Subtitles of the Movie

One of my favorite tools in Illustrator is this guy right here. It looks like a spider web but it's called the Mesh Tool. You can use it to color very organic looking objects such as fruit, a skin, or anything that's soft. What I'm going to do is draw out, let's see here, I think I'll draw a hmm, pear. I'll grab the Ellipse here and I'm going to just draw a shape like so. Now of course that looks nothing like a pear yet, but I'm going to grab the Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to start to tweak some of these shapes and some of these curves here just to get a start for this shape, so you get a feel for how you can modify any artwork that you create in Illustrator. As long as you use the Direct Selection Tool you can modify things and make it your own. If you want to add a little divot there at the top, go to your Pen Tool and just add a couple of anchor points. So, I'll add one right there, and as you can see I missed, so I get that dialog box. As many years as I've been using Illustrator I still miss. OK, so. Here we go, I've got to move that down a little bit and now we have something that looks a pear, or at least in my world. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this tool and I'm going to click inside of this object, but first I'll give it a fill color of a greenish thing like so, and then I'll click inside. What I've just created is a Mesh Point and what I can do is click to add more, and as you can see they follow the contours of your shape. Now, what this tool allows you to do is to click on any of these points here and then you can assign a different color to it. So I'm going to just use this slider and make that area a lot lighter as you can see here. I'll push it toward yellow so you can see it more clearly, and what I could do, of course, is click on this guy and do the same thing. I'm going to use my Swatches this time, and I'll just add some yellow. And I'll come over to this side now and I'll add some tan color to it, and as you can see it adds a nice soft gradient. I'll make that one darker right there, give a little blemish, and I'll put some here as well. So now we have a nice rounded object. I'll deselect by using my Selection Tool and I click away from it, and now you have a very organic and soft looking shape. You can use this tool, as I said before, for cartoons, for skin, for fruit Ð anything that's nice and hazy and soft. The beautiful thing of course is, like everything else in Illustrator, you can modify it. So, I can grab my Direct Selection Tool, click on a point here, and move it around. So let me go ahead and just click on the edge. By the way if you do click with the tool here, the Direct Selection Tool and you click and you get all of the solid points as you see here, one of the little tricks I like to use is to click at the very edge of an object until I see this little black box appear, then click and now you'll be able to modify the points more easily. So I can go ahead and just change the direction and the flow of this mesh. Now that's only one way to fill an object with the mesh. Let me move that over. I'm hungry for a pear now. And I'm going to draw this over here and I can do the same thing by using the Object Menu. So, I go to Object, and I can fill this in with Create Gradient Mesh. The Create Gradient Mesh dialog box appears and it will give me four rows, which will be this way here, and four columns, up and down. So you can change this if you want to, but I prefer to leave everything at the defaults and just add as needed. I'll click OK and once again I have my mesh and I can grab this tool and click on these points to change them. So that's how you can use the awesome Gradient Mesh Tool to create organic artwork inside of Illustrator.