- [Voiceover] In this movie, we'll add a gradient fill
to the background, and we'll lay down a couple of base
strokes, and we'll see how stacking order here inside
the appearance panel can effect the behavior of fill
and stroke attributes along with dynamic effects.
If that sounds a little mysterious right now,
believe me it will make perfect sense in the end.
Alright, so I'll switch over to our document so far
and I'll make sure that the polygon is selected by
pressing Control A, or Command A on the MAC,
and assuming that your working in the most
recent version of Illustrator CC,
you should see the word polygon over here
on the far left side of the control panel.
Alright now our first step is going to be to build
a gradient fill and things are just going to work
out better if we are working in the CMYK color space.
So I am going to go up to the file menu,
choose Document Color Mode, and then choose CMYK color.
Now what you want to do is make sure your fill is
active by clicking on the fill item
here inside the appearance panel.
Then, you want to go up to the menu window and choose
Gradient to bring up the gradient pattern.
Now we need our gradient panel to be bigger than this,
and if yours is shell like mine then go ahead and click
this double up arrow icon a couple of times
in order to make it nice and big.
And then just go ahead and click on this gradient ramp
right there in order to assign a dummy gradient,
which by default is going to go from white to black.
Of course this is not what we want,
so go ahead and double click this first color stop,
this little guy below the gradient ramp
in order to bring up this color panel.
And as opposed to viewing swatches, we want to see colors
so go ahead and click on this little pallet icon,
and then click on this little fly up icon right there
and switch to CMYK.
That will give you the cyan, magenta,
yellow and black sliders.
We want the first one, C, to be zero, so leave it that way.
Then we are going to change magenta to 85%,
tab to yellow and change it to 100%,
and then tab to black and change it to 35%, like so.
Alright now this last guy is currently black and
we don't really want that, but I can't get rid of it yet
because you have to have at least two color stops.
So what you want to do, just for the sake of efficiency
here, is alter option drag this first color stop like so,
and that will make a duplicate of it.
Then, you can grab this black color stop and drag
it downward to get rid of it.
Right now drag this guy all the way over to the
right hand side and double click on it
to once again bring up the CMYK values.
Because we copied the first guy,
our magenta and yellow values are just fine
all you need to do is correct the K value up to 100%,
and that way we are mixing 100% black ink,
along with 100% yellow, and 85% magenta.
Which means we have a total of 285% of ink,
which is about as much as you want.
It gives us this nice rich, dark brown over here
on the right hand side of each one of the hexagons.
Alright now we want to make a duplicate of this guy,
so go ahead and alter option drag it over to the left.
We are looking for a location value of 50%,
so go ahead and enter that,
and then double click on this middle color stop,
leave the magenta and yellow values alone once
again, and change that K value, which represents
black to 75% and press the Enter key,
or the Return key on the MAC, to accept that change.
This is the gradient we're looking for,
but we need to make one more modification,
and that is to change the type from Linear,
to Radial, which gives us this effect here.
Alright now we need to add a couple of strokes,
so go ahead and click on the stoke item here inside
the appearance panel and we need a little bit
more room to work so go ahead and collapse
that gradient panel once again, or better still,
just go ahead and switch back to the stroke panel.
And now, I'm going to crank up this line weight value to
28 points in order to create these very thick strokes here,
but this is not the color I am looking for.
You can click on this little color swatch there if
you want to select a predefined color from your
swatches panel, but that is not what we want to do.
We want to dial in our own color, so notice when I
hover over this swatch up here it tells me to hold
the shift key to bring up an alternate color UI,
and that's what I want.
And, I will go ahead and click in order to
make that one go away,
and shift click in order to bring up my CMYK values.
I am going to change the C value to zero,
I am going to change magenta value to once again 85%,
take the yellow value up to 100%,
and take that black value up to 100% as well.
So, we are dialing in that rich, deep brown.
Alright, now we want to create another stroke,
and you can do that by clicking on the Add New Stroke icon
in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel,
or you can press Control-Alt-/,
or Command-Alt-/ on the MAC.
Alright, this time I want yellow, so I am going to
shift click once again on that little color swatch
there to bring up the CMYK values,
and I am going to leave the cyan value alone.
Take the magenta value down to 35%,
take the yellow value down to 85%,
and the K, or black value, down to 0%,
and that will give us this very bright yellow right here.
Alright now take that line weight value down to 8 points
in order to produce this effect.
Now, as you can see we have some problems.
We have these obvious seams between the strokes,
and each and everyone of the hexagons is filled
with a radio gradient.
What we want is this,
seamless transitions between the strokes,
and one big radial gradient in the background.
To make that happen we need to change
the order of the attributes and the effects.
And to make a long story short we need to click on the first
transform and shift click on the last one,
and then just go ahead and drag them
and drop them on top of the attributes like so.
The reason this works out, is this way, this is kind
of weird the way this works in the appearance panel.
They are a little bit upside down.
This guy right here, if you click on it,
he represents the very first transform effect we applied,
and so rather than the first stuff being at the bottom,
the first stuff is at the top.
So what's happening here as a result of dragging these
effects to the top is that we are applying the effects
first, and then, we're adding the
fill and stroke attributes.
Which is why before, we had this effect,
and now we have this one where all the strokes
are working out seamlessly.
Alright, the last thing I want you to do is to go
up to the window menu and choose the Transform command
to bring up the transform panel,
and assuming you are working in the most recent version
of Illustrator CC then you will have the option of
changing the corner radius right here.
I want you to take that value up to 20 points,
and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the MAC,
to round off the corners of that first hexagon which
ends up creating this nice round honeycomb effect.
And that is how you fill a shape with a radial gradient,
as well as how you adjust the stacking order of attributes,
and dynamic effects here inside the appearance panel.