2.2 Add Mesh Points and Color

Hello everybody and welcome to the course advanced gradient mesh in Adobe illustrator here in Tuts+. This is lesson add mesh points and color. In this lesson we will learn how to add mesh points and how to set our base colors to our mesh object shapes. So let's get right to it and let's open up Adobe Illustrator. As you remember from the previous lesson, we started adding our mesh shapes. And you can see here that I've created three layers. One for the cake, one for the cream and one for the filling. Now if I zoom in here so I can show you better and if you hide the sketch, we'll see here that we have three shapes that we've created in the previous lesson. Remember we just created a single rectangle. We turned it into a mesh object by going to Object and then Create a Gradient Mesh. And then we repeated that as well for the shape that will be our cream and the one for the filling. As you remember also with the direct selection tool, we kind of distorted the edges a little bit and curved our shape. And since I'm toggling off and on the visibility here, again, by just clicking command and clicking on the layer icon our shapes are still wide. Now what we want to do is, we actually want to add our base color to our shapes before adding any mesh points. And since I've already created a selection of colors for us we can just open them up as swatches. I called them cake colors and here we can see three groups that I've created for us. The first group is for the cake. The second group is for our cream layer. And a third group for our filling. You can find those swatches in your source file folder. Of course, you can choose your own colors as well. Now first we want to select the cake shape. After that we want to select our base color. Right now we're using white fill for the color. But let's select a medium base color here from our first color group. And with the shape selected we just click the color that we want to use. Now if I toggle on the visibility, you can see now that we've added the base color to our gradient mesh shape. Of course we want to do the same thing with our cream color. So let me turn on the visibility here and then we would like to set the fill color to the lightest color we can find in our swatch group here. A small tps you can see. I've chosen already global colors for our color swatches. Now this will help us if we ever decided to change the color of our cake. And as you remember global colors can easily be changed by double clicking them. And then when you open them up you can change the colors and every shape that has this global color applied will get updated on the fly. Next we want to also choose the shape for our cream filling. And we want to choose a medium red or the brightest here. And if I turn on the visibility, now we have given the base colors to our shapes. One thing we have to do now, we have to actually move our layers around a little bit. Since I want the cake to be on the bottom, I will drag it underneath the filling layer. And the cream needs to be underneath the filling. If I turn back on our sketch you can see here, this is what we're going to be working with. The sketch of course is just a reference photo for us. It doesn't have to follow exactly the sketch. So let me hide it again and you can see that we're now working just on three shapes. Since we're going to duplicate those shapes and stack them up for our cake, we don't really need to do the work two times more. So once we've done the cake, the cream, and the fill we can just duplicate them. And then as you can see here in our sketch, we'll have the three layers of our cake. Now let's start and add some mesh points. The first shape we want to add mesh points to is the cake shape. Now let me zoom in a little bit so we can see better what's going to happen. So now I'm active on the cake layer here. I selected the shape and over here in the toolbar we can see the mesh tool. And now we just have to select it and as you can see as soon as I hover over the shape, we will get a plus with the arrow and we can see the little icon for the mesh. Now since we need to create some extra mesh points to our shape and the reason why we're doing this, we need to create highlights and shadows. And if I selected the anchor point and choose a darker color you can see that it spreads out far too much. And we don't want this we want to actually control where the color gets spread and mixed together. So let me undo this here. And then when I hover over our shape we want to add five horizontal lines. So what we have to do, we have to first click once here. And as you can see, I added a mesh line. Then maybe one on top in here. This is the second one. Then one approximately here. One underneath and then one more closer to the bottom. Sometimes when you don't see the plus sign all you have to do is just zoom in and as soon as you see the plus sign you can add another mesh point. So let me add one approximately here. Now if I zoom out you can see that we added mesh points to our mesh object. And all the lines are falling nicely into our shape. They're not overlapping or getting pushed outside. Now since we're adding mesh points, let's at the same time add a mesh point here in the middle. This time I want to select the edge top here and when I press you can see how it just added another mesh line right down in the middle vertically. And again I'm going to zoom out so we can see it better. And this is the shape now that we're going to color. Now I'm going to zoom in again. And since you can see that I'm still toggling our cake shape off. So we can see better where are our lines are falling. With the direct selection tool I'll start selecting the second end point here on our second horizontal line. And I'm going to choose this color here, the darker one in our cake-colors swatches. Of course you won't see anything right now because we are working in the toggle off mode but it'll make a lot of sense in a second. So here I'm going to add the dark colors. And now if I toggle it on again you can see that now we've created a darker band on the top here. And again, it's not much looking right now but when we add more colors to our points it will make much more sense. For example, now we see a little bit better what's happening we can select this point over here and we're going to choose a little bit of the lighter brown. As you can see now we're already getting some definition here. We might even want to choose the second point here and give it the same color. And then the third point here, probably the darkest one and so forth. Sometimes we actually have to hide the other layers so we can see what's going to happen when we select this point here and add a darker one and then maybe this one here in the middle, a tad lighter. And this one here in the middle we'll keep or make a little bit darker. It really depends on how you want it to look. And here we want to create actually, a highlight. So I'm selecting this point right here in the middle and let me zoom in. And I'm going to choose the lightest color we have, this yellow here. And as you can see, now we have a little bit of a dimension of a cake happening here. It's all about the highlights and the shadows. And I'm not just meaning white and dark or white and black. It's about the colors, where we set them. Now of course, we want to do the same thing on the side here. So at the same time we can select two points. Add a darker brown. Maybe the darkest one here for a little bit more dramatic effect. And if I want a lighter one I'll just pick a lighter one. Just to give a little bit of an edge here. And this is pretty much it. This is the really simple steps. How to add colors. How to add mesh lines. And in the end we can also manipulate them a little bit more. If we wanted to highlight he had to be a little bigger we can just drag the anchor point here and stretch it out. Now the same thing we're going to do with the cream layer and the cake layer but more on that in the next lesson. So let's wrap this up this up for now. And then let's move on to the next lesson where we're going to add all the finishing touches to the cake, the cream, and the fill.