Drawing gradient background is very simple with StdCtrlSkinTool. You will just need to define a background cell has type “gradient”, then define the starting and end colors, plus the direction.
Now there are four directions supported in StdCtrlSkinTool, they are:
Color changes horizontally. The left end uses the start color, while the right end uses the end color.
Color changes vertically. The top end uses the start color, while the bottom end uses the end color
Color changes in the direction of a slash (/). The top-right corner uses the start color, while the bottom-left corner uses the end color.
Color changes in the direction of a backslash (\). The top-left corner uses the start color, while the bottom-right corner uses the end color.
Demo2 with the configure file “demo2.cfg_B.xml” illustrates how the gradient could be used. The screen shot is as below:

The green parts on top of the dialog showed the four directions of gradient. The start color is light green, end color is dark green.
The first one is a horizontal gradient, then vertical, slash and back slash at last.
The second part with blue and red shows the result when placing four gradient rectangles together. The two parts on top have start color red, and end color blue, while the two parts at bottom have start color blue, end color red. Furthermore, the top-left and bottom-right parts have direction “backslash”. The top-right and bottom-left parts have direction “slash”. These four parts made a gradient rectangle which has blue at center, red at corners.
The third part is using the same direction and colors setting as part two. The four parts have different alpha blend values as 0, 64, 128 and 192. It is really difficult to see the gradient on the last one with alpha blend value 192.