Now in our last little section, I have considered a little bit more of a trick than anything else but it is not such a big trick. What I would like to do is take the gradients that we have been looking at and combine them with one setting that we looked at earlier in this lesson and that is the alpha setting. I mentioned that you can use an alpha any place that you use a color and that actually includes a gradient. So what if we were to take this cloud here and I did an example where we made the cloud completely transparent. Let me put the balloon behind the cloud again. And this time, I am going to set the fill color for the cloud from solid to a linear gradient. And, let us go for the dark ranges. I will just make a linear gradient that is white to gray. Now, that will be a standard cloud showing light on one side and shadow on the other side. But, what if I replace the white color with a white that is nearly all or mostly transparent?
Now, you can see my grid appearing in the preview window. Click away so we can see that. The grid shows up almost completely here because I have a nearly transparent white but on this side, I am going to an opaque-gray. That is what so interesting about this one is I can actually vary the transparency of the cloud as it goes along here. Now, I did not dump that in so let me add that into our cloud. We check the ranges so we can see where it is going to stop and start – it went a little bit big as I thought it would. So I will move it on in here. Let me grab that balloon and move it around behind it. Now you can start to see that we get that gray color over here on the corner but if I just simply grab the balloon, I will lock my cloud layer so I do not accidentally grab it and move that around behind. Our balloon is getting less and less visible. The further behind this cloud we get, you can kind of see it sticking out. You can see in this edge, it is not visible at all but down towards this end it is almost completely visible. That should about do us for color. We have seen how to select, save, and even do some advance color settings. So now, we have a lot more tools at our disposal to control colors, create effects, and to add depth.
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