Looks like a deep & interesting tour from Adrian Taylor. Says Smashing Magazine,
This extended video tutorial covers a wide variety of topics including basic gradient tools (0:30), the appearance pannel and multiple gradient fill layers (2:30), creating gradients with the blending tool (3:45), gradient strokes (6:30), gradient mesh (7:45), using gradients with type (14:00), wrapping gradients with envelope distort (16:30), and using opacity masks.
There is something about gradients in Illustrator that has always driven me nuts and I’m wondering if you have any explanation.
When changing a color node, any idea why there isn’t a color picker option like in Photoshop? The sliders are fine, but I find it so much easier to get the color I want with the colour picker.
Here’s another question about gradients for John and the Adobe team….
The gradient mesh tool is fabulously cool, but its implementation has always seemed so tedious to me. It’s almost like suffering for arts sake….create the mesh and then one by one select the points and colour pick the adjacent value. Not a problem in your chili pepper example – but try anything more complicated and you”ll end up clicking over and over and over…
I’ve never understood why there wasn’t a function of some kind that would allow you to select the gradient mesh that you’ve just created, press a button that then automatically have the calculated colour value below each of the x/y coordinates on your grid be assigned that colour. Surely that isn’t an unachievable task and it would be a MASSIVE time saver to anyone familiar with this tool.
To me, it almost seems like a no brainer, like that’s how the tool should have worked from the beginning. Not that you woud be forced to go this route as user, still allow the user to custom select colour values if they want/need to, but man, a nice feature to rollout for your loyal cloud users! 🙂
j.