Gradient to follow the shape of a line

[jhazel0705]

I am working with a rose petal and need the gradient to follow the SHAPE of the base line for the object.....so that it flows ( see illustration)....any thoughts on how to make this happen, I tried a linear gradient but it looked straight and flat against the curvature of the shape

[toltec]

You can't, not really, or not as a vector.

 

If you are using Photo, you could mould the shape using the Mesh Warp tool  after applying the gradient and rasterizing the shape.

[- S -]

I don't deal with vectors much, so it's entirely likely the following method may not be what you're looking for.  However these were the steps I used.

1) Created the main shape with the pen tool
2) Duplicated it
3) Removed the top part of the duplicated shape by breaking the curve and deleting the top nodes, leaving just the line along the bottom
4) Used this as the base for outline effect in the layer effects panel (see pic for settings)
5) Clipped it to the original main shape

 

 

 

[Mithferion]

Also, part of what you want to da can be achieved by a mix of Layer Effects, like this:

 

At least that's what I think we can do while the Mesh Gradient Tool comes around.

Best regards!

 

[Lynn]

I used a shape filled with red, then colored strokes curved as desired, grouped these and applied a Gaussian Blue, then nested them in the red shape.

 

[gdenby]

47 minutes ago, Lynn said:

I used a shape filled with red, then colored strokes curved as desired, grouped these and applied a Gaussian Blue, then nested them in the red shape...

 

 

Yup, that works! 

[jhazel0705]

Perfect....thanks soooo much...now off to try them all.....thanks again 

[Michael Sheaver]

Hi folks, I found Lynn's tips to be absolutely helpful. As you can see by this shot below, I got the result I was looking for - almost:

A wrestled with this all afternoon, but no matter what I do, the borders between the pie slices just do not want to blend nicely. When I tried to apply gaussian blur to the individual slices like Lynn did, the results were really horrendous, with yellow bands at the shape borders. The best I could manage was to apply gaussian blur to the group and crank the value all the way up, but it still not presentable.

Can someone look at the attached project file Circular Curved Arrows.afdesign and see what I might be doing wrong?

[firstdefence]

@Michael Sheaver Goooooooood Morning Affinity people,

Had a play with the round arrow issue and its a non starter so, after some early morning doodling I had a lightbulb moment hahaha!

Lightbulb moment = Conical Gradient  oh yeah!

Arrows.afdesign: File saved with history so you can scrub the history back and forth to see what I did.

I also wanted to get a good third spacing and get the arrows on the centre line so I used shapes as guides. I used a triangle for the thirds guide, and a third ellipse to mark the centre line, this helped with the arrow head positions, The only other issue was the overlap but I just duplicated one of the arrows and created a square and set its blend mode to erase to crop some of it off, the fill of the square is irrelevant so ignore that. oh I'd got a 0.3mm stroke on the arrows that I had to take off, don't know how that got there lol!

[lepr]

.

[Michael Sheaver]

Wow, wow, WOW! This is an unexpected surprise indeed! 

@firstdefence, that lightbulb pop was definitely a flash of inspiration! The crazy thing is that I had tried the conical gradient in the beginning, but because I never did understand how it works, could not get it to work. So I looked for ways to do a gradient on a path and happened upon this post.

Thank you for sharing your example work with the history with me! You might think I'm nuts, but I used it as my personalized tutorial and followed along with my own empty project. And man, I did learn a lot of cool things, including:

• Using the polygon-turned-triangle to get perfect spacing and proportions for the three curved arrows.
• Why you chose the polygon instead of the triangle tool for this, for it the alignment of the points with the outer circumference was perfect with the polygon tool.
• Aligning the center points of the arrow head (triangle) to be perpendicular to the center circle (I had eyeballed it before ).
• Using the erase blend mode for the overlap; I had never used. that one before.
• As an aside, I did set horizontal and vertical guides at the center of the circle to give me more precise placement of the focal points before transforming the duplicated arrows.

I had a TON of fun with this little exercise. 

@>|<, as soon as I saw your screenshot with the conical gradient, everything clicked for me, and it now makes perfect sense to me! I honestly don't think I could have understood the work of @firstdefence had you not posted that shot!  am so glad you did, and thank you deeply for that!

I also like your use of the compound shape versus the union operation, and will definitely use it next time. And yes, I have used symbols quite a bit, and love them!

Here is the result of my exercise:

I do see that I need to be more careful of where to place the center guide circle, for the arrowheads look a bit off. Now that I have a good grasp of this, it should be no problem for me to redo it again. I just say that I absolutely LOVE the greater flexibility and control that this approach gives me!

Again, my deepest heart-felt thanks to both of you!

 

Edited September 16, 2018 by Michael Sheaver
fix typos

[firstdefence]

You're welcome Michael