Points & Paths

This is an update to a tutorial I had on my earlier website. It’s been completely rewritten for Illustrator CS4 and, I believe, simplified. So perhaps you’re hooked on the “Aqua” look and are just aching to use it in your work. Look no further Trend Boy and/or Girl!

1. Create a circle with a radial gradient
In a new document, use the Ellipse tool to create a perfectly round circle. Using pixels as my unit of measurement, I created a 200 pixel x 200 pixel circle.

Apply the default black/white gradient fill to the circle. You can find this default fill at the bottom of the toolbar if you’ve not made any color adjustments to gradients recently or you can find it in the Swatches panel.

In the Gradient panel, set the gradient type to Radial. Also, set the stroke color on the shape to none.

Optional: Make sure the Fill box is overlapping the Stroke box at the base of the toolbar. In the Gradient panel, set the white color’s opacity value to 0%. To confirm transparency, you can turn on the Transparency Grid (View > Show Transparency Grid).

Before moving on to Step 2, name this layer “Circle” and lock the layer.

2. Create the highlight
Make a new layer, named “Highlight”, above the Circle layer. Use the Ellipse tool to draw another circle that’s a bit smaller than the original (as seen below) and fill it with white. Disable the stroke if there is one.

Select the bottom “handle” of the bounding box around the smaller circle and drag it up to vertically compress the circle. Your result should be similar to what’s seen below.

Click in an empty area of your document to deselect the shape. Switch to the Direct Selection tool and, with the help of Smart Guides (View > Smart Guides), hover over the top anchor point on the smaller circle. A small “anchor” label should appear. I’ve enhanced the appearance of the label for this image.

Click and drag this anchor point upward so it matches the inside contour of the larger circle as seen in the image below.

Use the Direct Selection tool on the bottom anchor point and drag down to get the result seen below.

To this shape, apply a two-color linear gradient fill. Set both colors on gradient to white. The opacity of one color should be 0% while the other is set to 40%. The transparent part of the gradient should appear at the top of the shape while the more opaque white is at the bottom.

And that’s all there is to it! To change the colors on your circle, just drag a swatch color from the Swatches panel onto the black color in the gradient on the Circle layer; just make sure that the circle is selected.

Bear in mind that you can alter the position of the gradient using the Gradient tool. You can also affect how the gradient spreads its color within the circle by making adjustments to the positions of the color boxes in the Gradient panel. The midpoint marker – the diamond above the gradient bar that appears between two colors – can also be adjusted.