Blends and Gradients in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Blends and Gradients Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Blends and Gradients. Today you'll see how you can combine shapes and blends and gradients in Adobe Illustrator to create interesting effects which could, for example, be used as background illustrations. As you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started working with blends in Illustrator. 2. Blends and Gradients - Part 1: For our first blend, I'm going to create a new document which is going to be 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size. I've turned off align new objects to pixel grid, and I am working in RGB color mode, so I'll click "OK". I'm going to start with a circle, so I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag out an ellipse. I'm going to remove the fill from it and I'm going to set a stroke color of orange. Now I've got an illustrator setting set up that's going to scale the stroke effects if I enlarge this circle, I want to disable that for this. I'm going to choose edit, and then preferences, and general. I'm going to turn off in the general preferences, scales, strokes and effects, and click "OK". If you're working on a Mac, you'll find that by choosing illustrator and then preferences. This will allow me to make a duplicate of this object by just Alt dragging a duplicate away and enlarge it, and it's still going to have a two pixel strike because it's not being scaled with the object. That's what I want to happen here. I'm going to give this a green stroke. To make my blend, I'm going to select both objects, and I'm going to choose object, blend, make. I'll get a blend from small to large, and from orange to green. I'm going to select either my blend, and I'm going to double click the blend tool here in the tool palette, with that opens up the blend options dialog. I'm going to turn preview on, and I'm going to set this to specified step so I can control the number of steps in the blend. I can make more or less by just adjusting this value and click "OK". It's also possible to make a blend go along a path. I'm going to go and get my spiral tool. It's just a tool bus positioned with the line segment tool. I'm going to click once in the document. I have a radius of 50, a decay of 80, so it's going to decay pretty quickly, 10 segments and I'm going in a counterclockwise direction. I'll click "OK", and that's created a spiral. I'm going to just enlarge my spiral a bit. Just holding shift as I do so, so it's constrained to its regular proportions. I'm going to put my blend along this spiral. I'm going to select both objects, the blend and the spiral. I'm going to choose object blend, and I'll choose replace spine. That's going to replace this linear spine with this spine to make the blend rotate around my spiral, I'll click replace spine. Now I chose counterclockwise direction because I knew I was coming from large on one side to small on the other. If you choose a spiral shape that doesn't work with your blend, just go and reselect your blend and choose object, blend and choose reverse spine. From this, you will say that I'm going now from large in the middle, to small on the outside. It's not what I want, but that will help you if you need to reverse your spine. Just going to go back and reverse it again, so I'll get what I want. I can fine tune this blend and I'm doing so by going to the selection tool. I'm just going to double-click on this shape here, and continue to click until I've got it in isolation mode. Now I can adjust just the starting circle, and when I make it bigger, you can say that the entire blend has changed because it's updated to go from this larger circle to the smaller one. I'm going to click away from that, and I'm going to go and pick up this circle. I am just going to enlarge it a little bit too. Then with the direct selection tool, I'm just going to press the "Escape" key to get out of isolation mode. I can come in here to this spiral, locate the points on this spiral, and just adjust them a little bit to tighten up the inside of this spiral, and just make the blend work a little bit better with it. I'm trying to get a space around my spiral a little bit. Working with the direct selection tool allows me to isolate these anchor points and individually edit them. Now this spiral could be used in things like making patterns, but you could also use it as a decorative element. One of the things that you might choose to do is to create a rectangle over the interesting part of the spiral and then clip the entire image to this rectangle. I've got a no fill, no strike rectangle here. I'm going to my last palette. I'm just going to open up what I've got here, and see I've got a rectangle and a blend. I'm going to select both of those, and I'm going to right click with the selection tool, and choose make clipping path, and that just clips the spiral to the rectangle. This element itself might make an interesting image for social media, or for web use. 3. Blends and Gradients - Part 2: For our next blend effect, I'm again going to choose exactly the same settings for my start image at 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, RGB, and I've got a line new objects to pixel grid turned off. I'm going to make sure that I have a stroke selected but no fill at all, and I'm going to start out by drawing a very small circle here, going to select the circle, and I'm going to choose "Effect", "Distort" and "Transform", "Transform". So I'm going to use the transform tools here. I'm going to turn preview on, I'm going to set my angle to 15 degrees, I'm going to set my horizontal and vertical scale to a 105 percent, and I'm going to start cranking up the number of copies. What I have here is a transition from a small shape to a larger one, and everything is centered over the top of the original circle, because this icon here, this middle of these nine boxes is selected. If we change it and select one of the other boxes, different things happen. We are creating interesting spiral effects. Now, I'm going to take this as the effect that I'm looking for. I'm just looking for an interesting spiral. I've got 70 copies selected. I'll click "Okay". Now, everything is associated with this circle here, so, if I move this circle, everything moves. If I enlarge or shrink this circle, I just enlarged at the wrong one, I want to shrink it now, then the entire shape is going to be reformed. I'm going to take this shape now, and I'm going to expand it, so, I'm just going to watch the layers panel, so we can see what's happening here. Right now, we've got a single path for the transformation on it. I'm going to select that and expand it, so, I'm going to Object, Expand, Appearance. Now, I've got a group with a whole series of circles in it, so, I'm going to break out that group, Object, Ungroup. [inaudible] got groups. Every single one of these circles is a group, so, I'm going to again choose "Object", "Ungroup". What I'm looking for, it's just a whole series of path, I want to keep this last palette as clean and tidy as I can because of what I'm about to do next. I've got all layers shape selected, so, this is what I've got, a whole series of individual circles. I'm selecting them, and I'm going to blend those, Object, Blend, Make. I'm going to double click the blend tool here, I'm going to turn preview on, I'm going to specified steps. I'm going to start increasing the values here. What I'm looking for is some interesting patterns here throughout the blended area, and I'll click "Okay". This is the blend that I have so far. I'm again going to select over this, and you can see that it's a blend in the last palette here. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to break out the blends. I'm going to choose "Object", "Expand", click "Okay". Now, I've got a whole series of shapes, and they're all grouped. Again, I'm going to choose "Object", "Ungroup". Just to make sure that I have just a lot of circles here. So now, let's see what we've got. This as what we have so far. I'm again going to select "Over Everything", and I'm going to the Swatches panel. I'm going to open the flyout list here, choose "Open Swatch Library", and then "Gradients". I'm going to choose fruit and vegetable because they are some interesting gradients here. I have already opened up the Swatches panel here, and chosen large thumbnail view. It just makes it easier to see what your swatches are going to be like. So I'm going to apply a gradient color to the lines of my circles, and this is now the effect that I can get. You can see with the gradient we are now getting some more interesting things happening in the center of the circle. [inaudible] going to press "Control" or "Command Z" just to undo this, let's just go back to what it looked like when it was black. That's what it looks like when it's black, let's select everything, let's apply a gradient. Much more interesting with the gradient. So you can reselect it and try different gradients to see what effect you get. Again, we could create a clipping mask for this and use that element for a social media post, or for a background element, or some logo if we wished. 4. Blends and Gradients Part 3: For our final pattern, I'm going to choose ''File'', ''New''. Again, I'm working with a 1000 pixel by a 1000 pixel image RGB color mode, turned off, Align new objects to pixel grid, I'll click ''Okay.'' Now this is a process that I learned from a Russian designer who posts really good videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, her videos are largely in Russian and she uses a Russian version, or did use a Russian version of Illustrator, so it made it a little hard to understand what was going on. This is Julie Roses' process, but I'm going to show you it here. I'm going to start with just a black stroke and no fill. That's really critical. I'm going to the ''Pencil'' tool. I'm actually going to double-click on it because I want to have a look and see what settings I have here. I've got ''Smooth'' cranked right up and that's a really good idea because we want some smooth lines and I've got everything else they selected here, so I'm just going to click ''Okay''. I'm going to draw out with my pencil tool some lines across my document. I'm going to start just over the edge here and I'm going to make some nice loopy lines and just some bendy ones. You probably want about six or seven lines in total, but you do want them to be nice and bendy. If you make a line that you don't like, just press ''Control'' or ''Command Z'' and just undo it. Once we've got a nice tangle of lines, you go into the selection tool, go and select over all of these lines and then you're going to choose ''Object'', ''Blend'', ''Make''. Double-click on the ''Blend'' tool, click ''Preview'', go to ''Specified Steps'' and start cranking up the steps. Now we learned a lot in that last video about what sort of patterns we're likely to see behind this texture if we are able to use a gradient on it, so don't be afraid of building up some really quite dark areas here in your image. I'm just going to click ''Okay''. I'm going to re-select over my entire object and I'm going to apply a gradient to this blend, but first of all, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to expand my blend. I'm going to ''Object'' ''Expand'', and I'll click ''Okay''. In the last pallet, we've got a group with lots of other groups in it, so I'm going to choose ''Object'', ''Ungroup''. I'm going to continue to do that until everything is ungrouped, just into single paths. I'm going to select over my paths and I'm going to apply a gradient and this time I'm going to apply a color harmony. I'm going to open up the ''Swatches'' panel, go to ''Open Swatch Library Gradients'' and I'm going to choose ''Spectrums''. Now I've lost my nice big thumbnail, so let's go to large thumbnail view. Now what I want to show you just before we leave this spectrum or before we use this spectrum one, is that if you don't like the gradient you see here, if you click this icon, you're going to load a different set of gradient. You can navigate through the gradients that you have in your gradient collection by just clicking on these icons. These are ''Neutrals'', these are ''Metals'', these are ''Gems and Jewels'', here is ''Fruit and Vegetables'' again. You can go backwards and forwards through that list by just clicking here, so you don't have to continually go back and open the panel. I'm going to ''Spectrums'', so I'm going to choose this spectrum. I can close this now because it's been added to my swatches panel because I've actually used it, I'm just going to click away. You can see how this has given us a really interesting look to our design. Now as we're working with the design, I'm going to select over all of these objects, but it would really help me if I could see what I was doing. So I'm going to ''View'', and I'm going to choose here, ''Hide Edges''. What that does, is it hides the edges of my selection, so I can actually see live what my shape is looking like. I've left the bounding box on because I just wanted to be reminded that I am actually working on all of these objects. I'm going to choose the gradient panel here because this is where I can adjust my gradient. If you want to make changes to your gradient, make changes to the color, or make changes to where the transition is, you can do so by dragging on these sliders. The ones underneath the gradient are the color stops, so this is the yellow color stop. If I move it closer to orange, then the transition from yellow to orange is going to be faster and the transition from yellow to green is going to be slow because it takes up more of this gradient. These on the top are intermediate stops and what they tell you, is where the intermediate point between blue and this color is. So if we drag it closer to the darker color, the transition is going to be much steeper, so we're going to have a lot of blue and then a really fast transition into this color here. If it's in the middle, then we're going to have a slow and even transition with our colors. You can work on your gradient, so you can adjust it if you wish. I'm going to bring a little bit more green into the end of this here because it's being cut off a little bit and just click away. Now what I also want to do, is I want to work on the blending mode, how each of these lines is blended in with every other line. I'm going to click on the layer to select everything here. I'm going to my "Appearance'' panel. You can see here that I have layer contents and what I'm doing here, if I were to work with the "Appearance" panel, is I would be working with the entire layer, so anything I did would be the way the layer interacts with other things. If I click on ''Contents'', double-click just to open it up, now anything I'm doing is affecting all these lines individually. What I want to do, is to change the blend mode, how every line here interacts with every other line. I'm going to open up ''Opacity'' and I'm going to set this to "Screen". There are a couple of blend modes that work particularly well, one is ''Multiply" and one is "Screen", but I'm going to try "Screen" because I really like these light points that it gives us. I'm going back to the last panel. I'm going to add a new layer here at the very top. I'm going to target this layer and I'm going to add a black filled rectangle to my art board. I'm just going to click here. My art board is a 1000 pixels by a 1000 pixels, so my rectangle is going to be that as well. I'm just going to go and get black, I'm going to fill it with black node stroke, go to the "Align" panel here, you can get to it by choosing "Window Align", drop-down menu, choose ''Show Options'', make sure I have "Align To Artboard" selected so I can now center this shape on my art board. In the last panel, I've just collapsed both my layers, so that all I can see is the layer itself. I'm going to drag ''Layer 1'' on top of ''Layer 2''. That just reverses the order of these layers so it's very easy for me now to see what my shape looks like with screen blend mode over a black background. Now before we have a look at this shape with a white background and a multiply blend mode, let's just go and borrow this rectangle. I'm just going to drag and drop it onto this new icon. Now I'm going to take this rectangle and just drop it up in the top of layer one. It's going to black everything out, but what I want to do is to use it as a clipping mask. So again, I'm going to select ''Layer 1''. I'm going to the ''Selection'' tool, I'm going to right-click and choose ''Make Clipping Mask'', and so that's just clipping the contents of ''Layer 1'' to the rectangle that is the size of the artboard, just giving us a little bit better of a look and seeing what our shape actually looks like. Now let's see what it's going to look like if we use multiply blend mode on a white background because it's not going to work on a black background. I'm just going to turn my black background off for a minute. Let's go back to this Layer one. Let's open up our clipping group and what I'm gonna do, is I'm going to select everything except the rectangle. I'm actually going to ''Lock'' the rectangle, that will allow me to select everything in this clipping group except the rectangle. I'm going to the ''Appearance'' panel and here you can see that I've got ''Path'' showing and I've got an ''Opacity'' of a 100 percent screen blend mode. Let's open that up and let's change the blend mode for every single one of these shapes to" Multiply". You can see that this gives us a different look. The "Multiply" blend mode gives us a much darker effect on our shapes. So you can use either of these or you could experiment with other blend modes, most probably won't do anything, but you might find something that is more interesting for you. Of course, when you finish doing all of this, you will want to turn your edges back on, so go to ''View'' and click ''Show Edges'', because you want to make sure that when you've got something selected that you are actually seeing the edges on it. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of these blend effects yourself and to apply a gradient if you wish to them and then post the resulting image in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about being creative with blends and gradients in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as the class that they may want to take and if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design For Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 5. Blends and Gradients - Extra video for CS5 and earlier users: If you're working with Illustrator CS5, CS4 or earlier, you're going to encounter a problem when you go to create the ribbon effect the way we did it in the last video. The reason for this is that the ability to use a gradient for a stroke was only new in Illustrator CS6, so CS5 users won't be able to do just that. But I've got a workaround for you that allows us to create pretty much the same ribbon effect, but I still suggest that you watch the first video just to get an idea as to where your headed. Now, I'm going to choose to create a new document, a 1,000 points by a 1,000 points in size is fine, RGB color. I'll click, Ok. Now, I'm going to the Pencil Tool as I did in the previous video. I'm going to double click on it and just make sure that I have smoothness set really high because I want Illustrator to smooth out my pencil lines. I'll click Ok. Now I don't want them to be filled, but I do want them to have just a regular black stroke, and I'm going to create just a few pencil lines. We're going to be done pretty much the same way as they were in the original video, I'm probably just not going to create quite so many. Once I've created my lines, I'm going to select over all of them so that they're all selected. I'm going to be aware of the stroke weight because we're not going to be able to change that to much later on. I want them to be quite thin lines and then I'll choose Object, Blend, Make. I'm going to double click on the Blend Tool here in the tools palette. I'm going to select Specified Steps, I'm going to turn preview on. I'm going to crank up this value quite high. So here I've got specified steps of 60 and I've got quite a good effect happening here, so I'll click Ok. So far we're at exactly the same places we would have been in the earlier video. I'm going to open up the last pallet because we're going to need to keep an eye on what's happening here. What I want to do at this stage is to break out this blend. With everything still selected, I'm going to choose Object, Expand. I'm quite happy to leave all the options in this box selected and just click Ok. Now, let's open up the last pallet and you'll see here that now we have a group that has lots of paths in it, one for each of the lines. I'm going to choose Object, Ungroup. Now, I just have all the lines that we have that comprise the objects. I'm just going to click away from here right now, you can see this is what we're going to have. Now, this is the point in the previous video where we applied a gradient to the line. If you try to do that in earlier versions of Illustrator, even though it tries to put it on the line, it actually ends up being on the fill. I'm just going to show you what happens because we're going to need this panel anyway. I'm going to open my Swatch Library, I'm going to Gradients, and I'm going to choose Spectrums. I'm going to click on the Spectrum that we planned to use. Even though the stroke was at the four there, it's been applied as a fill and there's no way that I can apply it as a stroke. Nothing when I click it here is working. I'm just going to turn the fill off entirely. Right now we have a series of thin lines. We can't apply a gradient to the strokes, but we could apply it to a fill. Let's select either all of these shapes again and we're going back to Object, Expand. This time, I'm going to disable Fill, because there is no fill on those lines but I do want to expand the current stroke. So I'll click Ok. Now I get a whole series of group, so again with everything still selected, I'm going to choose Object, Ungroup until everything is just a path. Now, let's have a look at one of these. I'm just going to click on one of these and you can see it now has a black fill, but no stroke. What we've done in expanding our strokes is we've actually turned these lines from having a black stroke to actually being just a filled shape. Effectively, now they're a really long thin bent rectangle. It's just that there's no easy way to get to that point without using the blend. Now that we've got our lines, let's go and select over everything and now let's go to the Fill and let's apply our gradient. When I do that, we've got the effect that we expected to see. I'm going to select over all the shapes again, go to the Appearance Panel. Here I have my same opacity settings here so I can set it to multiply, and that will give me a very dark effect here. So everywhere these shapes are overlapping, it's going to multiply the colors so they're going to darken and of course that would work well on a white background. If I select over all the shapes and use instead the blend mode screen, then I'm going to get that light effect, so that would work very well on a black background. Now you can follow the previous video in terms of making a clipping mask for this shape and also for adding your black background if you wish but this is a way of solving the problem with Illustrator CS5, CS4 and earlier where you're not able to apply a gradient to a stroke, but here we've converted lines into filled shapes to avoid that problem.