Raygun enhancing

I've taken the raygun illo into Photoshop and am noodling around with things like adding texture, boosting saturation, and playing with lighting:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Pew-pew continued

Here's where the raygun rendering stands currently:

I added the little targeting sight thingy, and refined some of the detail in the grip. Next step is to take it into Photoshop and add some texture.

Here's what the underlying mesh looks like:

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Raygun work-in-progress

Here's a new gradient mesh illustration I'm working on:

Pew-pew!

Still rough around the edges, but I'm liking the way meshes work with metallics...

Original reference photo here. (Remixed as allowed per Creative Commons 2.0 (by-nc-sa))

Marble mesh

Thought I'd try my hand at using gradient mesh for something made out of glass. I like the way the swathes of color turned out, kind of painterly.

Finished apple mesh

Here's the finished apple created with gradient mesh, with some texture added, all done in Illustrator. It's not a picture-perfect copy of the reference photo, but it gets the idea across. The original pic is actually pretty grainy/pixellated, so it's a decent trade-off.

Vector apple WIP

More gradient mesh practice, fruit seems to lend itself to these kinds of exercises.

Apple mesh work-in-progress

Without texture it's looking a little tomato-ish...

Adventures with Gradient Mesh

Gave the gradient mesh tool a go in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I think it turned out pretty decent:

(Original photo taken by benjamint444 and used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

Not a total copy of the original photo (all the little details would have been incredibly tedious to re-create, but I've certainly seen others go to those lengths) but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Eventually I'd like to make a face with gradient meshes, but hey, baby steps... There are also a couple things I'd like to try to create some original illustrations with it. Let's see where the road takes us.