- [Narrator] In this movie,
we'll create a basic gradient mesh.
Specifically, we're going to draw the body of this bacteria.
And to get a sense for what that looks like,
I'll go up to the view menu, and choose diagram,
to switch to that view that I saved in advance.
And I'll go ahead and turn off the diagram layer,
so that you can see that it's a kind of lozenge shape,
that has some shading over here on the left
and right hand sides, as well as through the middle,
in order to indicate a light source up above,
as well as some reflected light down here at the bottom.
And this is the kind of stuff
you can really only pull off inside Illustrator,
using a gradient mesh.
Alright, so I've got this layer right here, called you draw.
I'll turn it on, and click on that layer, to make it active.
And then, I'll go ahead and select my ellipse tool,
from the shape tool fly-out menu,
and I'll click right about there, let's say.
And I'm looking for width and height values of 274 points.
At which point, I'll click OK.
Alright, now I'll press the V key,
to switch back to my black arrow tool,
and I'll drag this guy up a little bit.
And for the moment, I don't want it to have a fill.
So, I'll click in the first swatch up here,
in the control panel, and change it to none.
Alright, now I'll press the enter key,
or the return key, on the Mac,
and because the black arrow is selected,
that brings up the move dialogue box.
And so I'll change the horizontal value to 317 points,
and I'll set the vertical value to zero,
and click the copy button,
in order to create a copy of that shape.
And then, I'll switch to the scale tool,
which you can get by pressing the S key.
And I'll press the enter key, or the return key, on the Mac,
to bring up the scale dialogue box,
I'll change the uniform value to 89%, and click OK.
Now, obviously, I didn't work this way
when I created this artwork in the first place,
but I've reverse-engineered it,
so that you and I get the same results.
Alright, now I'll press the A key,
to switch to my white arrow tool,
and I'll marquee these two anchor points here,
and I'll press the backspace key,
or the delete key, on the Mac, to get rid of them.
And then I'll press control-J, or command-J, on the Mac,
twice in a row, in order to join those two paths together.
Alright, now let's go ahead and fill this shape.
And so, here inside the color panel,
complete with my HSB values,
I'll change the hue value to 200 degrees,
and I'll set both the saturation
and brightness values to 100%.
Alright, now we need to turn this object
into a gradient mesh, by going into the object menu,
and choosing create gradient mesh.
And by default,
you're going to see four rows, and four columns.
And notice, all of the rows and columns are evenly spaced.
And notice this appearance option right here.
By default, it's set to flat,
which means that all of the mesh points
are colored in the same way,
so that you're not really seeing a gradient.
If you want to rough in the gradient from the get-go,
then change appearance, either to center,
at which point, you'll see a highlight
in the center of the shape, or to edge, at which point,
you'll see a highlight around the edge.
And you can determine how bright that highlight is,
by entering a different highlight value.
In my case, however, I want to leave appearance set to flat,
and I'm looking for a total of 10 rows, and no columns.
The lowest value you can enter is one.
The reason I don't want any columns,
is because I don't want the columns to be regularly spaced.
I want to have more columns
over on the left and right-hand side,
and a big empty area in the center.
At which point, I'll click OK.
Alright, now to add those columns, switch to the mesh tool,
which you can get by pressing the U key.
And then, click right about there.
Because we want to add a column, you want to click on a row.
Any row will do,
but you want to make sure you click on the row,
not slightly off of it, in which case,
you're going to create both a new column and a new row,
which is not what we want.
So press control-Z, or command-Z,
on the Mac, to undo that change.
And click on a row, like so.
And you can't click on a control handle, by the way,
so if a control handle gets in your way,
just move over a little bit,
to create a column in this location.
And then move back, to create a column right here.
Make sure you're seeing a plus sign next to your cursor,
by the way, and that'll show you
that you're about to create a new row,
or, in my case, a column.
Alright, so I'll create a new guy here,
I'll create one here,
and then I'll create one in between, like so.
Alright, now comes the fun part,
where we color all of these mesh points,
which is why I've created this diagram in advance,
just so that you can see what's going on.
So notice that we're starting
with a hue value of 200 degrees,
and saturation and brightness values of 100% each.
We've already performed that step.
And now what we're going to need to do
is select these red mesh points,
and change their brightness to 60%.
Take these orange ones, down here, and up here as well,
and set them to 70%.
And then we've got a couple of mesh points
that we're going to set to 75%, and so on.
And by the way, every single one
of our modifications is entirely symmetrical,
just to make things a little bit easier.
And then all of these diagonal mesh points,
that have strokes, are saturation modifications.
So in the case of the brightness modifications,
we're modifying the brightness value,
and only the brightness value.
We're leaving hue and saturation alone.
Where the saturation adjustments are concerned,
we're leaving hue and brightness alone.
So I just want you to see this, in advance.
You can come back to it, as well,
because I'm going to be moving pretty quickly,
through these changes.
Alright, so I'll go ahead and turn those two layers off,
and I'll bring back my you draw layer.
And then I'll switch back to my white arrow tool.
The reason being, if I try to select this shape
using the mesh tool, I add a new row and column,
as we're seeing right here.
I don't want that, so I'll press control-Z,
or command-Z, on the Mac.
And I'll switch to my white arrow tool,
which, of course, you can get by pressing the A key.
Then you just want to go ahead and select the shape.
Alright, now what I want to do
is marquee a bunch of mesh points at a time.
However, if I try to do that, then I'm going to mess things up,
by dragging a mesh patch around, as you can see right here.
So I'll press control-Z, or command-Z, on a Mac,
to undo that change.
And so I'll press control-K, or command-K, on a Mac,
to bring up the preferences dialogue box.
I'll select the second item in the left-hand list,
and I'll turn on object selection by path only,
which is a great setting,
when you're working with gradient mesh.
After which, I'll click OK.
And now notice, I can marquee these points,
in this row, directly below the middle one.
And notice that I'm selecting all of the points,
except the extreme ones.
The extreme one over here, on the left-hand side,
and the right-hand side.
And now, I'll select the brightness value,
and change it to 60%.
I'll marquee that next row down,
like so, to grab all of its points,
and apparently, I missed these guys over here,
so I will try again.
And then I'll also shift-click on these two mesh points,
and shift-click on these guys over here.
And I'll take the brightness value
down to 70%, this time around.
Next, I'll select this mesh point,
and shift-click on this one, so again,
all the modifications are symmetrical,
and now I'll reduce the brightness value to 75%.
And the reason I'm working this way,
is that I'm trying to create a nice, smooth transition.
And so you have to do some fill-ins, every once in a while,
because after all, you're ultimately working
inside a kind of rectilinear grid.
And so if you're trying to create smooth, curving shading,
then you're going to have to resort to
a little bit of trial and error,
which of course, I have performed in advance.
Alright, so I'm going to select this guy,
and shift-click on this one,
and then I also want this point,
so I'll shift-click on it, and it's opposite,
over here on the right-hand side.
And I'll shift-click on this point,
and I'll shift-click on this one.
And then, I'll select the brightness value,
and take it down to 80%.
Alright, now we want to select these two points,
right there, and then you want to select these two.
So they're almost on top of each other, right there.
And then I'll shift-click on this one,
and this one, as well.
And I'll go ahead,
and take the brightness value down to 90%, this time.
And then, finally, where the brightness are concerned,
I'll click on this guy, shift-click on this guy,
and then drop down to this point,
shift-click on it, and shift-click on this one,
and I'll take the brightness values down to 95%.
Press the enter key, or the return key,
on the Mac, to accept that change.
And now, press control-H, or command-H, on the Mac,
just so you can see how far we've come.
And it looks like we're getting
some very smooth transitions.
Alright, now I want to create some hot spots,
a few highlights.
The thing is, most of the mesh points are already maxed out,
where the brightness value is concerned.
Which means, to brighten things further,
we're going to have to reduce the saturation value.
Because, after all, as you reduce saturation,
you add, more or less,
equal amounts of red, green, and blue light,
which brightens the color.
Alright, so I'll press control-H, or command-H, on a Mac,
to bring back my selection edges.
And I'll click on this point, and shift-click on this one,
and now, I'll reduce the saturation value to 60%,
which is going to give us this bright band, right here.
Alright, now I want to taper things a little bit,
so I'll select this mesh point,
shift-click on this one, shift-click on these two,
and then I'll shift-click on this one, and this one,
way down here, in the bottom row.
And then, I'll take the saturation value,
this time, down to 80%, and I'll press the enter key,
or the return key, on the Mac, to accept that change.
And then, finally, I'll get this guy right there,
and shift-click on this one,
and I'll take the saturation value down to 90%,
and press the enter key, or the return key, on the Mac.
And now, if I click off the path,
you can see that we have some very nice,
if subtle, highlights.
Alright, now I'll press control-zero, or command-zero,
on the Mac, to center my zoom.
And I'll press the V key, to switch to my black arrow tool.
I'll go ahead and turn on the template layer,
down here at the bottom.
And I'll meatball it, in order to target the entire layer.
And I'll take its opacity value down to 50%.
If you loaded D keys,
all you have to do is press the five key,
in order to invoke that change.
And then, I'll lock the layer,
in order to protect it from harm.
And now I'll select the shape that I just created.
And by the way,
because you turned on that preference setting,
object selection by path only,
you can't just necessarily click inside the path,
in order to select it.
You need to click on it's outline.
Alight, now we want to rotate it into place,
by grabbing the rotate tool,
which you can get by pressing the R key,
and then press the enter key, or the return key, on the Mac.
And I came up with a jaunty angle value of 21.5 degrees,
after which point, I'll click OK, to accept that change.
I'll press the V key, to switch back to my black arrow tool,
and I'll drag this guy into the desired location, like so.
And now, I'll turn off the template layer,
and I'll turn on the rear stuff layer,
and then I'll turn on the front stuff layer, as well.
And notice if I click off the shape,
that I have lost my stroke.
And that's something that happens,
the second that you convert an object into a gradient mesh.
Now, you might figure to restore the stroke,
you could just go ahead and select the object.
And then notice, we don't have a line weight value,
up here in the control panel,
but I can see my stroke panel right here,
so I'll change the line weight to one point.
At which point, I ruin the effect. I lose everything.
Which, obviously, isn't what I want,
so I'll undo that change,
and then I'll go up to the window menu,
and choose the appearance command.
Notice that I have a mesh object selected.
And so I'll drop down to the add new stroke icon,
and click on it, or you have that keyboard shortcut,
of control-alt-slash, or command-option-slash, on the Mac.
And that's going to go ahead and, by default,
add a black, one point stroke, which is exactly what I want.
And so, now notice, if I click off the shape,
that I have reinstated that stroke.
Now, I'll go ahead and press the up key, a couple times,
to switch to the full screen mode.
And that, my friends, is how you shade an object,
using a very basic gradient mesh,
here inside Illustrator.