- [Voiceover] In this movie I'll show you how
to add transparency to a gradient in order
to create this shine effect right here.
Now the first I need to do is bring back a couple
of my path outlines by going up
to the Object menu and choosing Show All,
or you have that shortcut of Control+Alt+3
or Command+Option+3 on the Mac.
All right, now the only one's we'll be using
are these two right here, so I'll Shift+Click
on this guy with my black arrow tool
and then I'll Shift+Click on this big ellipse as well.
And that leaves just three paths selected, as you can see,
at which point I'll return to the Object menu,
choose Hide, and choose Selection, or just press Control+3
here in the PC or Command+3 on the Mac.
All right, now go ahead and select these new ellipses
by clicking on one and Shift+Clicking on the other.
And then, I want you to go up to the Window menu and choose
the PathFinder command to bring up the Pathfinder panel
and then just go ahead and click on minus front
in order to cut this front path away.
And there's no way you would know, of course,
that one path was in front of the other
unless you drew them yourselves,
but all you'd have to do if you clicked
the wrong one was press undo and then try again.
Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and hide the PathFinder panel.
These shapes are now grouped together
so I'll go up to the Object menu and choose Ungroup
and then I'll Shift+Click on the top path to deselect it
and I'll press the Backspace key
or the Delete key on a Mac to get rid of it.
All right, now I'll go ahead and click
this big path and I'll switch to my
white arrow tool by pressing the A key.
And now notice these round corner controls
at the tips of the path outline.
Go ahead and drag them inward and as opposed
to rounding off the corners, for some reason
Illustrator is choosing to bevel them off.
What we want to do instead is click on the word Corners
up here in the control panel and go ahead
and switch those guys to round, like so.
And then go ahead and take the Radius value
to 50 points in order to produce this effect here.
And now if you press the enter key,
followed by Control+Y or Command+Y on a Mac.
Well, I expected to see my template,
but I forgot I turned it off, so I'll go ahead and turn on
the Template layer here inside the Layers panel,
and you can see this path outline now traces
around the reflection on the emoji's head.
All right, now I'll press Control+Y or Command+Y on a Mac
to switch back to the preview mode,
and I'll click on this gradient ramp
here inside the Gradient panel in order
to apply the default black to white gradient.
If you don't see that then you can go ahead and click
on a down-pointing arrowhead right there
in the top left corner of the Gradient panel
and choose white-black from the list.
All right, now I don't want the stroke,
so I'll go up to my Strokes swatch,
the second swatch on the far left side of the Control Panel,
and change it to none, and then what I want
to do is create a white to white gradient.
So we're going from a white color-stop that's opaque
to a white color-stop that's transparent.
And to make that happen, just go ahead
and take this color-stop right there,
the white one, and instead of dragging it,
go ahead and press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac,
and drag it in order to create a copy, like so.
Now I'll take this one and drag it back to a location of 0%,
and I'll also reduce it's opacity value to 0%.
And then press the Tab key in order
to introduce transparency into our gradient.
Now I don't want this black color-stop,
so I'll just drag it away and then I'll drag
this opaque white color-stop all the way
to the right hand side of the gradient.
All right, now I want this gradient to go
from the top of the shape down,
and so I'll go ahead and change the angle value
to 90 degrees and press the Enter key,
or the Return key on the Mac, to make that change.
And so, whenever you're working with gradients,
bear in mind that this guy is the beginning of the gradient,
so the first color-stop, the one on the left,
is the beginning of the gradient,
which is now located at the bottom of the shape
and this last guy is the end of the gradient,
which is located at the top of the shape
because we're going upward with an angle of 90 degrees.
All right now, if you press Control+Y or Command+Y on a Mac
to switch to the outline modes
so that we're no longer seeing our gradient,
we're seeing the gradient in the template,
notice that it's not quite all the way opaque
up here at the top and it's not quite
all the way transparent down here at the bottom,
which might be more obvious if I turn
this layer off for a moment.
So, notice we have a little bit of opacity down here,
and we have a little bit of translucency up here at the top.
All right, I'll go ahead and turn the happy layer back on
and press Control+Y or Command+Y on the Mac
to switch back to the preview mode,
and I'll press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool
and I'll click on the shape to select it.
And then I'll select this first color-stop
and I'll take it's opacity value up to 10%
and then I'll select the last color-stop
and I'll take it's opacity value down to 80%
in order to produce this effect right here.
All right, now I recommend that any time you put any amount
of effort into a gradient you go ahead
and save it as a swatch by clicking on the little page icon
at the bottom of the Swatches panel
and then I'll just go ahead and call this guy White to trans
and click OK in order to create that new stop.
And that way I can apply this gradient
to any other shape that I like.
All right, just so we can really take in the effect,
I'll click off the shape to deselect it.
And then you can see we now have
this cartoon reflection on our shiny emoji's head,
thanks to our ability to introduce transparency
into a gradient by associating an opacity value
with any color-stop that we like,
here, inside Illustrator.