- [Voiceover] In this movie I'll show you
how to introduce some texture into your
custom gradient, using dynamic effects.
Specifically, we'll be going for this grass texture
right here, but there's all kinds of stuff you could do.
Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my
pre texture file and I'll click on those rolling hills
with the black arrow tool, in order to select that blend.
You know it's a blend because it's identified as such
in the far left side of the control panel.
Alright, so lets say you want the hills to bob up
and down a little more aggressively.
The first thing I'll do is press Ctrl + H or Command + H
on the Mac in order to hide my anchor points.
In that way we can just see things better on screen.
And then, I'll go up to the Effect menu, choose
Distort and Transform, and let's start with Tweak.
I'll go ahead and choose that command and then I'll
turn on the preview checkbox so you can see how
things are buffeting up and down in the background.
I'm gonna go ahead and switch from relative to absolute.
And I'll take the horizontal line down to zero
because we really don't need things moving back and forth.
We need the gradient intervals to move up and down.
And we can do that by raising
this vertical value right here.
And I'm pressing shift + up arrow in order to increase
the value in increments of 10 points.
And as you can see at 60 points we get
a whole lot of action going on.
It pretty much ruins any smooth color effect
we might have had previously.
But, it gives us a lot of extra action in those intervals.
You also have the option of deciding
what it is your modifying.
Anchor points controls the placement of anchor points,
so if you turn that off, you're just going to move
the so called control points here.
Those are really the control handles however.
And you can even decide well I actually just want to
move the handles that are going out of the points,
not the ones that are going in.
Or you can try the opposite effect like so.
And each time you're going to get something
different out of it.
So it really depends if you want gentle rolling,
in which case you want to modify the control handles
and not the anchor points, or if you want a bunch
spikey action, in which case you want to modify
the anchor points and possibly
leave the control handles alone.
Alright, so doing this for the sake of demonstration,
I'm going to cancel out here.
And now let's say we want a wavy effect.
So for example, imagine that instead of editing grass
this were supposed to water.
In that case, you would go up to the Effect menu
and choose Distort and Transform and choose Zig Zag instead.
And now I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox.
And you can see a bunch of spikes going on in the background
and you can increase the size of those spikes by
switching from relative to absolute if indeed relative
is selected for you in the first place, and then we
can increase that size value to something like 20 points.
And notice we're getting all kinds
of additional spiking going on.
If you want these to be more gentle waves,
then switch your points from corner to smooth like so,
and you'll get more of a rippling effect.
And if you want soften things down a little bit further,
then decrease this ridges per segment value.
And I'm gonna take it down to either one or I think two.
I think two ends up looking better.
And then I might take that size value back down to 10.
And so you have all sorts of options there.
I'll go ahead and click okay to apply this option.
And then I'll show you what happens if we follow this up.
By going to the Object menu,
choosing Blend and then choosing Blend Options.
And lets switch spacing to specified steps, turn
on the preview checkbox and then take this value
down to something like 10,
or I might even take it down to five
just so we can really see what's going on.
And now notice the rolling action that is associated
with each one of these intervals.
Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and cancel out.
And also press Ctrl + Z or Command + Z on the Mac
a couple of times apparently in order
to undo that zig zag effect.
For a grassy effect what we need to do is return
to the Effect menu,
choose Distort and Transform and choose Roughen.
And now I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox
so that you can see that we have a ton
of very rough intervals indeed.
Alright, I'm gonna switch from relative to absolute
to start things out here and I'm gonna leave the size
value set to five points.
That's the size of each one of these ripples by the way.
So if you wanted more spikeyness
you would increase that value.
But a size of five is going to work fine for this document.
And then I'll tab over to the detail value and take
it up to 30 per inches.
So in other words, 30 blades of grass per inch.
And if you wanted things to be smoother, that is to say
you want to use smooth points instead of corner points,
you could go ahead and switch this
points option if you want to.
But I want the spikier action associated with corner points,
so I'll leave this option set to its default and click ok.
Now I'll just go ahead and zoom in a little bit,
so we can see things a little better.
You can undoubtedly see these spikes up here at the top.
But if you're working along with me you should be able
to see some action inside the gradient as well.
To make the grass effect a little more obvious,
go to the Object menu, choose Blend,
and then choose Blend Options
and then switch the spacing options to Specified Steps
and take this value all the way down to five
and turn on the preview checkbox.
And now you can see an awful lot of
cartoon grass action inside this document.
In which point, I'll go ahead and click OK
to accept that effect.
And of course because you're working with a dynamic effect,
you can revisit your settings anytime you like by
going to the Window menu and choosing the Appearance
command and then here inside the appearance panel,
just go ahead and click the word Roughen.
Turn on the preview checkbox and then for example and take
this detail value up to 60 per inch, at which
point we'll see even more blades of grass.
I'm pretty happy with 30 however.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and cancel out.
And then you might want to press Ctrl + H or Command + H
on a Mac in order to bring back those selection outlines
because after all whether they're visible or not
is saved along with the illustration.
And then finally I'll go ahead and zoom out by pressing
Ctrl + zero and I'll press Ctrl + Shift + A or
Command + Shift + A on a Mac in order
to deselect the artwork.
And that's how you add text to your custom gradient.
By going to the Effect menu and choosing
Distort and Transform and then experimenting
with either Tweak, Zig Zag
or Roughen here inside Illustrator.