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

819 Nesting gradients inside a pattern

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

819 Nesting gradients inside a pattern

- [Narrator] All right, now I'll show you how you can nest gradients inside a pattern in Illustrator. Short story, it's perfectly legal. Illustrator doesn't even expand the gradients the way it does blends. And along the way, we'll take this orthogonal object with holes drilled into its center and we'll turn it into this shimmering and seamlessly repeating tile pattern. All right, so, the first thing I want you to do, if you're working along with me, is go ahead and hide the pattern layer and then turn on the guides layer so that you can see that the object fits inside of a hexagon that is flat at its top and its bottom. And were you to draw a hexagon using the polygon tool, while smart guides are turned on, then you would discover that the dimensions of this shape are 600 points wide and 519.62 points high. Now, that second value's a little difficult to remember, so I'm going to switch to the Type Tool, which you can get by pressing the t key, then I'll just go ahead and select that value and press CTRL+C or Command-C on the Mac in order to copy it. Now, I'll press the Escape key in order to exit the Text Mode, and I'll go ahead and turn off that guides layer. Now, you want to press CTRL+A or Command-A on the Mac to select all of the objects that we created in the previous movie, which include a bunch of blends, by the way, as well as path outlines combined into groups, and then we've got these circles that are filled with radial gradients. All right, now I'll go up to the Object menu, choose Pattern, and then choose Make in order to bring up the Pattern Editing mode. If you see this alert message, it's just telling you that Illustrator's automatically added a swatch to the Swatches panel, and so you can just go ahead and click OK, at which point all this screen debris will clean up nicely. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and name this guy Center holes, because, after all, we have holes into the center of this orthogonal object. Now, I'll change the tile type to Hex by Column, which you can see by the icon, is a hexagon that's flat on the top and the bottom. Now you want to change the width value to 600 and then tab to the height value and press CTRL+V and Command-V on the Mac in order to paste that value, which, again, is 519.62 points. And then if you press the TAB key you'll see that everything is repeating nicely. We do have some holes, however, so I'll go ahead and click on this group right here, armed with my black arrow tool, by the way, which Illustrator calls the Selection Tool up here at the top of the tool box. And now, I'll go ahead and drag this guy by its left-hand point, notice that, so I'm dragging it by its far left anchor point, and I'm going to drop it into this location here. You should feel a snap and you'll see the white stamping cursor, that's what you're looking for, at which point, just go ahead and press the ALT key, the Option key on the Mac, in order to display the double-arrowhead cursor, which tells you that you are going to duplicate that block like so. Now, drag it by it's bottom-left anchor point to this location right here so that it snaps into place, and press the ALT key or the Option key on the Mac, once again, in order to create a duplicate. And that's all there is to it. Now, I want you to notice if I select one of these guys, one of these blocks right here, that I can see every single one, for example, the horizontal lines inside the purple shape, which tells me that the blends have been expanded into static path outlines. That is not the case for the gradient. Instead, we have a circle filled with the radial gradient, just as we did before. All right, that's all there is to it. So, you can either click Done up here at the top of the screen, or you can just press the Escape key in order to finalize that path. Now, I'll go ahead and turn the pattern layer back on, and I'll unlock it so that I can click on that rectangle in the background in order to select it. And then I'll click on that first swatch on the far left side of the horizontal control panel in order to bring up this swatch's sub-panel, and I'll go ahead and select Center holes. And that will apply that new seamlessly repeating tile pattern. All right, we'll go ahead and press the Escape key to dismiss that panel. And now I just want to make a few modifications to the color scheme here. And so for starters, I'll go ahead and target the pattern layer so that the entire layer is active. And you do that by clicking on this little circle on the far right side of the Layers panel. Then I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command in order to switch over to the Appearance panel. And now I'll drop down to this red fill at the bottom of the stack, click this down-pointing arrowhead, and I'll change the fill color to this kind of shade of chartreuse that begins R=217, and we end up with this effect here. Now you want to click on the fill that represents the gradients, so the next fill up. Then, go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to switch to the Gradient panel. Make sure you can see the entire panel, so if you can't, just go ahead and expand it, like so. And then go up to the Swatches panel and grab this shade of yellow that begins R=252, and drag it and drop it onto the white color slide in order to produce this final effect here. All right, now I'll go ahead and deselect my artwork by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+A or Command-Shift-A on the Mac. And then, in the most recent version of Illustrator, I'll go up to the View menu and choose Presentation Mode in order to hide the interface. And I might as well go ahead and zoom on in, as well. And that's how you nest gradients inside of a seamlessly repeating tile pattern in order to create the shaded holes that we're seeing right here, down here at this location, and over here, as well, inside Illustrator.

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