Emergency Light

And one more artificial light source illustration for Hart McLeod’s Kazakh science textbook. 

This one was kind of fun because I used it to teach myself to use an Adobe Illustrator tool I hadn’t used before.  I can now use the gradient mesh!  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Most of you don’t know what that is and those who do are wondering why I hadn’t already mastered it.  Let’s just say it was a hole in my skill-set that I’m taking care of.  I still need to practice with it before I’ve really mastered it, but I now know what it is and how to use it.  

You can see it in use most obviously in the metal of the base.  Notice that the line of the reflection is not straight vertical, but at a slight angle to follow the slope of the base?  If it were straight, I could have used the regular gradient tool.  But with the slope, that wouldn’t work.  I also used a little on the reflection on the plastic lens, though you might not be able to tell.  I actually used it a bit more than that, but I was adding too many elements to what should be a pretty simple picture, so I pulled them back off again. 

I spent more time on it than the budget really called for, but I did it anyway because I needed to learn this.  So, the extra time spent was worthwhile.