a gradient brush is a brush that contains all the color nuances that vary from a starting color to an ending color, like the typical background screen of many installation procedures or Microsoft PowerPoint slides. The simplest way to create a linear gradient brush is passing its size (by means of a Rectangle object), the two colors, and a direction to the brush’s constructor. You can then use this brush to paint any filled shape :

' This statement assumes that you have imported the System.Drawing namespace' This code should run inside a Windows Form classDim gr As Graphics = Me.CreateGraphicsDim br As New LinearGradientBrush(New Rectangle(0, 0, 200, 100), Color.Blue, _    Color.Black, LinearGradientMode.ForwardDiagonal)gr.FillRectangle(br, 0, 0, 200, 100)gr.FillRectangle(br, 220, 0, 200, 100)br.Dispose()gr.Dispose()

The constructor that you see in the preceding code lets you indicate four directions for the gradient: horizontal, vertical, forward diagonal, and backward diagonal. If the shape being painted is larger than the brush rectangle, the brush is tiled to cover the shape. If the shape’s coordinates aren’t exact multiples of the rectangle’s size, the color of the shape’s upper left corner won’t coincide with the brush’s first color.