0:16 Or like in a watercolor painting, where color washes fade and bleed across into each other.
0:23 By default SketchUp doesn’t show light or color variation across its surfaces so this step goes a long ways in providing the soft and refined look we’re aiming for.
0:39 And that the groups are all opened showing the layers inside as we’ll be referencing them even though they’re off.
0:47 Let’s start with the planting areas.… Using the magic wand tool, go ahead and select part of the ground cover.
0:54 Depending on the Tolerance setting, you’ll notice it doesn’t select everything due to the variety of color and detail in the texture.
1:01 This is why we went through the trouble of creating and exporting a 'Colorbylayer' view.
1:13 And now magic wand into the same planting area and notice now how it selects the entire area evenly.
1:20 Hold 'shift' to wand more than one area at time until they’re all selected.
1:27 Then create a new layer in our ‘Color Base’ folder and name it ‘PA’...which is short for planting area.
1:33 With the area still selected, switch to your gradient tool and select a warmer yellow-green for your foreground color and a cooler medium green for your background color.
1:44 Colors don't have to be exact as we’ll be making adjustments as we progress through this course.
1:51 Now pull your gradient tool across the drawing starting from the corner up and to the right.
1:58 Using a lighter or warmer color in the front corner draws attention to that area.
2:04 f you want more attention the back of the drawing you can apply your gradient the opposite direction.
2:10 Now go up to the ‘Layer Style’ pull down and select 'Overlay' to allow the SketchUp texture below to show through.
2:18 Using the overlay style brightens and saturates the layer so if we’re finding it to be too much, we can always pull back a little bit by changing the hue/saturation.
2:29 Adjust the saturation and lightness down just a bit.
2:33 If we go too far we’ll begin to loose the gradient that we just worked so hard to apply.
2:40 Now, we need to repeat that same step 3 more times... one each for the road...plaza...and concrete walkway layers.
3:05 Now that we have our gradient overlays all complete and looking good, let’s look at a quick and easy additional step that we can do to our color overlays to add more depth and and tonal variety.
3:19 Start by double clicking on the planting layer…and under the 'Layer Styles' menu, select and check, ’Inner Glow’.
3:36 And play with the size and opacity sliders until the desired result is achieved.
3:41 Feel free to apply this same effect on each of the other base color overlay layers.
3:48 When finished, you’ll notice this step does a lot to reduce the repetition and flatness of our original texture export and really adds a new dimension to the drawing that we’d otherwise be missing.