In this movie, I'll show you how
you can assign blend modes to individual fill
and stroke attributes in the appearance panel.
And along the way, I'll show you
how I created this gradient circle.
Now, notice that it progresses
from red to orange to yellow and so forth
around the outside of the circle.
But as you may know, Illustrator only offers
two kinds of gradients: linear and radial.
Now, if we were working in Photoshop,
this style of gradient would be known as angle.
In Illustrator, it's known as nonexistent.
We also have the colors converting toward the center
from highly colorful to gray.
So how in the world do we pull an effect like this off?
Well, let me show you.
I'm going to go ahead and select the current circle
and press the backspace key or the delete key
on the Mac to get rid of it.
And then, just to clear out my attributes,
I'll tap the D-key to instate my default fill and stroke.
So I have a white fill and a black stroke
as you can see here.
Then, I'll go ahead and select the ellipse tool
from the shape tool flyout menu.
My smart guides are turned on,
so I'll go ahead and position my cursor
right there at the intersection of all those lines.
And rather than dragging or clicking,
I'm going to press the ALT key or the option key on the Mac.
And click to force the display of the ellipse dialog box.
And as you can see, I've already done this in advance.
So set both to width and height values to 480 points.
That just happens to work for this graphic.
And I'll click OK.
And because I ALT or option clicked,
I'm creating the shape from the center outward.
Alright, now, with the fill selected
here in the swatches panel,
I'm going to assign this swatch here
at the most colorful gradient ever,
and it does contain, as you can see here,
a ton of different colors.
If you want to see what that looks like,
I'll go ahead and grab the gradient panel.
Notice there are just gobs of color here.
And I'll go ahead and drag that panel out,
so I can make it really wide.
And I'll expand the panel as well
so that we can see the various assumptions.
And I want you to know that these are just
the brightest shades of each one of these colors
of red and orange and yellow and so forth.
And they are positioned every 8.3%.
And that's because that's the value you get
if you take a hundred percent and divide it by 12.
And afterall, there are 12 different colors
inside of this gradient, with red being a 13th color
that is repeated at the end.
Alright, so I just want you to see what that looks like.
Now, as I was saying, where a gradient is concerned,
you have linear and radial and nothing more.
And neither of those really suits our purposes.
So I'm just going to go ahead and grab the gradient panel.
And I'm going to drag it back into this group right here,
and move it over as well,
just so it's in its familiar location.
Alright, so the first thing we need to do
is turn this gradient into a stroke.
And so I'm going to swap the fill and stroke attributes
by pressing SHIFT + X, like so.
And now we end up with a black fill which I don't want,
so for the present, I'm just going to change it to none.
That way, I can focus on the stroke.
And I'm going to crank the line weight value
up to, let's say, 200, 'cause I'm
kind of feeling my way through this process.
Alright now, here in the gradient panel,
I'm going to switch to the stroke
so that I reveal the stroke options right here.
Currently, we're applying the gradient within the stroke.
That's now what I'm looking for.
I want to apply the gradient along the stroke.
Unfortunately, it's getting repeated a couple of times,
and that's because the type is set to radial.
However, if I switch it to linear, I'll end up seeing
the gradient repeated just once, as we're seeing here.
Unfortunately, it's going in a wrong direction,
but that's easily remedied by clicking
on this reverse gradient icon.
Alright, now I actually want to point that stroke
inside of the circle.
But if I click an inward stroke
appear in the control panel,
notice that I can't change the alignment.
It has to be centered.
And so what I'm going to do is apply a dynamic effect
specifically to this stroke in the appearance panel.
Now obviously, I need a little more room to work here.
So I'm going to double click on the swatches tab
in order to collapse that panel.
And I'll go ahead and drag upward
on that horizontal barrier.
And then I'll go up to the Window menu
and choose the appearance command
to bring up the appearance panel.
Alright, I'm going to go ahead and click on the stroke
because I specifically want to modify it.
And then I'll go up to the Effect menu,
chose Distort and Transform,
and choose the best dynamic effect ever,
which is Transform.
As you may recall, if you've loaded D-keys,
I gave you a keyboard shortcut of CTRL + E
or Command E for Effect.
Alright now, what we want to do is turn on the preview
check box so we can keep track of what we're doing.
And I had to play around with this
a little bit to figure it out,
but in the end, it's pretty simple.
You just want to change the horizontal
and vertical values, both of them, to 50%,
which is going to seem wrong at first,
but it's got to work out great.
And now, I'll just go ahead and click OK
to accept that change.
And now, what we need to do is increase the line weight.
So notice if I change the line weight value to 400 points,
we don't quite fill in the center of that circle.
And in fact, the only way we're going to fill in the center
is to match the diameter of the circle.
And so in other words, I need to change this value
to 480 points, at which point,
everything works out brilliantly.
Alright, now I'm going to zoom in a little bit here.
And I want you to notice that at this point,
we don't have anything that passes
for a conventional stroke.
Right now, looks like we have a filled circle.
I want to give it a stroke as well.
So I'm going to drop down to the Add New Stroke icon
right there and click on it.
Alright now, this stroke looks pretty messed up.
I'm going to go ahead and press CTRL+0
or Command 0 on the Mac to zoom out.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag below
the other stroke just for the sake of demonstration here.
And I'm going to click on the color swatch right there,
and I'm going to change it to black.
Now, obviously, it's way too big, so I'm just going to reduce
the line weight to one point, let's say.
Alright though, notice if I zoom in here
that the gradient stroke is covering up the one below it.
So notice if I turn the stroke off
that I've got a thicker one point stroke going on.
As soon as I turn that rainbow stroke back on,
then I'm losing half of that stroke.
Now obviously, one remedy is to drag this guy right here
above the other one, so you can do that if you like.
But I just want to show you you have more options.
Notice if I twirl this stroke open
that not only am I seeing my dynamic transform effect,
I'm also seeing this opacity option.
If you click on it, then you can change the opacity
associated with this stroke,
but you can also change the blend mode.
And so I'm going to change it to multiply,
and the great thing about multiply,
notice that the black stroke survives fully intact.
So anything in the background that's black
is going to show through.
Now in our case, we have a little bit
too much black black going on.
And by that I mean, notice this.
We can see all those pokes.
And so to cover those up,
I'm going to change this fill down here to white.
In that way, we're multiplying onto a white surface,
which is going to work out great.
Alright now, so far, the blend modes that we've applied
have been a little bit unnecessary,
because I could've just moved that stroke.
So here's the more exciting application of this feature.
I'm going to create yet another fill
by clicking on the Add New Fill icon
down here in the bottom left corner of the panel.
And then I'll drug this guy up to the top of the stack,
so that it ends up covering up everything.
Obviously, that's not quite what I want.
So I'm going to bring back my swatches,
and I want you to see this guy right here.
It's called opaque to trans gray - transparent gray.
And so I'll go ahead and click on it,
and notice that the color is set to 50% gray.
That's it, and incidentally,
both color swatches are set that way.
The only difference is that one is opaque,
so it has an opacity value of 100%,
and the other has an opacity value of zero percent.
And now, I'm going to change the type to radial,
so that the gradient is going from the center outward.
And I'm actually going to add another stop here
at, let's say, 66% should work out pretty nicely.
And I'm going to change the opacity of it to 50%,
just so we can exaggerate the amount of gray.
Alright now, I need that gray to sink in
to the gradient in the background,
and so notice that this fill has an opacity as well,
so each and every attribute has its own opacity setting.
And then you have this one down here at the bottom,
which affects the entire object.
For now I'm going to leave alone,
but I am going to click on this guy,
and if you're not seeing it,
just twirl your fill open like so,
then click on the word "opacity",
click Normal, and choose Saturation.
So here's a really great use for a weird blend mode.
And notice as soon as I choose it,
it goes ahead and reduces the saturation
of those colors as they go toward the center.
And so now I'm going to press the V-key
to switch back to my black arrow tool,
and click off the object to D-select it,
and I'll zoom out a little more
so we can take in the entire thing.
Now incidentally, if you're working along with me,
you may see some weird little artifacts inside the circle.
Those should not end up printing or exporting.
In my experience, everything should work out
perfectly smoothly.
And that is at least one application
for applying blend modes to fill and stroke attributes
inside the appearance panel.