I have always been a fan of the super-realistic effects you can get via the Gradient Mesh tool in Illustrator. Since I envied others being able to do this, I decided to put some effort into trying to achieve this myself. Turns out it wasn’t so hard for me once I had read through a couple of tutorials and did some experimenting. It just takes a lot of patience. Underneath that beautiful skin is quite a scaffolding of lines and points.

Each point must be positioned in a very exacting fashion so as to allow the soft color gradient effect to flow in the right direction.

This type of illustration is also called “vector”, which means, among other things, that it can be scaled up to any size without losing its crisp sharp edges and detail. Photographs, on the other hand, cannot gain any more detail than the original image, and once they have been made smaller, they cannot be enlarged again. Notice below, the detail of the eyes and flower stem.

Here is another illustration where I worked from a photograph and scanned my pencil outline and added color in Photoshop. I created texture for the Scrabble board, and wood grain on the tiles.