Unbelievable Spot Gradient Illustrator

2b - How to Turn an Active Gradients to Spot Colors in Adobe Illustrator.

Spot gradient illustrator. Heres a quick and dirty tips and tricks tutorial for getting clean gradations in Illustrator for screen-printing tee shirts. The number of steps in turn determines the maximum length of the blend before banding occurs. I would normally fix this by building a mixed ink in Indesign but it doesnt seem possible in Illustrator.

Clicking anywhere on the gradient slider will create a default black-to-white gradient. A lot of stuff for Photoshop but for Illustrator. In this example my job is 6 colors.

In Illustrator CS2 when a gradient mesh contains more than one spot color or a process color and a spot color Illustrator converts the mesh to the documents process color space. In the Gradient panel you can adjust the type of gradient the angle of the gradient the colors in the gradient and more. Select the a correct PMS Color from the Swatch Pallet.

Gradient colors can be assigned as CMYK process colors RGB colors or a spot color. Open the flyout menu at the top right corner of the Gradient panel and choose Show Options to display the full range of choices you can apply as you create and edit gradients. Illustrator calculates the number of steps in a gradient based on the percentage of change between the colors in the gradient.

A gradient is a graduated blend between two or more colors or tints of the same color or different colors. CMYK looks fine but Im getting poor results with PMS. Start by using the Rectangle Tool to create a simple rectangle to work on.

In this tutorial I cover how to use opacity masks to successfully make a spot color to spot color blend without that nasty looking grey problem in the cente. Then you can open the Gradient panel by clicking the icon in the toolbar or by going to Window Gradient. I also tried putting the lightest color solid on the bottom layer and putting the gradient on a top layer in overprint fill but Im afraid thats not the best way to.