We are going to look at the brushes category first. A rectangle is made up of three brushes, the fill, the stroke and the opacity mask. The opacity mask allows you to cause parts of the rectangle to be visible or invisible, but right now, we are going to concentrate on the film stroke.
In the brushes category, we see a large white rectangle to indicate that the fill of our rectangle is a solid white. The stroke, a large black rectangle shows that we have a solid black. The color editor below allows me to click on a given area of the spectrum rectangle to choose that color and I can change the hue by dragging up or down in the hue slider. At the bottom, I have displayed what the color of the rectangle was before I changed it and what its current color is.
The third button shows me the last color that I set. So when I choose my rectangle down here, that button maintains the olive green that I used above so I can very quickly set that color on the new rectangle. The color picker also has a color eye dropper that you can use to pick a color up of with any element anywhere on your windows desktop. You can click on windows outside the blend application as well, should you need too.
I also have the ability to set the red, green and blue components manually if I happen to know what the value I am looking for is. I click on any of the components and type in the value I am looking for. Some people are not as comfortable with the RGB color space so I can left click on any of those components and the menu is displayed with several of the other more popular color spaces, HLS, HSP and CMYK.
Lastly at the very bottom is a hex editor box in which you can type the specific hex value that the windows presentation foundation is more familiar with. This box has an extra ability however, that it understands some colors that when I just type a color in it, it converts that to the appropriate color. This box recognizes all of the colors that the dot net framework understands and those colors can be located in MSTN.
These are all the different ways that you can set the colors explicitly. But later on we would talk about resources, this hub allows you to choose any color that you have defined as a resource and this button allows you to define the current color as a resource. We will talk about this more when we get in to resources later on.
In addition to solid brushes as you see right now, you have the ability to choose a gradient brush. When I click on that by default I am giving the linear gradient brush expanding from black to white. Below the color picker, I now have the gradient editor bar that with a click, I can add additional gradient stops or by dragging the gradient stops downward delete them.
A gradient must always have at least two gradient stops, so once I have deleted two of the stops, I can no longer delete anymore. The currently selected gradient stop is shown with the black outline. When I changed its color to something else, you will see that the color is both displayed in the gradient editor below the color picker, as well as immediately live on the scene.
I can drag the gradient stops around to change how the gradient looks. I can also modify the alpha value on any of my gradient stops to cause portions of the gradient to appear transparent. When I drag the rectangle over one of the other rectangles, you will see that the green of the previous rectangle now shows through.
In addition to the linear gradient, there is the radio gradient. When I choose it, I now have a gradient that spins around a central point. The gradient editor however still works the same way and I can move my gradients around and delete them however I need.
I am going to make my rectangle a little bit larger because one of the other things you can do with a gradient is use the brush transform tool. When I select that, the adorners change to display the adorners that specify the gradient. The vector here now can be modified to get different gradient styles. I can move the entire gradient if I wish. I can also skew it and translate it.
Along with changing th
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