I have that back later selected and play around some cool effects. See which one I like the best. Great. You kind of see a lot of things you could do with this radio player out some colors here. I like that one new. That's kind of neat. Kind of a warm in a cool color put together so you can create some really modern stop. You could add your headline here. Um, create some filters. So if you're interested, you can take my blending class. You can find out more how to do this in more detail and not create some really cool Grady int filter effects with your photos.