The Illustrator class project this week was to make two fruits. For this I went down to the local grocery, picked up an orange, set it on some apples and took a picture. For the shape I started with ellipses and then adjusted them to fit the shape I needed by adding points and controlling the handles. I started with the orange and then did the apples front to back. Here are a few tricks I learned:

1. If you Ctrl + Click on the eyeball it will remove the color and leave the wire frame so you can make adjustments and more easily see what you are working with.
2. Once you lay down the gradient mesh, working in the above wire frame mode, you can alternate between the eye dropper and direct selection tool and pick colors up directly from the source image.
3. To get an interesting orange texture, make a layer copy of the orange, apply a sponge effect then a plastic wrap effect. Then set the new layer as Soft light over the original.

Still getting the hang of the color picker here, I can’t quite figure out how it wants me to pick what colors especially considering how easy it is to pick colors in Photoshop. Kind of seems like the feature that stood still here.

This is my first post for the Illustrator class I just started. The first image is a Collage based on Illustrator Symbols. The second was an Animal Illustration based on my own photography. This is a peacock from the San Francisco Zoo, I hope I did him justice.