An Illustrated Pear: Gradient Mesh

This is the fourth pear in my series on learning Illustrator. I had never really played with Mesh objects in prior versions of Illustrator but since I'm experimenting with everything while learning the CS6 version, decided to check it out. It's definitely fun, and if you are interested in using Illustrator as a painting tool, it's almost as much fun as the Blob Brush (more on that in a later entry.)

Started with my basic pear, leaf and stem from prior efforts, filled them with gradients close to what I wanted them to be colored like and started to convert them to gradient mesh objects.

Learned the hard way that if you want to convert something into a gradient mesh object, you are way ahead by starting with a solid filled object as opposed to an object that you've already filled with a gradient you like. When you select an object with a gradient already applied to it and choose Object>Create Gradient Mesh, you get an object filled with a black and white gradient. (What were they thinking when they came up with that?)  Whereas, if you start with an object filled with a solid color close to the color you want to work with, you get a gradient mesh of that color. The pear on the lower right was clearly easier to get to my goal with.

After the mesh is created, all points can be easily adjusted, rearranged and recolored. It is fun, kind of like painting! I eventually had to stop because you could go a million different directions with it. You can keep adding lines and mesh points and therefore colors endlessly. If you were really patient (which I'm not) you could create a pear that no one would know was not a photograph. My art falls way short of realism. But, I was looking at a real pear while I "painted" and it had interesting pink, green and purple areas, so I put them in.

Before I finished with the pear, I put in some dark blue colors along the bottom mesh points since I was planning a dark background that would be somewhat reflected on the pear's yellow skin. Meshed the leaf after filling it first with a solid green color and the stem with a brown.

Next I added a background and filled it with a pattern I'd created earlier. Jazzed up the border with a little scribble effect. Also added some spots for texture to it by creating a little "Art brush" of varying dots and colors that I could see on my real pear.

Painting the mesh was fun. It's not my usual style, but the effect is really nice and easy to achieve. Glad I tried it.

Coming up next - a summary pear created from all the little things I love to use in Illustrator.

An Illustrated Pear: Masking

Third in my series of learning Illustrator CS6 was a study of masking. Again, I used a pear for the design element, this time copying my pear from the prior illustration and just modifying the leaf shape slightly. I filled it in with a little gradient and pattern and rotated it. I also added a variable width stroke in gold to the pear and stem. (Love some of these new features that I have missed out on by stopping at CS3.)

But the goal was to fill the shape with something more complex, so I decided to frame my front door with the pear shape and call it Home Sweet Pear.

 Using some of the fun tools  (available in many prior versions) in Illustrator, like Divide Into Grid I was able to build a copy of my front door and then use blends to create the wooden panels.  Divide into Grid also helped create the slats on the hurricane shutters and the squares on the tile entry.

After the little smidgen of landscape that would show was added by creating symbols of leaves and flowers, I copied the shape of the pear to the top of the layer, selected the layer and clicked on the Create Layer Mask Icon at the bottom of the Layer Panel. Presto! All the little edges and things that don't fit get perfectly covered up by the pear shape! (I love masks - in Illustrator and Photoshop they give you such beautiful results and make jobs that would be difficult so simple.) Rotated the view to match the pear's rotation. Then created a little sunshine and clouds for the leaf and masked them in the same way.

Things are still easily added into the clipping mask just by dragging them into that layer so I built a welcome mat, and dragged it to the pear layer.

Added a background of rectangles filled with gradients and cut them up with the knife tool.

Next, tackling Mesh!

An Illustrated Pear: Pattern Brushes

This is another pear in my series of learning what's new in Illustrator CS6. I wanted to try some of the new pattern brushes.  I built both pear and leaf shapes and then created a series of arcs and positioned them over the pear. Then I selected an Arc and chose Edit>Path>Divide Objects Below to cut the pear along the arc. I continued that for each arc until the pear was cut into a series of stripes.

I then filled each stripe with color and placed another arc on top and applied one of the new pattern brushes that came with Illustrator - there are so many! A clipping mask keeps the patterns from extending beyond the edge of the pear. Since it looked so much like a Christmas ornament, used two rounded rectangles and a circle filled with gradients to create a hanger.  (Click to enlarge.)

Created a gradient background and cut it up with the knife tool. Added a few more gradient layers to create a little more drama for the background and to imply it's hanging in a Christmas tree.

There are so many pattern brushes that come with Illustrator, and they are so easy to create, that one could build hundreds of ornaments and they'd all be unique.