: Can I align a stroke to the inside of a shape with "Apply gradient across stroke" I am trying to make a gradient going from the edge of a shape to its offset center, to make it look like

@BetL875

You cannot. That's how Illustrator gradient on stroke works.

However, you can cheat using the appearance panel:

Add the gradient stroke to your text and select Path > Offset path in the Appearance panel. Use a negative value to align the stroke to the inside of the text. You might have to tinker with the stroke width / offset value to get better results.

I also added a mask made with the text itself, to control part of the stroke "spilling out" of the shapes.

I don't believe it will be perfect, as you can see in my example below, it distorts a lot depending on the shape of the letter. On the top right corner there's an ellipse with the same gradient applied.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Cooney243

You cannot select align inside or outside if gradient is set to stroke.
If i correctly undestood, shape A consists of 2 stroke - inside and outer and you apply gradient to outer stroke, but in this case you can use shape A with a single stroke, it's just a closed path and then apply gradient to this stroke with appropriate stroke width:

Also you can use Width Tool to achive some interesting results:



If you already have drawn letter forms and you don't want redraw them, gradient along stroke not a solution at all.
I am afraid, but in case of 2d soft (like Illustrator) you can not just 'create a style and then apply to all forms', it's more for 3d soft: you create 3d objects, choose light source and get result.
Here you should deal with each object's surfaces separatly, keeping in mind light directions and manually recreating lighting/shading effects. You can use gradients applied to form, not stroke (especially several various gradients applied to the same form with various color blend modes) or use mesh, there are a lot of tutorials about this.

Vote Up Vote Down