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Gradients & Blends

here we are, folks yet again showing you mawr awesome things that we're going to create an illustrator. And this episode is going to be how to use Grady INTs, the new freeform ingredient, which is pretty awesome and also go through and show you the blend tools so we can create grading and effects that way. So great aunts were kind of interesting to take a little bit of getting used to. And in your swatches panel, you have a few Grady INTs that are going to be here by default. We got a black and white or orange or blue. I've created several other radiance here. What, you're gonna find out how we're gonna do that? The way this works is we're gonna need Argh! Radiant panel, which is under the window menu calling up Grady INTs here. And we don't actually go in tow our swatches panel and created radiant. We actually create a Grady int actively on our object. So if I create an object and I go to my Grady INTS panel, I can click from the drop down menu of existing Grady INTs here. The default...

is gonna be black and white, so every time you started, Grady. And it's always black and white. And then we create the Grady int, and then we save it to our swatches panel after we do that, So it's a little bit different. We don't actually go in and say, Let's create a new Grady and do this. We actually at edit an existing one, then save it. So when we create our object and we use our Grady int panel here where we edit Argh, Radiant is down here at our Grady int ramp and we have our dots at the end of each one of the great Ian ramps here. There's always one on each end here and to edit those we're going to go ahead and double click. This is gonna call up our panel of choices we can either use or sliders. We can use our swatches, or we can use our eyedropper tool to pick a color from an existing area on our document here. So if we go in and we grab our slider here, double click on it, I'm just gonna choose an existing color. When I click on that, then I could go back to my other Grady int slider here. Double click on that. Use my sliders here. If I'd like to excess it that way or go in and choose from my spectrum of colors. And there is my Grady int. Now I am not limited to two colors on my Grady int. I can collect any point under my Grady int slider and yet another Grady in color Another Grady int stop the stop color, I should say. And I can now throw in any other colors that I'd like just by clicking here and then double clicking on there. And there are my radiant colors. Now, this doesn't look too awesome right here. And it's like, no, some of the Grady INTs just don't. But I'm gonna show you ways that we're gonna create really interesting Grady INTs That can be truly awesome. This is just the basic where we go ahead and start. Now you'll notice that we have the Grady in. This is called the grading annotate er, and this is on our object as we work and you can see that it mimics the Grady int slider here in the Grady int panel as well, so we can add it directly on here the same way that we would add it on greedy int slider here. And what's nice is that you can actually see this. You can click on these double click and then call up that content and add this right here and do it right here is well, either way, it's the exact same thing, a couple interesting features. Whenever I clicked on a Grady Int stop color, I could just drag this along, and it will allow me to go ahead and bounce over any other colors here. I could grab those colors, and I can change the locations of them and move them around the diamonds. Right here are basically our blends. How fast or how slow one color is going to blend into another. And basically it's controlled by our location here. And normally the location of 50% means that you're gonna have a balance between these two colors. And that little Grady int blend is gonna be 50% of the way through those two colors. If I don't like a color in here, I can simply grab that Grady and stop And I can just pull it down off the line and snap it right off. The remaining colors will be there and there we go. So it's pretty simple. If I like this Grady in, how do I go ahead and put it into my Swatch panel? Simple. I could just grab the Grady Int thumbnail here, drag it into my swatches panel and drop it. And now that Grady in was there and I can apply this Grady in tow, a fill or stroke or type. Not that I would recommend doing it to type, but anyway you can. It's in the swatches panel ready for you to work with. Now there's once we get our Grady int here, I can flip the style of the Grady in back and forth a swell. And right now we're working with a linear radiant. So it's going to go from one end to another, basically going to be a nice line going across. We have three different types of Grady INTs. Here we have our linear radiant, which is what the default is. We have our radial Grady int. We can also reverse the radio radiant, so it goes in the opposite direction here, and we're gonna get to our free for ingredient in a bit. So we're just going to show you the linear and their radio Grady int right at this point. Now I can reverse this to change the direction. I can also change the angle of my Grady in two. But I want to do this a little bit more dynamically rather than using the drop down menus in the options here. So I'm gonna grab my Grady int tool in the Grady int panel, which is right here. It's the letter g. All right, Now, the Grady int tool just shows up as a set of cross hairs. What this allows me to do is this allows me to collect anywhere and drag my Grady int across my object. I do not have to be within my object. I can be. But I can start way outside my object and drag across there and move that as well. And my grade Ian annotate er is going to show up. And so I can do that and I can rotate and I can pull these and change this and go these direction. Yeah, there it iss now. I'm used to illustrate her back in the days where we didn't have the Grady in an imitator, right on my Grady int. And to me, I find this to be a little bit, I don't know, a little bit annoying because it's always right there trying to help you. Some people love it because you can edit right on here. If you don't like having this Grady int annotate er, you can always go into the view menu and you can turn off your radiant annotate er choose hide, Grady and annotate er it goes away. But that doesn't limit you from going in and using ingredient, tool and clicking and polling and changing the direction of that Grady in. Okay, it just shuts the annotate er off so that you can't edit directly on there. And either way, it's fine. Doesn't change the functionality of it all. It's just a personal preference. So that's view. You can show your radiant annotate er or hide it. Now if I use a linear Grady in. If I switch over to a radio radiant here and I use my Grady int tool, you can see this allows me to put it off center so I could do, you know, kind of like a radio burst here. I've got that which can be kind of cool, so I don't have to have that centered in my object. Now an interesting thing with this is what happens if I draw a circle and I have my radio Grady int here and I just simply click in Poland. There's my you know, I gotta get my Grady int tool trying to draw a new stuff. There's my there it is Radiant tool I pulled from the middle on out, and it's like, Oh, that's awesome. Creates a really nice radio ingredient in that object. Well, if I go in and now squish my oval, you'll see that this squishes with it, which is kind of cool. Okay, but sometimes if I draw an oval here and I have my radio Grady int, he knows how I've got a novel. But my Grady int isn't oval, and it's like if you draw a circle and then squish it, the radio is going to go ahead and squish with the oval. But if you go ahead and drawn oval, you're going to get a circular radio blend here in the Grady Int panel. This allows you to control the aspect ratio so you can go ahead and squish if I the whole thing here. Now, once you do that and you make this larger and smaller or squish it Mauritz always gonna follow that, um, aspect ratio right there. So that's kind of a nice feature when you're going in and doing a radio blend. One more really interesting thing with the radio blend tool is I gotta be on my grade, Ian tool to do this. Yeah, I could go ahead and pull. And it's just gonna give me kind of like this great little radio burst from right here. But if I go in and I click and pull here and then I double click here and then I double click, I want to go in, and it's not letting me do this right here. So there it is. Yeah, it's supposed to work. Okay, Shift is gonna go ahead and allow me to put it right in the middle of my object right there and draw from the center right there. Create that. Flip it right there. So that's my radio. That's my linear. Change it, however, I'd like now it's an interesting concept when we go ahead and put this into a fill. If I put a stroke on my object here and I decided I'm gonna put a stroke on my object, I can also go to my swatches panel and apply my Grady int to the stroke as well. So if I select my stroke here in the Grady Int and apply that I could do that as well. And I can reverse that Grady int on the stroke from that so you can see that I can have my Grady int going the opposite direction. And here in my Grady INT panel, I can select my stroke and my fill, but use my Grady int tool. I can Also, if my stroke is selected, have my Grady int tool. I can change the direction of that stroke, change the direction of the fill based on what I want or what I have selected, I should say right there. Okay, there we have a stroke in the film. Now you can create some really crazy things, especially when you do type, get kind of not so nice looking. But you have those options. So that's applying ingredient to a film. And then a stroke, but I'm gonna apply ingredient to just a stroke here. Now, I've set up a Grady int here. That's kind of interesting. In fact, I can choose from my list of Grady INTs that I have created here. And I have created a Grady int in here that is black and white. And what I've done here is you can see I've set the location of each one of these colors to be equally spaced apart 10% apart. Okay, so this took a few minutes to go ahead and set up like this, but it's just going black toe, white, black, toe white. And it creates a very interesting effect. It kind of looks like steel bars because it kind of gives you that Grady in. And it's like, Okay, so here's a great isn't that actually looks like something Now, this is being applied to a stroke. Okay, this is not a fill in. What I'm going to show you here is on Lee for the stroke at an object. Ah, Grady int fail. I showed you how we could dio go ahead and do linear radio. Reverse the whole thing. Change the angle with Grady int tool. This is something completely different when we apply a stroke, our ingredient to a stroke. When we apply ingredient to a stroke, we've got three different ones that we could go. We've got within the stroke along the stroke and across the stroke. I still don't understand what the three concepts mean, but because we're visual people, you'll see what it actually is. So the first one is basically being applied within the stroke. So I've got a circle and it's just basically applying it within the circle. The next one is going to be along the stroke, So instead of applying it across there, this kind of makes it look like a record or a disk because it's kind of applying it like a fan around the stroke there, like it's fanning out from the center. And it's like, That's kind of cool because it makes it looks like it's kind of turning a rotating. And because we've got the distances set equally here, it makes it look like it's, you know, kind of emotion. And if you wanted to adjust the distances differently, it kind of give that effect of, you know, that you got your highlights and shadows, and it's kind of moving like a turning wheel. The third one is absolutely amazing, applying it across the stroke and this is so cool. So it's taking the stroke from the center of the stroke, and it's applying it across the entire width. So it's like, Are you kidding me? It's like we got this one that just makes it look like steel bars. We've got this one that makes it look like a moving, rotating kind of thing. And then this one which is taking the stroke, and it's actually taking the stroke here, and it's making it look like it's got these cool effects. Now most people would start with this and there'll be like, How do I draw this? Well, here's the crazy part. You don't draw this. This is the same stroke right here. I'm gonna show you the 33 different versions here with the, uh, with the different sets of stroke. So this is, um, along the stroke. This is That's across the stroke. This is along the stroke, and this is within the stroke. Okay? It's all the same ingredient, but three totally different looks and fields, and it's like, Wow, that's amazing. So, no. Now, you don't have to just go in and say, Well, you know, I apply the ingredient, and that's what you get along the stroke. Now, this is the three different types of Grady INTs that you can put along the stroke. And it's absolutely amazing what you can create exact same Grady int applied in three different ways here. This I love because this is like, super super super cool to go ahead and create any raised object. Now, I'm gonna show you a couple other tricks here with radiance that I think are fantastic. I'm just gonna do a very simple Grady int here, okay? And this is applied that to my stroke out to make sure the Phil is active. When I do this and I'm just gonna apply a really simple black and white Grady int here, I'm gonna copy this object, and I'm going to reduce it down in size, and I'm gonna rotated degrees in the park. It right on top of itself. Awesome. Look at that Nice little button. Okay. All it is is just a reverse Grady in one direction and another and this is a really cool way to create any type of inverted button right there. And it's like, Oh, my gosh, it's like, seriously, yeah, seriously, If you went in and you decided to do a radio Grady int here, then of course, you could take your Grady int tool your Grady int annotate er, and you can pull that to the side there to kind of create, you know, different section of highlight. Now, remember, you don't need to start in your object. You can start way outside your objects. Your radiant starts to apply in a different location and create a very different effect on how you want to do this Super simple. But this is one of the cool, radiant techniques. If you want to create a button kind of look, now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go to my stroke here, and I'm going to choose one of my Grady INTs that I have created here and apply this to it. I'm gonna need to beef up the stroke. Wait so we can actually see, and it's like, Okay, that doesn't look very good, you know, that's kind of but then I apply it along the stroke here or across the stroke, you can never remember Those doesn't make sense. And I can do that. And I can actually increase the size of the stroke here. I'm gonna make it nice and beefy right there and there it iss and it's like, Okay, this is an amazing button. It's like, Yeah, it can be. You could do this more subtly. So I'm not going from black toe white here. But if you've ever wanted to create a button that's got those little ring to textures on their this is how you could do it. And most people think it's like I never would have thought about that using a Grady. And it's like, Yeah, pretty cool, huh? It is. It's pretty awesome. So and it doesn't matter what colors you use. I just happen to do black and white because it's very dramatic here. But you can create any type of colors that you want across any object, and I've got different radiance here that I've done right here in this one. You know, here's a Grady in that's going to go ahead and give you multiple colors over an object to create kind of an interesting effect. Okay, it's all agreed, and it's not like multiple shapes of things. It's just one continuous shape just happens to be applied to the stroke, depending on which way you want to apply it to it. That looks pretty boring. That looks boring. And all of a sudden it's like, Wow, Oh, yeah, if you think that's cool, there's a whole lot more to come. But just some of the very basic things really cool. Grady INTs thio be ableto have and to use, and it's pretty awesome. Okay, so let's just using normal. Grady, it's Now I want to show you something here about using our freeform Grady in tool on our free for ingredient is gonna be awesome because I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna draw this shape. We're gonna have no stroke on it here. And I'm just going to fill this with a basic color here. And there's my basic color fill that I've got There it is. So I'm gonna pretend this is a tomato. But, you know, I'd like to get a little bit of, you know, cool highlights and shadows on this and not just using one of my very basic linear or radio Grady INTs here. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump over to the free form Grady int right here. When I jump over to the free for ingredient, what it's going to do is it's going to go ahead and it's going to land colors on here and usually the defaults about four colors. And I have no idea how it picks the color to go ahead and do this. But it's landed a color on my object here, and you can see my Grady INT panel has completely changed. So these are my little target colors. And if I click on a target over here, I can double click, and I could go ahead and I can add a color here. So I'm gonna go ahead and stay in the red ranges here and I can click on other locations. There's another red Maybe I go in and I'm gonna add a little bit more black to that red using my color sliders instead. And here I can create some really cool, interesting qualities, shadow and shading to make this thing like I look like a sphere or make it go ahead and undulate all by going in and just controlling the specific points. Now I can move these all around and this is kind of like acting like light. And you can see you can just drag these all around here, have to wait for this to catch up because this is kind of memory intensive here. As I go on Dio you can see as I drag. It's not always following me, but I can move this off. I can't quite move them all the way off. I could move about halfway off, but once I get past a little halfway in the circle, then it kind of falls off my shape. OK, This dotted ring around here is that spread so I can control just how much spread or how much interaction I'm going to have with all of the other shapes on here. Okay, so I can pull those in or out. You can see as I pull kind of think of these as lights shining down on this. You're going to kind of get the light kind of seeping into the other areas, too. And click off that with my selection tool. And now I can create some kind of sphere, and it's like, Wow, this is like, totally different in terms of radiance. It iss um it's quite interesting. In order to get back and edit the Grady in, you have to select it. And then you have to be back in your Grady int tool, which is G in order to get to this point right here. If you want to get rid of one of these colors, just simply go in and click on one of those little color dots and hit your delete key. Or you could just snap them right off there as well. Okay. Do you want to do that? Unfortunately, you can't go in and like option click and drag and duplicate these colors, which would be really nice. But when you do land a new color, it always picks up the last color that you were using. So that's gonna work as well. And, you know, don't be afraid to go ahead and then different colors in here If you want to kind of like at ambient highlights here, we do not need to use these highlights at their given intensity. You know, maybe I'm going ahead and I'm creating a multi light source sphere. And I wanna have some softer light, you know, some different colors kind of playing on here. I don't have to go in and use each color at its own intensity. You can see once I select the little colors, I can now go in here and I can control the opacity of this. So it allows me to go in and kind of create the opacity of that color. Now, keep in mind when we're using opacity in this particular sense right here, it's not going in. It's not like dimming the light. It's actually changing like the opacity of the light. So you notice how it doesn't like, just give me that kind of yellowish Overall, it kind of like, makes it more white. So this is Mork, kind of like creating a tent rather than opacity of this right here. It's not quite the same is using opacity with the color, so keep that in mind when you do that. So go switch to my selection tool and you can create some really interesting concepts here. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select this shape, and I'm gonna try something different to go, and I'm going to offset this path. Which means I'm going to create a smaller version of this inside itself right here and click. OK, so now I've got two spheres right here inside each other. It's the same thing, only smaller. And that's why you used the offset path. And you can see here you kind of create, like, kind of a domed effect with this, keeping the same object and kind of duplicating it. I could also go in and I could rotate. This is well, and you can see how that's gonna work to create kind of like this metallic looking button very much like we did here by reversing those things here. But with this, it just creates a lot more complex looking shapes. Now, with the free form radiant here, this Onley works on a Phil. We can't use this free for ingredient on a stroke, so that's one of the limitations of this particular feature. But you could do some absolutely amazing things. You want to go ahead and you want to create anything that's going to be much more realistic. Um, light wise, this works really, really, really well and again, you can Onley activate this through your radiant tool. Now, one other thing that we can do here you can see in the Grady int panel. We've got points and we've got lines while points are going to go ahead and give me each individual color. If I do lines right here, I'm gonna show you what lines look like. I'm going to create a different shape over here, so you can kind of understand the lines a little bit better. So if I have an object and I go ahead and I go to my Grady int tool when I click on my free for ingredient, it takes a second to activate it. But it does, and then you can see it just it's randomly picked three colors, and I'm not sure how it randomly picks these colors before it just picked one. But I'm not sure where this green came from because I haven't been using green, but there it iss all right. And now when I use the points, I could just literally land points which will be like three separate lights here, or I can use the line feature which allows me to click and drag and basically connect these together very much like my curvature tool. So now it kind of like has this umbilical cord where the colors blend differently. And now when I move this all together, you can see that the kind of blend in a slightly different And I would say a little bit smoother way right here. And I can land other portions here, and they kind of blend together and get rid of those just by clicking on them and deleting them. And you can see where did that blue come from? I have no idea, but I can then click on those lines and move those together with lines. Kind of blend these things together a little bit more. Um, if I want to do straight lines here, what I'm doing is I'm holding down my shift key and clicking on the points to get straight lines, which is very much how the curvature tool works. So if you understand the curvature tool, you'll understand how these connectors work right here on these lines. And if I click option, click on there, they're gonna go back to curved lines as well. I have not been able to find a way to go ahead and remove the lines. So once you connect these with lines, I haven't found a way to remove them. But I haven't found any detriment to having them as simply as points or his lines here other than blends or look just to be slightly smoother overall. So if you like to do illustrations and you like to do more complex blending here, the free for ingredient is pretty awesome. It's gonna be something that I would definitely suggest. You look into you because it's really quite robust in what it does, and other than the random colors, when you start off with, you can create a lot of really interesting effects. Okay, so we're gonna make it larger pace board here because we're starting to run out of room. There we go. And now I want to show you the blend tool because the blend tool is another way that we could go in and we can create blends of things. It's a kind of a Grady int. It looks like a Grady int, but using the blend tool it's slightly different. But it's the same interesting kind of effect, and the blend tools Really simple to use. You can take any shape that you want, and I'm going to fill it with a color. And then I'm going thio duplicate that shape and it could be larger or smaller. Doesn't make any difference. I'm just gonna keep it the same size. And I'm going thio create a totally different color. What I'd like to do is I want to blend these together so that they can blend overall. And there's different ways that I can blend objects together. Here. I may wanna blend objects because I wanted to more from one, like a circle to a square. But in this case, I wanted to go from color to color. Okay, but the blend works in any different way. I could go from a circle toe a line, and those can change color. In this case, I just wanna go from color to color. So I'm gonna select both objects here. I'm gonna go into the object menu. I'm gonna choose blend No, call up my options first and in my blend options, I've got smooth color, specified steps or specified distance. If I do smooth color here, it's going to blend everything together in a smooth color. But I do object blend, and then I choose make and it blends it together and just smooth colors overall. So that's one way to do it. Okay, I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna copy. This is well, and I'm going to go back to my blend options and with my blend options here, I'm gonna do specified steps. I'm gonna say, OK, let's do this over five steps so you can see and then it's gonna take, and it's gonna do five steps does not include the first or the last steps are in between. And so then it takes this and you could imagine if these were different shapes, how it would then blend from one color to another. But it would also blend from one shape to another. So this is an interesting way to go through and do this kind of thing right here. Now where we would use something like this. Well, what happens if we're creating something and we wanna dio like a slip shadow? So I'm creating some type of icon here, and maybe I've got this icon that I've created, and I would love to go ahead and create a nice little slip shadow going off behind this here in great kind of like, off to the side. And you've seen this before. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy this and then I'm going thio duplicate both of these and I'm going thio Fill these this with, like, a darker gray and this with a lighter gray, like so and move these over a bit on. This is gonna be my slip shadow. So this is the direction that I want them to go. I'm gonna grab both of these. Let me go into object. I'm going to go under my blend blend options here. What I wanna do smooth color. Because I want this to blend very nicely. And then I choose my object blend and make make his option command be and it blends the whole thing together like this. Okay, from one to another. Now, it's interesting here because it always blends from your first object that you've drawn Thio the last object that you've drawn. And here this is the first object which was the darker one in the lighter object here. And if I were to put my object over the top of this right here and put it over there and bring it to the front. It's gonna be shift command, right? Bracket. I have this, but it doesn't really look like it's creating this shadow. Looks like it's kind of creating the tube. And the reason why is because normally would want this dark one to blend to the light one, but the light ones on top. So how do I switch that order if I go into the object menu under blend here? What I'm gonna do is I'm going to reverse this from the front to the back. Okay, So the back was my darker one. The front is the lighter one of my reverse it from front to back. Now you can see how it's going to go ahead, and the dark one's gonna be in front, and then the light one's gonna be going to the back there. So now if I do my slip shadow here, gonna put that on there. Now I have my slip shadow going there, and this is how you can create a really interesting or really easy to do slip shadow here. Um, just using ingredient now I could have created both boxes and then drawn lines and merge those altogether and applied ingredient to it. But you notice how it's kind of got the angular look to it. I couldn't create a Grady Int that way and make it look realistic, so the blend tool could be something that could be definitely useful. Well, there's a couple other cool things with a blend Tulloch's Well, I'm gonna do command Why? Which is going to outline mode and you can see here we have connectors and these air called the spine. And it's just literally aligned because what we're looking at here is we're looking at an effect, all right? It's not really objects going through here. These are not separate objects. Right here. It is, in effect, or an appearance. It's giving the appearance that these are actual shapes or objects. And this spine that connects these two of these is a line. So what can you do with a line? Well, let me show you what you could do with a line here. I'm gonna use my curvature tool, and I'm going to go hover over this and it sees it. Finds the path right here are the spine. And I could just like any other line here with my curvature tool, I could go in and I could land a point and I could curve that. And the blend is then gonna follow that curve. And it's like, Okay, well, that's interesting. Try to do that with a blend tool, and it's like, Huh? Alright, never even thought of that You can. So if I want to go in and I were just like this one and I were to blend this, I could go in and make a change that I could do this with this. Fine. You know, maybe I want this to curve off over here. Cool, make it look kind of springing. Sure, it's just a path so very interesting things we can do with that spine of our object. Now, if we were done with this and we would like to break this apart into actual shapes here so that I have these shapes to mess with it's no longer in the blend mode is no longer the blend appearance. I could go under my object menu and I could go under blend, and I could go ahead and expand this right there. I could also do the same thing. It's a little bit closer, is just going to object, expand either way. And when they expand that that is going to break it out of its blend mode and then going to go in the outline mode using command, why? And now you can see those shapes were there. If I do this with an active blend and I go under object expand, then I'm going to do that and I can look at this and you can see that it's multiple shapes, kind of like a slinky overall. And each one of these is a blend step in and of itself. It's just literally a change of color. So it's kind of interesting to go through and see those aspects like that. I'm gonna undo this because I want to show you one really interesting thing. And this is called the Replace spine. Feature on dis is something that I just learned, you know, a while ago, but it's kind of like okay, I never would have even guessed how this would work or why we would use this. But then I saw a couple examples and I thought, Okay, this is awesome. I've got this blend from here to here, and I've been able to mess with the spying here. And Aiken, do with the curvature tool of the pen tool. But I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to use my spiral Tuell. And I would love to then do a blend that looks like this along the spiral. But I wanted to follow this path and I just can't take a circle here and put a circle there and say, Hey, connect them Thio and have it automatically say, Oh, I'm gonna connect in a spiral you have. You know, you have to tell it to do that. But there's no way we can tell it to go ahead and follow a path when we just blend two objects together. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna blend my objects together here, and then I'm going to draw a different path and select both my original and the path that I've drawn. When you go into the object menu under blend and I'm gonna choose replace the spine. So I've drawn my two circles first, I've blended them together, but Now, I'd like to go ahead and I'd like to take my spiral, and that's gonna be my new spine. So I'm going to replace the spine right there, and it's going to replace it with the spine right there. And it's like, Oh, my gosh, this is crazy. It iss it just took my blend right there. And by the way, that's gone Now it just replaced it, and I'm gonna go in, and I'm gonna look at this under normal right here. And I've got my you know, my circle here on my blend right there. And I'm you could go into isolation mode. You can double click, and I'm gonna make this circle really small right here. And we're gonna see what happens when we do this. And now when you double click and get into isolation mode, I can edit those ends right there, and I can actually change this whole spiral, and it's like, That's crazy. Plus, I could go under the object menu under blend, and I can reverse the spine, okay? And then reverse it so that this is going to go ahead and change the colors. So it basically the circles here there used to be green. Now it's orange. So that reversed the spine right there. And if I go under, blend right here. I can reverse that from front to back, which is then going Thio the green was behind, and now it's in front. So it's like, Wow. I mean, you could do some crazy, cool, fun things with this You can isolate right there. If I may go in and grab this end right here, and I reduce the size of this. Come on, going to reduce the size of this overall. There we go. Look at that. And it's like, how do you do A normal blend like that? And it's like, it's awesome because we just replace the spine. Now we do have a blend tool. Okay, so all these things that I've done right here could be done using the blend tool. I'm gonna show you how this works here using the blend tool. It's the exact same concept of using the blend command. The only difference is we have the blend tool. So we select our objects. We goto our blend tool here. We wanna call up our options. Double click on the blend tool and then we can choose, like the number of steps right here. And then the blend tool requires us to click on a point on the initial object and then a point on the end object. Now, normally, what I would do is I would pick a point here, click and pick on the corresponding point, and it's gonna blend. But I'm gonna undo this because watch what happens when I go through and I click on click on non corresponding points. I'm going to click on the top point of my first object. The bottom point of my second object and it's gonna go ahead is going to connect them. Kind of like a twist. In fact, here's what I'm gonna deal. I'm going to go, and I'm going to change this to a rectangle over here, and I'm gonna have blend a circle to a rectangle. I'm gonna use my blend tool. I've got my steps to be five steps, but I'm gonna click on this location here and then that location there and you see how it kind of twists and turns because it's taking those points, and it's kind of trying to draw those points and blend them together. If I click on this point here and then click on that point here, it's gonna go ahead and change the blend modes or the blend transition right here. I'm gonna do two lines and so this is gonna be a lot of fun. I'm gonna do a line here and we need to add a stroke to this right there. And then I'm going to dio with line here. Same line, same blend modes. When I'm gonna use my blend tool, click here on the click here. Come on, blend together right there and it actually takes them. It's kind of twisting them right there. You can't see it because it's going and it's turning them and twisting them right there. So this is a really cool way to do a blend and get these kind of step apart right there. So if you don't want just the normal blend, use the blend tool and then connect different points to that. And keep in mind, too, that you can change the attributes of this and you're gonna change the overall blend effect, which is just totally amazing. And it's like, Wow, now, remember, this is still in effect when I go into outlined mode. But if I did wanna have these lines tumbling along after I'm done, I could select those owned. By the way, I could isolate this one, and then I could go ahead and I could make this beef here and it's going to go ahead and, you know, change the attributes overall and blend those two. So super, super cool stuff could take these object expand and I could expand everything. And now that their own separate lines here, instead of being in blend mode. So just all these cool, crazy things. Now there's so many things you can do with blends ingredients. I have set up a whole bunch of other stuff here, too, and these air all blends. We've talked about a lot of this stuff here, too. Of course, I have my little bacon blend, which is nothing more than a wavy line, but we've seen a lot of this other stuff. Here is a nice little ribbon where I've just gone and have created a Grady int, and all I've done is I've hinted a little bit darker collar at the end of the ribbon to kind of create a shadow. Now I do have a totally separate video out there on blends ingredients that gets into the nitty gritty with all sorts of things. But I wanted to show you just a really comprehensive guide of going in and use ingredients and blend here in this boot camp Siri's so you could really get comfortable with this and know all these things. But if you wanna dig even deeper, check out my other ingredient and blend video that I did not too long ago. And that's gonna take you even deeper into this stuff. And it's amazing how many things you can create, rather than just really horrible look ingredients. You can create really dynamic looking things and, you know, it all starts a little bit of knowledge and a whole bunch of fun, uh, to go ahead and create these kind of things. But as you know, you're watching this video and there's always more stuff to come. So stay tuned because we've got Mawr. Good stuff for you