Shading an area

Instead of filling an area with a single color, we can use several colors with a transition between them. TikZ provides several kinds of smooth transitions in different ways with the shade action.

Similar to fill, shade can be used as a command and an option:

• \shade is equivalent to \path[shade]; use it for shading without drawing a border
• \shadedraw is the same as \path[draw, shade] and \draw[shade]; it produces the shading and adds a border

We will look at several shading styles in the following few sections. The first three, axis, radial, and ball, are included with TikZ by default. To use the other shadings, load the corresponding library in your preamble with \usetikzlibrary{shadings}.

Often, you don’t need to choose a style explicitly. Depending on your color options, TikZ can automatically determine one, so it’s pretty intuitive.

We will look at examples with some randomly chosen colors.

Axis shading

Axis shading...