I was hoping to add a little interest to this job by adding a gradient that goes
from spot orange to black. But you can see how anemic it is.
So it's a little bit disappointing. If we look at this in Separations
Preview, you can get a better idea of what's going on.
When I go to Window > Separations Preview, if I turn off the Orange, so
that we can see the Black, it's going from solid black at the very right, and a
little transition off to white on the left.
And then if I turn off Black, you can see what's happening to the Orange.
So you can see that they both start falling off pretty much immediately.
And so that mean that you don't have any real, strong combination of those colors
here in the middle and that's why it looks a little bit weak.
It looks a little bit gray. Now there is no way in Illustrator to
create an ink that's a combination of two colors.
So, I can't make a swatch that's a combination of Black and Pantone Orange,
that's what I really like to do, but since I can't do that, I am going to cheat.
So in the Layers panel, you can see there's my Gradient, so I'm going to
select that object, and I'm going to duplicate it.
And I can just drag it down to the new sublayer icon, and that'll do that.
So here's my game plan. I'm going to have two versions of the gradient.
One is just going to be for the orange, and one is going to be for that
transition from black to white. So I'm going to turn off the top one,
select the bottom one, and this is really just going to be solid.
It's just going to be that solid orange. And now I'm going to come back and turn
on the other one. By the way, this is kind of a great
little trick. If you want to select something sort of
by remote control, that little circle there is a target for that object.
If I click on the circle, that selects the object.
Sometimes in a really messy document, that's an easier way to get a hold of something.
So for this, I'm going to go into my gradient panel, and where I now have
orange on the left, I'm going to change that to just be white.
Now, what's going on up to this point? Well, if I turn the original little shape
on, we can't see it because the black doesn't overprint.
So now, I'm going to select my black gradient, and I'm going to go to Window >
Attributes, and set the Fill to Overprint.
We don't see the results, because Illustrator is not showing me Overprint,
but since I already have my Separations Preview open, I can just do it there.
When I click on Overprint Preview, now you can see, that looks much better.
Although, now that I'm doing it this way, I think I might change the distribution
of that black to white gradient. So with this shape still selected, I'm
going to go into my gradient panel. And this little diamond up above the
little ramp here, lets me determine the break point.
If I move it all the way to the left, you can see that it stays solid black longer,
and then there's a sudden transition to white.
If I move it to the right, it stays white longer, and there's a sudden transition
to black. So what I want to do is have that heavy
end happen a little longer. So I want a little more weight over here.
So, I'm going to move it a little left of center.
And I think that does what I want. I still see plenty of orange but I have
enough weight over here that it looks more robust.
So this is a little trick. It's a bit of a cheat, it's going to look
a little weird unless you have overprint preview on.
But anytime you have a gradient that goes from a spot color to black, remember this
little trick in Illustrator. It's the only way you can get a good mix
of the spot color and the black and not have that sort of anemic gray look that
you saw initially. It takes two objects, and you have to
remember to turn on Overprint Preview. And remember the way I induced Overprint
in that shape was to go to Attributes And turn on Overprint Fill.
So, remember that little trick in the future and your Gradients will look a lot better.