With that out of the way, let's actually try and use this on one of our project files. So I will head to my File Menu and go down to Open, if you are not inside your Lesson 04 folder, head to your Desktop, inside your Project Files folder into the Part 01 folder and look for Lesson 04 and the file that we are after is called Space Girl, so go ahead and open up our Space Girl here.
Okay, so here is our Space Girl and like any good space girl, she has purple and pink hair which is cool and lots of techno-type technology all over here, and the idea is to setup a gradient mesh for face here. I did some work already on this file for us to speed things up here a little bit. I put a Gradient up on her hat here and on her goggles and so on. So really, it's just her face that we have to finish off.
Now, if you have your Layers Palette handy, let's take a quick look at how I set this up. I set this up in a similar way to our rotten tomato. So we have the Inked Outline, we have the eyes and the hair happening on a separate layer, we have what I call the Hardware, that's all that tacky-type stuff, and the Hat n' Goggles and then finally at the very bottom, we have the Face. So go ahead and turn on the Face layer, and right away her face fills entirely with red.
Now maybe if she was some kind of an alien creature that would be fine, but she is not, she is human. So we want to fill this in with some kind of a skin tone here and begin working on her gradient mesh here. So you may choose to zoom in just a little bit more here so we can see what we are doing, and the first thing that I will do is I will highlight her face here, and much like you saw just a second ago, I am going to start with a base color.
So over in my Swatches Palette here, I will find some kind of a skin tone to begin with, something like this perhaps, and I am done with my Gradient Palette by the way, I am just going to drop that back over on the right-hand side. And you saw how to create a Gradient Mesh using the Gradient Mesh Tool, that's one way to do it. Here is another way to create a Gradient Mesh.
I have the face selected, so I am going to go up to the Object Menu and all the way down to Create Gradient Mesh. I get the Create Gradient Mesh dialog box coming up here; it's asking me for the number of rows and columns. So in other words, you could think of a gradient mesh almost as you would a table. I will turn on my Preview checkbox here and that's what Illustrator is going to create for me based on the shape of this object, the shape of her face.
So if I want I can come in here and create a more detailed gradient mesh by increasing the number of rows and number of columns here, and by the way, I am just typing in a value and hitting Tab so I get that refresh there. But you know what, I am going to leave the defaults which was 4 rows and 4 columns, there we are. I will click on OK and there we have the beginnings of a soon to be very fine gradient mesh.
Now all of the points inside the gradient mesh are highlighted, that's no good, because I want to start applying some different colors here.
