Initial Attempted Image making on Illustrator

Greetings From

Here are some of my first attempts at producing shapes on illustrator. I lost control of the lines a few times, but that can be worked to advantage potentially. In the top left corner I played about with mixing ellipsis to make shapes then merging them. 

I used this naff looking apple from the internet, as a template to create my own shapes on illustrator. 

At first I created an apple shape by using hundreds of little straight lines and anchor points, but asides from looking pretty bad, it also made it a bit too complicated to edit and apply gradients etc. So I was shown again how to draw lines that could be curved too, and this improved lots of things. Especially the appearance of the shape. 

You can get some great textured brushes on Illustrator actually. 

I'm not really sure that this is achieving anything, the triangles placing needs tweaking, but I do like how even though this image is a little squint and highly imperfectous, in some small way is a little reflective of my way of working/how I like to image make. Then again I suppose it does reflect me because it is so imperfectous! My drawings lean towards expression, and being natural, they rarely feel entirely neat and precise.

I tried to use a gradient grid on this apple shape, but I couldn't successfully make it work. I was shown this site for quite amazing tutorials on much more advanced gradient based artwork created on Illustrator. This is it here.