Now, I have made a couple of really nice gradients so I might want to use them again. I am going to pick up a couple of tools that we have used before to not only select and grab these gradients but also to save them. Now the first one, I am going to on purpose click off my gradient setting in my paint palette and just pick some random color because I wanted to show that I can use my eyedropper tool on either one of these gradients. This is kind of interesting. Actually, the contrast is – let me switch to this eyedropper tool. Now, we have talked about this one. This one is the one we use for picking up our colors in our color palette. If I roll this over the gradient, this is literally picking up pixel colors. So you can see if I go the outside of the balloon, I get a dark orange and if I go into the middle, I am picking up a white or near white, orange. So it is actually looking at what pixel the color is sitting on top of in order to pick it up and the same thing with my green gradient down here.

What is different about our standard eyedropper tool out of the tool palette is that when I go over to the balloon, it is recognizing it as a fill. And, when I pick it up, it is loading the gradient not in single color into my fill palette. Now we can use that in a couple of different ways. One of them I am thinking of is color swatches. Remember this panel, we used it to save custom colors that we have selected so that we could grab them again and we drop them in our palette. Well, you might have noticed that in addition to our standard colors at the bottom of our swatches, we actually have a few gradients that we could select straight out of here and we can make swatches of our gradients as well. But since I used that eyedropper tool, the normal one in our palette before, in order to pick the color up, a swatch was added to my color swatches palette just like it was when I use the eyedropper tool for the regular color swatches.

Now, these swatches are just going to be the colors of the gradient. They are not going to be the other settings. There is one another tool that we are going to use to control some of those other settings like the positioning and scaling of each gradient within the graphic that we have used it on. I would like to try that out. The best place we can see this is in the paint bucket tool. Paint bucket tool has a lock fill icon and usually by default it is on. Now, if your fill is a solid color, this is not really going to make any difference at all but if it is a gradient color, it is going to make a lot of difference. Here it is how it is going to work. I am going to turn it off to start with and let us try it out. Now, what I would like to do is I would like to pick up the green gradient we used on the leaf. It has managed to reset my lock fill so I am going to turn that back off because what I would like to do is just drop that gradient fill into the second leaf.

Now, what you will notice here is it has rescaled the fill so that the gradient starts at the edge of the leaf and ends at the right edge of the leaf. So the left edge is light, the right edge is dark just like the gradient fill set up in here. If we look at these two gradients, I have used the same colors but the settings were different. We can see that with the gradient transform tool. If I click on this one, I got a certain set of settings that scale the full length of the leaf from right to left. And, on this one, I have got completely different settings. It did carry the angle across but it did not make them exactly the same. So we can adjust this leaf accordingly. So even though I am using the same gradient, I have a completely different orientation for the gradient that matches whatever shape of vector object that I have dropped it onto. So that would be an unlocked fill.

Let us try an example of a locked fill. I think the sun would be a good position for this one. I am going to make up a brand new gradient for this so let me just deselect everything. Let us go back to our color mixer and let us create a gradient fill. I am going to create a