Summary

Well, we sure covered a lot of ground in this chapter! Our journey took us from building the paths and curves based on a concept sketch all the way up to a fairly realistic, stylized couple of fun characters. We utilized the skills learned from the previous chapter and put them to good use creating a more advanced illustration.

We learned how a cohesive color palette can contribute to giving overall harmony to an otherwise complex illustration. We discovered how to transform flat, 2D colored shapes into dimensional surfaces with the use of shading and highlighting. We explored using Inner Shadow effects and Linear and Elliptical Gradients to describe form and shadows from a consistent light source. Not least of all, with the exception of part of the background, we created all of this using an all-vector workflow, with the advantage of making it easy to continue to refine it at any time while maintaining its resolution-independent nature, allowing it to be used at any size...