#Color & gradients

#Fill and stroke

In Properties → Appearance:

• Fill — Solid, Linear or Radial gradient.
• Stroke — color, width (any weight from 0 pt: type it, or scroll the box in 0.25 pt steps), a width profile for lines, dashes, line caps and joins, and whether it sits inside, centered or outside the edge.
• Opacity and Blend mode for the whole object.

Pick colors from the color picker or your swatches. Add the current color to your swatches to reuse it.

Gradient swatches sit under the color swatches of the fill. When the fill is a gradient, Save gradient keeps it. Tap a saved gradient to put it on the selected objects, or on the next shape you draw. Right-click or hold a swatch to remove it. Swatches are saved with the document and come along into a new one.

#Eyedropper

The Eyedropper (I): click any artwork to copy its paint onto the selection — fill, stroke and a gradient as a whole. Click an image to pick a single color from it.

• Shift-click takes only the color under the pointer and makes it a plain fill. On a gradient that is the color of the gradient at exactly that spot.
• With nothing selected, what you pick is used for the next shape you draw.
• The eyedropper button next to a color field picks just one color into that field. On a tablet, use this where a keyboard would use Shift.

#Gradients

1. Choose Linear or Radial for the fill.
2. Click a stop on the gradient bar — or tap a stop's dot on the canvas — to select it.
3. Any color you choose now goes to that stop: a swatch, the color picker or the eyedropper.

• Drag stops along the bar to move them; one undo restores a drag.
• On the canvas, drag the gradient's handles to move it, change its angle and length, or squash a radial gradient.

#One gradient across several objects

Select several objects and choose Linear or Radial: the gradient runs once across the whole selection, as if the objects were one shape. A saved gradient or the eyedropper does the same.

• As one / Each object under the gradient buttons switches between one gradient across the selection and a gradient of its own in each object. Objects that already have their own gradients stay as they are until you choose As one.
• While they share one gradient, the angle, length and center work on the whole selection, and the handles on the canvas span all of it.
• Each object keeps its part of the gradient. Move or resize the selection together and it stays joined. Move one object on its own and its part goes with it; select them again and choose As one to rejoin. Flipping a selection with an angled gradient separates it the same way.
• Text uses a measured estimate of its box, so a gradient across text and shapes can sit very slightly off on the text.

Note: Choosing No fill removes the gradient.