Gradient
Filling an enclosed region with a two-colour ramp drawn by a drag, and the gap and expand controls it shares with the bucket.
Reference
- Tool
- Gradient
- Panel
- Tool Options
- Section
- Gradient
The Gradient tool fills an enclosed region with a ramp between two colours. Drag inside the region: the point where the drag starts takes the From colour and the point where it ends takes the To colour.
Gradient runs on the same fill machinery as the Fill tool. Regions are closed by stroke geometry rather than by colour, so the same rules about watertight walls and unclosed loops apply, and the Close gap and Expand controls behave identically. The drawing surface is resolved once, when the drag begins.
Controls
The colour at the start of the drag. This is the shared brush colour — the same swatch the Fill tool and the paint tools use, so changing it here changes it for them.
The colour at the end of the drag. This swatch belongs to the Gradient tool alone.
Bridges small breaks in the surrounding outline before the region is flooded. This is the same setting the Fill tool uses — adjusting it here adjusts it there.
Grows the finished region past the line, or shrinks it back. Also shared with the Fill tool.
The mechanism behind Close gap and Expand — the order in which they are applied, the leak abort, and the square dilation footprint — is documented on Fill.
What the panel does not carry
The Gradient panel has no "Boundary from" picker. The three boundary scopes — This layer, Layer + sublayers, All layers — appear in the Fill tool's Tool Options and nowhere else.
There is likewise no gradient type control (no linear-versus-radial choice), no angle field, no editable stops, and no reverse button. The ramp is defined entirely by the two colour wells and the direction of the drag; to reverse a gradient, drag it the other way.
QuickStrip and Sub Tool
The QuickStrip carries no sliders for Gradient — only the colour well. Gradient has no sub-tools.