- In this movie, we're gonna blend in
a second translucent gradient using a couple of
carefully placed opacity values in order to
establish the boundaries of the earth.
And I wanna retrieve that compound path
that represents the earth, so I'll go ahead and
twirl open my gradients layer here inside the layers panel,
and I'll turn on that compound path so that I can see it.
I also need to be able to see my guides,
so I'll turn them on and I'm gonna select
that guide's layer as well.
Now at this point you're gonna have to sort of bear with me.
What I want to do is establish a circular guide
that we'll use in order to draw the second radial gradient,
and I want it to be the size of that original Earth,
the one that was rounded in opposition of Saturn,
that we created back in the previous chapter.
And I didn't keep that big circle,
so I'm gonna have to recreate it,
and I'm gonna do so by switching to the ellipse tool,
which I can select from the shape tool flyout menu,
and then, I'll go ahead and position my cursor right there
at the center of that rectangle,
at the bottom of the exhaust plume,
and then I'll Alt click or Option and click on a Mac
to bring up the ellipse dialog box.
And then, assuming that you're seeing
two equal values right here for width and height,
then go ahead and turn on your Link icon and
set either the width or the height value to 1,000 points.
And then click OK and you'll create
this enormous circle like so.
Then, remember that we scooted it down and to the left,
and you can do that by pressing the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool, and then press the Enter key
or the Return key on a Mac to bring up the Move Dialog box,
and these are the exact values we want,
an angle of negative 120 degrees
and a distance of 280 points.
You don't need to worry about the horizontal
and vertical values, they'll reconcile automatically.
Then go ahead and click OK to accept that change like so.
Now, with this object on the guides layer,
go up to the View menu, choose guides,
and then choose Make Guides in order to
turn that circle into a guide.
All right, now what we want to do is select the earth,
and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit as well,
and we wanna fill it with a gradient,
so I'll just go ahead and click on the gradient slider.
This time around, notice that the fill is active,
that's very important, and we wanna change the type
once again to radial, and now I'm gonna select the
gradient tool, which you can get by pressing the G key,
and you wanna drag from this center point all the way up
to let's say right about there,
and I have to eyeball things a little bit this time,
so that it's more or less aligned to the outer perimeter
of the circle.
Notice that my angle value this time is 60.3 degrees.
I want it to be exactly 60 degrees,
so I'll go ahead and change that value,
and I want the color to be white, so
I'm gonna double click on this first color stop
and I'll just change it to an HSB white,
which can be any hue value, it really doesn't matter,
but I am gonna change it to 210 degrees.
The saturation does need to be zero,
and the brightness needs to be 100%,
and then you can go ahead and create a copy of that color
by Alt or Option dragging the color stop,
and now, we can get rid of black because we don't want it,
just by dragging it downward like so.
And the result is a white-to-white gradient,
which of course, doesn't make any sense,
but it will in just a moment.
Now, I'm gonna start by changing this second location value
to 88%, again easy to enter and memorable as well.
It's the kind of thing that somebody
can easily reproduce after you,
and then I'll select that first color stop,
and I'll change it to 77%.
Now, all of this only makes sense if we introduce
some opacity variation, so I'm gonna change the opacity
of the first color stop to 0% here inside the gradient panel
and you can now see that we have a gradient that's going
from 0% opacity at this location right there
to 100% opacity at this location,
and I can change that, by the way,
I don't want it to be 100%, so I'll go ahead
and double-click on this second color stop,
the one that has a location of 88%,
in order to bring up this panel here
inside the document window, at which point I can change
the opacity value to 50% to make it a little bit lighter.
Then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac
to make that change.
All right, now I'm gonna zoom in and at this point,
I experimented with where this endpoint should be,
and I've found that if I dragged it too far,
for example, right about here, I lost that little bit of
brightness that I want,
and then if I don't drag it far enough of course,
we have too much brightness, it's a little bit garish,
and it gets flat right in these corners,
this corner here on the right side as well as
the corner on the left side,
so I ended up taking this guy up to the bottom of this
rectangular guide, which is about the point at which
the wings dissolve into the body of the rocket,
and you want to make sure by the way,
after you get done making your modification,
that the angle value is still 60 degrees,
so that's very important and assuming that it is,
you can just go ahead and press the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool and then click off of
that path outline to deselect it,
and then finally, descend to the guides layer
here inside the layers panel and turn it off
so that we have an uninterrupted view of our logo.
And that's how you indicate the boundaries of a logo element
by blending one gradient with another using
a couple of carefully placed opacity values
here inside Illustrator.