Quick Tip: A Gradient Brush?
Tutorial Details
- Program: Illustrator CS4
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Length: 3:08 min
Is it possible to stroke a path using a gradient? No. But in this Quick Tip, Cheryl Graham shows you how to fake it.
Tags: Videos
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By Cheryl Graham
Cheryl Graham trained as a traditional artist in drawing and painting. These days she spends more time in front of the computer than the easel. Her Illustrator work has been featured in the "The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book" and "Real World Illustrator CS5." She wrote the now-defunct Illustrator blog at freetransform.net.
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Great tip!
Does it still work if you just use a gradient fill instead of blending before you create the brush?
no, that is why this is such a good tip
This is a great quick tip! Simple, but incredibly powerful.
Thanks!
Thanks for that, can honestly say I didn’t know how to add a gradient to a stroke. Going to play around with this and see what I can come up with
Won’t load.
Sometimes it takes a while to load, I’ve had to re-load videos before, give it another try and let me know if it happens again
Thanks Cheryl,
your tuts are the best 5 minutes I spend on the web!
Very useful tip, I was thinking a couple of time if it’s possible in general, but didn’t succeed to find an answer.
Nothing as cool and rainbow gradients! Except maybe Netscape…
Nice tutorial. Decided to try a different approach. http://screenr.com/QKA
Sorry there is no sound as i don’t have a microphone at work. Hopefully it makes sense. Happy Illustrating!
This tip is better than the way you use because your gradient don’t follow the path’s orientation, it just stay vertical. With the blend-brush way, stripes get aligned with the path’s orientation…
I wasn’t saying mine was any better. Just a different approach. I’m sure they both have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Thanks so much Cheryl, really usefull!!!!!
Great tip! Thanks!
Amazing! Thank you for the tutorial, I was looking for this for a long time. It’s really a great tip!
Very interesting i wrote something similar on this topic a more comprehensive tutorial can be found here
http://www.aivault.com/?p=1453
What’s totally whack is that InDesign has a gradient stroke option, but for Illustrator you have to do this workaround. Rubbish.
Inkscape also let’s me have different gradients for stroke and fill. I’m really disappointed that Illustrator doesn’t.
Than’s really good technique.
Thank you
M
Great tip!!!
Tnx!
Extremely useful tip! Thank you! To take it a little further, if you go to Object > Expand Appearance you can then apply any of the Photoshop Effects under Effects.
Or, in some cases, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you might be able to skip creating a “gradient brush” by simply expanding a selected stroke or group of strokes to begin with (Object > Expand) and then applying a gradient as you would to any object. This works with text as well.
Very nice and useful tip, thanks
I figured this out by myself by accident but it is possible to add a gradient to a stroke, i know this works in illustrator CS3 and in illustrator CS4, i am not sure if it works in CS5 or not but here is how you do it. Start off by creating your path, then create the desired gradient, once you have done this double click in the fills panel when the window where you can change the color of the shape comes up drag your cursor to the bottom left portion if the screen, once you have done this you will notice a few things one of which is your color spectrum in the color window it is not your usual spectrum and it will look very strange, the second thing you will notice is if you look under the fill where it shows your gradient , the color is no longer a color but a gradient, so the gradient fill option and the color fill option will be the same, if you turn your fill to none and then on the stroke selection change it to a color fill (your gradient) it will be applied to your shape. If this does not work then try again eventually you will get it. I hope you find this interesting, and if someone makes a tutorial of this please credit me thank you.
Great tip! Very useful for me! Thanks
thank you so much, this is really useful!
Thanks for sharing! Always wondered how to get that gradient stroke can be done in an editable way.
Cool tip, thanks for this!
unfortunately, i can see nothing here even i refresh again and again.
ist a video tutorial?
OMG! this is amezing,such a useful tip
Awesome, great tut
Thank you for this useful tut!
soo good!!!!! thanks
awesome quicktip! im new to this site and im starting to love it more and more bc of tuts like these! thanks cheryl!
Really useful tip! Thanks so much.
Thank you for the Great tip!!!
Simple but powerful!!! Thank you so much