Tri-Color Gradient The toughest part about working with gradients is that many low-end paint programs will only permit you to create a gradient of one hue to a second, so gradients with three or more colors may at first seem out of reach for you. As you discovered while working with the Golden technique, however, those multi-colored gradients are easily obtained with a couple simple steps. Following Golden, you created a tri-colored gradient that ran vertically from Color 1 to Color 2 to Color 3. In that instance, our Colors 1 and 3 were actually the same hue, but the process is similar if 1, 2, and 3 are each different. Let's go through one here, using green-to-yellow-to-pink.

Step 1: Open a new window about 300 x 300. Create your green-to-yellow gradient. (Make a note of the ending color formula in order to match it in the next step.)

Step 2: Open another new window about 300 x 300. Beginning with the same shade of yellow you ended on in Step 1, create a yellow-to-pink gradient.

Step 3: Open a third new window 300 x 300. Resize the green-to-yellow window to 300 x 150 and paste this to the newest window. (This gradient is vertical, so we are cutting the vertical direction in half. If your gradient is horizontal, cut the horizontal direction in half, i.e.: 150 x 300.)

Step 4: Resize the yellow-to-pink window to 300 x 150 and paste this to the newest window, aligning it to match up to the green-to-yellow. You've just created a tri-color gradient! Save this image in your storage directory and it will be ready for many uses ahead. Be sure to save it in an uncompressed, 24-bit color format such as BMP, PCX, PNG or TGA.

Bring On The Gradients! Knowing how to create a tri-color gradient, *any* number of colors are now within your grasp! Why? Because no matter what the combination of hues in any given gradient, they can always be reached by 2 (Color A to Color B) or by 3 (Color A to Color B to Color C).

Here's a sample of a multi-colored gradient that was created with Kai's Power Tools. Can you see how you could readily reproduce it without a special plug-in? Gradient: Blue to Orange to Green to Lilac to Pink to Red By 2: By 3: Blue to Orange, Orange to Green, Green to Lilac, Lilac to Pink, Pink to Red Blue to Orange to Green, Green to Lilac to Pink, Pink to Red

Great Gradients to try: Here are some gradient text effects you might want to reproduce. Each was created using the basic copy/paste routine that is detailed for the Golden and Texture techniques. Highlights and shadows were added following the techniques given for Shadows and Sculpted. Vertical A to B to A Vertical Red to Purple to Violet Violet to Blue to Turquoise Turquoise to Green to Chartruese Chartruese to Yellow to Orange Horizontal A to B to C to B to A Vertical A to B Each letter received individual treatment of Horizontal A to B to A

What cool gradients will *you* make?