hey! guys it's GraphicTemple.com from yes I'm a designer let me show you a new feature in adobe illustrator CC 2019 so this has to be my favorite new feature in this version the gradients in the previous versions were already working really well and we obviously have the gradient mesh option which I have in this case as well you can see all of these shapes have gradient meshes on them which means that if I use the direct selection tool I can move these nodes around and you can see how the colors are starting to mix differently now this is an amazing feature and I know that a lot of professional illustrators would use it all the time I do as well
but finally now we have a new option which is a new take on creating this type of illustrations so let me show you this I'm just going to turn on this other shape that I prepared which is not a gradient mesh so this is just a simple shape at this moment but what we will be doing here is to add a gradient on it and the way I'm going to do it is by going through the window menu select gradient that brings us to the gradient panel and notice that we have the new option here next to the original linear and radial gradient now we have also this third category called free form gradient and that's the new feature so let me click on that and as soon as I click on it is going to automatically assign a few pinpoints on the gradient so you can think of these as control points these control points can be moved around freely and easily and you can see a live update of how your new gradient is going to look like I just love this feature it's more similar to the puppet work that was introduced in the previous version but now that we can use these pins also for gradients it's just amazing and of course you can add new points as well as easily as that and you can move them freely around and you can see how cool effects you can get very quickly but of course there's more so if you want you can also double click on any
these and switch to a different color so I can take something completely different and then we can also increase the area that it covers it's called spread which you can access again by click and dragging this little black point and then now we can see it has a reach that is less smoothing transition but it covers a bigger area with that selected color another really cool feature is that while you are selecting colors for your gradients and this actually applies to all types of gradients finally now we have the eyedropper tool as well available so I can pick a color from another design so I can check very quickly which color would suit past this part of my gradient and then I can just leave it at that so having the feature might seem like a small thing but again it's just so much more convenient to work with gradients in general just by having that option there now if you don't see the nodes or control points on your gradient or free form gradient make sure you press G to get back to your gradient tool and that way you should be able to see them again but they're still not all there's more you can even add control lines instead of points so just select lines here on the top or from the gradient panel and all you have to do is to start drawing so let me just put my first point down but before I go any further I'm going to change the color of this to something like that and then notice that I will see a rubber band showing the line that is going to be created so if I click again there's my new point using again the previous color which is very smart but here comes the coolest thing if I keep drawing with this it's going to automatically curve this path and each of these color stops will be using my most recent color so because I created this is a line that means that the gradient is running along the edge of the shape now so this is a brilliant feature for shading shapes and in a much more intuitive way than it used to be with the gradient mesh
so you can see I can select each of these points still and double click on them to change the color I can of course use color swatches or the eyedropper and I can very quickly assign different shading on them like this one as well I can make a bit darker and immediately it starts to feel that this shape has a bit more depth because this bottom area is darker than the top but of course you can still move these points around and notice how nicely all the other parts of the curve update so if I move this point around you can see both neighboring details updating again this behavior on the path actually comes from the curvature tool so think of this as the curvature tool use within a gradient to define your color stops and the
transitions between them once again the freeform gradient is an amazing feature make sure you test it out because it's much more intuitive than the gradient mesh and it is just pure fun to work with and thanks a lot for watching I hope this was useful and if you want to find out more about all the new features released in this version for Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign make sure you check back on our site see you guys in the next one
graphictemple.com
graphictemple.com