Game Changer For Editing Gradient Mesh In Adobe Illustrator

Working with gradient meshes in Illustrator can be hard, but you can make it easier for yourself if you know all the tricks with the Gradient Mesh tool. And this is what we are going to be looking in this video, so we're going to investigate the Mesh tool. Now I have a gradient mesh here and probably you've created one of those and when editing you've probably used the direct selection tool. And when using that and you want to move one of the mesh points you can move it along and put it here and you see it doesn't really adapt to the curve that has been there. But if you want to move that A little more to the right in order to create another mesh point here, then it would be nice if it would just follow that curve. So I'm going to undo that. Let's use the mesh tool for that. And you have to be very careful to actually hit the points with the mesh tool in order to not create a new one by accident. But then you see you can move it. It does the same because I didn't really use the secret move. So when you hold down the shift key and then move that, you see what's happening here. And also what has happened is that these handles adapted as well. They got shorter. And so you can take this one too, hold down shift and move it along. And do the same with this one. Hold down shift and move it along and then you can create a new mesh point here in this place. But that's not all. You can also use this on envelopes. Let's go down here and I'm going to first make an envelope. So let's go to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Warp. So I'm just using one of these default warps, just this one. Go to OK, and then you can use the Mesh tool on those as well. You can, for instance, click here to create a new mesh line in it. And then again, we can select this mesh point, hold down Shift and move it along. And of course, you can take these. And move them around. That is possible because gradient meshes and envelopes are basically the same object. So if I like this, then I can make a copy and go to Object Envelope Distort Release. And then I can select these points and apply color to them. And this is now a gradient mesh. I can go back and forth with them. So that's the secret of the gradient mesh tool and if you liked this video then probably you are interested in the one thing you need to know about gradient meshes.