Read this Adobe Illustrator tutorial to learn how you can use layers, transparency and feather style to achieve quite same effects rendered by a gradient mesh tool. In the last weeks we posted few gradient mesh galleries. Gradient mesh is one of most difficult Adobe Illustrator tools to learn/use at its true value. So, if your gradient skills aren’t great, even you are not a beginner do not disarm. For small illustrations/purposes, using a few tricks you can apply similar visual effects.

Let’s use in our play a hammerhead shark. Very often is used in corporate identities, logos for its clear unique shape what is easy to be recognizable. Is one of my favorites too.

1. Use a hammerhead photo reference.

2. Make a deep blue background with a radial gradient on a separate layer.

3. Make a contour of your hammerhead picture. Is hard to find a picture to have 100% your wanted pose. This is also our case. You will notice the shape will be a bit different from hammerhead photo. Name the layer “contour”. To use same colors like mine, use a free and simple color picker like “pixie“

4. Make a new layer and hide the previous one, “contour” (sure, you need to make it visible each time when you draw a new shape). Now you need some shapes to apply transparency and feather style (i used a 25px  feather radius). Use also deep blue colors depending on how dark / light is your zone (shadows or highlights). The rule is simple. If  a body part is close to you, will be more light in color. The dark ones are for parts placed far away.