Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

When you hover over the annotator (the key to getting

it to work), you’ll also see fi ve-sided color stops and tiny

square midpoint skews, both labeled in Figure 7-1. Drag a

color stop to change its location. Double-click it to display

a pop-up Color panel and assign a new color. (You may

need to click the icon and choose CMYK to ac-

cess anything other than gray values.) Click along

the edge of the annotator to add a new color stop.

Drag the midpoint skew square to change the speed

at which one color stop transitions into the next.

Gradients are all very fl exible once you come to

terms with them. Problem is, Illustrator offers just

two styles of gradient: linear, in which one color

transitions directly into another, and radial, which

fi lls the shape with concentric rings of color. (You

switch between them from the Gradient panel.) That’s

fi ne for design work. The many gradient boxes and back-

grounds in this book, for example, are fi lled with linear

gradients. But what if you’re trying to approximate real-

life or otherwise volumetric shading inside an illustration?

That, my friend, is when you resort to blends and meshes.

Designing Custom Gradients

Despite the fact that it was introduced more than 20 years

ago, Illustrator’s second gradient solution, blending, contin-

ues to rank among the program’s most powerful capabili-

ties. Blending permits you to design custom gradations

and morphs, in which one shape or group of shapes

steadily transitions into another, by creating inter-

mediate subpaths, called steps, between two se-

lected extremes. You can then mask the blended

paths—or any other collection of objects, for that

matter—inside a path.

The fi nal solution, gradient mesh, is altogether

unique to Illustrator. It allows you to move colors

in two-dimensional space—right there in the art-

board—and blend between neighboring colors in all

directions. You can create bright spots, shaded edges, even

rivers of color. Figure 7-2 features an illustration created

using just two shapes, each fi lled with a gradient mesh.

Figure 7-3 shows each shape with its mesh exposed as a

series of anchor points and segments.

Figure 7-2 .

Figure 7-3 .

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Designing Custom Gradients