447 Wrapping a gradient around a circle in Illustrator

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques, this week we're going to do something that's completely and utterly impossible inside Illustrator. We're going to create a gradient of colors going around a circle. Now, if this were Photoshop, this would be called an angle gradient, but there is no such thing in Illustrator, in Illustrator we only have linear and radial gradients and that's it, So how in the world do we accomplish this? What form of sorcerer's magic are we going to employ this time? Well, none as it turns out, we're going to use a stroke. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

Alright, here's that color diagram that I created inside of Illustrator, just so you have a chance to see it on screen. And notice once again, that we have what amounts to a very colorful gradient that's wrapping around the outside of the circle. Now, if we working inside of Photoshop, this would be called an angle gradient but here inside Illustrator it's not called anything at all because technically it doesn't exist. And I'll show you what I mean, I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel and then notice here in the Type pop-up menu, we still have those same old options that we've had forever inside of Illustrator, which are linear and radial.

No angle, so what in the world did I do? Well, let me show you, I'll go ahead and turn off this top layer in the Layers panel which contains the various labels and then I'll go ahead and click on this front circle and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it and then I'll go ahead and click on this next circle down and delete it as well. And so I'm going to start things off with nothing selected, as we're seeing right here and I'm going to define a new custom gradient by dragging the Gradient tab out here into the document window, so it becomes a free floating panel, and that way I'll have a lot of room to work because there's quite a few colors that I need to add right here and so I'm going to go ahead and click on this gradient bar to make it active, and currently I've got a pretty lousy gradient so I might go ahead and switch over to one of the defaults here inside the Swatches panel, such as Gold Dust, might be a good place to start, or it might not, who knows? In any event I'm going to go ahead and select this first color stop and then I'm going to switch over to the Color panel, which you can get by choosing the Color command from the Window menu, and that way I can work with my HSB values, if I go to my fly-out menu and choose HSB, and they will persist throughout this experience.

So I'm going to change the hue value to zero degrees, I want the saturation and brightness to remain 100%. And then I'll go ahead and create a copy of that color stop by Alt or Option dragging it and I want the location value to be 8.3% by the way, and now I'm going to change its hue value to 30 degrees. So we have a little bit of grunt work ahead of us here because we have to create this extremely colorful gradient. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this color stop just by dragging it down, and then I'll click on this one and I'll change its location to 16.7% is what it wants to be and I'm going to change the hue value to 60 degrees for this guy and I'm going to take the brightness value up to 100%.

And then let's go ahead and create a copy of this one at 25%, and once again I'm creating a copy of that color stop by Alt or Option dragging it, and then I'll go over here to the Color panel and I'll change the hue value to 90 degrees. Notice that these values are going to update to their nearest RGB equivalents because I'm working inside of an RGB document. Alright, now I'll Alt drag or Option drag another copy of this guy and change its location to 33.3% and I'll change the hue value to 120 degrees and I'll go ahead and make another copy, this time at 41.7% is what I want.

And in case you're wondering how I figured this out, you just need to divide 100% by 12 because we have 12 steps here and then everything turns into a multiple of 8.33%. Alright, now the hue value wants to be 150 degrees like so, and again I'll make another copy, this time at 50%, is the location we're looking for, and the hue value should be 180 degrees. We're halfway done here so I'll go ahead and make another copy at 58.3% if you want to be very exact about it and I'll change the hue value to 210 degrees.

Now I'll create another copy and I'll change it to 66.7% right here and I'll raise the hue value to 240 degrees and now we want another copy, imagine that, and this time the location wants to be 25% and the hue value wants to be 270 degrees. So I'm just raising the hue value in 30 degree increments, by the way. Now I'll create another copy, this time at, I think it's going to be 83.3%, sure enough, and the hue value wants to be 300%.

We're almost done, no sense in even having this guy here, I'm just going to get rid of it. And I'm going to create a copy of the red stop right at the beginning and I'll drag it, or Option drag it on a Mac, all the way to the end right there and now I'll make a copy of this guy, this second to last one currently, but it's actually going to be the third to last by the time we're done, and I'll change its location to 91.7%. Actually, this is our last color stop right here and we're going to change its hue value to 330 degrees. And we are done, we have now made the world's most colorful gradient.

Alright, now let's switch back over to the Swatches panel and you may find it any old location, and now what I want you to do is just click on the little New Swatch icon and let's go ahead and call this gradient, "The most colorful gradient ever" maybe, might be a good name for it, and then I'll click OK. I'll just go ahead and put the Gradient panel away, because we're done with it, and I'm actually going to move it between Stroke and Transparency right there and hide it as well. Now let's make a circle and I'm just going to press the D key in order to establish my default colors here and then I'll select the Ellipse Tool from the Shape Tool fly-out menu.

And let's say I just happen to know that I want this circle to be 480 points in diameter, then I'll go ahead and press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, and click at the intersection of those two guidelines and now notice that my link icon is on and my width and height values match. So I'll just press Shift Down Arrow a couple of times in order to change those values to 480 points and I'll click OK. And because I started things by Alt or Option clicking, I've centered that circle as you can see right there. And now I just want you to see that I've got the fill active here in the Swatches panel.

If I click on "The most colorful gradient ever" it starts off life as a linear gradient and that's because I didn't bother to change its type, but if I click on the double arrow icon a couple of times next to the word "Gradient" and change it to Radial, I'm not going to get any better results. Instead what I want to do is stroke the shape with the gradient. In fact, I'm just going to change the fill to black, we don't need it. And I'll click on the stroke here inside the Gradient panel, and by the way you need Illustrator CS6 or later to pull this off, I just want to make that clear, at which point I'll go ahead and click on the gradient to assign it as a stroke which we can't even see and that's because it's such a skinny stroke.

So what I'm going to do is just raise the line weight value up here in the control panel, to 100 point let's say, so that we see this effect right here which is not what I want at all. But we have these little stroke options right here. By default we're applying the gradient within the stroke, which is going to do us no good whatsoever, we can apply the gradient along the stroke, so that it essentially repeats in our case a couple of times, or you can apply the gradient across the stroke as we're seeing right here. I want to apply it along the stroke but I definitely don't want the gradient repeating like this and that's the function of having the type set to radial.

So I'll go ahead and switch the type back to linear and we end up with this effect here. Problem is, it's going the wrong direction, it's supposed to go from red to orange to yellow upward instead of downward. So what I'm going to do is click on the little Reverse Gradient icon right there in order to swap those attributes. Now the problem becomes, well how do I end up covering the fill? Well basically what you want to do is make the line weight even higher, and you want to set it to half as big as you want your circular effect to be. So in other words, I set my circle to a diameter of 480 points, I want to go ahead and divide that value by two.

So I'll enter 480/2 and then I'll press the Enter key and Illustrator will do the math for me and set this line weight to 240 points. Now I need to reduce the size of the circle to 240 points as well by clicking on the word "Transform." Then I want to select the center point in this Reference Point matrix. I'm going to go ahead and link the width and height values together, and I'll take the width value down to 300 points, just so that you can see what happens here. Notice that we almost get rid of the center of the circle.

If you take it all the way down to the line weight, which is 240 points, then you will end up eliminating all traces of the fill because the fill is entirely covered by that stroke. Alright, now click off the shape to deselect it and I'll go ahead and turn those labels back on as well. And that's how you create what Photoshop calls an angle gradient by assigning a gradient along a stroke, here inside Illustrator. If you're a member a lynda.com, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to blend additional colors into a gradient.

So notice, we're not only going around the circle, but the colors are blending inwards as well using the saturation blend mode. If you're waiting for next week's free movie, we're going to take this haphazard collection of paths that I drew using the Line Segment Tool and we're going to join them together into this perfect white arrow using the new Join Tool in Illustrator CC. Deke's techniques each and every week, keep watching.