From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

778 Freeform gradient limitations

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

778 Freeform gradient limitations

- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll talk about a couple of Freeform gradient gotchas. Including the fact that you can't drag a point outside of a path outline, and you can't cross lines. And along the way, we'll go ahead and shade the stem of this left hand pepper. Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch over to our document so far and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the stem like so, so that we can see it up close and personal. And then I'll click on it with the black arrow tool in order to select it. The shape currently has a solid fill, and so we're not seeing any of our gradient controls up here in the control bar. So I'll go ahead and switch to my gradient tool, which I can get by pressing the G key, at which point all of my gradient controls appear. Now, assuming that your fill is selected, that's very important, you can not apply Freeform gradients to strokes. Then you will see the Freeform gradient icon. At which point, all you have to do is click on it, in order to automatically add a few points. And in my case, I ended up with a total of four color points as we're seeing here. None of them are really what I'm looking for, but I'm just going to go ahead and select this middle guy and press the backspace key, or the delete key on a Mac to get rid of it. And then I'll select this point in the bottom left corner and I'll double click on it to bring up the swatches panel, notice that I've created a couple of custom green swatches in advance including this guy, stem low. So I'll go ahead and select it in order to start things off. And then up here in the control panel, I'll make sure that lines is active. Although I should say that you can combine lines with independent points, inside of a single path outline. Alright, now I'll click to create a sequence of points like so, ending right about there. Alright, now I want to start a new line, but as you can see I'm still working on the old one. As indicated by that segment preview, as well as that little circle cursor with the wavy line, and so if I want to start something new all I need to do is press the escape key and not only does that segment preview go away, but where the cursor is concerned, the wavy line gets replaced by a little plus sign. Now, I'll go ahead and select this guy let's say, and I'll move it up a little, and then I'll double click on it and change it to this color swatch, stem high. And now I'll press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac to dismiss the panel. I'll create a point high up like so, and then I'll move my cursor down, and then once again notice as I move the cursor, I'm introducing curvature to that previous segment, as well as the new one. And now I'll create a point right about there let's say, and another one down at the bottom. Alright, now I'm going to create a third line, so I'll go ahead and press the escape key. In order to dismiss that segment preview, and to change my cursor back to a plus sign, I'll go ahead and double click on this point, and it'll change it to stem low right there, and then I'll click to set a point here, and one up here, let's say, another at this location and then I'm going to kind of move around this edge. And notice I can not create a point outside of the path outline, so I have to keep my cursor inside the path. And that's looking pretty good. So once again, I'll just press the escape key. Alright, now I want to preview how things are looking, and so I'll press and hold the control key, or the command key on a Mac, in order to temporarily access my black arrow tool, and hide all of the points, and it's seeming to me, that this edge isn't quite dark enough down here, and this one is too dark. And so, what I'd like to do is move this point right here, and I'd like to be able to move it outside of the stem, so I'm still effecting the path outline, but I'm just brightening it up a little bit, but if I do that, notice that the point just disappears. Now, ironically, if I get my cursor in the proper location here I can click in order to set a point outside the path outline but I can't move it to a location outside the path, or Illustrator automatically deletes it. So what I need to do is create the point, way out there, and then just drag it in, and perhaps down a little bit as well, and I'll click to add another point right there, and I will move it up as far as I can, and then I'll click down here to set a point, and move it down and inward. Alright, so that's one thing to keep an eye out for, here's another. Imagine I select this color point right there, and I press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac. Illustrator's going to gripe at me, and it's going to tell me that you can't create, move, or delete a color stop that causes one or more paths to intersect. And so at this point that's just not allowed. And so I'll just go ahead and click okay, to dismiss that message and so instead, I'll just go ahead and drag this guy down a little bit. And now to once again preview the effect, I'll press and hold the control key, or the command key on the Mac, to temporarily access my black arrow tool. And, if you're happy with what you see, then you can just go ahead and release control or command and go up to the select menu, and choose the deselect command, or you can press control shift A, or command shift A on the Mac. Alright, I'll go ahead and press control zero, or command zero on the Mac to zoom out, and I just want to show you once again, that this is a bonafide fill that you can transfer to a different object, which is something you can not do with gradient mesh, by the way. And so for example, I could go ahead and grab my black arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls a selection tool, I could click in that big rectangle to select it, I could switch to the eyedropper tool. Which you can get by pressing the I key, and then I could click inside that stem, in order to transfer that custom Freeform gradient, to that larger shape. And if I'm just crazy, I could control or command click on a pepper shape right there, in order to select it and then click on the stem once again, to make it this eerie sort of x-ray green. Alright, I don't want to do any of those things, so I'll press control Z or command Z on the Mac, a couple of times in order to restore my previous Freeform gradients I'll press control shift A, or command shift A on the Mac, to deselect the artwork, and I'll go ahead and turn on the text layer. And finally, just so we can fill the screen with the artwork, I'll go up to the view menu, and choose presentation mode. So just remember, when you're creating Freeform gradients, that the color stops have to remain inside the path outline, and the lines cannot cross. Here inside Illustrator CC 2019, and I imagine, going forward.

Contents