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

831 Creating rainbow gradients with blends

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

831 Creating rainbow gradients with blends

Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Technique. Now last week inside Illustrator, we colored our triangle tunnels with gradients. This week, also inside Illustrator, we will be coloring our triangles with blends which gives us the opportunity to switch from blue, what's wrong with blue? To rainbows. I ask you, what's wrong with rainbows? Here, let me show you exactly how all the colors work. All right, here are those blended rainbow tunnels just so you have a chance to cast your peepers upon 'em. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the blue version of the artwork and I'll turn off the pattern layer as well as the blues layer right here and I'm going to create a copy of the hexangles layer just by dragging it and dropping it on that little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and then I'll go ahead and turn off the original layer and I'll double click on a new one and I'll call it Rainbow Blends, let's say and then I'll change the color to something bright like peach so that we can see what's selected and what's not. All right, now I'm going to zoom in here and armed with my black arrow tool, I'll go ahead and partially marquee these two blends and then I'll go ahead and assign dark red which is color 1b and notice that I've set up a bunch of color swatches that are alternately bright and then dark, so bright red, dark red, bright orange, dark orange and so forth. All right, now what you want to do is go ahead and drag and drop swatches onto this guy, so we're looking for color 1a, don't just click on it because that'll just replace the existing colors. Instead, you want to drag it and drop it inside this next triangle right there and then go ahead and drag and drop this guy inside this triangle and that will result in this blended gradient and so, because blends are dynamic, they update automatically. All right, now I'm going to marquee these two blends and I'll switch them to color 2b and then I'll go ahead and grab color 2a and drag it and drop it inside this triangle and then drag it and drop it inside the next triangle in right there. All right, now let's marquee these two guys and I'll set them to color 3b which is a dark yellow and then I'll grab the bright yellow right here and I'll drag it and drop it into this triangle and then I'll drag it and drop it into this triangle as well and in each case, you should end up with a kind of gradients that's growing brighter and then darker towards the center. All right, now I'll marquee these guys and I'll set 'em to color 4b and then I'll grab color 4a and drag it and drop it into this guy and then I'll do it for the next triangle in as well. So dragging and dropping that swatch into each of those triangular regions. Now I'll marquee this guy, so it's pretty much same thing over and over again. I'll set it to color 5b and then I'll grab color 5a and I'll drag it and drop it into this triangle and I'll grab it again and drag it and drop it into this one. And just for the sake of variety, I'll take the opposite approach on this last pair of triangles. I'll start by setting them to color 6a this time around and then I'll grab color 6 and drag it and drop it into the biggest triangle right there and then I'll grab it again and drag it and drop it into the dinkiest of the triangles. So either way is going to work for you. All right, I'll click off the shapes to deselect 'em and I'll go ahead and marquee all of them or I could just press Control + A or Command + A on a Mac because after all, this is the only visible layer and then I'll go up to the Object menu, choose Pattern and then choose Make and I'll go ahead and name this guy Rainbows let's say and then I'll change the tile type to match the hexagon which is going to be Hex by Column right here and Illustrator's going to very nearly get the dimensions right, however, I'm going to click into Width Value and then our negative four, so minus four and then I'll tap to the Height value and click after it and enter minus four for it as well and then I'll go ahead and press the Enter key to accept my changes and in order to accept the new pattern, I'll click on the Done button up here in the top left corner of the screen or you can just press the Escape key. All right, now I'm going to turn the pattern layer back on and I'll click on it to select it and then I'll go ahead and switch the fill, assuming the fill is active here in the swatches panel to that final pattern Rainbows and then I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac to deselect my artwork and then I'll go up to the View menu here in the most recent version of Illustrator and I'll choose Presentation Mode which has a keyboard shortcut incidentally of Shift + F for full screen and that will allow us to see the rainbow version of the artwork. And that's how you create a bunch of concentric rainbow gradients using one of the oldest and I think best features in Illustrator, object blends. Okay, so coloring a pattern with blends actually has its downsides and as much as I love Illustrator, it's totally Illustrator's fault. Blends were introduced in Illustrator 88 which came out in 1988, the years Guns N' Roses, as you might recall, released "Sweet Child of Mine." The current pattern editor which does not support blends was introduced in Illustrator CS6 which came out in 2012, the year Psy released "Gangnam Style" which by the way, was 24 years later, that's the entire life of the internet plus a decade. Anyway, the upshot is that that makes our colors that much harder to update but not impossible which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to do exactly that. Now the change may not be that noticeable but I want you to see that I've rotated the colors around. It's actually a really great techniques. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll show you how to draw an old-school impossible trident in a program that I was just dissing 30 seconds ago, my favorite vector-based drawing program on the planet, Guns 'N Roses. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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