Gradients

Every so often I open up Illustrator and just mess around. The tools that it offers to create and edit graphics are seemingly endless, and sometimes I find it helpful to re-discover its capabilities.

I was inspired by the cover graphic I saw in the latest issue of Kootany Mountain Culture Magazine. It was a pretty simple image really; a series of gradient strips all smashed together. The effect was pretty interesting and I decided to give it a try. I started by choosing a swatch selection from Kuler and then began messing around with the gradient tool in Illustrator. Here's the result:

When I completed the gradient image I started to play around with the transparency and blending mode tools and began to layer some cool textures. These are two of my favourites:

This is really just scratching the surface in terms of what Illustrator can do, but even with only using a few tools you can get some really interesting graphics.