Painting with the Mesh Tool in Illustrator - Part 2

A continuation of learning how to "paint" your vectors in Illustrator.

Adjusting Mesh Point Handles

Dragging a mesh point’s handle further away from it will extended the intensity of the mesh point’s color further outwards to cover more area around the mesh point.  Similarly, moving the handle closer to the mesh point will do the reverse and color from the mesh point radiates with less intensity from it.  To move all of a mesh point’s handles together at the same time, Shift-click on one handle and you can adjust all handles simultaneously.  You don’t have to just use the Mesh tool to adjust these handles, but can use all the regular tools that work with normal anchor point handles, such as the Convert Anchor Point tool and the Direct Selection tool.



Distorting with Anchor Points

Sometimes you’ll want to distort only the mesh line because you want to distort the color that flows along it. This is done by adding anchor points onto the mesh line using the Add Anchor Point tool.  Then simply adjusting them just as if they were ordinary anchor points, using either the Mesh tool or the usual tools that manipulate anchor points, such as the Direct Selection tool.



Assigning a Color

Let’s create more mesh points, but this time Shift-click with the Mesh tool in another place inside the rectangle.  This will create a new mesh point that is automatically assigned the color under where you happened to click rather than with white, which was the last active color we had used.  If you are not happy with the new color assigned, you can change this using either the Color or Swatches panels.  



In Part 3, we'll examine how to apply color over broad areas across a mesh object.