I attempted to recreate a summertime scene shown in a tutorial. I started by drawing a shape using the Pencil tool, then dragged a green radial gradient across it for it to represent the first grassy hill. Again, with the Pencil tool I drew another curvy shape sending it to the back using the CTRL / CMD + [ shortcut. I kept the gradient the same simply changing the direction to 180 degree. For the third shape I did the same thing. After creating the three hills I lowered the opacity of the two in the back. Then, I filled the art board with blue and white gradient which should represent the day sky. Next I created the clouds by drawing bunch of small circles and combining them into one single shape with the Add to Shape Area option from the Pathfinder tool. Also, I dropped the opacity of the clouds slightly. I created a bunch of various size flowers by using drawing a circle and using Distort effect Pucker & Bloat for the shape to look like petals. Then I simply drew a round shape for the flower’s center. After that I copied and pasted the flower to create many more, and just altering the size and colours of each one. Next I created a butterfly. I copied and pasted five different size and colour
circles to create the wings, grouped the shapes, and this way created a beautiful butterfly. Lastly, with the Pencil tool I drew a smooth curve representing the flight path of the butterfly, then added a dashed white stroke. I finalised the image by trimming down any excess shapes. I did this by grouping all the objects and drawing a rectangle over the area. With all of the objects selected I trimmed the desired area by pressing the Crop option from the Pathfinder tool. This was the only step I had a problem with because when I cropped the image some of the objects lost their colour or it bizarrely created a gradient on some of the shapes. Besides this, I found the exercise quite easy and enjoyable, even if it did require some time, as there
are many steps in the tutorial.