How to use the Gradient Mesh Tool in Illustrator

[Music] welcome back everyone my name is Aaron and I am going to show you today how to recreate this banana as a vector illustration using the gradient mesh tool which is over here on your pallet kind of halfway down on the left hand side it's kind of like a little wavy grid if you are gonna redraw this banana and try to customly create the the gradients and the shades of the banana it would take you longer so the gradient mesh tool is kind of a shortcut way to get the same to give the your object some depth so first you want to start by finding what you want to recreate find a photos I've seen it done mainly with fruit I don't know why Apple banana but really any type of photograph that has shades and lights and darks in it you can use so you want to go up to file down to place and you want to get your place your image in here and then you want to open up your layer palette and we're gonna create a second layer so pick up to the right hand corner and do new layer and we'll call our second layer artwork make sure you're at work layer is on top and then go ahead and lock down the layer that has your photo on it just so that we don't end up moving it or deleting it and then the first step is you want to just using the pen tool you want to trace your object and get the outline doesn't have to be perfect luckily a banana is somewhat easy another reason why I chose to do it and just go ahead and get rid of that Phil so tracing as good as I can there we go and then just to get the base color for the banana you want to use your eyedropper tool over here and you want to hit basically what you're doing with the eyedropper tool is you're sucking up a color from your image so I'm gonna try to find one of the nice yellow bright yellow spots this looks good I'm gonna click on it and then it fills your object with that color and now I'm gonna move my outline up and out of the way so I can still see my photograph and then we want to select our gradient mesh tool and we're gonna start clicking right on the edge of our outline so we're gonna click click click and what this is doing is adding dimension to our drawing and okay click some down here to sew it instead of it being flat no it's got some depth already so just keep clicking around that looks pretty good um okay and then now see in our gradient mesh how all of these little points I'm gonna zoom in all the little points in here have white spots where they intersect and what we want to do is use our direct selection tool which is the white arrow and when we have that selected you're gonna hold your Shift key down and we're gonna first start creating this highlight that runs the length of the banana so kind of like where the light is hitting it get rid of my layers here and so we want to select the dots that run along that area where we want the highlight so I'm gonna hit see how that changed to red that's what I'm gonna do all the way down the length of the banana right where I want that highlight to go I want to go all the way up here so you can see this area inside is red there's no white dots and I'm gonna zoom out just a little bit here so we can see the whole thing go back to my arrow tool so now that we have the area selected actually I'm gonna do this one too right there that we want highlighted then we go back to our eyedropper tool and we suck up the highlight color so right here in the middle of the banana suck it up in there see how it added a nice highlight to our banana so then let's go down here and do the dark along the bottom so again we're starting with all white and I'm gonna start with my shift key held down the whole time I'm gonna start clicking along these dots right where I want the dark shadow to go so I'm gonna do the bottom and then the first line click click click I assure you this is much faster than drawing them the old-school way so one more up here so now all of these dots I have changed them to read by holding my shift key down and selecting them I'm gonna use my eyedropper tool and I'm gonna go down to the bottom of my image and I'm gonna suck up this dark shadow color pretty cool and again if that isn't the shade that you want just kind of you can just kind of click around until you get what you do want there I like that so um what else do we want to do let's see how it looks first look at that I mean we started with a flat yellow object and we can already tell that there's dimension to it so you know from here go around.if maybe add a little bit more highlight right along the top here I'm also going to show you an easy way to get this the little brown spots if you want to go a step further we'll zoom in um all we have to do for those brown spots is make a gradient so I'm gonna start by I'm gonna draw if it lets me I want to square a rectangle I'm gonna draw a rectangle then has this brown color you can use your eyedropper and suck up the brown color if it didn't pop up and then I'm gonna draw another one and suck up the nice yellow part of the banana I'm just gonna use those as color guides along the way here and then I'm going to use my ellipse tool and I'm just gonna draw up here a little ellipse that's about the size of one of the spots and then we're gonna pull up our gradient panel and our color panel actually and with our ellipse selected we're gonna fill it with a gradient which is a default this white to black gray thing which we're gonna change but first we want it because it's a circular pattern or a circular dot instead of a linear gradient we're gonna check this switch it to radial and then down here is where you control that so in order to change these colors I want to change this gradient to our two banana colors the light in the dark so let's start with the slider on the right which is the outside color we are going to switch it to CMYK well first we got to figure out our outside color let's figure out what it is Oh cancel one step I forgot okay so our nice yellow color is about 18% magenta and 95% yellow so let's make that our first gradient color so we're gonna select our spot we're gonna double click to change the spider color and we're gonna do 18 magenta 95 yellow and zero on thwack so now we have to change the inside to be the spotty brown color so our brown color sometimes I have to write these down when they're not easy as 21:4 need 100 and we'll do zero for black so back to our splotch click on your little dot and then now we're gonna double-click on the left side of the thing and we're gonna switch it to the CMYK sliders and then we'll plug in our colors it was zero and then 21:40 and 100 and there we have our spot oh no b100 black oh I judge my numbers around 21:40 100 and zero yeah okay here's our brown color so there's our first little spot and we can adjust these if we want to make them bigger and my little slider here I'm gonna bring the brown and give it a little bit more Brown there we go okay so now we can close out of our sliders because all we're gonna do is copy and paste these around we're gonna switch the size we're gonna rotate them so they'll start to look somewhat natural there you go you can continue to add your little dots and you have bruise marks we'll just get rid of these because we don't need them anymore so there you have it there is how you recreate a banana using the gradient mesh tool so that you can get nice smooth tones contours and all that sort of stuff so I would love to see a few days um find something that you want to practice the Sun and it turns out awesome shoot at my way I would love to see it until next time have a great day thanks [Music]

Channel: Erin Gipford

Views: 492,855

Keywords: gradient mesh tool, gradients in illustrator, illustrator tutorial for beginner, shading in illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorial, how to draw a banana in illustrator, How to use the Gradient Mesh Tool in Illustrator

Id: jNH7g0jAaKw

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018