Subtitles of the Movie

Just in case you were wondering, no - you really don't need to have a reference image to create images with the Mesh Tool. You can use any color at all, so you can grab your Selection Tool here and you can just change the colors and then add them to your object at leisure, so I can grab the Swatches, for example, I can go ahead and click on this point here, click here, click here, and so on. The image gives you a more realistic look because you're actually mimicking a real object instead of trying to fake it, so when you're trying to do something that's going to look realistic for a poster or for a client you need a reference image to really nail it and take a lot of the guesswork out of it. OK, now that we've talked about that what we're going to do next is we're going to look at our Layers, alright, this is important here. We're going to do a little trickery. We're going to actually take this same orange and we're going to duplicate it. We're going to go to Edit, Copy and we're going to create a brand new Layer and we're going to Lock the other Layers and paste on this Layer here. So, choose Paste in Front and this is our new Mesh object that lives on top of the other orange. With this one selected we're going to go to Effect and if I remember correctly I think I added, let's see here, it's one of these things - Texture - here we go. Texture Grain and as you can see we have this grain all of a sudden that appears and I'm going to leave it at the defaults because I like the way this looks. In just a moment when I zoom in you see that we have this grain now. Now, of course, it's too pronounced so what we need to do is grab our friend, the Transparency Panel and we're going to drop the Opacity down and in a moment it will start to look more realistic. I'll go ahead and deselect. So right away we have that nice stippling feeling that gives us that flesh of the fruit but wait! There's more. You'll also notice there's some pretty large pock marks here that give us the shadows and the highlights. We're going to use our friend, the Blob Brush, on a different Layer to create those so let's grab our Blob Brush and make sure the size is pretty small, alright and then what we're going to do is we're going to choose a light color. So get your Eyedropper Tool and click on a very bright part of the skin here, go back to your Blob Brush and just click and paint some of those very bright spots. And don't worry, we're going to dim this down because right now it's just too bright and it doesn't look realistic. Layers are truly your best friend. Now, grab your Eyedropper again and get a very dark area, go back to your Blob Brush and let's paint some of those in. And, by the way, feel free to use any tool you want to, to create these dark spots. You can even go to Photoshop. It doesn't really matter, just make sure you use Layers because Layers gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility even in doing something as simple as dots like this. Now we're ready to do one more trick. I'm going to make sure everything's locked except for these splotches here and I'm going to drag-select these guys and with the Transparency Panel still open I'm going to drop these down in Opacity as well and I'll click away to deselect and in a moment we should have the effect and it looks much more realistic. If it's still too dark you can go back and try it again, just reduce it until it looks good and just deselect it and now you have a very realistic or the beginning of a realistic piece of fruit. Keep in mind that when you're doing something like fruit the Gradient Mesh Tool takes a little practice. It takes a little patience and you really have to just stay at it to get the shadows going the way you want to. Right now this is very simplified and this is not exactly something that I'd be quite happy with, so I would actually go back in - let me close these guys - and I'd add a little bit more shadow around here, so I'd go ahead and grab these points here, for example, grab my Eyedropper Tool and just slowly work this shadow in to give it a little bit more of a round feeling and on this side, too. If you look at real objects you'll notice that there is a sense of volume that's given to it by the light, so you have to just play around with it. And don't forget you can click inside the fruit itself until you find a color you're happy with. And I'm going to give this one a little bit darker color. Let's see here, that looks good. I can even go over here to darken that up a little bit more; hold down that keyboard combination I showed you a little while ago and just darken this up, click here, make it a little darker until I get something that looks a little bit more realistic and see that? You have this really nice sense of volume, you have the sense of lighting and just play around with it. And if you really want to be adventurous and really practice this I like to double-dog dare you to go ahead and do a pear. As you could see, there's a lot more detail that you have to worry about. These brown little scars here, this light area here, the lighting itself and the roundness and that little crease that pears seem to have and you'd have to figure out what tool you need to use to do this kind of thing. Don't forget, in this version of Illustrator you have a Bristle Brush and that might be the area that you can use this tool on. So, just experiment. Try some of the other fruit. Try a banana and try real people. Try a face or a hand or an animal. It's a really great tool and you'll be able to get some really great results from using it.