3.2 Add Color to Your Glaze Shape

Hello everybody. I'm Simona, and welcome back to the course, Advanced Gradient Mesh Techniques in Adobe Illustrator here on tuts+. And this is lesson, give color to your glaze shapes. Remember in the last lesson, we created the base for our first glaze shape. We added some mesh points, and now we are ready to add some color. So let's get right to it, and let's open up Adobe Illustrator. As you can see here in this file, this is the shape we've worked with in the last lesson. We added tons of mesh points, and we added the base color. And now we're going to add the highlight. So let's study the shape a little bit. This part here down here will be the overhanging glaze on to the cake. In the middle approximately on the second or third line here, we need to place some highlights, and below, we need to place some shadows. So first, let's zoom in here on the right side. And let's have a look at those mesh points here. This will have a highlight. So now if I select those points one by one, I'm pressing the Shift key so I can select them all, to approximately this point here. I'm going into my lightest color, and I'm going to apply it. And as you can see, we've placed our first highlight now. Now I want to select the one below and the one following along the horizontal line. This one as well, and while we're at it, we might even select the one above. So not the one following right here on the left, but the one just above. Now I'm going to select the light color again. And now if I zoom out, you can see that we're placing some highlights. We might have to do some tweaking here and add a little bit of a highlight in here. And we might have to move the points around a little bit. But I think you're getting the idea. Next, we want to add some shadow to the outer parts here, so we're selecting the points, and I'm going to add the darkest color. And we might even want to select those two points here, followed by this one, and add the dark color. Again, since we have two lines here, we need to select the next one, so the color will spread into the lighter red. So I'm selecting it, and I'm spreading it. After, I'm going to zoom in on the left side, and here, I want to select some mesh points as well. And I'm going to select this one here, not from the one two, but the third line. Again, I'm selecting several. If I need to see better, I'll zoom out. But I think we need just two more points here. And then we're going to add a highlight again with the lightest color. So I'll zoom out. And now you can see, I've added some highlights. We might want to spread the highlights a little bit. And I'm selecting another line above. And now I'm spreading the highlight. I might want to select those ones in the corner here as well. And you can see we're spreading the highlights. And this is pretty much what we have to do. Let me just show you what happens if we're selecting these points here. And let's say I want to add a little bit of a lighter red. So I'm selecting the light red here in our swatches palette, and you can see, now I'm adding a lighter red. Maybe I want to spread it here, and I add it. Maybe I want to have a lighter red highlight over here, and when I select the outer points, I'm going to add some darker color for some shadows in the back. Now this is pretty much the way we have to go about it. And before, I'm going to select every single point and add in the colors, I've already prepared the shape for us. So let me show it to you. I will turn this one off and the finished one on. As you can see, this is our shape for the glaze. Let me zoom out, and let me show you the cake parts. So here's our glaze for the top. Of course, it doesn't look like much right now because we're still missing the drips, but the drips we will create in the next lesson. I first want to show you how we can manipulate the colors bleeding into the other colors a little bit. For example, this point here, I'm not too happy about how the highlight falls here. And I think we can manipulate it and make it look a little better. So all I'm doing is with the Direct Selection tool, I'm selecting the point, and I'm dragging the whole point to the left. As you can see, it spreads a little bit better now. The same thing I would like to do with this point here. But instead of dragging it to the left, I will drag it to the right. So I'll grab it, and then I just pull it over here. Maybe I'll even drag the other one and pull it a little bit with it. As you can see now, we're spreading the color, and our glaze might just look a little bit more dynamic. Maybe I need to move this point as well and drag it a little bit more and play with the highlight a little bit. Because we want to have the glaze look like it's falling off onto the cake, and since we need to create the drip part as well, we need to make sure that we can morph those two colors together. And what I mean by morphing, that we need to match the shape that we’re going to create into the next lesson, that it will fit with the top shape of our glaze. But now, let's wrap this lesson now. And then, let's move over to the next lesson, where we’re going to create the drips for our glaze.