From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Photorealistic painting at its best

Photorealistic painting at its best - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Photorealistic painting at its best

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- In this chapter, I'll take you on an absolutely blissful tour of one of the most impressive features in all of Illustrator. I know, I'm always saying stuff like that. But seriously, you're going to like this. The feature in question goes by the name gradient mesh and it allows you to add points of shadow and highlight inside a single path outline so that you can take an otherwise flat shape and make it appear contoured and volumetric and just plain full-on real. Remember the freeform gradients that we saw back in chapter 22 of the advanced course? Well, now imagine that feature but with more control. Think of a gradient mesh as a kind of net that you cast across the height and width of a path outline. At the intersection of any two ropes in that net, there exists an anchor point. You can of course move that anchor point around to any location you like, which adds contours to the net, which in turn implies an element of depth.…

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