Using blur for complex shading
Mesh gradients are a great tool for advanced control of your gradients, but the more complex your shape is, the more complex your mesh gradient may have to be to get the effect you want. Also, the more color stops you’re going to have to edit to get the gradient to conform to the shape.
Take, for example, a splotch shape made with the Star and Polygon tool, which we covered in Chapter 3, Drawing Shapes with the Shape Tools. It’s nearly impossible to get a good shadow on this sort of shape with a mesh gradient. Rather than undertake hours of tedious stop-editing, we can start using our knowledge of Booleans to create an area for our shadow.
Simply copy the splotch shape, then select Edit > Paste in Place, and then move it up and over a bit to the left. We can then select both shapes and perform a difference path operation (Path > Difference) to get a shadow shape, then select Paste in Place again to get back our original splotch...