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

936 Combining multiple gradient fills and effects

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

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936 Combining multiple gradient fills and effects

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- [Narrator] In this movie, we're still working on the cat's eye. And we're going to focus our attention on this region of iris that I've highlighted with this white outline. And it's all the result of multiple radial gradient fills, along with dynamic effects working together here inside Illustrator. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to our graphics so far, and armed with a black arrow tool, I'll click on this path in order to select it. And then I'll go up to the window menu and choose the appearance command in order to switch over to the appearance panel, which may be at a different location on your screen. In any event, I'm going to click on this second fill right here in order to select it. And I'll drop down to this little plus sign in the bottom right corner of the panel, which looks like a tiny page in previous versions of Illustrator, and we'll click on it in order to duplicate that fill. Now what you want to do is return to the window menu and choose the gradient command in order to bring up the gradient panel. And as you can see, I'm starting to run out of room, but it's still going to work out nicely. Now, you want to make sure that the panel is fully expanded, if it's not, then you can click on this little double arrow icon right here, in order to expand the panel incrementally. And then make sure that the fill is active over here on the left side of the panel, and click on the second type icon, which reads, radial gradient. And that'll go ahead and assign a default white to black gradient, as we're seeing right here. That's of course, not what we want. So make sure that your swatches panel is up on screen, and if you can't see it, then choose the swatches command from the window menu. And now what I'm going to do, is grab this first swatch, pale yellow, down here in this cat eye colors group, and I'm going to drag it and drop it very carefully onto this white color stop. And I say very carefully because if you're off just a little bit, you can end up keeping that white color swatch and adding pale yellow, as opposed to replacing that color stop like so. All right, I'll go ahead and drag it back all the way over to the left. And then I'll grab this fourth color swatch, golden brown, and I'll drag it and drop it onto this black color swatch like so, so that we end up with a yellow to brown gradient. All right, now I actually want to take this yellow gradient stop right here, and I want to drag it further over to the right. And I'm looking for a very specific location value. And so I'll go ahead and click on the word location and change that value to 60% like so. All right, now I want to return to the appearance panel, which is awfully smashed at this point. And so I'm just going to click on the stroke tab in order to hide the gradient panel and give myself some more room. And I'll twirl open this fill right here so that I can see its various dynamic effects. Now we don't need the inner glows. So I'll go ahead and click on one and shift click on the other, in order to select them. And I'll click on a little trash icon down here in the bottom right corner of the panel, in order to get rid of them. Now I'll click on the word ellipse in order to bring up the shape options dialog box. And I'll change the width value to 470 points, and then I'll change the height value to 500 points like so. And then I'll go ahead and click OK. Now we still have the transform effect from the previous movie, which if you click on it, you can see that we have a vertical move value of -100 points, which moves the fill 100 points upward. That's just fine, so I'll cancel out of here. But I don't want this sharp edge, I want it to appear more rippling as we're seeing in the final version of the graphic. And so what I'm going to do, is with this fill selected, so you want to make sure to click on the fill that we just created. And then click on the fx icon in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel. Choose distort and transform, followed by roughen. All right, now you can see that creates a kind of spiky edge. Assuming that your preview checkbox is turned on, I want to switch from relative to absolute, and then I'm going to change that absolute value to 40 points, so we have an awful lot of roughness, a detail setting of 10 wiggles per inch is just fine. But I want the points to be smooth points as opposed to corners. And so I'll go ahead and select that smooth option and click OK. And I end up with this effect here. Now I want to stress that I end up with this effect, and that's because the roughen effect is random. In other words, your effect is going to differ somewhat from mine. And notice that we're seeing the dynamic effects in the opposite order they were applied. So in other words, the first effect is on top, and the last effect is supposedly on the bottom. But for some reason Illustrator's chosen to put roughen in the middle. I'm going to go ahead and click on it and drag it to below transform like so. That's not going to make a difference in the appearance of the effect, but it will make it easier to follow along. Alright, now we want to blur the effect, so I'll go ahead and click on that fill once more, click on the fx icon, choose blur followed by Gaussian Blur. And I'll go ahead and set that blur value to a radius of four pixels, and I'll click OK. All right, that takes care of that fill, but we need another one. So I'll go ahead and click on that fill like so, and I'll drop down to the little plus sign and click on it, in order to duplicate that fill complete with all of its dynamic effects. All right, now I want to switch out the colors in the gradient. So, I'll click on a gradient tab right here, and notice that I still have a radial gradient. And so what you want to do is go up to this third color swatch, assuming that you're working along with me, and grab it and drag it and drop it to the beginning of the gradient like so. And I want it all the way over to the left, so that the location value is 0%. Now, I'll go up to the second color swatch, dole gold, and I'll drag it and drop it onto this pale yellow color stop, here inside the gradient panel, and then I'll change the location value for that stop, to 50%. Alright, now we want to replace the last color stop, once again with khaki green. So I'll go ahead and drag it and drop it on that final color stop like so. Then notice that we're kind of covering up one gradient with another. I don't want that, so what I'm going to do is click on the stroke tab, so that I have more room here inside the appearance panel, and I'll click on the word ellipse. And I'll reduce the width value to 370 points, and I'll take the height values down to 400 points like so. And you can see that we now have a smaller inset gradient, at which point I'll click OK to accept that effect. Now all these other effects are just fine as is, including transform, roughen and blur by the way, however, I want to add one more effect. And so notice that the ellipse effect is currently selected, that's fine either in effect, or the fill itself needs to be selected. So either one's going to work. And then drop down to the effects icon, choose stylize and choose Outer Glow. And then what you want to do, is click on that little color swatch right there, in order to bring up the color picker dialog box, click on color swatches, so that you can see a long list of these color swatches that are provided for you in advance. And I'll select dark green and click OK. A blend mode of normal is just fine. I'm going to set the opacity value to 50%, and I'll set the blur value to 50 points, at which point I'll click OK in order to accept that effect. All right now, at this point, I want to compare the iris to the photographic image in the background. So I'll switch to the Layers panel and turn off the eye layer for a moment. And notice that we have this kind of darkish yellow edge around the outside of the iris. Compare that to my iris, which is surrounded by this dark green. That's not really what I want. So, I'll go ahead and click on that path outline to select it once again, I'll switch back to the appearance panel. I'll twirl close that most recent fill right there, and I'll twirl open that pale yellow fill. So that's second fill from the bottom, and I'll click on this first instance of inner glow in order to bring up the Inner Glow dialog box. And there's my shade of green right there. And so, the great thing about dynamic effects is that you can change your mind whenever you like. And so I'll just go ahead and click on that color swatch, and then I'll click on the color swatches button right here, in order to bring up my long list of color swatches, and I'll switch this guy to khaki green. So from dark green to khaki green, at which point you can see that we end up with what I consider to be a much better effect. And so I'll just go ahead and click OK. And that is at least one way to build up the iris for the cat's eye using a combination of multiple radial gradients, along with dynamic effects here inside Illustrator

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