Introduction to Blend: Brushes - Page 3

In the previous page you customized your background by applying a gradient and changing some colors around. There are  a few more tricks you can perform with gradients, so let's look at those and then start drawing our shapes onto the stage.

11. Right now, our background gradient changes only in a left-to-right direction. Let's angle the gradient so that the color changes at an angle. To change the fill angle color, click on the Brush Transform button from your Toolbox:

[ click on the Brush Transform button ]

12. Once you have clicked on the Brush Transform button. You should see a large arrow superimposed over the area of your background in your Artboard. You can drag, rotate, and scale this arrow to adjust subtle details associated with the background:

[ the arrow's direction and size determines how your gradient looks ]

Feel free to use the Brush Transform tool to modify your gradient in any way you want. I have mine angled and stretched a little bit as shown in the above image, so feel free to apply a similar transformation if you want.

13. We've spent quite a bit of time making modifications to the brush's background property, but there are more brush properties that we haven't touched upon. In order to use some of the other properties, let's create a few new objects to populate on our background.
    
    In your Toolbox, find the Shapes button, click on the small white arrow on the bottom-right corner of that button to display the shapes menu, and select the Ellipse tool:

[ click on the Shapes button to select the Ellipse ]

The Ellipse tool allows you to draw ellipses and its related friends, the circles.

14. With your Ellipse tool selected, click on your stage and drag the mouse outward to draw a circle. To make a perfect circle, hold down your Shift key. Release your mouse to stop the dragging, and you will see your circle appear on the Artboard:

[ your plain (for now) circle should be displayed on the Artboard ]

The circle you should see will feature the default colors and outlines from when last used this feature, so let's go through and customize how our circle looks. Let's first start with the background, since you should be familiar enough with this property already.

15. Change your circle's background color by setting it to white, but depending on your circle's defaultl color, your circle might already be white. If your circle is already white, feel free to skip this step, but if it isn't, you can make your circle white by going to your Brushes panel and selecting the Solid color brush:

[ The Fill property specifies the fill color of your selected object ]

The Solid color brush applies a solid color throughout your shape or object. This is different from a gradient brush where you specify multiple color values.

16. Once you have selected the Solid color brush, select a white color from the color box. You will see that your circle is now colored white also.

17. Now, click on the Stroke property from the same Brushes panel to select it. Stroke is another term for our shape's outline:

[ select the Stroke property to make modifications to your shape's outline ]

18. With the Stroke property selected, click on your Solid color brush again to specify the stroke color. The color box will appear after you click on Solid color, and this time pick a light blue-ish color:

[ select a light blue color from the color editor ]

19. Once you have selected your light blue stroke color, you probably won't see the effects of it actually. The reason is that the stroke thickness is too small to be noticed over our background. To fix that, we need to increase the stroke thickness
    
    Find the Appearance panel (it should be below your Brushes panel) and in the StrokeThickness field, enter a value of 10:

[ make your shape's stroke more visible by increasing its thickness ]

After entering a value of 10 for StrokeThickness, you will see that your circle now has a thick light-blue outline (stroke):

[ with a thicker stroke thickness, your shape's outline is more visible ]

Finally, your design is starting to take shape. We only have one, albeit cool-looking, circle in our Artboard. In the next page, let's hope to change that.

Onwards to the next page!

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