The Grapes Illustration for Illustrator Class

I'm taking a class in Adobe Illustrator CC 2017 at The School of Visual Arts which I'm absolutely thrilled about. Here's a recent exercise utilizing the 'mesh' tool to create a vector likeness of an actual photo of grapes by sampling the actual colors. At left are my 'fake' vector grapes in preview mode, and the below image shows the wireframe view.

To those unfamiliar with the staggering power of the mesh tool, as I was until it was bestowed upon us by the wonderful Mary J. Belthoff, is that vector-based creations of photographic quality can be scaled to any size and used in lots of situations that pixel-based or rasterized images can't.

This is the most amazing illustration tool I've seen in a long time. It's a little tricky at first but with some practice this can be a real game-changer.

©Larry McFarland. 2017.