Assigning and modifying a gradient

- [Instructor] All right, here we are in Photoshop for a moment. So we can see this memoji that I created using a recent iPhone. And a great thing about it is you can choose your various facial details and then you animate the emoji by moving your face. And so I was able to get this guy to smile and raise his eyebrows. He looks great and everything, but he's very low res. Notice these harsh pixel transitions, which is why I decided to take him into Illustrator and redraw him as a piece of resolution vector-based artwork as we're seeing here. Complete with lots and lots of gradients. And so in this movie, we'll see the basics of applying a gradient inside Illustrator. For starters, we're going to switch to this document right here, which contains the base path outlines. And I'm going to go ahead and click on the big face path in order to select it. And I want you to notice up here in the control panel, this very first swatch, which indicates the fill, is set to none. All right, now I'm going to expand my toolbox so that it is two columns wide. And I want you to see that the fill is active down here near the bottom of the toolbox. And we have three different color options that are available to me. One's just called color. It applies a flat color to, in this case, the fill. The next is gradient. And then we once again have none. Each one of these icons has a keyboard shortcut and they're right next to each other on an American keyboard. If you press the comma key, this guy's going to change from none to white, notice that. And Illustrator's also going to switch us over to the color panel. So that you can select a color just by clicking on it there inside that spectrum ramp. If I press the period key, then I'm going to switch to a default white to black gradient and Illustrator will also go ahead and open the gradient panel. If it ends up small like this, then just click that double arrow icon a couple of times in order to expand the panel. And then If I were to press the slash key, which is next in order, then I would switch my fill, in this case, to none. You'll also have the option of clicking on either one of these gradient ramps right here or you can click this down-pointing arrow head and that will give you a list of all the gradient swatches included along with this document. Which happen to be the ones you get whenever you're making an RGB document. And so for the sake of demonstration here, I'm going to switch over to gold dust, like so. And now you have the option of moving these color stops around. So these little round guys are color stops. You can also specify a location numerically. So if I want that stop to be right in the middle, then I could change it to 50%. You have the option of reducing the opacity of a color stop. So for example, by taking it down to 10%, if there was something in the background, I would go ahead and reveal it. If you want to get rid of a color stop, you could either select it and then click on the trashcan or you can just grab it and drop it down like so. You also have the option of changing the color of one of these stops. In which case, all you have to do is double-click on it in order to bring up the RGB sliders. And you can go ahead and switch to HSB if you prefer. And then I'll just go ahead and change the color to blue so that it's clearly visible right there. Not necessarily the most beautiful gradient, it'll suffice for now. And I'm going to change the color of this guy as well to let's say, a bright shade of green. If you want to change the angle of the gradient, just enter an angle value. So for example I could change it to 45 degrees if I wanted to. And that would give me a diagonal gradient. If you want to switch the order of the colors, then you can click on this reverse gradient button and that'll swap those colors around. Not only inside the gradient, but you'll see the colors relocate inside the gradient panel. And then finally, notice that we have three types to choose from. Linear, which we're seeing right now, radial, which is going to arrange the colors in concentric circles, and then the newest of them, freeform gradient, which I will demonstrate at length in a future movie. Now I know that's a lot to throw at you all at once which is why we're going to be revisiting all these options and more over the course of this chapter.