So this is where it gets a little bit tricky. I am going to start with this point here. Maybe I want this point here to have a slightly darker color on it because this is the bottom of her cheek here. So mentally make a note of where that point is and then deselect and then move your mouse back up into that area and you will notice that I get a little white box beside my White Arrow Tool which is the tool that you should have turned on by the way. That tells me that I am over top of an anchor point, I single-click, there is the anchor point that I got and I have to be honest. I got that more out of dumb luck. Sometimes it takes me one or two tries before I actually get the anchor point that I am after. So I am glad that worked out for me.
So I have my anchor point selected, I will go over to my Swatches palette and I will find a darker skin tone to work with. Maybe I will go with this Cappuccino here, there it is. I can move this down just a little bit; adjust my direction lines until I have something like this happening, looks half decent there. Maybe what I will do as well is start to work on some of my shadings. So I will grab an anchor point down towards the bottom of her jaw line here and I will use an even darker color inside my Swatches palette. So really it's just a matter of working a way around your gradient mesh and applying colors to your different anchor points. Maybe up towards the top of her nose, I want to define the ridge of her nose here.
Now there are a couple of ways to do this. What I want to do though is I want to adjust the number of rows and columns that I have inside my gradient mesh. To do that I can go back to my Mesh Tool, bring my Mesh Tool back over top of my artwork here and I can single-click where I would like a new row or a new column to appear. So now I have this new column that runs all the way down my gradient mesh here and maybe for this point here I will set a darker color and then I will adjust using my direction lines here until I have something like this happening.
Now when I go to deselect, I have to remember to hold down the Ctrl key and single-click and that gives the impression of her nose ridge. There are a few other neat things you can do with your gradient meshes here. I am going to switch back to my White Arrow Tool just by pressing my A key on my keyboard. There is my gradient mesh there, I will grab one of my points here and I can actually drag it around inside my mesh. Now what's happening is this whole area is being moved because you can see that all of the anchor points are highlighted here and that might not be exactly what I am after here. So maybe instead I will go for one of the anchor points down towards the bottom here and continue working my way around the shape of her jaw here. I hope I haven't lost my gradient mesh there.
There it is there; continue working my way around until I have something like this happening, looking pretty good. Now at any point I can grab any of these anchor points here and obviously I can manipulate them here. What I can also do though is with an anchor point selected or several anchor points selected I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard. I can move my anchor point upwards or towards the left or towards the right or whatever direction I would like to set the position if you will of that color.
So things are starting to look good here. I could of course continue all the way around here, setting different colors and so on for each of my anchor points and like I said earlier, it's just a matter of working your way around your artwork. Now that last little bit I am not too happy with that. So obviously just a regular undo would back me out of that. There we are there.
One of the last things I will show you here in regards to your gradient meshes, I was mentioning that I can grab my anchor points here and nudge them around using my arrow keys, here is a neat trick as you are working with your gradient meshes and hopefully your gradient meshes is coming out fairly nice. I am going to hit Ctrl+H or Command+H on the Mac, but before I hit that keyboard shortcut, I had selected my anchor point and obviously when I hit Ctrl+H or Command+H all of my paths and anchor points disappear, but because I have that object still selected, I don't know if you can see that there or not but I am actually nudging the color around inside my gradient mesh until I get the exact effect that I am after, maybe something like that.
So there is a quick run through on working with your gradient meshes here, of course I can continue and finish off our space girl face here, I still need to do a lot of detail in her ear over here and so on. But what I would like to do is show you how to blend different objects into a gradient mesh.
