From the course: Illustrator: Seeing Through Transparency

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Adding transparency to gradients

Adding transparency to gradients

One of the nicer things that Adobe has done with regard to gradients is that as of Illustrator CS4, you have the ability to assign opacity values to individual stops or color stops that appear on a gradient and now also inside of Illustrator CS5 we also have the ability now to apply transparency or opacity values to individual mesh points in a gradient mesh. Let's see how that works here inside of a document. I have this file opened up. It's called flowerpot.ai. Let's start by looking over here at the bottom of the file where I kind of have this black area that would kind of act as some kind of a reflection or some other kind of a cast shadow maybe of the flowerpot itself. Now I could normally fill this with a gradient, a regular black to white gradient, but if this were on some kind of a background, or I wanted to place this on a pattern, or on top of another image, I would really want a way for me to have the gradient go from some kind of color to transparent. So let's see how to do…

Contents